The flip-flop of leadership has led the Tories into the ditch of being risk adverse and aggressively pursuing policies that make no real difference except to appear to be threatening the stream of people risking their lives to migrate to the UK in rubber dinghies across the English Channel paying people smugglers for the privilege. The solution according to Rishi Sunak is to deport one or two hundred for hundreds of millions of pounds to Rwanda because this tough talk is what pockets of the few people left who would vote for them want: to damage the potential opportunity of asylum seekers. Already the Tories think there is no need to process asylum seekers who are a combination of the hapless victims of war, soldiers on the run, economic migrants who can not get a work permit, probably a few terrorists, and professionals who are fleeing from climate disasters, war and near certain death. The last group could become valuable citizens and some of the others need to be deported or imprisoned before the inflect havoc and chaos. Instead of putting this backlog of unprocessed asylum seekers, Sunak is avidly pursuing a nightmare policy of swapping a small sample of this crowd for Rwanda’s own immigration rejects.
That is about 30 or 40 thousand people per annum. More serious is the 700,000 actual legal immigrants, a percentage of whom are employed and probably more who are their families creating pressure on the NHS as wel as probably supplying desperately needed staff for care homes and hospitals. Before Brexit, we had about 250,000 immigrants and FOM (Freedom of Movement) meant that some UK citizens could freely start working in European countries and the seasonal workers who came here were not necessarily permanent.
Due to Covid as Chancellor, Sunak decided alongside the worst PM this country has elected, Boris Johnson’s terrible handling that prolonged lockdowns by dithering, to extend hundreds of billions of pounds to replace wages and support PPE with schemes that did not work and some corruption. These handouts have given the Tory government a reputation of being “socialist”, when in fact, their policies have reduced the state and local authorities though austerity to a begging bowl reality. Creeping inflation and not adjusting tax brackets has provided the windfall the Government needed to be able to say that they are economically responsible as the majority of citizens go broke trying to pay their bills or keep a roof over their heads, or feed their families. Doing both is now seen as a luxury by our billionaire PM and his cabinet of multi millionaire robber barons, landlords and £115k per annum ex PMs who make additions to the House of Lords with their daily expenses looked after for life of their friends.
This has been a sorry and sad time for Britain and saddest of all for the Conservative Party that have lost their way completely.