It already feels like quite a long time since the Tories were in power, but it was only in December that James Cleverly took a day trip to Rwanda to sign a deportation deal that, given the supreme court had ruled against it, was dead in the water anyway. One shouldn’t use that phrase without pausing to note how many migrants have actually died in the water while trying to cross the Channel – at least 53 so far this year, making 2024 the deadliest year on record. Everything about the Conservative stance on immigration, from its dehumanising rhetoric to the way it weaponised loss of life to whip up fury about small boats, was disgusting.
But the Rwanda plan was the standout insult – and the details of Cleverly’s trip make that point more keenly than all the context we already knew. For a start, it was pointless, because it was never going to happen. The £165,561 he spent chartering a private jet may sound like peanuts, set against the estimated £700m the scheme cost overall, which included payments to the Rwandan government, chartering flights for asylum seekers that never took off, detaining people then releasing them, the salaries of the 1,000 civil servants who worked on the policy, and Cleverly’s trip itself, of which £9,803.20 went on catering.
The first rush of questions – how is £653.55 a head even possible? Why could they not just have gone to Pret? – are unanswerable, exasperating. More details emerge: there was a TV crew with Cleverly, but don’t worry, guys – they paid for their own food. Sadly, this opens up the possibility – probability even – that the trip was undertaken for the cameras in the first place, as part of that grim mutual fantasy that had taken hold at the tail end of the last government. Rishi Sunak was convinced that one plane, with one asylum seeker, landing in Kigali would be enough to reassure the country that a grownup was in charge and the small boats issue was under control.
Most of the media parroted this view – in defiance of all the evidence. By April 2024, only 23% of Britons strongly supported the Rwanda plan. Even then, more than half of people surveyed weren’t convinced it would make any difference to small-boat crossings. This was a pantomime co-created by the political class and the media, so it makes sense that they would all have to chip in for the catering, but it’s still not possible to chalk this spectacle up to “the kind of thing that kind of person does”.
An asylum seeker waiting for their claim to be processed in the UK receives £49.18 a week for food, clothing and toiletries; if meals are included in their accommodation, this goes down to £8.86 a week. There is no provision for transport, so let’s hope your school or Home Office appointment is within walking distance. You get an extra £9.50 a week if you are the mother of a baby under one, which goes down to £5.25 on their first birthday; the supplement vanishes altogether when they hit three. All fine, of course: everybody knows that children stop needing things when they learn to talk.
This brutal situation can persist for years. There are more than 118,000 people waiting for an initial decision, according to the Refugee Council’s latest figures, published in June. So the sour taste left by Cleverly’s in-flight meal is not just about the waste of taxpayer’s money; it’s also the grotesque asymmetry with which refugees are treated. Whether you are looking at the Rwanda scheme, the Bibby Stockholm or the small boats media frenzy, you are looking at an environment in which immigration has become an industry, where people are coining in political or actual capital. The asylum seekers are not part of this economy; they are just grist to its mill.
• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
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