Hotel that’s Rwanda

My approach to arithmetic tends to be digital: counting on the fingers of one hand, two in extremis. But that’ll suffice to assess the government’s project of sending boat people to Rwanda for processing.

The plan has come in for hamstringing legal challenges and much criticism, most notably from the Prince of Wales, who called the scheme ‘appalling’. That made my mind up for me even before I considered the issue in detail.

HRH is my infallible guide to reaching the right conclusions. Whenever he advocates something passionately, I don’t have to think for myself. I simply take the opposite position and smile all the way to the keyboard.

Thus his drive for ‘organic’ foods (to be pedantic about it, all food is chemically organic), has turned me off such foods for ever. HRH wants to have chemical pesticides, herbicides and fertilisers banned. This noble principle is dearer to him than the millions of lives around the world that will be lost to famines as an inevitable result.

This brings me back to my rudimentary arithmetic. The population of the world will reach eight billion this year. I don’t know how many of them would happily swap their home country for Britain, but I’m sure it’s a hell of a lot, in round numbers. Billions, for sure.

Even HRH and other honorary members of the righteous, or rather self-righteous, set must agree that Britain can’t welcome all such aspiring immigrants. She can’t even accommodate all of roughly 80 million who are refugees already.

Hence some limitations on immigration have to be in place. I’d be keenly interested to know how Prince Charles proposes to handle this problem, but he hasn’t so far graced us with anything approaching a solution.

As to limitations on illegal immigration, there shouldn’t be any. The government is duty-bound to stop it altogether, 100 per cent. Such migrants are law-breakers, which makes this problem not only arithmetical but also legal.

Boris Johnson, who commendably sees little intellectual difference between HRH and the trees he loves to hug, put it in a nutshell: “We cannot sustain a parallel illegal system. Our compassion may be infinite, but our capacity to help people is not.”

On that occasion, he didn’t cite any numbers, leaving the task to me in my self-assumed capacity of homespun arithmetician. So back to my adopted discipline.

In 2021, 28,526 people crossed the Channel in dinghies and other death traps, having paid gangsters thousands of pounds for the privilege of risking their lives. That was more than a three-fold increase over 2020 – and another huge increase is expected this year.

The general rule is that refugees must stay in the first safe country they reach. Since they cross into Britain from France, one has to assume that France isn’t safe in the eyes of the world.

But here’s an interesting paradox: since the 1970s France has indeed suffered the greatest number of terrorist attacks in Europe. However, most of them have been perpetrated by first- or second-generation migrants. That circle is as vicious as they come, which explains why the French look the other way when those dinghies set sail for Britain.

Boat people who don’t drown en route fall into the reluctant embrace of the Home Office, which has to process each case individually. That costs £1.5 billion a year, plus £4.7 million a day for hotels.

That’s it. No more arithmetic is either forthcoming or needed. It ought to be clear to HRH and his like-minded wokers that the plan to ship all such illegal immigrants to Rwanda for processing makes sense on every level – moral, legal, political and financial.

The first 31 are supposed to be shipped tomorrow, but that’s unlikely to happen. Left-wing activists have instructed left-wing lawyers to launch 31 challenges on behalf of that group. They demand an injunction, which may for years bind the whole sensible plan in legal shackles.

Since my grasp of immigration law is even weaker than my numeracy, I don’t know what recourse the government has. It may be able to fight off the challenges and go ahead.

Barring that, much as I detest democracy by plebiscite, I’d be happy with a referendum on this issue. On second thoughts, we don’t really need one. The referendum held six years ago almost to the day communicated the electorate’s views in no uncertain terms.

The people voted to leave the EU for various reasons, but perhaps the strongest one was their wish for Britain to be able to control her borders. The reaction of the woke élite (and most of our élite is woke) to that vote makes one doubt those people’s commitment to democracy.

They held up Brexit for over three years, and it took Boris Johnson’s masterly handling of political mechanics to give the people what they had demanded. As an aside, this partly explains the flood of venom poured on Johnson in all our media, with the exception of The Telegraph and The Mail.

He has many sins, and I for one hate most things the PM is doing. But he deserves gratitude for Britain’s regaining her sovereignty and the right to ruin her economy by her own efforts.

Yet the same influential bigwigs who tried to undermine Brexit are now working behind the scenes to reverse it. Their methods are perforce underhanded, for they can’t afford to be seen as open enemies of democracy. Yet their strategy isn’t hard to discern.

First, they try to make sure Britain’s control of her borders remains a pipe dream. Then they do their utmost to ascribe the current economic difficulties to Brexit, rather than to HMG adopting the same suicidal policies they themselves favour.

The next step will be to force the Tory government out and put their own Labour puppets in. That will be followed by a massive campaign, saying that every reason for Brexit has been compromised.

The influx of migrants hasn’t abated, the economy hasn’t improved, and most of the same EU laws still apply. Hence Britain can only recover by returning to the fold. Keir Starmer, or whoever is in charge, will then call for re-entry into the EU, and the combined forces of the left-wing media and woke quasi-intellectuals will work tirelessly to get their desired result.

Since most of those people are republicans, they may launch a parallel campaign to abolish the monarchy. I wonder if they’ll be able to count on HRH the Prince of Wales for support.