He should spend the money sacking the HomeOffice teams and replacing them with actually competent people that can process claims quickly and efficiently.
Exactly, if their claims were processed faster and more competently (i.e. with very low likelihood of successful appeal), then the ones who are not genuine asylum seekers can be deported legally and quickly, which is surely a greater deterrent than the Rwanda scheme.
Am I just a naive lefty? What am I missing?
You’re asking for a competent government.
A competent government is not actually a hard thing to achieve. The problem is you’re assuming that the Conservatives are just incompetent, and while a great deal of them are, the issue is far more that they just don’t want to process the asylums. They want this to be a problem, that way they can rail against the evil terrible foreign people which is what they think their voter base wants.
This is a Conservative manufactured problem. They have no interest in processing asylums quickly, being slow and ineffective is the intention. It’s not a failing.
It’s more than that in the UK, unfortunately. Suella Braverman’s father ran British concentration camps in Kenya, she’s trying to restart the family business (funded entirely by the taxpayer), the reason they haven’t been processing people is simply so they have enough occupants for their new camps.
The majority of the civil service don’t support those policies. It’s not their fault that every now and then some crazy unelected “CEO” comes along and tells the directorate “now do this”. In the last ten years the Home Secretary changed eight times!
Most civil servants are good (for government workers) but the Home Office has been stacked with people by all the vile Home Secretaries the Tories have had over the last 14 years. Sacking them is prudent.
The Labour leader will pledge to make British beaches “hostile territory” for people smugglers
Not sure what good that’s going to do as the people smugglers are mostly in France…
True, but they do move money through here, not just people. Plus, the plans include actually working with France and the EU, not just picking arguments to keep the europhobes happy.
to be fair, he’s pledging it so it will never happen
y’all could just actually commit to net zero and mitigating climate change if you wanted to stop the boats but instead starmer just wants to be boris-lite as he turns labour into the new conservative party.
Little nieve to think evan an instant fix to climate change. Will instantly stop the desire for immigration.
World economics has been negative towards the global south for 100s of years now.
The effects of climate change are at best very recent.
I mean I am in no way disagreeing its a priority. But it will not fix this issue without some huge changes in world finance.
Seems short sighted to announce this. The Rwanda money has already been spent so you’re undermining any potential deterrent effect which might exist by saying it will be reversed straight away.
Could have let the Tories take the blame for the “evil” policy while reaping any potential benefits. It seems like there has been a limited deterrence so far given the news out of Ireland that they are receiving additional asylum claims at the moment.
This is the sunk costs fallacy. If a policy is bad, you scrap it, you don’t stick with it just because it’s there already.
It’s only a deterrent to people already in the country, but Rwanda can only take about 150 people a year so it’s not much of a deterrent. People going to Ireland are the ones selected. Now the government has to waste time, and money, selecting new people, presumably doing this forever until some of them hang around for some reason and get deported. Eventually 150 will be deported and then it will be a complete non-issue for everyone else.
There’s no long-term plan here.
Getting rid of it is the best strategy.
but Rwanda can only take about 150 people a year
Don’t forget the vulnerable refugees that the UK will be taking from Rwanda, per Article 19 of the agreement.
Somebody was pointing out that when they go to Rwanda they’re not prisoners they get citizenship papers. So technically, their citizens of Rwanda now, and Rwanda is not a save country, so they could come to the UK and claim asylum.
No, it’s one of the very few things that make me agree with Labour.
One effect of the harebrained Rwanda policy was to drastically reduce the price of getting on the boats, so this announcement may reduce crossings as fewer will be able to afford it
