Rwanda

Thursday

Robert Peston

What’s wrong with the Rwanda plan?

There are many unanswered questions about the government’s new policy of compelled expulsion to Rwanda of uninvited asylum claimants. Here are just a few. 1) What is the estimated cost per expelled refugee? None of the briefings give a clue. In its absence, how can the policy be assessed for its value for money, compared with the status quo? 2) What is the UK’s responsibility – moral, legal – if bad things (illness, accident, attack) happen to the expelled refugees after arrival in Rwanda? This would be a concern even if Rwanda did not have a recent history of trampling on civil liberties and basic human rights (see this report from

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

The problem with Boris’s Rwanda solution

Is the Prime Minister’s plan to divert some asylum seekers to Rwanda racist? Is it inhumane? Is it a dead cat to distract from his fixed-penalty notice for breaching Covid rules? These are the questions fixating the political-media-activist class today and while they are not necessarily unimportant, they neglect a question that might be of more immediate concern to the average voter concerned about border integrity and abuse of the asylum system. Namely, will the Prime Minister’s plan work? To answer this, we must acknowledge its provenance in Australia’s policy of offshore processing, detention and turn backs, introduced in 2001 as John Howard’s Pacific Solution and reintroduced by Tony Abbott

Thursday

Aidan Hartley

When it comes to Africa, the media look away

Kenya We were flown around the country, hovering low over mobs using machetes to hack each other up Each time I sit in St Bride’s on Fleet Street during the memorial of another friend, I look around at the crowds they’ve been able to pull in and feel terribly envious. Riffling through the order of service and then the church’s book of correspondents to find the faces of old comrades, I’m like a man wondering if any guests will bother turning up to one’s own hastily arranged bring-a-bottle party. Our 1990s generation of Nairobi hacks has been severely depleted. While we survivors are not a distillation of complete bastards, it’s

Thursday

Boyd Tonkin

The dictator of the dorm: Our Lady of the Nile, by Scholastique Mukasonga, reviewed

In the cloud-capped highlands of Rwanda, even the rain-makers sound like crashing snobs. When two teenage pupils from Our Lady of the Nile lycée slope off to consult the sorceress Nyamirongi about some boyfriend trouble, she sizes up their genealogies and comes over all Mitford duchess: ‘You’re not from very good families. But nowadays they say it no longer matters.’ Like so much in Scholastique Mukasonga’s novel, it’s a comic scene with a rumble of menace in the background — akin to the rainy season’s distant thunder in these lush, green hills. Where you belong — your people, your connections, your identity — has been a matter of life and

Thursday

R.T. Howard

English beef: France’s loathing of the ‘Anglo-Saxons’

To find out who your true friends and rivals really are, just gauge the reaction to news of your latest success story. It is revealing, for example, that many French officials have taken grave exception to the stunning speed and efficiency of our national vaccination programme. This became clear at the end of January, when President Emmanuel Macron defied medical opinion by unjustly claiming that the AstraZeneca jab was ‘quasi-ineffective’ for elderly people. His cynical tone, remarkable even by the frosty standards of the rest of the EU, was echoed by his Europe Minister, Clément Beaune, who stated that ‘the UK has taken a lot of risks in authorising Astra-Zeneca