Unfortunately the occupant in the plane which successfully took off for Rwanda this week didn’t stay in order to get a taste of the “hospitality” of Paul Kagame’s de facto military dictatorship.
Home Secretary Cleverly visited in Kigali on Tuesday to salvage his government’s “Rwanda Plan”. A new Treaty is meant to somehow bypass the Supreme Court ruling that Rwanda can’t be regarded as a “safe place”.
Others at the press conference intervened to speak about Rwanda’s “good” refugee record. True, lots of refugees already end up in Rwanda - and have to be looked after, not by the Rwandan state, but the United Nations’ refugee agency, the UNHCR.
It’s also true that many are refugees from a war sponsored in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo by. . . the Rwandan regime - and conducted by its proxy militia, the notoriously brutal M23.
This, from Human Rights Watch:“[the M23] have committed unlawful killings, rape, and other apparent war crimes. . . Attacks with explosive weapons in populated areas of North Kivu province have killed and injured civilians, damaged infrastructure, and exacerbated an already dire humanitarian crisis”.
It should come as no surprise that a British government which backs Israel’s bloody slaughter in Gaza should be happy to shake hands with Kigali’s murderous regime. Nor should we be surprised that Cleverly is amending rules so as to cut legal migration into Britain ahead of the election, when the only way that social care and NHS staffing levels can be rendered “safe” is by employing migrant workers.
If there were British workers to do these jobs then there wouldn’t have been a shortage of over 200,000 workers last year. And despite the relaxation of immigration rules to allow families of foreign workers in, there are still over 150,000 vacancies! What’s more, turning what currently are offered as unskilled domestic jobs into real healthcare jobs on proper wages is not on the Tory agenda - and not on Labour’s either, of course.
It would need a reversal of the privatisation of social care and the placing of both social care and the part-privatised NHS into public - that is workers’ - control. And for that to happen, nothing short of a social revolution will be necessary!