Even the Tories’ performative aims of Rwanda scheme struggle to land

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Good morning. There are some things in life without a price. The British government’s Rwanda scheme, however, is not one of them. The policy will cost about £170,000 for every person sent to Rwanda. (Assuming, that is, that anyone is ever actually sent to Rwanda.)

Of course, the point of the policy isn’t to work, but to show willing. Some thoughts on the whole thing in today’s note.

It’s the name of Kagame

What is the point of the UK government’s Rwanda policy? In theory, to act as a deterrent to people considering the perilous journey to the UK via a small boat. In practice, given that people making that journey are risking their lives by crossing the world’s busiest shipping lane, the prospect of being shipped off to Rwanda is frankly, no big deal. It is not going to deter anything like the 40 per cent of people that the Home Office estimates it will need to deter in order to make the scheme break even.

In addition to the (at this point, wholly theoretical) cost of the deportations, the UK government has already provided Rwanda with £120mn in initial investment. Paul Kagame, the Rwandan president, defended the deal in April last year: “It would be mistaken for people to just make a conclusion: ‘You know Rwanda got money.’ We are not trading humans . . . We are actually helping.”

Of course, the actual purpose of the Rwanda policy is to give Conservative MPs something to say about the people coming to the UK via small boats, ie “well, once the Rwanda policy gets up and running, the number of people coming to the UK via small boats will fall”.

In practice, the Rwanda scheme has meant that now, in addition to the various stories about the government’s inability to “tackle” the problem of small boats, there is now a drip-drip of stories about the costs involved with the Rwanda scheme, which of course prompts more stories about the fact the government cannot tackle the small boats issue.

Now try this

After spending a lot of last week listlessly searching for something to listen to while writing my column, this week was pretty painless. I wrote this week’s column — which was on the “cat” identity story and the political impulse to see every problem as having a school-shaped cause or solution — to Bob Dylan’s marvellous 1989 record, Oh Mercy. One of my many bad opinions is that Dylan’s Gospel period was actually very good, but given that I didn’t have to live through it at the time, it may be that it is a lot easier to enjoy Slow Train Coming if you know that “Man in the Long Black Coat” is just round the corner.

Thank you for sending in your music suggestions!

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