Weird mathematics and losing the plot

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When he says that the Rwanda Bill will “get the job {of stopping the boats} done”, Lord Cameron may just be saying what he knows that he has to say in order to display loyalty to the PM and keep his job. Unprincipled and cowardly, for sure – but we already knew that about him anyway. Alternatively, he may even believe what he says, which would merely make him too stupid to hold high office. But I think we already knew that too. There is no explanation for his words which is going to leave him looking good, but that, again, is hardly something new. The only reason that he isn’t widely known as the worst UK PM ever is the four who have followed him in the job.

Back in the real world, whilst we don’t know exactly how much capacity Rwanda has for taking asylum-seekers from the UK, all the reports suggest that the total is in the low hundreds annually. Even if we assume that the reduction to around 30,000 last year in the numbers arriving by small boats is a ‘real’ reduction rather than largely a product of weather conditions, knowing that a maximum of around 1% are likely to be sent to Rwanda seems unlikely to be the all-powerful deterrent as which the government present it. Not for those who have a basic understanding of arithmetic anyway – which is a considerably higher proportion of asylum-seekers than it is of government ministers. And, to the apparent surprise of those ministers, many of the asylum-seekers can and do read news reports which suggest that more than 80% of them are likely to be granted asylum status eventually, whilst the Home Office will simply (and conveniently, if the objective is to reduce the numbers) lose track of many of the remainder, who will quietly disappear into the UK’s black economy. Unless they're planning detention camps on a large scale. Working out whether ‘80% plus’ is a higher number than ‘less than 1%’ isn’t exactly what my maths teacher used to call a ‘hard sum’ for most of us, but government ministers are clearly trained in some form of alternative mathematics. Presumably to complement the alternative facts which they brandish so readily.

Meanwhile, Farage’s limited company, pretending to be a political party called Reform, has come up with the suggestion that the answer to controlling the numbers of immigrants is to impose a policy of “one in, one out”, under which no-one would be allowed into the UK until after someone else has left. The implications for care and health services, to say nothing of fruit-picking, are not spelled out, but it wouldn’t be at all surprising if the ‘success’ of this policy depended on an approach similar to that outlined by the Deputy Chair of the Tory Party a few years ago: rounding up those declared to be a nuisance, putting them in tents and forcing them to harvest vegetables and fruit. Others have suggested that pensioners should be obliged to do community or care work, or else lose part of their pensions. Directed or forced labour coupled with detention camps would seem to be the logical conclusion of the policy, but given past history the reluctance to say so is understandable.

Some Tories have suggested that, rather than allowing immigrants to fill job vacancies, the government should be encouraging people to have larger families to provide a future source of labour. Leaving aside any sustainability considerations surrounding population increases, to say nothing of the minor inconvenience that there is at least a 20-year lead time on this approach to solving labour shortages, it does nothing to answer the basic problem – as repeatedly outlined by the government – that immigration is leading to a shortage of houses, places in schools and health facilities. Whether the population increases because of migration or an increasing birth rate is irrelevant – an increase in population requires more facilities. And that is the lie at the heart of the anti-migrant rhetoric: it isn’t migration which causes the shortage, but government failure to plan for and provide the resources to match the needs of a growing population. Blaming migrants is just misdirection.

Perhaps Sunak has some polling data which hasn’t been made more widely available; maybe there really is a large number of people who will suddenly return to the Tory fold if they can see a tiny number of migrants being manhandled in chains onto aircraft destined for Central Africa. But it doesn’t seem to match publicly available data. And pinning so many of his hopes on a policy which seems destined to fail, even if it doesn’t destroy his own party first, looks like the action of a man who has completely lost the plot.