Sorry, Archbishop, the government is right to finally start tackling illegal immigration
A new immigration crisis, of an unprecedented kind, has come out of the blue and on this occasion its startled victims are the unreconstructed open-borders fanatics of the left. The problem is that, for the first time in post-War memory, the British public has been exposed to mass tragedy in the shape of thousands of Ukrainian refugees, mostly women and children, fleeing from a barbaric war in Europe.
The weeping woman whose parents have been killed or left behind, whose children are traumatised and whose husband is serving in the Ukrainian armed forces and may be killed at any moment: that is a refugee. There are countless permutations on the accounts of cruelty, murder, loss of homes, starvation and terror of every kind. Yet these are, if it is not stretching irony too far to say so, the lucky ones. Back in Ukraine, in many isolated villages, elderly women or mothers with children go to bed in damp bunkers and pray to survive till the morning. The same occurs in city cellars.
The British public, as it has historically done, has taken these people to its heart, opening family homes to house them, supplying every possible comfort and, most importantly, extending a warm welcome from the whole community. It is fortunate these arrivals did not know Britain is “systemically xenophobic and racist”, as proclaimed by the woke left.
This, of course, presents a grave problem for the left. Now that the people of Britain have witnessed the heartbreaking tragedy of the Ukrainian refugees, it will be challenging, not to say impossible, to sustain the imposture that the healthy young, mainly male, illegal immigrants who have crossed half a dozen frontiers of safe countries to get here, paid thousands of pounds to people smugglers and arrived on our south coast primed to demand their “rights”, are genuine “asylum seekers”.
The whole sentimental narrative, misrepresenting economic migrants as victims, collapses in the face of the genuine article coming from Ukraine. That contrast of genuine and counterfeit is damning for the open-borders left. Something of its frustration was expressed in a BBC interview when a sneering reference was made to Ukrainian refugees as “white Christians”. Clearly, to help them is an expression of white supremacy; it may even be a non-crime hate incident that Plod should be recording.
Note, too, that “Christian” is a term of reprobation in Britain’s deep state. In 2017, for example, when Syrian refugees were processed by the Home Office under the Government’s Vulnerable Persons Relocation Scheme (VPRS), a FoI request revealed that only 0.23 per cent of Syrians admitted to Britain were Christians, despite their accounting for 10 per cent of the population and being the most targeted by Isis.
Yet no one can accuse Christian leaders of not speaking up on the immigration crisis this Easter. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, denounced the government’s scheme to send illegal migrants to Rwanda in unusually forceful bell-book-and-candle terms. Welby stormed that the Rwanda scheme raised “serious ethical questions” and “cannot stand the judgment of God” or “carry the weight of our national responsibility as a country formed by Christian values”.
He was soon joined by the Bishop of Chelmsford, Guli Francis-Dehqani. She (in 2014 the Church of England corrected a mistake made by God the Son two millennia ago and admitted women to episcopal ordination) wrote to Home Secretary Priti Patel, appealing to her to listen to the concerns being raised by “a cross section of public opinion”. She did not specify the composition of this cross section, but it presumably embraced the BBC (very cross indeed), the Guardian, Labour, the Greens and all the other usual suspects.
It was notable that, in the condemnation poured out upon Boris Johnson and his government, the demonisation of Rwanda as a nightmare destination was based on implicitly racist assumptions (“tropes”, in Wokespeak). Rwanda has recovered from the civil war of almost 30 years ago, has a temperate climate and, being overwhelmingly Christian, no jihadist threat. For migrants primarily from the African continent, it is an unobjectionable destination. Alternatively, they can opt to stay at home, or settle in one of the safe European countries they have previously passed through en route to Britain.
Boris Johnson has rightly pointed out that the BBC and the Archbishop of Canterbury are more critical of the Rwandan migration proposals than of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. That is absolutely true: Justin Welby did not even utter Putin’s name in that part of his sermon that deplored the war in imprecise terms. Another Justin, however, opened a fresh salvo on the Prime Minister, on behalf of the BBC.
Justin Webb, while interviewing business minister Paul Scully, accused the Prime minister of using the Rwanda scheme as a “smokescreen”, to divert attention from the so-called “partygate” row, which the BBC considers infinitely more serious than the Ukraine war. “He is changing the subject,” said Webb, “and going on the attack and attacking people he really ought not to be attacking.” That would be the sacred cow that is the BBC. Well, that is certainly an Easter type of theme: “He blasphemeth.”
Webb asked: “I just wonder, can you come up with an occasion when Boris Johnson has put his life on the line for the truth…?” Well, actually, yes: as recently as the 9th of this month, when Johnson travelled across Ukraine in a train vulnerable to Russian air attack and strolled through the streets of Kyiv with Volodymyr Zelensky, at risk from Wagner Group assassins and precision Russian missile strikes.
The BBC’s sense of self-righteousness and entitlement has reached clinical dimensions. The Church of England, for generations, has failed to preach or practise authentic Christian teaching and is now futilely seeking “relevance” by turning itself into just another woke institution. Like the rest of the elites, it has lost touch with the society it is supposed to serve. The Church was intended to evangelise the world; instead, the world has evangelised the Church.
The much-abused Rwandan scheme is, at best, imperfect. It is a counsel of desperation, but at least it indicates that the government at last realises the situation is desperate. In the early stages of Britain’s preparations to receive the Ukrainian refugees there was much criticism of the administrative delay. What officialdom did not care to broadcast was the fact that much of this delay was caused because the large-scale hotel accommodation across the country which, in normal circumstances, would have been the first resort for housing Ukrainian refugees was full of economic migrants and bogus asylum seekers, to the exclusion of genuine refugees.
In that emergency, the government fell back on the generosity of the public, with home-owners competing to accommodate the refugees. But the reality is that we have finally reached the crunch. Boris Johnson promised the electorate in 2019 that he would take back control of our borders and end illegal immigration. He has done neither. Now, with a genuine refugee influx compounding the burden of illegal migration and the cost of living crisis, action can no longer be avoided.
If Boris wants to survive the ridiculous partygate charade, he must get immigration under control before the next election. The Rwandan scheme need not be as hare-brained as it sounds. A similar scheme in Australia has saved many lives. Overwhelmed by tens of thousands of illegal arrivals, Australia diverted asylum claimants to Nauru and Papua New Guinea, where those granted protection could settle. The illegal boatloads stopped, saving many people from potential drowning.
Priti Patel’s Rwanda scheme deserves credit for showing some imagination and acknowledgement of the crisis. The scale of known illegal migration is becoming thoroughly alarming. Last month alone, at least 3,065 people crossed the Channel, the highest monthly rate ever. The total for the first three months of this year was four times that for the same period last year, itself a record at the time. Almost one million people, both from the EU and outside, were given permission to come/stay or claimed asylum in 2021. We cannot go on like this.
The uncontrolled flow of immigration is also aggravating the cost of living problem. In particular, it has negative effects for low-paid workers, already worst hit by rising costs, as indicated by the Bank of England in 2015. The official Migration Advisory Committee (MAC) confirmed this in a recent report. The same body reported earlier that 160,000 British workers had been displaced from their jobs by low-wage migrant workers between 1995 and 2010; since this process is aggravated by economic downturn, we can expect to see a similar outcome during the current crisis. Migration also makes it harder for people of modest means to acquire their own home.
Even if the Rwandan scheme works to its utmost potential, it can only be a partial solution. It is essential to clear the way for a clean-sweep migration reform by removing the obstacles created by decades of liberal policy. The government must bite the bullet, exit from the European Convention on Human Rights (a policy championed by none other than Theresa May in 2016) and repeal the Human Rights Act. As the welcome extended to Ukrainian refugees demonstrated, the British do not need obstructive foreign treaties to enforce respect for their fellow human beings.
The fundamental need is to embody in law the principle that anybody who reaches our shores illegally must never be eligible for settlement here, still less citizenship. We need some serious deterrence. For too long, successive governments have encouraged the idea British citizenship is an automatic entitlement.
Aristotle recommended that new arrivals should be regarded as on probation for three generations, after which the golden prize of citizenship could be awarded to them. It is time we recovered something of that reverence for the status of the British subject.