Imagine if you will that we are at the Home Office Christmas party in 2021. Not that parties happened in lockdown. Uh-uh. No way. We have Boris Johnson’s word for that. In a corner over there a number of senior civil servants are sitting around a table. Several bottles have been emptied and perhaps some other substances inhaled. It is time to play Batshit; a game where government staff try to top one another in imagining the craziest scheme to present to their Secretary of State. The topic is the arrival of small boats on the South coast of England.

Player 1: “We send them back to France.” (chuckles)

Player 2: “We send them thousands of miles away. Africa, maybe.” (Shared chuckles)

Player 3: “We pack them all onto a large boat and sail them over there.” (Laughter)

Player 1: “No! Make it a landlocked country so we have to fly them there.” (More laughter)

Player 2: “That would be insanely expensive.” He thinks “But let’s pay that country hundreds of millions of pounds to do it.” (Laughter grows louder)

Player 3: “Maybe a country best known for a genocide in the 90’s. Say, Rwanda.” (Fits of laughter)

Player 2 and 3 watch Player 1. Will he fold? A wry smile crosses his lips. He leans back in his chair. “And they get to send their asylum seekers to us.” There is a long pause. Player 2 and Player 3 look at each other before raising their glasses and shouting “Batshit!” before all three dissolve into hysterical laughter.

Now I’m not saying that that’s how the Rwanda Scheme began but I find it hard to imagine anything more rational. Of course the Government argues that shipping a couple of hundred asylum claimants off to Rwanda will deter people from coming to our shores. Let’s think that through for a moment. People who have paid, perhaps, their whole savings to make an uncomfortable clandestine journey across Europe, to risk their lives, and those of their kids, in a glorified lilo in the Channel will be deterred by (on rough calculation) a 0.1% chance that they’ll be shipped to Rwanda. Batshit, right?

That is, or was, by all accounts the view of the Home Secretary, James Cleverly. Now, though, he seems to have had a Damascus road conversion and is a true believer. This may or may not be because it got him promotion to one of the highest offices of state in the land and made him the person responsible for implementing this policy.

A policy opposed when first floated, by all accounts, by the then Chancellor of the Exchequer on the not unreasonable grounds that it is insanely expensive. Who was that again? Oh yes! Rishi Sunak. The man who is now Prime Minister and who has now staked his premiership and the reputation of this country on getting this batshit policy, at least in some form, onto the statute books. In doing so he has provoked a genuine constitutional crisis with regard to the role of government and the role of the courts in determining what is legal and what is not.

Why? Because this is not a policy. It’s not a scheme. It’s not a plan. It’s a totem. It’s a cultic fetish. It’s a shibboleth demanded by an influential wing of his party that they demand of all Tory MPs and, especially, the weakest Prime Minister in living memory. A man with no mandate, no real grasp of politics, no core values: a middle manager somehow flung into the chair of a CEO.

So here we are. Here we are with the real threat that we may become a pariah nation by disavowing the treaties we have entered into regarding the rights of refugees. Here we are with right wing shills stirring the hornets’ nest to deprive us of our human rights; by separating ourselves from the European Convention on Human Rights -  a document we used to be proud of.

Here we are struggling to stay warm and to pay the rent. Here we are with folk freezing in doorways and begging on our streets. Here we are watching that better world we wanted for our kids dissolving into hopelessness. And our Government is consumed by a batshit scheme that no one really believes in. 

 But one folk have to claim to adhere to in the most dysfunctional Government I’ve ever seen