Why neither Andrew Neil nor I can be part of the Establishment

Even before the ECHR injunction, the bishops had issued their anathema. All 25 of them in the House of Lords told the Times that flying asylum-seekers to accommodation in Rwanda ‘should shame us a nation’. I can see reasonable objections to the policy, but is it really a source of shame? Most countries try to check the flow of refugees and most voters agree. They pay other countries to help them do this. In 2020, Turkey contained about four million refugees from Syria. It is still being paid by the EU to keep most of them out of the EU. The housing Britain is funding in Rwanda looks (though one must lay off for propaganda) like proper permanent buildings, much more pleasant than refugee camps. If we had called it development aid, the bishops might even have praised it. Although their letter speaks of Rwanda as a ‘brave country’, they seem to think sending people to Africa is automatically a dreadful thing to do.