The Rwanda policy has been scrapped and the Bibby Stockholm is to be closed down. The policy on asylum seekers was almost a gift from the last government to this; it was so expensive and cruel that to abandon it was both common sense and a moral imperative. The Rwanda scheme cost £700m and, according to Yvette Cooper, ejected four people, all of whom left voluntarily. Had it not been ditched, the cost estimate for the next decade was £7bn. Using the Bibby Stockholm barge to house asylum seekers has cost taxpayers more than £22m to date. The expense itself was a performance of contempt and dehumanisation. No money could ever be found to clear the backlog, or help to establish safe routes; yet no amount was ever too much to make an asylum seeker feel despised.
So yes, great work everyone, voting those sadists out; but the migration debate, not just in Britain but across Europe and, of course, in the US, is sliding towards necropolitics – the politics of who gets to live and who has to die – a descent into barbarism that simply wouldn’t be possible if the category of refugees hadn’t been sorted, implicitly and explicitly, into the deserving and the undeserving.
