British Home Secretary Priti Patel could face a Home Office mutiny over her plans to process migrants 5,000 miles away in Rwanda after overruling to push through her plan despite sweeping condemnation and criticism.
Patel issued a rare ministerial direction to overrule widespread concern about the plan. It marks the only second time that a ministerial direction has been handed to the Home Office in 30 years. A ministerial direction is an order enforced by a minister despite objections from a permanent secretary.
Civil servants may stage mass walk-outs in protest against the plans.
Patel has promised Rwanda an initial 120 million pounds as part of an “economic transformation and integration fund.” But the UK will be paying for operational costs as well. Funding will be allocated for each migrant and is expected to cost an enormous amount, between 20,000 and 30,000 a person for the flight to Rwanda, and three months of housing there while being processed.
Asylum seekers who arrive in the U.K. by crossing the Channel in small boats will be sent on a plane to Rwanda for “processing.”
Most are against the policy, on both legal and ethical grounds. The plan has been called “chilling,” “cruel,” “inhumane,” “ill-conceived,” and plain “evil.”
The UN refugee agency UNHCR is one of many organizations to come out really strongly against the plan, condemning it in the strongest terms, and saying pointedly that the Rwanda plan will fail. Refugee and human rights organizations have vehemently criticized the plans and said that all the plan will do is exploit vulnerable people even more, and will fail to address the exploitation of the vulnerable.
In terms of the cost, others have said that the UK is in the middle of a cost of living crisis, and the idea to spend money on unethical and unworkable schemes is an obviously terrible way to spend government funding.
Be the first to comment