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. If I were a Rwandan Anglican (a much higher proportion of the church-going population there than here), I might feel insulted that such a stay in my country is considered wicked. Episcopal hyperbole leaves little verbal power for something which is truly appalling, such as repeated Islamist murders of Christians in Nigeria, or the Russian Orthodox Church’s support for Putin’s violence against Ukraine. On the Russian invasion, the Archbishop of Canterbury did express his ‘grave concern’ to Putin’s toady, Patriarch Kirill; but he and his colleagues reserve really big, bad words like ‘shameful’ or ‘immoral’ for the British government.
Andrew Neil recently interviewed me for Tortoise. I was pre-announced as someone ‘at the apex of the establishment’. In Andrew’s view, I have a record as long as my arm – Eton, Trinity, Spectator, Telegraph, House of Lords.
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