Bloodied horses are a symbol of U.K. demise
What best illustrates the point that Britain is collapsing? Would bloodied Household Cavalry draught horses galloping apocalyptically through the streets of London and crashing into a red double-decker bus this week do the trick? The state of the nation has frightened even the royal animals.
Brits have options. “VISIT RWANDA. VISIT RWANDA.” The slogan encircles the field in the Arsenal Football Club stadium. Rwanda sponsors the London club, which is happy to take Rwanda’s cash, even though no one’s visiting Rwanda for any reason whatsoever, not while PM Rishi Sunak plans to send asylum seekers — arriving across the Channel in small boats — back by plane and bound by zip ties.
How wincingly awkward it is that this resembles slave shipments, or the 162,000 convicts Britain once transported to Australia. Arsenal’s Rwandan fans are unlikely to visit their homeland lest they be mistaken for deportees having a sticky time of it in an alien nation. Will Sunak’s exiles be Black like slaves, or brown like Sunak?
Rwanda, home of a 1994 genocide, is a gloomy destination. From bereaved locals to Sunak’s despairing exiles, Rwanda’s green gulag might not appeal to the discerning pleasure-seeker. Back to Croatia it is then.
The deal will cost U.K. taxpayers more than $3 million per despairing asylum seeker whose rubber dinghy probably contained fresh corpses.
“Saying you’ll keep sending flights to Rwanda until the small boats stop is like saying you’ll keep throwing rocks at cars until you win the lottery,” commented British comedian Matt Green. Comic Will Sebag-Montefiore smeared ketchup on his white T-shirt and did a monologue as an offended stallion claiming it was the bus that was bleeding, not him.
It’s particularly odd because Sunak was born in Britain to East African-born Hindu parents of Indian descent who worked hard to become British. More than 50 years ago, mad tyrant Idi Amin expelled South Asians from Uganda. Britain, Canada and other goodhearted nations took them in.
Now a PM of Indian heritage is rounding up and expelling (mostly) Africans to Africa. Sunak needs a therapist asking the central psychoanalytic question: Do you see a pattern here? Add Israel’s Netanyahu and India’s Modi for group sessions.
This column likes tracking patterns. I started with Sunak because he’s a cartoon version of the human need to keep out “the differents.” This era is spasming about borders, people like us, scams, accents, ethnic enclaves and multiculturalism.
I’m seeing Sunak-style overreaction everywhere. Border wars are being fought internationally, nationally, provincially and municipally (zoning). When you see Republican senators frothing over Latin American migrants to the south and claiming Mexicans are invading from the north, you are seeing the Yankee version of Rwandas, Russias, Hungarys, Roxham Roads and the English Channel, all people igniting over the precise nature of borders.
Is there not a middle way? Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre won’t disavow Alex Jones’ rancid endorsement because he wants Canadians to get bellicose over migrants and jealous of homeowners. Continuing the equine theme, Trump in court has again become what comic John Mulaney described, “a horse loose in a hospital.”
I can’t get over the low comedy of it, that shabby Britain, its people said by Sunak to prefer sick notes to work, would expel young people who could do that work. Britain is an island. It’s a line in the water that keeps shifting as its cliffs erode, and for that line, Sunak disgraced the nation his parents yearned for.