The Needless Insanity of the UK Rwanda Scheme

Introduction

The Rwanda Scheme was a wretched policy pursued by the Conservative Party, starting in 2022. The first official flights were expected to occur some time after July 2024 (and would take a tiny fraction of asylum seekers to Rwanda to have their asylum claims processed). Rishi Sunak, the then-Prime Minister, called a General Election for the 4th July 2024 (which he was all but certain to lose), and when the Labour Party then took power, one of their first decisions (as stated in their manifesto) was to axe this ridiculous scheme.

What surprises me however, is that there are still people out there -- Conservative pundits and MPs no less! -- who actually try to defend this utter waste of time, money and oxygen. They will say things like "well the Rwanda Policy was a deterrent, and now we no longer have one! That's why the small boats haven't been stopped yet", and this is a sentiment that really needs to be put to rest.

Simply put: the Rwanda Scheme was nothing short of an embarrassing, abject failure of government policy: an expensive gimmick designed purely to throw red meat to a particular voting demographic in a time of internal crisis for the governing party, and which never had a snowball's chance in hell of ever succeeding.

I'd like to use this post to explain why this is the case, in the hope of arming those who have argued against the policy with effective ways of counteracting some of the more nonsensical suggestions. If perhaps you have friends or family who have voiced similar arguments in support of the scheme, then my goal is to ensure that you can push back against those arguments confidently but tactfully; you can make your case, but without it ruining the Sunday Roast, so to speak.

What was the policy, and why was it proposed?

Before getting into the arguments, let's give a quick bit of surrounding context and outline what the Rwanda Scheme actually was, and what its stated goals were.

In 2016, the UK had a referendum on membership of the European Union, in which it voted to leave. By 2020, the UK officially left the EU. One of the key drivers that led to the Leave result was an increasingly negative public attitude towards migration (both legal and illegal). 

The Conservative Party won a large majority in December 2019 off the back of their promise to "Get Brexit Done": they would finally implement a policy that would seek to reduce net migration numbers into the UK. This majority was accompanied by strong opinion polls for the Conservatives, which bolstered them through the pandemic and into mid 2021.

But by 2022, the polls were suddenly looking quite bad for the Tories. A number of high-profile scandals had eroded confidence in the party, to the extent that Labour were polling ahead of them basically since the end of 2021.

On top of this, polling was also showing that Immigration and Asylum -- a key area of perceived strength for the Conservatives -- was then narrowing against Labour considerably. Public trust in the Conservatives wasn't just falling due to scandal, but because people no longer believed the party to be capable of delivering on this policy.

To make matters even worse for the Tories (and to basically cement this panic): migrant boat crossings were increasing significantly since 2020. It had jumped from 8,466 in 2020 to 28,526 in 2021. The trajectory was not looking good: 2022 would see the year end with 45,744 crossings made.

So in this environment, the Conservatives needed a bedazzling, flagship policy that they could use to counteract the prevailing narrative of their perceived weakness on immigration. 

Enter: The UK and Rwanda Migration and Economic Development Partnership (colloquially called the Rwanda Scheme or Rwanda Policy), announced by Boris Johnson in April 2022.

The Policy stated that any asylum seeker entering the UK "illegally" from safe countries (for example, using small boats to cross the English Channel from France) could be sent to Rwanda to have their asylum claim processed there instead. Rwanda would agree to house the applicants and process their claims: if successful, the applicants would stay in Rwanda and not be allowed to stay in the UK. If they failed, the applicants would be deported from Rwanda to their country of origin (as is the case with any asylum claim system).

Great idea, right? To the anti-immigrant demographic, the Tory Party was able to look tough on migration by deporting people coming to the UK on small boats, and asylum seekers would be deterred from making the journey to the UK due to the threat of being sent to Rwanda. But what you might not have known is that this was always destined for failure.

Where does this all fall apart?

The policy relied on two dubious premises:

1. Rwanda is a safe country

2. The threat of deportation to Rwanda is an effective deterrent.

Let us pick these premises apart.

A logical contradiction

Suppose that Rwanda is safe. If you were an asylum seeker who was willing to cross the English Channel in a small boat to reach the UK, then you're willing to risk your life (and that of any family you are taking with you) in incredibly dangerous waters just for the opportunity to live in a safe country. That asylum claim could still fail and have you deported back to your home country, but you've accepted that as a potential risk. Why would being sent to another safe country stop you from making the trip? There are only two scenarios: either:

• You get sent back to your home country (a risk you accepted from the start) or

• You successfully claim asylum in a safe country (whether that is the UK or Rwanda)

There is no deterrent in any case. So if Rwanda is safe, it does not deter asylum seekers from trying to make it to the UK.

Instead, suppose that deportation to Rwanda is an effective deterrent. The only way that this deterrent can work is if Rwanda is not only unsafe, but so unsafe that being sent there would effectively be worse than being sent to your home country (remember, you are seeking asylum!). If Rwanda were in any way an improvement on being sent home, the risk-reward assessment of crossing the channel in a small boat would still be in your favour to make. So if deportation to Rwanda is an effective deterrent, it would mean that Rwanda is not safe.

This establishes a logical contradiction: the premises cannot both be true. If something is logically contradictory, then it absolutely cannot work in practice. The government was pushing ahead with a policy that, at its core, was incoherent.

Who cares if Rwanda is safe, though?

What matters in the mind of someone who would find the policy attractive is that it is tough on immigrants who come to the country illegally and dissuades them from coming here, safety be damned.

However, there is one point that I deliberately left out from the above assessment: the actual likelihood of someone being sent to Rwanda. If we accept that Rwanda isn't safe, it would still require that the chances of being sent there are great enough to give an asylum seeker pause for thought. If the chances of it happening are too low, you again have no deterrent: people would just make the trip and hope for the best.

So what was the actual probability of ending up in Rwanda? The Conservatives themselves estimated that the number of people actually affected would only be in the hundreds. That would mean a measily 1-2% chance of deportation. No sane person fleeing a dangerous country to the UK would look at those odds unfavourably. So once again, the policy can't be conceived of as an actual deterrent, even for people willing to accept the sheer naked cruelty of knowingly deporting desperate people to dangerous countries.

What do we get for engaging in this malice and buffoonery? Further degradation of the image the UK has on the world stage of being sensible; of being a reliable ally and a nation  that honours agreements that were made in good faith (and entered for good reasons). The Refugee Convention was established in 1951 in the aftermath of the Second World War, and the UK was one of its co-writers and co-signers. It establishes that refugees are able to seek refuge in any country that is signed up to the convention. This is important because the vast majority of refugees (a whopping 75%) actually settle into their neighbouring countries, which obviously creates pressure on these hosts. Part of establishing the convention was to relieve this pressure into countries that could share the load, demonstrating international solidarity and a commitment to stabilising geopolitics.

Just to be clear: this is not just about international politics or optics. Our own Supreme Court (that is, the UK’s, not a foreign court) ruled that the Rwanda Scheme was unlawful (specifically because Rwanda isn't a safe country for asylum seekers and we would be breaking international agreements by implementing the policy).

In the end, the UK spent £700 million on this scheme, and in total only 4 people were actually sent to Rwanda (all of whom were voluntary; it was effectively a way for the government to try and save face by claiming that it had started the deportations). If it had actually continued, the cost per asylum seeker would have been in the region of £2 million. The cost of simply processing an asylum claim here in the UK on the other hand, would have been just £106k.

What could have been done instead?

The last argument where a supporter of the Rwanda Scheme can take refuge (pun intended) is in the idea that there were no other reasonable options available. That as much as the policy may suck, be expensive or be ineffective, that it is better than doing nothing, and with no other good options, we should still be respectful of what it was trying to accomplish.

This is nonsense. For all of the rhetoric that the Conservatives have on "caring about tackling (illegal) immigration", they actively took steps that made this process worse. In 2023, as a consequence of their Illegal Migration Act, asylum claims simply stopped being processed altogether. Until a claim is processed, a claimant isn't able to take up work in the UK or be deported: they're simply reliant on state assistance (which was an absolute pittance: sometimes as little as £6-7 a day to live on) and are effectively in limbo. They outright stopped processing asylum claims entirely, meaning that nobody was being sent to Rwanda, or any other country for that matter. A complete and utter farce of a policy.

It is also important to remember that there is a supply-side element to this (which the Conservative government completely failed to address): the criminal gangs who profit from human trafficking to illegally get people into the UK. Migrants don't often come here on dinghies that they've purchased: it's usually part of an enterprise criminal operation where desperate people pay a sum of money to gangs, who provide the flimsy tools needed to barely make the trip in the channel. Tackling these gangs requires bolstering domestic policing and international cooperation with the intelligence agencies of other countries.

Lastly, if we want to look at the root of the problem, we will remember that asylum seekers exist because of political and ecological instability around the world. It is in the interest of countries like the UK to invest in plans and policies that aid people in (and surrounding) countries that are at risk from these types of problems. Collectively investing in humanitarian aid, jobs and education (with the help of countries that are also signatories of the Refugee Convention) will mean that people have drastically reduced incentives to make these kinds of dangerous journeys to further countries. Simply put: the UK benefits from a safer world in general. Peace is not cheap, but it is an investment that pays dividends to future generations.

Conclusions

The Rwanda Scheme typified much of what was wrong with the heart of governance in the 2019-2024 Parliament. It was a logically incoherent policy, pushed through by a party desperate to turn their electoral fortunes around without any regard for the long-term consequences this would have on the citizens of the country, on immigrants or on the UK's international reputation. It was a gimmick that was never going to satisfy the anti-immigration lobby of the Conservative Party nor its constituents, and the fact that no Conservative minister could either see or articulate this should be a national mark of shame for the party.

The Tories really should have been grateful that Labour axed the scheme, and they should have used the opportunity to let it slink into obscurity and hope the public forgets that it was ever conceived. Actively defending the policy, or simply claiming that a deterrent is needed without expanding on what that means, shows how rudderless the party still is.

In practice: if you're pushing back against someone that is in favour of the scheme, I believe that you can do so without an emotive appeal to the cruelty of what the policy entailed; this often results in people shutting off and the discussion turning into a moral shouting contest at best. The basic logic of the policy is absurd and indefensible. You can hopefully push back against some of the points made in its favour with the following types of comments:

"Rwanda is a safe country and/or we had the right to do so!"

Our own Supreme Court ruled that no, it was not, and no, we did not. The UK believes in law and order, so it is important that we abide by both domestic and international laws if we are to be taken seriously on that belief.

"It was a deterrent/it would have stopped the boats!"

Someone willing to cross the channel in a small boat and risk drowning isn't going to hear that they could end up in Rwanda and say "What, Rwanda__?? Well I may be desperate but I'm not crazy__; I'm definitely not going to chance it going to the UK!"

"It was cost-effective/worth the money!"

We spent millions to deport enough people to fit into a Mini. Putting the sheer level of waste into context had the policy continued: it would have been cheaper to process each person's asylum claim and give them £1 million in cash for their troubles. You'd still have enough money left over to buy them a comfortable freehold in London.

"It was better than nothing/it was the only thing we could do!"

There absolutely were other options that were available: actually spending time and effort processing asylum claims; tackling the criminal smuggling gangs and investing in humanitarian efforts where geopolitical instability is a concern were all options on the table which the Conservative government deliberately ignored. They chose an expensive gimmick that was guaranteed to fail over even entertaining any such options.