Thinking through the messaging

Tweet

 

According to the UK government, the main objective of the policy of sending migrants to Rwanda is to act as a deterrent. In this scenario, sending a couple of hundred people a year to central Africa will have the effect of deterring 40,000 other people each year from attempting the trip across the Channel from France. An unkind soul might point out that this effect depends firstly on desperate people being deterred by the prospect of being sent somewhere they consider undesirable, and secondly on them being unable to calculate that the mathematical probability of them actually being sent to Rwanda is, shall we say, on the low side, even if the policy is eventually ruled to be legal.

Faced with the possibility that it will be found to be illegal anyway, to say nothing of the probability of losing three by-elections this coming Thursday, the geniuses of the New Conservative group have resurrected a discarded old Priti Patel idea of sending migrants instead to remote Scottish islands. Their aim is to win or retain the votes of those who have been persuaded that migrants are responsible for all their woes, and should therefore be treated as inhumanely as possible, but is also, presumably, intended to have a deterrent effect: people will be so frightened of being sent to these so far unnamed remote islands that they will decide not even to attempt to enter the UK. I can’t help but wonder, however, whether these geniuses have thought through all the implications of their message. Taking such a decision without asking Scotland doesn’t seem to be treating Scotland as a valued partner in ‘this great union of ours’, and taking it as read that the prospect of living in parts of Scotland will put people off the idea of becoming UK citizens doesn’t exactly sound like extolling the virtues of Scotland remaining part of the UK. Whilst it’s obviously true that the policy is aimed at English voters rather than Scottish ones, admitting as much would merely compound the problem.