Refugees and Rwanda: the Tories’ road to perdition

Behind the Conservatives’ obsession with sending asylum-seekers to Africa is a politics of never-ending scapegoating.

Outside observers may well be perplexed by the British Conservative Party tearing itself apart over plans to send a small proportion of irregular asylum-seekers to live in Rwanda. The case can be better understood if one stands the public argument on its head.

That argument runs as follows. To deter refugees from trying to enter Britain illegally (and there are very few ways to do so legally), it is necessary to send some of them to live in a place they will not like. The government in Kigali has offered Rwanda as such a place. Yet human-rights law, among the Council of Europe’s 46 member states ultimately under the aegis of the European Court of Human Rights, may well prevent this from happening.

Therefore, it is necessary drastically to reduce the United Kingdom’s acceptance of that court. The government proposes to remove almost all channels through which asylum-seekers might appeal to Strasbourg, while leaving a small sliver of opportunity to avoid formally renouncing the UK’s commitment to the court. Its critics on the far right of the Conservative Party say this does not go far enough, and only complete rejection of the jurisdiction of the court will do.

Perplexing puzzle

The argument is perplexing, because it is assumed that refugees who have braved deserts and the high seas to reach Britain, risking their lives on multiple occasions, will find the risk of being sent to Rwanda more daunting than all of that. It will be only a very small risk, as there is no scope for sending large numbers to that country.

Even if an asylum-seeker were to find themselves in Rwanda, that might be a better fate than staying at home in a country probably torn by civil war or facing famine through desertification. The UK is thus in the strange position of telling the law courts and anyone else who listens that Rwanda is quite a reasonable country in which to live, while telling asylum-seekers that it is ghastly. (On Monday night the House of Lords called for delay in ratifying the treaty with Rwanda until the government could prove it was safe.) So why bother with such a policy at all?

But stand the argument on its head and the puzzle is solved. The policy position of the Tory right is not that the Strasbourg court may have to be rejected to achieve the goal of sending refugees to Rwanda. Rather, Rwanda is necessary to the central goal of removing the UK from its jurisdiction. Obviously, no concession that the government can offer without completely renouncing the court will do. And a rather arid debate can be given vivid life by tying it to the highly emotional issue of the presence of ‘foreigners’ in the country.

Agreements endangered

It goes further. If the UK were to renounce the court, it is likely that the Trade and Cooperation Agreement negotiated with the European Union to apply after the UK’s departure would be endangered, as it refers repeatedly to the European Convention on Human Rights on which the court adjudicates. The same is true of the 1998 Belfast agreement, which would certainly be imperilled as human-rights issues have always been key to the Northern Ireland conflict.

That these things should happen is precisely the agenda of the extreme-nationalist wing of the Conservative Party, which resents having any relationship with ‘Europe’ at all. For the same reason the government will not go all the way to withdrawing the UK from the court, because it fears the consequences of severing all European ties.

But this explanation serves only to create a new source of perplexity: why do so many Conservatives want to renounce a court that British politicians and lawyers, particularly Conservative ones, did so much to establish during the early postwar years? While the issue at hand concerns asylum-seekers, the main general principle behind the ECHR is that a denizen of a country which has ratified the convention has a right to vindicate their human rights against that state. Putting the individual before the state used to be a core Conservative idea.

Serious warning

There are three answers to this question: one pathetic, one very pathetic and one that serves as a serious warning.

Pathetic is the belief, fundamental to this xenophobic generation of Conservatives, that no foreigner should have any influence over what British governments do, and an international court of which the UK is a contracting party counts as ‘foreign’. This proceeds from a 19th-century view—unrealistic even then—of absolute ‘national sovereignty’. It simply does not work in a world of interdependence, international organisations and the shared sovereignty of rules enabling countries to deal with each other in a civil way.

Very pathetic is the second answer. Conservatives are not confident that they can win the general election that awaits them later this year. In 2019 they won handsomely by concentrating almost exclusively on the desire to leave the EU, a desire largely motivated by hatred of ‘immigrants’. Can the same trick be pulled off in 2024, with Strasbourg standing in for Brussels and asylum-seekers for migrants utilising EU freedom of movement? This recalls the old cliché about generals fighting the previous war.

Insatiable appetite

Far more sinister is the final answer. Conservatives’ desperate search for a new anti-foreigner issue demonstrates something we have seen in several other countries in recent years. Once launched on the xenophobic path, the appetite for finding new enemies becomes insatiable. This is because hating foreigners does not address the discontents its advocates claim to articulate.

These discontents flow from the insecurity of economic life in a world dominated by aloof and wealthy elites with contempt for ordinary people. Xenophobic movements redirect the dissatisfaction by redefining the elites as for some reason favouring immigrants (and, sometimes, gays, women or sundry other targets of ‘anti-wokeness’) over straight, usually male, indigenes. This reinterpretation has to be achieved, as the leaders of xenophobic movements, and even more the people who fund them, are themselves members of very wealthy elites.

But attacking false targets cannot resolve the initial discontent. Therefore, new targets for opprobrium have repeatedly to be found. Next in line in Britain will be legal immigrants, whose numbers have increased since Brexit. And after that there will be new enemies, each time notching up the intolerance and hate speech.

Important lessons

There are important lessons here for parties and movements worried about the growing appeal of xenophobia. Do not try to buy into the populists’ rhetoric—that just shifts the whole game further in their favour. Instead, do two things.

First, plan creative approaches to people movement that give ordinary citizens a role in determining policy, especially at local levels. Gesine Schwan and Robin Wilson showed the way forward on this last week.

Secondly, think about tackling the real problems caused by arrogant elites in societies with growing inequality. It often seems that, as they decline, social-democratic and other progressive parties cling desperately to their hard-earned place as part of postwar establishments. They become reluctant to see the world through the eyes of the little people on whose support they depend. This has made it so easy for right-wing populists to depict them as part of the elite too.