Rwanda isn’t the answer to stopping dangerous Channel crossings – but this might be

Channel crossings – and lorry stowaways – should have been treated long ago as a national security issue, writes Mary Dejevsky

The weakness in the argument of all those opposing Rwanda is that they have offered no alternative (REUTERS)

“I felt like I was going to be executed...” Few can have read The Independent’s harrowing account of what it was like for two of those waiting for the first UK government flight to Rwanda without at least a frisson of sympathy and some sense of national shame. Here were the real-life, individual human beings at the end of an ill-conceived and misapplied government policy. And their torment, it would appear, is not over. The government insists it will press on.

In designing this plan to send people it defines as illegal migrants to the middle of Africa, however, the government has set up an easy target – far too easy a target – for those who oppose all or most controls on migration. If, of all countries in the world, only Rwanda is able to offer the required combination (a willingness to accommodate the UK’s deportees – at a price – and a just-about OK standard of human rights) then there must surely be something wrong with the policy.

You don’t have to belong to that class of so-called “lefty lawyers” to see the Rwanda option as undesirable. Many of those who would support a stricter migration and asylum system – and I include myself here – also regard Rwanda as a step too far. And that is a problem for the government.