YESTERDAY, Tory Prime Minister, and convicted criminal, Boris Johnson, announced the plan to give refugees and asylum seekers seeking shelter from imperialist war a one-way ticket to Rwanda.
He revealed an agreement had been reached that will see asylum seekers dumped 5,000 miles away while they await a decision on their application for asylum in Britain.
Johnson even had the brass neck to declare his plans were driven by ‘humanitarian considerations’.
While Johnson was telling MPs this plan, the Tory Home Secretary Priti Patel was in Rwanda finalising the arrangements to take an initial 100 single male asylum seekers in a trial-run before dumping thousands there.
Under the Tory scheme, Rwanda would take full responsibility for these refugees, put them through the asylum process and, if they are successful, they will be given long-term accommodation in Rwanda and ‘encouraged to settle there’ with no chance of ever being allowed into the UK.
Left to rot in a country over which the Tory government itself raised concerns at the United Nations last year and called for independent investigations into ‘allegations of extra-judicial killings, deaths in custody, enforced disappearances and torture’.
Clearly these are the very qualities that the Tories are looking for now in a country in which to entrust the safety of vulnerable asylum seekers who risked their lives to escape the wars inflicted across the Middle East and North Africa by US and British imperialism.
Even a leading Tory and former cabinet minister, Andrew Mitchell, was moved to warn that this plan would involve building a ‘British Guantanamo Bay’.
Johnson’s surprise announcement even blindsided the government’s own refugees minister Richard Harrington, who admitted he had not been informed of the plans and that they were likely to fail.
This led the Labour Party leaders to denounce Johnson’s plans as simply a means to distract attention away from Johnson’s criminality, including the widely reported further fines he faces over ‘partygate’, but this ignores the fact that the Tories have been scouring the world since 2020 for anywhere in the world to dump refugees.
Along with the plans to build a British Guantanamo Bay hellhole in Rwanda, Johnson also confirmed that the navy would be in charge of turning back the fragile boats used by men, women and children risking their lives in the dangerous Channel crossing in the search for a life free from wars and starvation.
With the navy using gunboats to turn back, and risk sinking these boats, anyone who successfully manages to reach Britain and who is not rounded up and sent to Rwanda, faces being forced into new ‘reception centres’ where they will be subjected to strict rules, routine checks and curfews under the new Tory plans.
None of this is being scrutinised or voted upon by MPs.
Johnson made his surprise announcement not primarily to distract from his own political crisis, but because the Tory immigration bill which would have legalised sending asylum seekers to other countries, has been subjected to numerous amendments in the House of Lords and will face massive opposition from all parties on its return to the Commons.
Johnson has pre-empted any chance of its defeat and in the process treated Parliament and bourgeois democracy with the contempt of a ruling class determined to portray refugees from countries laid waste by imperialism as the enemy.
The working class will see that the same Tory government that wants to build virtual concentration camps at home and dump people in Rwanda, is the same government that is determined to drive workers and their families into absolute poverty and destitution in Britain.
The enemy of the working class is not refugees but this Tory government and a barbaric capitalist system that can only survive through wars.
The future for the working class is to join with the peoples of the world in the fight to end war and poverty by smashing imperialism by socialist revolution.
In Britain, it means building the WRP to lead the struggle for a general strike to kick out the Tory enemy and go forward to a workers government that will welcome every worker from any country to join in building a socialist society.