Telling The Truth

Despite what media commentators and political personalities claim, Rwanda was never a deterrent to the Channel crossings.

When there was a brief two-week gap in illegal arrivals, it was due to the wind blowing North-Eastern.

The UK has now had more illegal immigrants arrive in 2022 than what arrived in the entire year of 2020.

In 2020 it was 8,466 and last year we had a total of 28,526 arriving by boat. This year, we are already close to 9,000 illegal immigrants arriving by boat (that we know about). Of course, it’s difficult to know how many overstay their visas and arrive via vehicles due to the obvious difficulties of covering it.

Home Secretary Priti Patel said on the 18th of April that “We’re taking action to control our borders and deter illegal entry with our new partnership with Rwanda”.

This has been proven to be a lie. Long before the media started celebrating the Rwanda deal as a success story, UK Independence Party has consistently pointed out the fact that to call this a deterrent is simply a lie, because there was no evidence to suggest it is or will ever be so.

Conservative MPs and political commentators alike were taking credit for the weather stopping the crossings.

I and many others suspected it was a smokescreen to gain some credibility before the local elections and unfortunately that appeared to be the case.

It has been reported by numerous sources that only 50 illegal immigrants will be sent to Rwanda next month, however, I very much doubt 50 will leave, if any.

The Home Office struggle to deport people to their nation of origin, so to suggest sending people to a nation they don’t belong to, will have very obvious and difficult stumbling blocks, not to mention the sheer expense of sending people to Rwanda.

The Justice Secretary, Dominic Raab, says he won’t say how many removals will be expected to leave each year, but he made it abundantly clear that ‘it’s not going to deal with the whole problem’.

The deal will at best see a couple of hundreds be flown to Rwanda each year rather than the tens of thousands that are needed to create any form of successful deterrent. However, I very much doubt any will leave via this route.

I’ve been banging this drum since it was first announced but people refused to acknowledge what I was saying.