Throughout my childhood, the far right harboured a rabid xenophobic desire to purge this country of its migrants.
Now they’ve gained power.
We’ve been moving inexorably towards the Rwanda plan throughout the most recent Tory years.
Like Theresa May’s “Go home” vans, sanctioned to drive around London with megaphones in 2013 ordering illegal immigrants to go back to where they came from.
And the Windrush Scandal, in which people from Commonwealth territories who’d arrived here before 1973 were threatened with deportation if they couldn’t prove their entitlement to remain in the UK.
Among a raft of other “schemes” we’ve had the ongoing charter flights, jetting individuals who have lived, worked and paid taxes here for decades, back to Africa and the Caribbean.
Now we have this abomination, with the complicity of a country (shame on Rwanda) happy to take the £120million it will cost to effectively dump those fleeing Syria or Afghanistan anywhere but in the UK.
Lest we forget, Rwanda is a small, land-locked country in east-central Africa. A country criticised by, er, the UK Government last year over its human rights policy.
The claim that people will be sent there for “processing” is rubbish. Migrants fleeing war in their own lands are being sent to another country recovering from genocide, for good.
Callous, ghoulish Home Secretary Priti Patel, the daughter of economic migrants herself, has established herself as one of the most sociopathic, despicable government ministers of her generation with this plan.
She claims it is needed to prevent people trafficking.
But hang on a minute, isn’t she about to transport thousands of people halfway around the world for a pile of cash herself?
The lickspittle Tory MPs trying to defend it use watered down versions of Enoch Powell’s notorious 1968 speech and the language of Nigel Farage, demonising migrants and characterising them as criminals.
Rivers of blood back then, evil gangs now.
Actually they are people –men, woman and children – risking their lives in boats, searching for a better life.
They are ordinary people already here, having been encouraged to come and help rebuild this country after the war.
Greg Hands was the latest government minister to peddle that illegal migration line on Monday morning’s breakfast TV. But when asked what the legal route was he found himself lost for words.
Presenting migrants as a danger to us all plays better for the Government. It plays to the fears fascists tried to exploit in the Sixties and Seventies.
Thankfully ordinary people in our current multicultural society see through the Tories’ hateful rhetoric for what it is.
There’s Conservative – and then there’s this lot. Tub-thumping ghouls who have replaced the far right with their evil and racism at their core.
