Rwanda ‘solution’ is not the answer

I’M sure I’m not alone in wondering why the Government is persisting with the utterly ridiculous scheme to fly migrants off to Rwanda. It’s the kind of bonkers idea that a pub bigot would come up with after too many shandies, but the Tories are actually taking it seriously – baffling.

Also, they are prepared to waste God-knows-how-much of our hard-earned money on pushing it through the courts, or maybe even side-stepping the legal system and international agreements altogether in order to make it a reality.

Some commentators see it as a deterrent to anyone getting into a dodgy boat on the French coast and risking life and limb to get to this once great country of ours. Let’s face it – it simply won’t work. Several politicians spout promises using the tag line ‘Only we can stop the boats’ but like all such Westminster promises, it will fall on its bottom and become an expensive farce that you and I will pay for.

Why don’t they just accept the fact that as long as there are people seeking sanctuary and people traffickers exist to prey on them, the boats won’t stop coming? End of.

If we accept that reality then I wonder if anyone in Westminster has bothered to cost out the alternative to throwing money at the inept French border control force and sending these poor people to the middle of Africa? The alternative I’m talking about is the cost to make the Government’s handling of migrant applications fit for purpose.

Would it not be cheaper to the UK tax payer and fairer on the migrants to make the asylum application process and handling thereof more efficient and speedy? Someone out there in your readership undoubtedly has more economic data in their brain than I, so which of these two options is the cheaper, fairer, and more efficient plan...

Option 1: Paying France £millions to do an ineffective job at stopping boats setting out for the UK. Spending our money on shoving the new arrivals on to specially converted barges, into hotels, or camps. Paying for their upkeep while their applications crawl through our creaking bureaucracy for months on end. Maybe offering money both over and under the table to an oppressive regime in Africa and jetting migrants from squalor to slightly more tropical squalor.

Option 2: Investing money from the same piggy bank into restructuring and modernising our appalling immigration process. Staffing it to a level that would see application times slashed to weeks rather than months/years by welltrained immigration officers, and then accepting/rejecting the claims as appropriate.

Has anyone in Westminster ever bothered to tot up the figures? After all, it’s not their money being spent, is it!