We need to stop spending money on hotels and instead spend more money on judges and lawyers to get through the backlog and either (a) permit asylum so they can start working, or (b) deport.
Isn't that essentially this government's policy ?
Yes. They seem to have been steadily churning through the backlog left them by the incompetence of the Conservative government. Not that you’d ever learn this from hysterical DM headlines.
Sometimes competent government is just getting the job that’s in front of you done, to the best of the adminstration’s ability.
That’s not going to be enough to draw the sting of the immigration figures by the next GE I suspect, because (again) the previous government f’ed things up so completely that the population has lost all trust in any current government & the continued drumbeat of headlines only reinforces that loss of faith. But Labour appear to be doing the right thing here at least.
Labour also abandoned the Rwanda plan for the boat people, which was arguably working (hence the Irish shrieking about it) and replaced it with their brilliant new plan to SMASH THE GANGS
How's that going?
The Rwanda Plan would never have worked - the agreed numbers were, what, in the low 100s? When you have 10,000s a year crossing the Channel, a 1% chance of being sent to Rwanda is no deterrant at all.
If the Conservatives had credibly set up a program to move all Channel crossers into Rwanda, then I would agree with you - that would probably have had the desired effect, if they were actually capable of mopping up all of them. Once established you’d then only need a small program “pour encourager les autres”.
But the program as actually established & funded was pitifully small compared to the size required for it to ever actually work. The Conservatives were not a serious government & the Rwanda program is just another exemplar of their fundamental failure to actually govern effectively. You either do something like that properly or not at all if you want it to be effective. The actual program as implemented was guaranteed to be woefully ineffective, therefore we must conclude that the government was not actually interested in making it succeed - they just wanted the headlines that would give the impression that they were doing something until the next GE rolled around.
Yes and No. I agree the Rwanda plan was horribly incoherent and almost built-to-fail. It's almost as if the politicians and civil servants tasked with enacting it WANTED it to fail because they are all woke wankers at heart, and it was just a gesture. But maybe that's the cynic in me
However there is evidence that even in its chaotic, half-formed and unconvincing state, the Rwanda Plan was still having a deterrent effect. The Irish certainly thought so, and said so
"Rwanda Bill causing migrants to head for Ireland instead of UK, deputy PM Micheál Martin says"
Imagine what a non half-arsed Rwanda Plan could have done, in this light. It would have probably stopped the boats
My assertion is that the Rwanda plan was half arsed because the Conservatives were not serious about it. Just like they weren’t serious about anything else.
Now the current government is left trying to pick up the pieces. Labour have their flaws, but at least they’re serious about being a government.
Why didn't Big Rish launch a Rwanda flight after he passed his fucking daft legislation but before the election? Why did he prefer to campaign on the notion of Rwanda rather than the actuality?
People who compare Rwanda to Australia's OSB operation understand neither.
1. The RAN did tow backs to Indonesia. Neither Big Rish nor SKS have a tithe of the fortitude it would take to do that. 2. Australia had Christmas Island. The asylos could be taken their directly off their boats without ever setting foot in the Australian Migration Zone and therefore having access to the Australian Courts. No such place exists for the UK.
Channel Islands? Independent immigration system, and ruled by KCIII. Though only technically a possibility. I can imagine what the locals - and KC - would say if anyone asked him to write up the appropriate royal ordinance.
We need to stop spending money on hotels and instead spend more money on judges and lawyers to get through the backlog and either (a) permit asylum so they can start working, or (b) deport.
Isn't that essentially this government's policy ?
Yes. They seem to have been steadily churning through the backlog left them by the incompetence of the Conservative government. Not that you’d ever learn this from hysterical DM headlines.
Sometimes competent government is just getting the job that’s in front of you done, to the best of the adminstration’s ability.
That’s not going to be enough to draw the sting of the immigration figures by the next GE I suspect, because (again) the previous government f’ed things up so completely that the population has lost all trust in any current government & the continued drumbeat of headlines only reinforces that loss of faith. But Labour appear to be doing the right thing here at least.
Labour also abandoned the Rwanda plan for the boat people, which was arguably working (hence the Irish shrieking about it) and replaced it with their brilliant new plan to SMASH THE GANGS
How's that going?
The Rwanda Plan would never have worked - the agreed numbers were, what, in the low 100s? When you have 10,000s a year crossing the Channel, a 1% chance of being sent to Rwanda is no deterrant at all.
If the Conservatives had credibly set up a program to move all Channel crossers into Rwanda, then I would agree with you - that would probably have had the desired effect, if they were actually capable of mopping up all of them. Once established you’d then only need a small program “pour encourager les autres”.
But the program as actually established & funded was pitifully small compared to the size required for it to ever actually work. The Conservatives were not a serious government & the Rwanda program is just another exemplar of their fundamental failure to actually govern effectively. You either do something like that properly or not at all if you want it to be effective. The actual program as implemented was guaranteed to be woefully ineffective, therefore we must conclude that the government was not actually interested in making it succeed - they just wanted the headlines that would give the impression that they were doing something until the next GE rolled around.
Missing the point entirely.
The Rwanda plan could have worked, it worked in Australia where it was done.
The numbers though would have to, and could, change.
Trialling a new policy the numbers are generally low. Labor's Rudd in Australia changed their Rwanda equivalent from low numbers to everyone once the policy was operational.
The biggest hurdle is on our side, not their side, that we via our courts etc don't want to send people. Rwanda will take as many as we pay them for, and initially there's no point paying for more than small numbers but if we can sort out our side, that can change.
Never judge a policy based on trial numbers. Object to its ethics, sure, but it could and has worked elsewhere.
They would have had to have plans in place to radically increase the scope of the Rwanda plan after setting it up.
They didn’t have those plans, nor could we have afforded them at the prices the Rwandan’s were charging us IIRC. Ergo the Conservatives were not serious. I agree entirely that they could have made something like the Rwanda plan work, but they don’t appear to have wanted i to work - they just wanted it to exist so they could point to it whenever anyone asked them what they were doing about the boats.
How do you know they didn't have those plans?
Once its operational it only takes an agreement to give more money to expand it to everyone, which is exactly what Labor's policy was under Rudd.
Rudd's policy worked. No reason it couldn't work here.
The issue is the ethics, and saying we don't want to do that. That's on our side.
But there is absolutely no reason to give Rwanda more money for them to take everyone, as Rudd agreed with PNG, until the hurdles on our side have been cleared.
To say it can't work is folly. To say its unethical and you don't want to work, that has principles.
We need to stop spending money on hotels and instead spend more money on judges and lawyers to get through the backlog and either (a) permit asylum so they can start working, or (b) deport.
Isn't that essentially this government's policy ?
Yes. They seem to have been steadily churning through the backlog left them by the incompetence of the Conservative government. Not that you’d ever learn this from hysterical DM headlines.
Sometimes competent government is just getting the job that’s in front of you done, to the best of the adminstration’s ability.
That’s not going to be enough to draw the sting of the immigration figures by the next GE I suspect, because (again) the previous government f’ed things up so completely that the population has lost all trust in any current government & the continued drumbeat of headlines only reinforces that loss of faith. But Labour appear to be doing the right thing here at least.
Labour also abandoned the Rwanda plan for the boat people, which was arguably working (hence the Irish shrieking about it) and replaced it with their brilliant new plan to SMASH THE GANGS
How's that going?
The Rwanda Plan would never have worked - the agreed numbers were, what, in the low 100s? When you have 10,000s a year crossing the Channel, a 1% chance of being sent to Rwanda is no deterrant at all.
If the Conservatives had credibly set up a program to move all Channel crossers into Rwanda, then I would agree with you - that would probably have had the desired effect, if they were actually capable of mopping up all of them. Once established you’d then only need a small program “pour encourager les autres”.
But the program as actually established & funded was pitifully small compared to the size required for it to ever actually work. The Conservatives were not a serious government & the Rwanda program is just another exemplar of their fundamental failure to actually govern effectively. You either do something like that properly or not at all if you want it to be effective. The actual program as implemented was guaranteed to be woefully ineffective, therefore we must conclude that the government was not actually interested in making it succeed - they just wanted the headlines that would give the impression that they were doing something until the next GE rolled around.
Yes and No. I agree the Rwanda plan was horribly incoherent and almost built-to-fail. It's almost as if the politicians and civil servants tasked with enacting it WANTED it to fail because they are all woke wankers at heart, and it was just a gesture. But maybe that's the cynic in me
However there is evidence that even in its chaotic, half-formed and unconvincing state, the Rwanda Plan was still having a deterrent effect. The Irish certainly thought so, and said so
"Rwanda Bill causing migrants to head for Ireland instead of UK, deputy PM Micheál Martin says"
Asylum applications hit record high for 12-month period
A total of 111,084 people applied for asylum in the UK in the year to June 2025, the highest number for any 12-month period since current records began in 2001.
The number is up 14% from 97,107 in the year to June 2024, according to new figures published by the Home Office.
The previous record for a 12-month period was 109,343 in the year to March 2025.
Migrants who arrived in the UK after crossing the English Channel in small boats accounted for 39% of the total number of people claiming asylum in the year to June.
Just tell them all no. We can't accommodate everyone from every shithole on earth and its daft that we're even trying.
The public is pretty much at that stage now. A flat NO to everyone, from now on, apart from specific exceptions - Ukraine, Hong Kong
And we need a large number of those already here to go home
We need to stop spending money on hotels and instead spend more money on judges and lawyers to get through the backlog and either (a) permit asylum so they can start working, or (b) deport.
Isn't that essentially this government's policy ?
Yes. They seem to have been steadily churning through the backlog left them by the incompetence of the Conservative government. Not that you’d ever learn this from hysterical DM headlines.
Sometimes competent government is just getting the job that’s in front of you done, to the best of the adminstration’s ability.
That’s not going to be enough to draw the sting of the immigration figures by the next GE I suspect, because (again) the previous government f’ed things up so completely that the population has lost all trust in any current government & the continued drumbeat of headlines only reinforces that loss of faith. But Labour appear to be doing the right thing here at least.
Labour also abandoned the Rwanda plan for the boat people, which was arguably working (hence the Irish shrieking about it) and replaced it with their brilliant new plan to SMASH THE GANGS
How's that going?
The Rwanda Plan would never have worked - the agreed numbers were, what, in the low 100s? When you have 10,000s a year crossing the Channel, a 1% chance of being sent to Rwanda is no deterrant at all.
If the Conservatives had credibly set up a program to move all Channel crossers into Rwanda, then I would agree with you - that would probably have had the desired effect, if they were actually capable of mopping up all of them. Once established you’d then only need a small program “pour encourager les autres”.
But the program as actually established & funded was pitifully small compared to the size required for it to ever actually work. The Conservatives were not a serious government & the Rwanda program is just another exemplar of their fundamental failure to actually govern effectively. You either do something like that properly or not at all if you want it to be effective. The actual program as implemented was guaranteed to be woefully ineffective, therefore we must conclude that the government was not actually interested in making it succeed - they just wanted the headlines that would give the impression that they were doing something until the next GE rolled around.
Yes and No. I agree the Rwanda plan was horribly incoherent and almost built-to-fail. It's almost as if the politicians and civil servants tasked with enacting it WANTED it to fail because they are all woke wankers at heart, and it was just a gesture. But maybe that's the cynic in me
However there is evidence that even in its chaotic, half-formed and unconvincing state, the Rwanda Plan was still having a deterrent effect. The Irish certainly thought so, and said so
"Rwanda Bill causing migrants to head for Ireland instead of UK, deputy PM Micheál Martin says"
Asylum applications hit record high for 12-month period
A total of 111,084 people applied for asylum in the UK in the year to June 2025, the highest number for any 12-month period since current records began in 2001.
The number is up 14% from 97,107 in the year to June 2024, according to new figures published by the Home Office.
The previous record for a 12-month period was 109,343 in the year to March 2025.
Migrants who arrived in the UK after crossing the English Channel in small boats accounted for 39% of the total number of people claiming asylum in the year to June.
Just tell them all no. We can't accommodate everyone from every shithole on earth and its daft that we're even trying.
I don't disagree we should consider changing the rules.
But to be clear there are 8.4 million asylum seekers globally. So we are not getting "everyone" but 1.3% of asylum seekers. The UK is about 1% of the global population.
Changes from 13th August [Find Out Now, 20th August, N=2,615]
Good morning
Astonishing poll with Reform 15% ahead of labour who are 1% ahead of the conservatives
If it is to be believed, the populace simply have had enough of all the parties and Reform represents NOA
I have no idea how UKPLC is governable
The "governable" bit is easy - if a party has a majority in the Commons it can govern. Mid term poll ratings don't (or shouldn't) make any difference.
It's a poor poll for Labour AND the Conservatives - 35% for the old duopoly is probably an all time low.
Reform, as you say, continue to ride the tiger of disillusionment and are currently all things to all people (much as the Alliance was in its early days). Farage currently doesn't need to have the answers (he just has to say he does) but as we approach the election, it will be reasonable for us to ask the searching questions about what a Reform Government would do if it still looks a possibility.
I have to say I am a little cynical of the idea that the scales will fall from people’s eyes once they start properly “scrutinising” Reform before a GE.
People are so fed up that I wonder how much they’ll really think twice. We often thought American voters would think twice before electing you-know-who, and that simply wasn’t borne out.
I’m not saying it won’t happen - I’m just saying it feels to me very uncertain that this will make much difference.
Agreed.
Now, sure, it's a long time until the next general election and a lot could change between now and then, but I think something would have to change to prevent Farage becoming PM.
The people who are taking it for granted that it will do so likely face a big shock come GE2029.
I think it's wishful thinking, to imagine that Reform will just disappear.
I could see them having the same trajectory as Sinn Fein in the last Dail, getting into the mid thirties, before subsiding into the twenties as the election approaches.
The interesting one that I am not sure how they will cope with or even approach is when people start thinking about who is going to be Chancellor, Foreign Secretary, Health Secretary etc.
The options seem to be Tory retread quitters, halfwits like Anderson or unknown business people. I am not sure the electorate will be comfortable with any of those even if they are happy with Farage as PM.
On topic, I am very much in favour of our commitment to Ukraine with UK continuing to supply training, technical and security support, and military hardware
However, ‘boots on the ground’ is not a simple question and there are many nuances and conditions that would need to be resolved
Sky’s defense analyst said that an Anglo UK, French, German force would not be nearly sufficient and questioned just how many troops UK could provide
Other questions are how long the commitment would be, how much would it cost, and how much would it deplete UK’s other defence commitments?
Furthermore, who acts as military support for this force, and will the US come fully on board?
In any peace settlement it would not be unreasonable for the UN to act as a peacekeeping force as it is unlikely NATO without the US could fulfil that role
The question may well be premature and academic anyway, as Putin is simply not going to agree for western troops to be deployed in Ukraine and I understand, ironically, he suggested yesterday Russia could be part of a peacekeeping force!!!!!!!
I would just say that you do not have to be a pro Putin Reform supporter to have concerns about UK boots on the ground in Ukraine
It may happen someday, but there are legitimate questions to ask
Surely Nato would be a trip wire force, you would station a relatively small contingent on the front line so that Russia would have to kill Nato soldiers to advance
There must be a point at which 'ordinary' soldiers rebel against being sent forward to certain death, surely. What were the reasons behind the French mutiny in 1917 or thereabouts and how close were German and British troops at the time to similar action? Anyone know?
The British (and Empire troops) never came close to a significant mutiny. The French mutinied after the Nivelle offensive. Nivelle believed he had worked out how to win (and to be fair the French performance on July 1st 1916 did indeed show the way, or at least part of it.) He promised a crushing victory in 48 hours and when it failed morale collapsed. Add in that by then 1 in 20 French men (of all ages) was dead by then (more than a million men) and you can see why.
Arguably the British and Empire avoided losses on that scale (or had by that point in the war - the Somme was bad, and third Ypres would be bad too) but I think in general, despite revisionist bollocks in the 60's, the troops were well looked after, rotated in and and out on a regular basis. Many if not most were better fed in khaki than in civilian life.
Significantly, despite the horrors of the Somme and Paschendale, both were battles that the British and Empire armies won. Germany was shattered by the Somme fighting and knew it could not sustain it forever. The French had a rather different experience in 1916 - fighting the defensive battle of Verdun. Quite whether the historiography of that battle is true, at any event fighting to avoid losing ground was truly terrible, and I think led to 1917.
The Germans fought tenaciously almost to the end, but had started to give up for more easily during the 'hundred days'*. And the German Navy did indeed mutiny at the end of the war.
We have a very skewed perspective on WW1 - much of our official education about it comes from reading a small handful of poems by posh boys. Many, many soldiers did their bit with pride and a fair few enjoyed the war, on the whole.
Owen, Rosenberg and Gurney (among others) weren’t posh. I’m sure as in every war there were some who enjoyed it and others who hated it but were proud to have done their bit. However I don’t think it would have turned into a semi religious act of remembrance (unfortunately now turned into a fetish) if the war hadn’t represented a psychic scar on a generation, or several generations if you count parents and children.
I agree with that, but we forget that for many soldiers and much of the public Haig was a hero. Commemoration in the 20s and 30s was about remembering but also pride in a job well done. Of course in Britain our leaders in the late 30's didn't want their children to have to go through what they had (unlike Germany where too many wanted a rematch). In France it was even worse, and that partly explains why their army performed so poorly in 1940, despite having more guns and tanks than the invading Germans. That spirit of Elan was no longer there, hollowed out by the horror of Vimy Ridge and Verdun.
They wouldn't have put his name on the Haig Fund if he hadn't been generally, on balance, respected. .
While popular history is the stalemate, the veterans at the end of the war thought of the Hundred Days - advancing, ever faster, as the German retreat became a rout.
Asylum applications hit record high for 12-month period
A total of 111,084 people applied for asylum in the UK in the year to June 2025, the highest number for any 12-month period since current records began in 2001.
The number is up 14% from 97,107 in the year to June 2024, according to new figures published by the Home Office.
The previous record for a 12-month period was 109,343 in the year to March 2025.
Migrants who arrived in the UK after crossing the English Channel in small boats accounted for 39% of the total number of people claiming asylum in the year to June.
Just tell them all no. We can't accommodate everyone from every shithole on earth and its daft that we're even trying.
The public is pretty much at that stage now. A flat NO to everyone, from now on, apart from specific exceptions - Ukraine, Hong Kong
So just white people and honourary white people. Uh-huh.
On topic, I am very much in favour of our commitment to Ukraine with UK continuing to supply training, technical and security support, and military hardware
However, ‘boots on the ground’ is not a simple question and there are many nuances and conditions that would need to be resolved
Sky’s defense analyst said that an Anglo UK, French, German force would not be nearly sufficient and questioned just how many troops UK could provide
Other questions are how long the commitment would be, how much would it cost, and how much would it deplete UK’s other defence commitments?
Furthermore, who acts as military support for this force, and will the US come fully on board?
In any peace settlement it would not be unreasonable for the UN to act as a peacekeeping force as it is unlikely NATO without the US could fulfil that role
The question may well be premature and academic anyway, as Putin is simply not going to agree for western troops to be deployed in Ukraine and I understand, ironically, he suggested yesterday Russia could be part of a peacekeeping force!!!!!!!
I would just say that you do not have to be a pro Putin Reform supporter to have concerns about UK boots on the ground in Ukraine
It may happen someday, but there are legitimate questions to ask
Surely Nato would be a trip wire force, you would station a relatively small contingent on the front line so that Russia would have to kill Nato soldiers to advance
There must be a point at which 'ordinary' soldiers rebel against being sent forward to certain death, surely. What were the reasons behind the French mutiny in 1917 or thereabouts and how close were German and British troops at the time to similar action? Anyone know?
The British (and Empire troops) never came close to a significant mutiny. The French mutinied after the Nivelle offensive. Nivelle believed he had worked out how to win (and to be fair the French performance on July 1st 1916 did indeed show the way, or at least part of it.) He promised a crushing victory in 48 hours and when it failed morale collapsed. Add in that by then 1 in 20 French men (of all ages) was dead by then (more than a million men) and you can see why.
Arguably the British and Empire avoided losses on that scale (or had by that point in the war - the Somme was bad, and third Ypres would be bad too) but I think in general, despite revisionist bollocks in the 60's, the troops were well looked after, rotated in and and out on a regular basis. Many if not most were better fed in khaki than in civilian life.
Significantly, despite the horrors of the Somme and Paschendale, both were battles that the British and Empire armies won. Germany was shattered by the Somme fighting and knew it could not sustain it forever. The French had a rather different experience in 1916 - fighting the defensive battle of Verdun. Quite whether the historiography of that battle is true, at any event fighting to avoid losing ground was truly terrible, and I think led to 1917.
The Germans fought tenaciously almost to the end, but had started to give up for more easily during the 'hundred days'*. And the German Navy did indeed mutiny at the end of the war.
We have a very skewed perspective on WW1 - much of our official education about it comes from reading a small handful of poems by posh boys. Many, many soldiers did their bit with pride and a fair few enjoyed the war, on the whole.
Owen, Rosenberg and Gurney (among others) weren’t posh. I’m sure as in every war there were some who enjoyed it and others who hated it but were proud to have done their bit. However I don’t think it would have turned into a semi religious act of remembrance (unfortunately now turned into a fetish) if the war hadn’t represented a psychic scar on a generation, or several generations if you count parents and children.
I agree with that, but we forget that for many soldiers and much of the public Haig was a hero. Commemoration in the 20s and 30s was about remembering but also pride in a job well done. Of course in Britain our leaders in the late 30's didn't want their children to have to go through what they had (unlike Germany where too many wanted a rematch). In France it was even worse, and that partly explains why their army performed so poorly in 1940, despite having more guns and tanks than the invading Germans. That spirit of Elan was no longer there, hollowed out by the horror of Vimy Ridge and Verdun.
They wouldn't have put his name on the Haig Fund if he hadn't been generally, on balance, respected. .
While popular history is the stalemate, the veterans at the end of the war thought of the Hundred Days - advancing, ever faster, as the German retreat became a rout.
Not to say both are wrong, though. My granddad started in 1915 so most of his experience ...
FON uses a different methodology for working out the Reform vote if I understand them correctly. I have no idea who is right, but it's obviously an interesting question. Some of their views on this are here:
These unfortunates have, it seems, only made a gain of £836,219 compared with what they paid.
For a lot of people their home represents their entire life's work, not just for one or two people, but for much larger numbers of people from their family.
Changes from 13th August [Find Out Now, 20th August, N=2,615]
Good morning
Astonishing poll with Reform 15% ahead of labour who are 1% ahead of the conservatives
If it is to be believed, the populace simply have had enough of all the parties and Reform represents NOA
I have no idea how UKPLC is governable
The "governable" bit is easy - if a party has a majority in the Commons it can govern. Mid term poll ratings don't (or shouldn't) make any difference.
It's a poor poll for Labour AND the Conservatives - 35% for the old duopoly is probably an all time low.
Reform, as you say, continue to ride the tiger of disillusionment and are currently all things to all people (much as the Alliance was in its early days). Farage currently doesn't need to have the answers (he just has to say he does) but as we approach the election, it will be reasonable for us to ask the searching questions about what a Reform Government would do if it still looks a possibility.
I have to say I am a little cynical of the idea that the scales will fall from people’s eyes once they start properly “scrutinising” Reform before a GE.
People are so fed up that I wonder how much they’ll really think twice. We often thought American voters would think twice before electing you-know-who, and that simply wasn’t borne out.
I’m not saying it won’t happen - I’m just saying it feels to me very uncertain that this will make much difference.
Agreed.
Now, sure, it's a long time until the next general election and a lot could change between now and then, but I think something would have to change to prevent Farage becoming PM.
The people who are taking it for granted that it will do so likely face a big shock come GE2029.
I think it's wishful thinking, to imagine that Reform will just disappear.
I could see them having the same trajectory as Sinn Fein in the last Dail, getting into the mid thirties, before subsiding into the twenties as the election approaches.
The interesting one that I am not sure how they will cope with or even approach is when people start thinking about who is going to be Chancellor, Foreign Secretary, Health Secretary etc.
The options seem to be Tory retread quitters, halfwits like Anderson or unknown business people. I am not sure the electorate will be comfortable with any of those even if they are happy with Farage as PM.
How much do the public actually worry about that?
Reeves et al didn't have much ministerial experience.
Changes from 13th August [Find Out Now, 20th August, N=2,615]
Labour plus LDs plus Greens on 40% combined though, 7% more than Reform's 33%, so Labour MPs and Tory MPs in marginal seats will clearly hope for tactical voting from them to keep out Reform
I don't see tactical voting by Tory voters against Reform being a thing at all except in a very limited number of places.
Asylum applications hit record high for 12-month period
A total of 111,084 people applied for asylum in the UK in the year to June 2025, the highest number for any 12-month period since current records began in 2001.
The number is up 14% from 97,107 in the year to June 2024, according to new figures published by the Home Office.
The previous record for a 12-month period was 109,343 in the year to March 2025.
Migrants who arrived in the UK after crossing the English Channel in small boats accounted for 39% of the total number of people claiming asylum in the year to June.
Just tell them all no. We can't accommodate everyone from every shithole on earth and its daft that we're even trying.
The public is pretty much at that stage now. A flat NO to everyone, from now on, apart from specific exceptions - Ukraine, Hong Kong
And we need a large number of those already here to go home
It wouldn’t make any difference to a party’s election chances - for racists even a massive reduction in people of other colour wouldn’t be noticed because they would still see a lot of legal residents and ask why are they still here
Changes from 13th August [Find Out Now, 20th August, N=2,615]
Labour plus LDs plus Greens on 40% combined though, 7% more than Reform's 33%, so Labour MPs and Tory MPs in marginal seats will clearly hope for tactical voting from them to keep out Reform
I don't see tactical voting by Tory voters against Reform being a thing at all except in a very limited number of places.
It will be Reform vs Tory in most of the non LD held seats in the SE, SW and East and chunks of the Midlands Can't see many NE or NW Tories going Labour and in the bulk of LD held seats the Tories will see themselves as the challenger so I agree, very few Tories voting tactically. Nor should they as Green, Lab (and LD in the main) won't come to their rescue in ConRef fights
Asylum applications hit record high for 12-month period
A total of 111,084 people applied for asylum in the UK in the year to June 2025, the highest number for any 12-month period since current records began in 2001.
The number is up 14% from 97,107 in the year to June 2024, according to new figures published by the Home Office.
The previous record for a 12-month period was 109,343 in the year to March 2025.
Migrants who arrived in the UK after crossing the English Channel in small boats accounted for 39% of the total number of people claiming asylum in the year to June.
Just tell them all no. We can't accommodate everyone from every shithole on earth and its daft that we're even trying.
The public is pretty much at that stage now. A flat NO to everyone, from now on, apart from specific exceptions - Ukraine, Hong Kong
And we need a large number of those already here to go home
It wouldn’t make any difference to a party’s election chances - for racists even a massive reduction in people of other colour wouldn’t be noticed because they would still see a lot of legal residents and ask why are they still here
This is clearly wrong. If the boats visibly stopped - as they would, if we ended the right to asylum (which we must) - the governing party responsible would get a huge boost. The boats are a smallish part of the overall migration problem, but they are totemic and conspicious
Asylum applications hit record high for 12-month period
A total of 111,084 people applied for asylum in the UK in the year to June 2025, the highest number for any 12-month period since current records began in 2001.
The number is up 14% from 97,107 in the year to June 2024, according to new figures published by the Home Office.
The previous record for a 12-month period was 109,343 in the year to March 2025.
Migrants who arrived in the UK after crossing the English Channel in small boats accounted for 39% of the total number of people claiming asylum in the year to June.
Just tell them all no. We can't accommodate everyone from every shithole on earth and its daft that we're even trying.
The public is pretty much at that stage now. A flat NO to everyone, from now on, apart from specific exceptions - Ukraine, Hong Kong
So just white people and honourary white people. Uh-huh.
So just people who are more likely to integrate, work in jobs, and not blow people up, yeah-huh
Asylum applications hit record high for 12-month period
A total of 111,084 people applied for asylum in the UK in the year to June 2025, the highest number for any 12-month period since current records began in 2001.
The number is up 14% from 97,107 in the year to June 2024, according to new figures published by the Home Office.
The previous record for a 12-month period was 109,343 in the year to March 2025.
Migrants who arrived in the UK after crossing the English Channel in small boats accounted for 39% of the total number of people claiming asylum in the year to June.
Just tell them all no. We can't accommodate everyone from every shithole on earth and its daft that we're even trying.
The public is pretty much at that stage now. A flat NO to everyone, from now on, apart from specific exceptions - Ukraine, Hong Kong
And we need a large number of those already here to go home
It wouldn’t make any difference to a party’s election chances - for racists even a massive reduction in people of other colour wouldn’t be noticed because they would still see a lot of legal residents and ask why are they still here
This is clearly wrong. If the boats visibly stopped - as they would, if we ended the right to asylum (which we must) - the governing party responsible would get a huge boost. The boats are a smallish part of the overall migration problem, but they are totemic and conspicious
Where's the lasting gratitude the Tories received for implementing Brexit gone?
The voters believed Johnson when he said he would get it done, and so elected him, but it didn't in the end make a huge difference to the voters when it was achieved.
If the boats are stopped, but voters don't then see a difference in terms of housing, health service queues, etc, then they aren't going to be grateful for the boats stopping.
One of the reasons people are angry about the boats is because it's a simple explanation for why things aren't working in Britain. When things still don't work afterwards they will have to find a different explanation, which is unlikely to favour the incumbent government.
Asylum applications hit record high for 12-month period
A total of 111,084 people applied for asylum in the UK in the year to June 2025, the highest number for any 12-month period since current records began in 2001.
The number is up 14% from 97,107 in the year to June 2024, according to new figures published by the Home Office.
The previous record for a 12-month period was 109,343 in the year to March 2025.
Migrants who arrived in the UK after crossing the English Channel in small boats accounted for 39% of the total number of people claiming asylum in the year to June.
Just tell them all no. We can't accommodate everyone from every shithole on earth and its daft that we're even trying.
The public is pretty much at that stage now. A flat NO to everyone, from now on, apart from specific exceptions - Ukraine, Hong Kong
So just white people and honourary white people. Uh-huh.
So just people who are more likely to integrate, work in jobs, and not blow people up, yeah-huh
Its such a stupid debate. What really counts is class and how likely people are to socialise well. The reason an NHS lacky like Foxy knows and gets on so well with many immigrants is that that are the well educated medical professional types. Similar interests, similar outlook. If that's all you meet you will no doubt wonder what anyone would have against immigration/asylum seekers. I see it broadly at university. Academics come from everywhere and again will have broadly similar outlooks on life.
Asylum applications hit record high for 12-month period
A total of 111,084 people applied for asylum in the UK in the year to June 2025, the highest number for any 12-month period since current records began in 2001.
The number is up 14% from 97,107 in the year to June 2024, according to new figures published by the Home Office.
The previous record for a 12-month period was 109,343 in the year to March 2025.
Migrants who arrived in the UK after crossing the English Channel in small boats accounted for 39% of the total number of people claiming asylum in the year to June.
Just tell them all no. We can't accommodate everyone from every shithole on earth and its daft that we're even trying.
The public is pretty much at that stage now. A flat NO to everyone, from now on, apart from specific exceptions - Ukraine, Hong Kong
And we need a large number of those already here to go home
It wouldn’t make any difference to a party’s election chances - for racists even a massive reduction in people of other colour wouldn’t be noticed because they would still see a lot of legal residents and ask why are they still here
This is clearly wrong. If the boats visibly stopped - as they would, if we ended the right to asylum (which we must) - the governing party responsible would get a huge boost. The boats are a smallish part of the overall migration problem, but they are totemic and conspicious
Where's the lasting gratitude the Tories received for implementing Brexit gone?
The voters believed Johnson when he said he would get it done, and so elected him, but it didn't in the end make a huge difference to the voters when it was achieved.
If the boats are stopped, but voters don't then see a difference in terms of housing, health service queues, etc, then they aren't going to be grateful for the boats stopping.
One of the reasons people are angry about the boats it's because it's a simple explanation for why things aren't working in Britain. When things still don't work afterwards they will have to find a different explanation, which is unlikely to favour the incumbent government.
You said it wouldn't make any difference to a party's election chances. I've just shown you that is wrong. If Labour solved the boats, maybe 6 months before the election - 6 months with zero boats, because they "reformed" asylum - you can be damn sure they'd put it on every poster in the country, because it would greatly benefit their election chances
We need to stop spending money on hotels and instead spend more money on judges and lawyers to get through the backlog and either (a) permit asylum so they can start working, or (b) deport.
Isn't that essentially this government's policy ?
Yes. They seem to have been steadily churning through the backlog left them by the incompetence of the Conservative government. Not that you’d ever learn this from hysterical DM headlines.
Sometimes competent government is just getting the job that’s in front of you done, to the best of the adminstration’s ability.
That’s not going to be enough to draw the sting of the immigration figures by the next GE I suspect, because (again) the previous government f’ed things up so completely that the population has lost all trust in any current government & the continued drumbeat of headlines only reinforces that loss of faith. But Labour appear to be doing the right thing here at least.
Labour also abandoned the Rwanda plan for the boat people, which was arguably working (hence the Irish shrieking about it) and replaced it with their brilliant new plan to SMASH THE GANGS
How's that going?
The Rwanda Plan would never have worked - the agreed numbers were, what, in the low 100s? When you have 10,000s a year crossing the Channel, a 1% chance of being sent to Rwanda is no deterrant at all.
If the Conservatives had credibly set up a program to move all Channel crossers into Rwanda, then I would agree with you - that would probably have had the desired effect, if they were actually capable of mopping up all of them. Once established you’d then only need a small program “pour encourager les autres”.
But the program as actually established & funded was pitifully small compared to the size required for it to ever actually work. The Conservatives were not a serious government & the Rwanda program is just another exemplar of their fundamental failure to actually govern effectively. You either do something like that properly or not at all if you want it to be effective. The actual program as implemented was guaranteed to be woefully ineffective, therefore we must conclude that the government was not actually interested in making it succeed - they just wanted the headlines that would give the impression that they were doing something until the next GE rolled around.
Yes and No. I agree the Rwanda plan was horribly incoherent and almost built-to-fail. It's almost as if the politicians and civil servants tasked with enacting it WANTED it to fail because they are all woke wankers at heart, and it was just a gesture. But maybe that's the cynic in me
However there is evidence that even in its chaotic, half-formed and unconvincing state, the Rwanda Plan was still having a deterrent effect. The Irish certainly thought so, and said so
"Rwanda Bill causing migrants to head for Ireland instead of UK, deputy PM Micheál Martin says"
Imagine what a non half-arsed Rwanda Plan could have done, in this light. It would have probably stopped the boats
My assertion is that the Rwanda plan was half arsed because the Conservatives were not serious about it. Just like they weren’t serious about anything else.
Now the current government is left trying to pick up the pieces. Labour have their flaws, but at least they’re serious about being a government.
The French returns program seems just as half arsed as the Rwanda plan. Yes the gov't says they can scale it but any plan is, in theory, scalable - even the Rwanda one. We will never know if the Rwanda plan would have worked because there were too many vested interests in stopping it and Rishi didn't do what needed to be done in Parliament to make it work. Will Keir's "returns agreement" fare any better ? I have my doubts.
Jenrick was a big fan of the one in one out deal with France and believed it would be a major disincentive.
To divert us for a moment: this 30 minutes of loveliness on competitive stone-skimming will make anyone's day a better one. If you don't have 30 minutes, just watch the first two: I challenge you not to be drawn in. Dougie Isaacs is my new favourite sportsman. He looks like Nick Cave and competes with a pint and a roll up in a Stone Roses t-shirt. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5gEI33klgI
If supporting liberal democracy is important to you… As they say, the clue is in the name.
Yes, and LDs are strong on internationalism. I wonder what the Greens think.
From my comrades in the party, I'd say opposed, possibly more than the Fukkers. Largely driven by an instinctive revulsion toward imperialism and a probably well founded concern that it'll turn into an incompetently managed bloodbath that achieves the exact opposite of its purpose of record.
You'd think they'd want to do something to oppose that SMO, then.
No no, not THAT imperialism.
Literally the only imperialist nation anxious to send their troops into Ukraine is Russia. Oh, and N Korea, if they count (Joseon did after all style itself as an empire).
The includes the modern "imperialists" of the US, and the old style European imperialists - the UK; France; Germany and even Poland.
Dura's comment is either his usual high grade satire, or delusional. Genuinely hard to distinguish.
Interesting, according to the latest poll in Germany, Green party voters are the only ones who support German peacekeeping troops in Ukraine (53% vs 31%). Overall the majority are against (56% vs 28%). Though this is a poll conducted for dodgy 'news' outlet NiUS. They claim it was done by genuine pollsters INSA, but I can't find any details.
Of course the German Green party isn't very similar to the UK Green parties.
Germany has Linke for starters
For sure the Green Party has lost many of its traditional more pacifist-ish voters to the Left with its stance of being the strongest supporter of supplying arms to Ukraine of all the German parties.
I note that Germany seems not to have supplied Taurus missiles to Ukraine (which the Green Party supports) despite the promises made by Merz before the election.
The SPD defence minister has said Patriot missiles will be brought from the US instead
That's not exactly an "instead" although it's possible that Patriots should be the higher priority, especially now that Ukraine has Flamingo. Also not sure if they are getting a supply of Stormshadow/SCALP, they were supposed to no longer be in production but that might have changed
AP has photos of the production line of the Flamingos, showing serial numbers 479 and 480, one wonders how many they have in stock. The rumour is one per day coming off the line now, but with plans to make that 8 per day by the autumn.
Meanwhile, there’s also rumours of long queues for fuel in Russia. I’m not too sure of these, they’re similar to images of checkpoints set up after the “Spider Web” drones operation earlier in the year. https://x.com/bohuslavskakate/status/1958223912275489138
Asylum applications hit record high for 12-month period
A total of 111,084 people applied for asylum in the UK in the year to June 2025, the highest number for any 12-month period since current records began in 2001.
The number is up 14% from 97,107 in the year to June 2024, according to new figures published by the Home Office.
The previous record for a 12-month period was 109,343 in the year to March 2025.
Migrants who arrived in the UK after crossing the English Channel in small boats accounted for 39% of the total number of people claiming asylum in the year to June.
Just tell them all no. We can't accommodate everyone from every shithole on earth and its daft that we're even trying.
The public is pretty much at that stage now. A flat NO to everyone, from now on, apart from specific exceptions - Ukraine, Hong Kong
So just white people and honourary white people. Uh-huh.
So just people who are more likely to integrate, work in jobs, and not blow people up, yeah-huh
Its such a stupid debate. What really counts is class and how likely people are to socialise well. The reason an NHS lacky like Foxy knows and gets on so well with many immigrants is that that are the well educated medical professional types. Similar interests, similar outlook. If that's all you meet you will no doubt wonder what anyone would have against immigration/asylum seekers. I see it broadly at university. Academics come from everywhere and again will have broadly similar outlooks on life.
Yes, and this is why asylum is so politically destructive on so many levels. These are not actual doctors or academics, they really are young men of fighting age, often with zero qualifications and little talent, and a subset will have criminal or radical tendences
And these people are now being dispersed around the country, 110,000 a year, every year, into hotels, HMOs, and now - it seems - actual housing which the government will buy and use (even as Brits struggle to get housing)
"Government issues urgent appeal for 5,000 homes to house 20,000 migrants Home Office turns to property specialists as councils prepare to follow Epping and attempt to stop hotels housing asylum seekers"
It's hard to think of a policy better designed to aggravate ordinary Britons, who are now confronting - in their own town centres - young Eritreans, Syrians, Somalians, etc, who barely speak English and have nothing to do and no obvous reasoin for being here. Not doctors or academics, And yet these people are comfortably housed for free by the taxpayer, as young taxpaying Brits have to pay huge rents or scrimp and save for a mortgage
Expect Reform to go over 35% and Labour under 15%. And I am possibly serious
Just jigged about my future pension purchases a touch (Various stock market indices), took a look at a gov't bond tracker performance over the last few years. Oh dear !
Asylum applications hit record high for 12-month period
A total of 111,084 people applied for asylum in the UK in the year to June 2025, the highest number for any 12-month period since current records began in 2001.
The number is up 14% from 97,107 in the year to June 2024, according to new figures published by the Home Office.
The previous record for a 12-month period was 109,343 in the year to March 2025.
Migrants who arrived in the UK after crossing the English Channel in small boats accounted for 39% of the total number of people claiming asylum in the year to June.
Just tell them all no. We can't accommodate everyone from every shithole on earth and its daft that we're even trying.
The public is pretty much at that stage now. A flat NO to everyone, from now on, apart from specific exceptions - Ukraine, Hong Kong
So just white people and honourary white people. Uh-huh.
So just people who are more likely to integrate, work in jobs, and not blow people up, yeah-huh
Its such a stupid debate. What really counts is class and how likely people are to socialise well. The reason an NHS lacky like Foxy knows and gets on so well with many immigrants is that that are the well educated medical professional types. Similar interests, similar outlook. If that's all you meet you will no doubt wonder what anyone would have against immigration/asylum seekers. I see it broadly at university. Academics come from everywhere and again will have broadly similar outlooks on life.
They had Lord Falconer of Resignation on R4 this morning in his de haut en bas style criticising those against immigration hotels etc. I hope somehow they can stick a dirty great immigration hotel/camp next to his house and see if he still holds his views. It’s all very easy to criticise those with issues about migrant hostels when they will never experience the reality on a day to day basis.
Asylum applications hit record high for 12-month period
A total of 111,084 people applied for asylum in the UK in the year to June 2025, the highest number for any 12-month period since current records began in 2001.
The number is up 14% from 97,107 in the year to June 2024, according to new figures published by the Home Office.
The previous record for a 12-month period was 109,343 in the year to March 2025.
Migrants who arrived in the UK after crossing the English Channel in small boats accounted for 39% of the total number of people claiming asylum in the year to June.
Just tell them all no. We can't accommodate everyone from every shithole on earth and its daft that we're even trying.
The public is pretty much at that stage now. A flat NO to everyone, from now on, apart from specific exceptions - Ukraine, Hong Kong
And we need a large number of those already here to go home
It wouldn’t make any difference to a party’s election chances - for racists even a massive reduction in people of other colour wouldn’t be noticed because they would still see a lot of legal residents and ask why are they still here
This is clearly wrong. If the boats visibly stopped - as they would, if we ended the right to asylum (which we must) - the governing party responsible would get a huge boost. The boats are a smallish part of the overall migration problem, but they are totemic and conspicious
So how do you get the people back to the country they came from.
It’s perfectly legitimate for those countries to do perform a “Shamima Begum” on us and say - sorry they are your problem..
Heck if you look at what is happening on the Greek Islands at the moment that seems to be exactly what is happening
To divert us for a moment: this 30 minutes of loveliness on competitive stone-skimming will make anyone's day a better one. If you don't have 30 minutes, just watch the first two: I challenge you not to be drawn in. Dougie Isaacs is my new favourite sportsman. He looks like Nick Cave and competes with a pint and a roll up in a Stone Roses t-shirt. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5gEI33klgI
Something very satisfying about getting a stone to skim to the point where it briefly seems to float on the water.
We need to stop spending money on hotels and instead spend more money on judges and lawyers to get through the backlog and either (a) permit asylum so they can start working, or (b) deport.
Isn't that essentially this government's policy ?
Yes. They seem to have been steadily churning through the backlog left them by the incompetence of the Conservative government. Not that you’d ever learn this from hysterical DM headlines.
Sometimes competent government is just getting the job that’s in front of you done, to the best of the adminstration’s ability.
That’s not going to be enough to draw the sting of the immigration figures by the next GE I suspect, because (again) the previous government f’ed things up so completely that the population has lost all trust in any current government & the continued drumbeat of headlines only reinforces that loss of faith. But Labour appear to be doing the right thing here at least.
Labour also abandoned the Rwanda plan for the boat people, which was arguably working (hence the Irish shrieking about it) and replaced it with their brilliant new plan to SMASH THE GANGS
How's that going?
The Rwanda Plan would never have worked - the agreed numbers were, what, in the low 100s? When you have 10,000s a year crossing the Channel, a 1% chance of being sent to Rwanda is no deterrant at all.
If the Conservatives had credibly set up a program to move all Channel crossers into Rwanda, then I would agree with you - that would probably have had the desired effect, if they were actually capable of mopping up all of them. Once established you’d then only need a small program “pour encourager les autres”.
But the program as actually established & funded was pitifully small compared to the size required for it to ever actually work. The Conservatives were not a serious government & the Rwanda program is just another exemplar of their fundamental failure to actually govern effectively. You either do something like that properly or not at all if you want it to be effective. The actual program as implemented was guaranteed to be woefully ineffective, therefore we must conclude that the government was not actually interested in making it succeed - they just wanted the headlines that would give the impression that they were doing something until the next GE rolled around.
Missing the point entirely.
The Rwanda plan could have worked, it worked in Australia where it was done.
The numbers though would have to, and could, change.
Trialling a new policy the numbers are generally low. Labor's Rudd in Australia changed their Rwanda equivalent from low numbers to everyone once the policy was operational.
The biggest hurdle is on our side, not their side, that we via our courts etc don't want to send people. Rwanda will take as many as we pay them for, and initially there's no point paying for more than small numbers but if we can sort out our side, that can change.
Never judge a policy based on trial numbers. Object to its ethics, sure, but it could and has worked elsewhere.
They would have had to have plans in place to radically increase the scope of the Rwanda plan after setting it up.
They didn’t have those plans, nor could we have afforded them at the prices the Rwandan’s were charging us IIRC. Ergo the Conservatives were not serious. I agree entirely that they could have made something like the Rwanda plan work, but they don’t appear to have wanted i to work - they just wanted it to exist so they could point to it whenever anyone asked them what they were doing about the boats.
How do you know they didn't have those plans?
Once its operational it only takes an agreement to give more money to expand it to everyone, which is exactly what Labor's policy was under Rudd.
Rudd's policy worked. No reason it couldn't work here.
The issue is the ethics, and saying we don't want to do that. That's on our side.
But there is absolutely no reason to give Rwanda more money for them to take everyone, as Rudd agreed with PNG, until the hurdles on our side have been cleared.
To say it can't work is folly. To say its unethical and you don't want to work, that has principles.
The Conservative government was never going to spend £10billion on this project, but that’s what they’d have to spend to make it work - you have to credibly be able to take the majority of the Channel crossers, otherwise your project is just another roadblock to overcome.
That’s why Rwanda was the project of an unserious government: They had to stuff the Rwandan’s mouths with silver (to paraphrase Aneurin Bevan) to get them to take 300 people because nobody else would take our money & the entire project was clearly not economically possible given that constraint.
If they could credibly have put all the channel boat crossers through this scheme then I agree, it might have worked. But we couldn’t afford it & so it was never going to work. Going ahead with it, given that inevitability, shows that they only cared about headlines, not doing things that might actually work. (Stopping the processing of migrants just to stuff up the next government & make things worse in the short term so that they could claim to be the ones with a plan at the GE was also the sign of a deeply unserious government but that’s a separate problem.)
Asked where you’d house migrants if they all had to leave hotels , the stock answer deport them , asked about the interim period ,more drivel . And says he wants zero legal net migration , an unworkable policy just thrown out there to appease the easily duped.
We need to stop spending money on hotels and instead spend more money on judges and lawyers to get through the backlog and either (a) permit asylum so they can start working, or (b) deport.
Isn't that essentially this government's policy ?
Yes. They seem to have been steadily churning through the backlog left them by the incompetence of the Conservative government. Not that you’d ever learn this from hysterical DM headlines.
Sometimes competent government is just getting the job that’s in front of you done, to the best of the adminstration’s ability.
That’s not going to be enough to draw the sting of the immigration figures by the next GE I suspect, because (again) the previous government f’ed things up so completely that the population has lost all trust in any current government & the continued drumbeat of headlines only reinforces that loss of faith. But Labour appear to be doing the right thing here at least.
Labour also abandoned the Rwanda plan for the boat people, which was arguably working (hence the Irish shrieking about it) and replaced it with their brilliant new plan to SMASH THE GANGS
How's that going?
The Rwanda Plan would never have worked - the agreed numbers were, what, in the low 100s? When you have 10,000s a year crossing the Channel, a 1% chance of being sent to Rwanda is no deterrant at all.
If the Conservatives had credibly set up a program to move all Channel crossers into Rwanda, then I would agree with you - that would probably have had the desired effect, if they were actually capable of mopping up all of them. Once established you’d then only need a small program “pour encourager les autres”.
But the program as actually established & funded was pitifully small compared to the size required for it to ever actually work. The Conservatives were not a serious government & the Rwanda program is just another exemplar of their fundamental failure to actually govern effectively. You either do something like that properly or not at all if you want it to be effective. The actual program as implemented was guaranteed to be woefully ineffective, therefore we must conclude that the government was not actually interested in making it succeed - they just wanted the headlines that would give the impression that they were doing something until the next GE rolled around.
Yes and No. I agree the Rwanda plan was horribly incoherent and almost built-to-fail. It's almost as if the politicians and civil servants tasked with enacting it WANTED it to fail because they are all woke wankers at heart, and it was just a gesture. But maybe that's the cynic in me
However there is evidence that even in its chaotic, half-formed and unconvincing state, the Rwanda Plan was still having a deterrent effect. The Irish certainly thought so, and said so
"Rwanda Bill causing migrants to head for Ireland instead of UK, deputy PM Micheál Martin says"
Imagine what a non half-arsed Rwanda Plan could have done, in this light. It would have probably stopped the boats
My assertion is that the Rwanda plan was half arsed because the Conservatives were not serious about it. Just like they weren’t serious about anything else.
Now the current government is left trying to pick up the pieces. Labour have their flaws, but at least they’re serious about being a government.
The French returns program seems just as half arsed as the Rwanda plan. Yes the gov't says they can scale it but any plan is, in theory, scalable - even the Rwanda one. We will never know if the Rwanda plan would have worked because there were too many vested interests in stopping it and Rishi didn't do what needed to be done in Parliament to make it work. Will Keir's "returns agreement" fare any better ? I have my doubts.
Jenrick was a big fan of the one in one out deal with France and believed it would be a major disincentive.
Asked where you’d house migrants if they all had to leave hotels , the stock answer deport them , asked about the interim period ,more drivel . And says he wants zero legal net migration , an unworkable policy just thrown out there to appease the easily duped.
Hes on the telly on awful lot for a bloke who just does DOGE stuff
Asked where you’d house migrants if they all had to leave hotels , the stock answer deport them , asked about the interim period ,more drivel . And says he wants zero legal net migration , an unworkable policy just thrown out there to appease the easily duped.
Hes on the telly on awful lot for a bloke who just does DOGE stuff
Yes he’s everywhere at the moment spouting nonsense .
We need to stop spending money on hotels and instead spend more money on judges and lawyers to get through the backlog and either (a) permit asylum so they can start working, or (b) deport.
Isn't that essentially this government's policy ?
Yes. They seem to have been steadily churning through the backlog left them by the incompetence of the Conservative government. Not that you’d ever learn this from hysterical DM headlines.
Sometimes competent government is just getting the job that’s in front of you done, to the best of the adminstration’s ability.
That’s not going to be enough to draw the sting of the immigration figures by the next GE I suspect, because (again) the previous government f’ed things up so completely that the population has lost all trust in any current government & the continued drumbeat of headlines only reinforces that loss of faith. But Labour appear to be doing the right thing here at least.
Labour also abandoned the Rwanda plan for the boat people, which was arguably working (hence the Irish shrieking about it) and replaced it with their brilliant new plan to SMASH THE GANGS
How's that going?
The Rwanda Plan would never have worked - the agreed numbers were, what, in the low 100s? When you have 10,000s a year crossing the Channel, a 1% chance of being sent to Rwanda is no deterrant at all.
If the Conservatives had credibly set up a program to move all Channel crossers into Rwanda, then I would agree with you - that would probably have had the desired effect, if they were actually capable of mopping up all of them. Once established you’d then only need a small program “pour encourager les autres”.
But the program as actually established & funded was pitifully small compared to the size required for it to ever actually work. The Conservatives were not a serious government & the Rwanda program is just another exemplar of their fundamental failure to actually govern effectively. You either do something like that properly or not at all if you want it to be effective. The actual program as implemented was guaranteed to be woefully ineffective, therefore we must conclude that the government was not actually interested in making it succeed - they just wanted the headlines that would give the impression that they were doing something until the next GE rolled around.
Missing the point entirely.
The Rwanda plan could have worked, it worked in Australia where it was done.
The numbers though would have to, and could, change.
Trialling a new policy the numbers are generally low. Labor's Rudd in Australia changed their Rwanda equivalent from low numbers to everyone once the policy was operational.
The biggest hurdle is on our side, not their side, that we via our courts etc don't want to send people. Rwanda will take as many as we pay them for, and initially there's no point paying for more than small numbers but if we can sort out our side, that can change.
Never judge a policy based on trial numbers. Object to its ethics, sure, but it could and has worked elsewhere.
They would have had to have plans in place to radically increase the scope of the Rwanda plan after setting it up.
They didn’t have those plans, nor could we have afforded them at the prices the Rwandan’s were charging us IIRC. Ergo the Conservatives were not serious. I agree entirely that they could have made something like the Rwanda plan work, but they don’t appear to have wanted i to work - they just wanted it to exist so they could point to it whenever anyone asked them what they were doing about the boats.
How do you know they didn't have those plans?
Once its operational it only takes an agreement to give more money to expand it to everyone, which is exactly what Labor's policy was under Rudd.
Rudd's policy worked. No reason it couldn't work here.
The issue is the ethics, and saying we don't want to do that. That's on our side.
But there is absolutely no reason to give Rwanda more money for them to take everyone, as Rudd agreed with PNG, until the hurdles on our side have been cleared.
To say it can't work is folly. To say its unethical and you don't want to work, that has principles.
The Conservative government was never going to spend £10billion on this project, but that’s what they’d have to spend to make it work - you have to credibly be able to take the majority of the Channel crossers, otherwise your project is just another roadblock to overcome.
That’s why Rwanda was the project of an unserious government: They had to stuff the Rwandan’s mouths with silver (to paraphrase Aneurin Bevan) to get them to take 300 people because nobody else would take our money & the entire project was clearly not economically possible given that constraint.
If they could credibly have put all the channel boat crossers through this scheme then I agree, it might have worked. But we couldn’t afford it & so it was never going to work. Going ahead with it, given that inevitability, shows that they only cared about headlines, not doing things that might actually work. (Stopping the processing of migrants just to stuff up the next government & make things worse in the short term so that they could claim to be the ones with a plan at the GE was also the sign of a deeply unserious government but that’s a separate problem.)
Complete fallacy here.
Two issues, one is the costs change, paying for the first of anything costs much more than paying in scale.
Second issue is that numbers change. If everyone who crossed the channel knew they were guaranteed to go to Rwanda, the numbers coming would be ~0 anyway.
Object based on principles or ethics, but your numbers arguments are complete bullshit.
Sadiq Khan reads PB. Just days after I described getting my bits scanned in outpatients, the bus I took this morning had a poster warning that exposing your privates is illegal sexual harassment that will not be tolerated. The bus back had one about upskirting which must be aimed at someone else. I'm not entirely sure Britain is in a happy place if these warnings are necessary. What next? Stabbing strangers will not be tolerated?
Meanwhile OpenReach are noisily digging up the pavement outside – installing more VPNs, no doubt.
Asked where you’d house migrants if they all had to leave hotels , the stock answer deport them , asked about the interim period ,more drivel . And says he wants zero legal net migration , an unworkable policy just thrown out there to appease the easily duped.
Net zero legal migration is what the UK had until the 1990s.
We need to stop spending money on hotels and instead spend more money on judges and lawyers to get through the backlog and either (a) permit asylum so they can start working, or (b) deport.
Isn't that essentially this government's policy ?
Yes. They seem to have been steadily churning through the backlog left them by the incompetence of the Conservative government. Not that you’d ever learn this from hysterical DM headlines.
Sometimes competent government is just getting the job that’s in front of you done, to the best of the adminstration’s ability.
That’s not going to be enough to draw the sting of the immigration figures by the next GE I suspect, because (again) the previous government f’ed things up so completely that the population has lost all trust in any current government & the continued drumbeat of headlines only reinforces that loss of faith. But Labour appear to be doing the right thing here at least.
Labour also abandoned the Rwanda plan for the boat people, which was arguably working (hence the Irish shrieking about it) and replaced it with their brilliant new plan to SMASH THE GANGS
How's that going?
The Rwanda Plan would never have worked - the agreed numbers were, what, in the low 100s? When you have 10,000s a year crossing the Channel, a 1% chance of being sent to Rwanda is no deterrant at all.
If the Conservatives had credibly set up a program to move all Channel crossers into Rwanda, then I would agree with you - that would probably have had the desired effect, if they were actually capable of mopping up all of them. Once established you’d then only need a small program “pour encourager les autres”.
But the program as actually established & funded was pitifully small compared to the size required for it to ever actually work. The Conservatives were not a serious government & the Rwanda program is just another exemplar of their fundamental failure to actually govern effectively. You either do something like that properly or not at all if you want it to be effective. The actual program as implemented was guaranteed to be woefully ineffective, therefore we must conclude that the government was not actually interested in making it succeed - they just wanted the headlines that would give the impression that they were doing something until the next GE rolled around.
Missing the point entirely.
The Rwanda plan could have worked, it worked in Australia where it was done.
The numbers though would have to, and could, change.
Trialling a new policy the numbers are generally low. Labor's Rudd in Australia changed their Rwanda equivalent from low numbers to everyone once the policy was operational.
The biggest hurdle is on our side, not their side, that we via our courts etc don't want to send people. Rwanda will take as many as we pay them for, and initially there's no point paying for more than small numbers but if we can sort out our side, that can change.
Never judge a policy based on trial numbers. Object to its ethics, sure, but it could and has worked elsewhere.
They would have had to have plans in place to radically increase the scope of the Rwanda plan after setting it up.
They didn’t have those plans, nor could we have afforded them at the prices the Rwandan’s were charging us IIRC. Ergo the Conservatives were not serious. I agree entirely that they could have made something like the Rwanda plan work, but they don’t appear to have wanted i to work - they just wanted it to exist so they could point to it whenever anyone asked them what they were doing about the boats.
How do you know they didn't have those plans?
Once its operational it only takes an agreement to give more money to expand it to everyone, which is exactly what Labor's policy was under Rudd.
Rudd's policy worked. No reason it couldn't work here.
The issue is the ethics, and saying we don't want to do that. That's on our side.
But there is absolutely no reason to give Rwanda more money for them to take everyone, as Rudd agreed with PNG, until the hurdles on our side have been cleared.
To say it can't work is folly. To say its unethical and you don't want to work, that has principles.
The Conservative government was never going to spend £10billion on this project, but that’s what they’d have to spend to make it work - you have to credibly be able to take the majority of the Channel crossers, otherwise your project is just another roadblock to overcome.
That’s why Rwanda was the project of an unserious government: They had to stuff the Rwandan’s mouths with silver (to paraphrase Aneurin Bevan) to get them to take 300 people because nobody else would take our money & the entire project was clearly not economically possible given that constraint.
If they could credibly have put all the channel boat crossers through this scheme then I agree, it might have worked. But we couldn’t afford it & so it was never going to work. Going ahead with it, given that inevitability, shows that they only cared about headlines, not doing things that might actually work. (Stopping the processing of migrants just to stuff up the next government & make things worse in the short term so that they could claim to be the ones with a plan at the GE was also the sign of a deeply unserious government but that’s a separate problem.)
Complete fallacy here.
Two issues, one is the costs change, paying for the first of anything costs much more than paying in scale.
Second issue is that numbers change. If everyone who crossed the channel knew they were guaranteed to go to Rwanda, the numbers coming would be ~0 anyway.
Object based on principles or ethics, but your numbers arguments are complete bullshit.
No, that number I quoted /only/ included the costs the Rwandans were charging us /per/ asylum seeker. It included none of the fixed costs, nor the bonus £120million we were going to pay them once we hit 300 migrants transferred.
Look at the migration watch figures: The costs are eye-watering & if you thing the Rwandan government would have charged us less once they realised we were willing to pay these vast sums & had no other government willing to take them I have a few bridges to sell you.
How long before someone has a great fall off a ladder?
How long until these flags are a tatty disgrace?
I'm all for flags- the more, and the more varied, the better. It's one of the things that makes towns on the continent nicer. But this isn't the right way to do it.
I don’t care either way. When I went to the last Blues game of the season I was struck by the large amount of Palestine flags in the streets around the ground.
What I do think is off is Birmingham Council will remove British/English flags but have said they won’t touch the Palestinian ones
The former flags are largely on council property, stret lighting, etc. etc. If you leave them up, it'll be PA flags, Happy Dene Villas Housing Estate flags, Joe's Used Motors flags, etc. etc.
That’s Worcestershire not Brum. I’d struggle to walk to the Blues ground from there although I knew someone who got a lift to Derby, didn’t have one back so ended up walking most of the way from Derby to Sutton C
The Palestine flags in Small Heath were/are predominantly on street furniture.
Wow!
Wythall and Hollywood get a name check for flying the flag of St George. How times change. In the fifteen years I lived in Wythall (until 1977) and the concurrent ten years I was at school in Hollywood I never saw a flag of St George. I know this because when I moved to Herefordshire I was shocked to see there were quite a few. They were flying as a demonstration of Herefordshire people's antithesis to the neighbouring Welsh. Why fly them now? Wythall is still at least fifty miles from Wales.
I used to do a secure homes collection round in Hollywood and Drakes Cross. My mom lives not far from there and we like Becketts Farm even though the service is poor. My Dads wake was held at the golf club there. Never ever recall seeing a flag there either
I lived in Meadow Road just a few hundred yards on the left along Station road from Becketts Island, turn left into school drive and I was a couple of houses to the right. I went to both the junior school in Silver Street, Drakes Cross and the infants and secondary schools in Shawhurst Lane. My dad's ashes are scattered at Woodrush RFC, opposite the Peacock, just along from Kings Norton Golf Club (my dad was a member at the ill named Gay Hill Golf Club on Hollywood Lane).
Asylum applications hit record high for 12-month period
A total of 111,084 people applied for asylum in the UK in the year to June 2025, the highest number for any 12-month period since current records began in 2001.
The number is up 14% from 97,107 in the year to June 2024, according to new figures published by the Home Office.
The previous record for a 12-month period was 109,343 in the year to March 2025.
Migrants who arrived in the UK after crossing the English Channel in small boats accounted for 39% of the total number of people claiming asylum in the year to June.
Just tell them all no. We can't accommodate everyone from every shithole on earth and its daft that we're even trying.
The public is pretty much at that stage now. A flat NO to everyone, from now on, apart from specific exceptions - Ukraine, Hong Kong
And we need a large number of those already here to go home
It wouldn’t make any difference to a party’s election chances - for racists even a massive reduction in people of other colour wouldn’t be noticed because they would still see a lot of legal residents and ask why are they still here
This is clearly wrong. If the boats visibly stopped - as they would, if we ended the right to asylum (which we must) - the governing party responsible would get a huge boost. The boats are a smallish part of the overall migration problem, but they are totemic and conspicious
So how do you get the people back to the country they came from.
It’s perfectly legitimate for those countries to do perform a “Shamima Begum” on us and say - sorry they are your problem..
Heck if you look at what is happening on the Greek Islands at the moment that seems to be exactly what is happening
Tow them back to France
Also, open a couple of El Salvador like prisons along unsightly bits of the Thames Estuary. They can easily hold 30,000 people each. As the asylum seekers will have broken the law simply by crossing on a dinghy, we can immediately put them in these jails. Keep them there until they volunteer to go home
You'd need to keep these prisons open for about six weeks, and then all the boats would totally stop, and we would actually SAVE lives by stopping drownings, and we'd end the misery of Calais etc
We need to stop spending money on hotels and instead spend more money on judges and lawyers to get through the backlog and either (a) permit asylum so they can start working, or (b) deport.
Isn't that essentially this government's policy ?
Yes. They seem to have been steadily churning through the backlog left them by the incompetence of the Conservative government. Not that you’d ever learn this from hysterical DM headlines.
Sometimes competent government is just getting the job that’s in front of you done, to the best of the adminstration’s ability.
That’s not going to be enough to draw the sting of the immigration figures by the next GE I suspect, because (again) the previous government f’ed things up so completely that the population has lost all trust in any current government & the continued drumbeat of headlines only reinforces that loss of faith. But Labour appear to be doing the right thing here at least.
Labour also abandoned the Rwanda plan for the boat people, which was arguably working (hence the Irish shrieking about it) and replaced it with their brilliant new plan to SMASH THE GANGS
How's that going?
The Rwanda Plan would never have worked - the agreed numbers were, what, in the low 100s? When you have 10,000s a year crossing the Channel, a 1% chance of being sent to Rwanda is no deterrant at all.
If the Conservatives had credibly set up a program to move all Channel crossers into Rwanda, then I would agree with you - that would probably have had the desired effect, if they were actually capable of mopping up all of them. Once established you’d then only need a small program “pour encourager les autres”.
But the program as actually established & funded was pitifully small compared to the size required for it to ever actually work. The Conservatives were not a serious government & the Rwanda program is just another exemplar of their fundamental failure to actually govern effectively. You either do something like that properly or not at all if you want it to be effective. The actual program as implemented was guaranteed to be woefully ineffective, therefore we must conclude that the government was not actually interested in making it succeed - they just wanted the headlines that would give the impression that they were doing something until the next GE rolled around.
Missing the point entirely.
The Rwanda plan could have worked, it worked in Australia where it was done.
The numbers though would have to, and could, change.
Trialling a new policy the numbers are generally low. Labor's Rudd in Australia changed their Rwanda equivalent from low numbers to everyone once the policy was operational.
The biggest hurdle is on our side, not their side, that we via our courts etc don't want to send people. Rwanda will take as many as we pay them for, and initially there's no point paying for more than small numbers but if we can sort out our side, that can change.
Never judge a policy based on trial numbers. Object to its ethics, sure, but it could and has worked elsewhere.
They would have had to have plans in place to radically increase the scope of the Rwanda plan after setting it up.
They didn’t have those plans, nor could we have afforded them at the prices the Rwandan’s were charging us IIRC. Ergo the Conservatives were not serious. I agree entirely that they could have made something like the Rwanda plan work, but they don’t appear to have wanted i to work - they just wanted it to exist so they could point to it whenever anyone asked them what they were doing about the boats.
How do you know they didn't have those plans?
Once its operational it only takes an agreement to give more money to expand it to everyone, which is exactly what Labor's policy was under Rudd.
Rudd's policy worked. No reason it couldn't work here.
The issue is the ethics, and saying we don't want to do that. That's on our side.
But there is absolutely no reason to give Rwanda more money for them to take everyone, as Rudd agreed with PNG, until the hurdles on our side have been cleared.
To say it can't work is folly. To say its unethical and you don't want to work, that has principles.
The Conservative government was never going to spend £10billion on this project, but that’s what they’d have to spend to make it work - you have to credibly be able to take the majority of the Channel crossers, otherwise your project is just another roadblock to overcome.
That’s why Rwanda was the project of an unserious government: They had to stuff the Rwandan’s mouths with silver (to paraphrase Aneurin Bevan) to get them to take 300 people because nobody else would take our money & the entire project was clearly not economically possible given that constraint.
If they could credibly have put all the channel boat crossers through this scheme then I agree, it might have worked. But we couldn’t afford it & so it was never going to work. Going ahead with it, given that inevitability, shows that they only cared about headlines, not doing things that might actually work. (Stopping the processing of migrants just to stuff up the next government & make things worse in the short term so that they could claim to be the ones with a plan at the GE was also the sign of a deeply unserious government but that’s a separate problem.)
Complete fallacy here.
Two issues, one is the costs change, paying for the first of anything costs much more than paying in scale.
Second issue is that numbers change. If everyone who crossed the channel knew they were guaranteed to go to Rwanda, the numbers coming would be ~0 anyway.
Object based on principles or ethics, but your numbers arguments are complete bullshit.
There's still a few Tory ministers out there trying to sell Rwanda - doesn't look like people are listening because they know its vapourware.
Asked where you’d house migrants if they all had to leave hotels , the stock answer deport them , asked about the interim period ,more drivel . And says he wants zero legal net migration , an unworkable policy just thrown out there to appease the easily duped.
Hes on the telly on awful lot for a bloke who just does DOGE stuff
Yes he’s everywhere at the moment spouting nonsense .
He has nonsense verbal diarrhea, spews it nine to the dozen all day every day. Mostly obsessively about Jenrick and Braverman.
We need to stop spending money on hotels and instead spend more money on judges and lawyers to get through the backlog and either (a) permit asylum so they can start working, or (b) deport.
Isn't that essentially this government's policy ?
Yes. They seem to have been steadily churning through the backlog left them by the incompetence of the Conservative government. Not that you’d ever learn this from hysterical DM headlines.
Sometimes competent government is just getting the job that’s in front of you done, to the best of the adminstration’s ability.
That’s not going to be enough to draw the sting of the immigration figures by the next GE I suspect, because (again) the previous government f’ed things up so completely that the population has lost all trust in any current government & the continued drumbeat of headlines only reinforces that loss of faith. But Labour appear to be doing the right thing here at least.
Labour also abandoned the Rwanda plan for the boat people, which was arguably working (hence the Irish shrieking about it) and replaced it with their brilliant new plan to SMASH THE GANGS
How's that going?
The Rwanda Plan would never have worked - the agreed numbers were, what, in the low 100s? When you have 10,000s a year crossing the Channel, a 1% chance of being sent to Rwanda is no deterrant at all.
If the Conservatives had credibly set up a program to move all Channel crossers into Rwanda, then I would agree with you - that would probably have had the desired effect, if they were actually capable of mopping up all of them. Once established you’d then only need a small program “pour encourager les autres”.
But the program as actually established & funded was pitifully small compared to the size required for it to ever actually work. The Conservatives were not a serious government & the Rwanda program is just another exemplar of their fundamental failure to actually govern effectively. You either do something like that properly or not at all if you want it to be effective. The actual program as implemented was guaranteed to be woefully ineffective, therefore we must conclude that the government was not actually interested in making it succeed - they just wanted the headlines that would give the impression that they were doing something until the next GE rolled around.
Yes and No. I agree the Rwanda plan was horribly incoherent and almost built-to-fail. It's almost as if the politicians and civil servants tasked with enacting it WANTED it to fail because they are all woke wankers at heart, and it was just a gesture. But maybe that's the cynic in me
However there is evidence that even in its chaotic, half-formed and unconvincing state, the Rwanda Plan was still having a deterrent effect. The Irish certainly thought so, and said so
"Rwanda Bill causing migrants to head for Ireland instead of UK, deputy PM Micheál Martin says"
Imagine what a non half-arsed Rwanda Plan could have done, in this light. It would have probably stopped the boats
My assertion is that the Rwanda plan was half arsed because the Conservatives were not serious about it. Just like they weren’t serious about anything else.
Now the current government is left trying to pick up the pieces. Labour have their flaws, but at least they’re serious about being a government.
Why didn't Big Rish launch a Rwanda flight after he passed his fucking daft legislation but before the election? Why did he prefer to campaign on the notion of Rwanda rather than the actuality?
People who compare Rwanda to Australia's OSB operation understand neither.
1. The RAN did tow backs to Indonesia. Neither Big Rish nor SKS have a tithe of the fortitude it would take to do that. 2. Australia had Christmas Island. The asylos could be taken there directly off their boats without ever setting foot in the Australian Migration Zone and therefore having access to the Australian Courts. No such place exists for the UK.
That's the dog that didn't bark, which shows that the whole thing was barking.
Once Rishi has his legal ducks lined up (which he had), the only thing stopping him trying for a flight was his decision.
We need to stop spending money on hotels and instead spend more money on judges and lawyers to get through the backlog and either (a) permit asylum so they can start working, or (b) deport.
Isn't that essentially this government's policy ?
Yes. They seem to have been steadily churning through the backlog left them by the incompetence of the Conservative government. Not that you’d ever learn this from hysterical DM headlines.
Sometimes competent government is just getting the job that’s in front of you done, to the best of the adminstration’s ability.
That’s not going to be enough to draw the sting of the immigration figures by the next GE I suspect, because (again) the previous government f’ed things up so completely that the population has lost all trust in any current government & the continued drumbeat of headlines only reinforces that loss of faith. But Labour appear to be doing the right thing here at least.
Labour also abandoned the Rwanda plan for the boat people, which was arguably working (hence the Irish shrieking about it) and replaced it with their brilliant new plan to SMASH THE GANGS
How's that going?
The Rwanda Plan would never have worked - the agreed numbers were, what, in the low 100s? When you have 10,000s a year crossing the Channel, a 1% chance of being sent to Rwanda is no deterrant at all.
If the Conservatives had credibly set up a program to move all Channel crossers into Rwanda, then I would agree with you - that would probably have had the desired effect, if they were actually capable of mopping up all of them. Once established you’d then only need a small program “pour encourager les autres”.
But the program as actually established & funded was pitifully small compared to the size required for it to ever actually work. The Conservatives were not a serious government & the Rwanda program is just another exemplar of their fundamental failure to actually govern effectively. You either do something like that properly or not at all if you want it to be effective. The actual program as implemented was guaranteed to be woefully ineffective, therefore we must conclude that the government was not actually interested in making it succeed - they just wanted the headlines that would give the impression that they were doing something until the next GE rolled around.
Missing the point entirely.
The Rwanda plan could have worked, it worked in Australia where it was done.
The numbers though would have to, and could, change.
Trialling a new policy the numbers are generally low. Labor's Rudd in Australia changed their Rwanda equivalent from low numbers to everyone once the policy was operational.
The biggest hurdle is on our side, not their side, that we via our courts etc don't want to send people. Rwanda will take as many as we pay them for, and initially there's no point paying for more than small numbers but if we can sort out our side, that can change.
Never judge a policy based on trial numbers. Object to its ethics, sure, but it could and has worked elsewhere.
They would have had to have plans in place to radically increase the scope of the Rwanda plan after setting it up.
They didn’t have those plans, nor could we have afforded them at the prices the Rwandan’s were charging us IIRC. Ergo the Conservatives were not serious. I agree entirely that they could have made something like the Rwanda plan work, but they don’t appear to have wanted i to work - they just wanted it to exist so they could point to it whenever anyone asked them what they were doing about the boats.
How do you know they didn't have those plans?
Once its operational it only takes an agreement to give more money to expand it to everyone, which is exactly what Labor's policy was under Rudd.
Rudd's policy worked. No reason it couldn't work here.
The issue is the ethics, and saying we don't want to do that. That's on our side.
But there is absolutely no reason to give Rwanda more money for them to take everyone, as Rudd agreed with PNG, until the hurdles on our side have been cleared.
To say it can't work is folly. To say its unethical and you don't want to work, that has principles.
The Conservative government was never going to spend £10billion on this project, but that’s what they’d have to spend to make it work - you have to credibly be able to take the majority of the Channel crossers, otherwise your project is just another roadblock to overcome.
That’s why Rwanda was the project of an unserious government: They had to stuff the Rwandan’s mouths with silver (to paraphrase Aneurin Bevan) to get them to take 300 people because nobody else would take our money & the entire project was clearly not economically possible given that constraint.
If they could credibly have put all the channel boat crossers through this scheme then I agree, it might have worked. But we couldn’t afford it & so it was never going to work. Going ahead with it, given that inevitability, shows that they only cared about headlines, not doing things that might actually work. (Stopping the processing of migrants just to stuff up the next government & make things worse in the short term so that they could claim to be the ones with a plan at the GE was also the sign of a deeply unserious government but that’s a separate problem.)
Complete fallacy here.
Two issues, one is the costs change, paying for the first of anything costs much more than paying in scale.
Second issue is that numbers change. If everyone who crossed the channel knew they were guaranteed to go to Rwanda, the numbers coming would be ~0 anyway.
Object based on principles or ethics, but your numbers arguments are complete bullshit.
No, that number I quoted /only/ included the costs the Rwandans were charging us /per/ asylum seeker. It included none of the fixed costs, nor the bonus £120million we were going to pay them once we hit 300 migrants transferred.
Look at the migration watch figures: The costs are eye-watering & if you thing the Rwandan government would have charged us less once they realised we were willing to pay these vast sums & had no other government willing to take them I have a few bridges to sell you.
Fallacy again.
Per person for 300 or per person for 30000 are a matter for negotiations, they're not immutable laws of nature. If you negotiate for more of something you tend to pay less per unit. Scale negotiations happen across almost every industry and sector.
Rudd did the same thing, start with some as a trial, then negotiate for all.
We need to stop spending money on hotels and instead spend more money on judges and lawyers to get through the backlog and either (a) permit asylum so they can start working, or (b) deport.
Isn't that essentially this government's policy ?
Yes. They seem to have been steadily churning through the backlog left them by the incompetence of the Conservative government. Not that you’d ever learn this from hysterical DM headlines.
Sometimes competent government is just getting the job that’s in front of you done, to the best of the adminstration’s ability.
That’s not going to be enough to draw the sting of the immigration figures by the next GE I suspect, because (again) the previous government f’ed things up so completely that the population has lost all trust in any current government & the continued drumbeat of headlines only reinforces that loss of faith. But Labour appear to be doing the right thing here at least.
Labour also abandoned the Rwanda plan for the boat people, which was arguably working (hence the Irish shrieking about it) and replaced it with their brilliant new plan to SMASH THE GANGS
How's that going?
The Rwanda Plan would never have worked - the agreed numbers were, what, in the low 100s? When you have 10,000s a year crossing the Channel, a 1% chance of being sent to Rwanda is no deterrant at all.
If the Conservatives had credibly set up a program to move all Channel crossers into Rwanda, then I would agree with you - that would probably have had the desired effect, if they were actually capable of mopping up all of them. Once established you’d then only need a small program “pour encourager les autres”.
But the program as actually established & funded was pitifully small compared to the size required for it to ever actually work. The Conservatives were not a serious government & the Rwanda program is just another exemplar of their fundamental failure to actually govern effectively. You either do something like that properly or not at all if you want it to be effective. The actual program as implemented was guaranteed to be woefully ineffective, therefore we must conclude that the government was not actually interested in making it succeed - they just wanted the headlines that would give the impression that they were doing something until the next GE rolled around.
Yes and No. I agree the Rwanda plan was horribly incoherent and almost built-to-fail. It's almost as if the politicians and civil servants tasked with enacting it WANTED it to fail because they are all woke wankers at heart, and it was just a gesture. But maybe that's the cynic in me
However there is evidence that even in its chaotic, half-formed and unconvincing state, the Rwanda Plan was still having a deterrent effect. The Irish certainly thought so, and said so
"Rwanda Bill causing migrants to head for Ireland instead of UK, deputy PM Micheál Martin says"
Imagine what a non half-arsed Rwanda Plan could have done, in this light. It would have probably stopped the boats
My assertion is that the Rwanda plan was half arsed because the Conservatives were not serious about it. Just like they weren’t serious about anything else.
Now the current government is left trying to pick up the pieces. Labour have their flaws, but at least they’re serious about being a government.
The French returns program seems just as half arsed as the Rwanda plan. Yes the gov't says they can scale it but any plan is, in theory, scalable - even the Rwanda one. We will never know if the Rwanda plan would have worked because there were too many vested interests in stopping it and Rishi didn't do what needed to be done in Parliament to make it work. Will Keir's "returns agreement" fare any better ? I have my doubts.
A problem with all such plans is that they imagine that people coming over on small boats are well-informed about UK immigration policy. They're not. They generally don't have the foggiest about a Rwanda plan or a France plan or what benefits are on offer or what accommodation will be used.
Changes from 13th August [Find Out Now, 20th August, N=2,615]
Labour plus LDs plus Greens on 40% combined though, 7% more than Reform's 33%, so Labour MPs and Tory MPs in marginal seats will clearly hope for tactical voting from them to keep out Reform
I don't see tactical voting by Tory voters against Reform being a thing at all except in a very limited number of places.
If anything, I'd expect to see tactical voting of Tory voters TO reform.
Newsom's media interns are living their best lives at the moment.
WOW! FOX NEWS CAN’T STOP TALKING ABOUT ME (GAVIN C. NEWSOM), AMERICA’S FAVORITE GOVERNOR!!! TONIGHT THEIR ENTIRE PRIMETIME LINEUP WAS ABOUT ME! JESSE WATTERS KEPT CALLING ME “DADDY” (VERY WEIRD, NOT INTERESTED, BUT THANK YOU!). SEAN HANNITY (VERY NICE GUY) NEARLY CRIED BECAUSE I WON’T TAKE HIS “ADVICE.” SORRY SEAN!!!! THEN THEY DRAGGED OUT THE B-TEAM OF DUMB DUMBS: “MEATBALL RON,” TOMI “TOILET” LAHREN, AND TEDDY “CANCUN” CRUZ (HE EVEN FLEW BACK SPECIAL FROM MEXICO!) ALL WHINING ABOUT ME, GCN! THEY HAD TO “PLAY THE MUSIC” TO SHUT TED UP ABOUT MY BEAUTIFUL HAIR (I GET IT! SO JEALOUS!). TOTAL DISASTER. MAGA HATES ME BECAUSE THEY HATE YOU. THEY HATE THAT CALIFORNIA IS THE 4TH BIGGEST ECONOMY IN THE WORLD. THEY HATE THAT CRIME IS DOWN, THAT WE’RE #1 IN FARMING (I LOVE THE FARMERS!), MANUFACTURING, TOURISM & TECH… ALL WHILE WE GIVE AFFORDABLE HEALTH CARE, FREE SCHOOL MEALS (MAKE AMERICA PREGNANT AGAIN!), PAID “BABY LEAVE” FOR MOMS (THEY SHOULD NOT RETURN ANYWAYS!!), $20 MINIMUM WAGE & SO MUCH MORE FOR THE PEOPLE!!! THEY HATE THAT DEMOCRATS ARE WINNING. FOX & MAGA HAVE NEWSOM DERANGEMENT SYNDROME!!! THEY SHOULD CRY HARDER! SAD!!! — GCN https://x.com/GovPressOffice/status/1958357487180194071
The women behind all these tweets is Newsom's digital director. Her name's Camille Zapata (and she's not an intern).
We need to stop spending money on hotels and instead spend more money on judges and lawyers to get through the backlog and either (a) permit asylum so they can start working, or (b) deport.
Isn't that essentially this government's policy ?
Yes. They seem to have been steadily churning through the backlog left them by the incompetence of the Conservative government. Not that you’d ever learn this from hysterical DM headlines.
Sometimes competent government is just getting the job that’s in front of you done, to the best of the adminstration’s ability.
That’s not going to be enough to draw the sting of the immigration figures by the next GE I suspect, because (again) the previous government f’ed things up so completely that the population has lost all trust in any current government & the continued drumbeat of headlines only reinforces that loss of faith. But Labour appear to be doing the right thing here at least.
Labour also abandoned the Rwanda plan for the boat people, which was arguably working (hence the Irish shrieking about it) and replaced it with their brilliant new plan to SMASH THE GANGS
How's that going?
The Rwanda Plan would never have worked - the agreed numbers were, what, in the low 100s? When you have 10,000s a year crossing the Channel, a 1% chance of being sent to Rwanda is no deterrant at all.
If the Conservatives had credibly set up a program to move all Channel crossers into Rwanda, then I would agree with you - that would probably have had the desired effect, if they were actually capable of mopping up all of them. Once established you’d then only need a small program “pour encourager les autres”.
But the program as actually established & funded was pitifully small compared to the size required for it to ever actually work. The Conservatives were not a serious government & the Rwanda program is just another exemplar of their fundamental failure to actually govern effectively. You either do something like that properly or not at all if you want it to be effective. The actual program as implemented was guaranteed to be woefully ineffective, therefore we must conclude that the government was not actually interested in making it succeed - they just wanted the headlines that would give the impression that they were doing something until the next GE rolled around.
Yes and No. I agree the Rwanda plan was horribly incoherent and almost built-to-fail. It's almost as if the politicians and civil servants tasked with enacting it WANTED it to fail because they are all woke wankers at heart, and it was just a gesture. But maybe that's the cynic in me
However there is evidence that even in its chaotic, half-formed and unconvincing state, the Rwanda Plan was still having a deterrent effect. The Irish certainly thought so, and said so
"Rwanda Bill causing migrants to head for Ireland instead of UK, deputy PM Micheál Martin says"
Imagine what a non half-arsed Rwanda Plan could have done, in this light. It would have probably stopped the boats
My assertion is that the Rwanda plan was half arsed because the Conservatives were not serious about it. Just like they weren’t serious about anything else.
Now the current government is left trying to pick up the pieces. Labour have their flaws, but at least they’re serious about being a government.
The French returns program seems just as half arsed as the Rwanda plan. Yes the gov't says they can scale it but any plan is, in theory, scalable - even the Rwanda one. We will never know if the Rwanda plan would have worked because there were too many vested interests in stopping it and Rishi didn't do what needed to be done in Parliament to make it work. Will Keir's "returns agreement" fare any better ? I have my doubts.
A problem with all such plans is that they imagine that people coming over on small boats are well-informed about UK immigration policy. They're not. They generally don't have the foggiest about a Rwanda plan or a France plan or what benefits are on offer or what accommodation will be used.
Lol. You really don't understand the modern world....
Asylum applications hit record high for 12-month period
A total of 111,084 people applied for asylum in the UK in the year to June 2025, the highest number for any 12-month period since current records began in 2001.
The number is up 14% from 97,107 in the year to June 2024, according to new figures published by the Home Office.
The previous record for a 12-month period was 109,343 in the year to March 2025.
Migrants who arrived in the UK after crossing the English Channel in small boats accounted for 39% of the total number of people claiming asylum in the year to June.
Just tell them all no. We can't accommodate everyone from every shithole on earth and its daft that we're even trying.
We're not trying to "accommodate everyone from every shithole on earth". I've told you a million times not to exaggerate.
We need to stop spending money on hotels and instead spend more money on judges and lawyers to get through the backlog and either (a) permit asylum so they can start working, or (b) deport.
Isn't that essentially this government's policy ?
Yes. They seem to have been steadily churning through the backlog left them by the incompetence of the Conservative government. Not that you’d ever learn this from hysterical DM headlines.
Sometimes competent government is just getting the job that’s in front of you done, to the best of the adminstration’s ability.
That’s not going to be enough to draw the sting of the immigration figures by the next GE I suspect, because (again) the previous government f’ed things up so completely that the population has lost all trust in any current government & the continued drumbeat of headlines only reinforces that loss of faith. But Labour appear to be doing the right thing here at least.
Labour also abandoned the Rwanda plan for the boat people, which was arguably working (hence the Irish shrieking about it) and replaced it with their brilliant new plan to SMASH THE GANGS
How's that going?
The Rwanda Plan would never have worked - the agreed numbers were, what, in the low 100s? When you have 10,000s a year crossing the Channel, a 1% chance of being sent to Rwanda is no deterrant at all.
If the Conservatives had credibly set up a program to move all Channel crossers into Rwanda, then I would agree with you - that would probably have had the desired effect, if they were actually capable of mopping up all of them. Once established you’d then only need a small program “pour encourager les autres”.
But the program as actually established & funded was pitifully small compared to the size required for it to ever actually work. The Conservatives were not a serious government & the Rwanda program is just another exemplar of their fundamental failure to actually govern effectively. You either do something like that properly or not at all if you want it to be effective. The actual program as implemented was guaranteed to be woefully ineffective, therefore we must conclude that the government was not actually interested in making it succeed - they just wanted the headlines that would give the impression that they were doing something until the next GE rolled around.
Yes and No. I agree the Rwanda plan was horribly incoherent and almost built-to-fail. It's almost as if the politicians and civil servants tasked with enacting it WANTED it to fail because they are all woke wankers at heart, and it was just a gesture. But maybe that's the cynic in me
However there is evidence that even in its chaotic, half-formed and unconvincing state, the Rwanda Plan was still having a deterrent effect. The Irish certainly thought so, and said so
"Rwanda Bill causing migrants to head for Ireland instead of UK, deputy PM Micheál Martin says"
Imagine what a non half-arsed Rwanda Plan could have done, in this light. It would have probably stopped the boats
My assertion is that the Rwanda plan was half arsed because the Conservatives were not serious about it. Just like they weren’t serious about anything else.
Now the current government is left trying to pick up the pieces. Labour have their flaws, but at least they’re serious about being a government.
The French returns program seems just as half arsed as the Rwanda plan. Yes the gov't says they can scale it but any plan is, in theory, scalable - even the Rwanda one. We will never know if the Rwanda plan would have worked because there were too many vested interests in stopping it and Rishi didn't do what needed to be done in Parliament to make it work. Will Keir's "returns agreement" fare any better ? I have my doubts.
A problem with all such plans is that they imagine that people coming over on small boats are well-informed about UK immigration policy. They're not. They generally don't have the foggiest about a Rwanda plan or a France plan or what benefits are on offer or what accommodation will be used.
I suspect the only way we can fix the problem is if we send significant numbers back to France so the story gets back that it’s not worth it you will be back here in a month.
And I know that means bringing significant numbers in quickly from France but at least those will be able to work immediately
Asylum applications hit record high for 12-month period
A total of 111,084 people applied for asylum in the UK in the year to June 2025, the highest number for any 12-month period since current records began in 2001.
The number is up 14% from 97,107 in the year to June 2024, according to new figures published by the Home Office.
The previous record for a 12-month period was 109,343 in the year to March 2025.
Migrants who arrived in the UK after crossing the English Channel in small boats accounted for 39% of the total number of people claiming asylum in the year to June.
Just tell them all no. We can't accommodate everyone from every shithole on earth and its daft that we're even trying.
The public is pretty much at that stage now. A flat NO to everyone, from now on, apart from specific exceptions - Ukraine, Hong Kong
And we need a large number of those already here to go home
It wouldn’t make any difference to a party’s election chances - for racists even a massive reduction in people of other colour wouldn’t be noticed because they would still see a lot of legal residents and ask why are they still here
This is clearly wrong. If the boats visibly stopped - as they would, if we ended the right to asylum (which we must) - the governing party responsible would get a huge boost. The boats are a smallish part of the overall migration problem, but they are totemic and conspicious
So how do you get the people back to the country they came from.
It’s perfectly legitimate for those countries to do perform a “Shamima Begum” on us and say - sorry they are your problem..
Heck if you look at what is happening on the Greek Islands at the moment that seems to be exactly what is happening
Tow them back to France
Also, open a couple of El Salvador like prisons along unsightly bits of the Thames Estuary. They can easily hold 30,000 people each. As the asylum seekers will have broken the law simply by crossing on a dinghy, we can immediately put them in these jails. Keep them there until they volunteer to go home
You'd need to keep these prisons open for about six weeks, and then all the boats would totally stop, and we would actually SAVE lives by stopping drownings, and we'd end the misery of Calais etc
We can't tow back without drowning people - which is why it isn't being done. There are no "just do this" magic wand solutions that actually work.
The detention camp idea? How do you choose a place - "patriots" would protest and then attack any workers trying to construct it. I assume you propose a big razor wire enclosure and tents? Who staffs it to ensure the health and wellbeing of the detainees? Who protects the staff from attacks by "patriots"?
We're in a horrible mess here. Never mind asylum being out of control (and it demonstrably is) we also now have hate mobs being encouraged by supposedly Conservative politicians to distrust the rule of law. Riots were easier to manage - nick and jail scumbags. This? Much harder. How do you stop chunks of England turning into Ulster at the height of the troubles?
We need to stop spending money on hotels and instead spend more money on judges and lawyers to get through the backlog and either (a) permit asylum so they can start working, or (b) deport.
Isn't that essentially this government's policy ?
Yes. They seem to have been steadily churning through the backlog left them by the incompetence of the Conservative government. Not that you’d ever learn this from hysterical DM headlines.
Sometimes competent government is just getting the job that’s in front of you done, to the best of the adminstration’s ability.
That’s not going to be enough to draw the sting of the immigration figures by the next GE I suspect, because (again) the previous government f’ed things up so completely that the population has lost all trust in any current government & the continued drumbeat of headlines only reinforces that loss of faith. But Labour appear to be doing the right thing here at least.
Labour also abandoned the Rwanda plan for the boat people, which was arguably working (hence the Irish shrieking about it) and replaced it with their brilliant new plan to SMASH THE GANGS
How's that going?
The Rwanda Plan would never have worked - the agreed numbers were, what, in the low 100s? When you have 10,000s a year crossing the Channel, a 1% chance of being sent to Rwanda is no deterrant at all.
If the Conservatives had credibly set up a program to move all Channel crossers into Rwanda, then I would agree with you - that would probably have had the desired effect, if they were actually capable of mopping up all of them. Once established you’d then only need a small program “pour encourager les autres”.
But the program as actually established & funded was pitifully small compared to the size required for it to ever actually work. The Conservatives were not a serious government & the Rwanda program is just another exemplar of their fundamental failure to actually govern effectively. You either do something like that properly or not at all if you want it to be effective. The actual program as implemented was guaranteed to be woefully ineffective, therefore we must conclude that the government was not actually interested in making it succeed - they just wanted the headlines that would give the impression that they were doing something until the next GE rolled around.
Missing the point entirely.
The Rwanda plan could have worked, it worked in Australia where it was done.
The numbers though would have to, and could, change.
Trialling a new policy the numbers are generally low. Labor's Rudd in Australia changed their Rwanda equivalent from low numbers to everyone once the policy was operational.
The biggest hurdle is on our side, not their side, that we via our courts etc don't want to send people. Rwanda will take as many as we pay them for, and initially there's no point paying for more than small numbers but if we can sort out our side, that can change.
Never judge a policy based on trial numbers. Object to its ethics, sure, but it could and has worked elsewhere.
They would have had to have plans in place to radically increase the scope of the Rwanda plan after setting it up.
They didn’t have those plans, nor could we have afforded them at the prices the Rwandan’s were charging us IIRC. Ergo the Conservatives were not serious. I agree entirely that they could have made something like the Rwanda plan work, but they don’t appear to have wanted i to work - they just wanted it to exist so they could point to it whenever anyone asked them what they were doing about the boats.
How do you know they didn't have those plans?
Once its operational it only takes an agreement to give more money to expand it to everyone, which is exactly what Labor's policy was under Rudd.
Rudd's policy worked. No reason it couldn't work here.
The issue is the ethics, and saying we don't want to do that. That's on our side.
But there is absolutely no reason to give Rwanda more money for them to take everyone, as Rudd agreed with PNG, until the hurdles on our side have been cleared.
To say it can't work is folly. To say its unethical and you don't want to work, that has principles.
The Conservative government was never going to spend £10billion on this project, but that’s what they’d have to spend to make it work - you have to credibly be able to take the majority of the Channel crossers, otherwise your project is just another roadblock to overcome.
That’s why Rwanda was the project of an unserious government: They had to stuff the Rwandan’s mouths with silver (to paraphrase Aneurin Bevan) to get them to take 300 people because nobody else would take our money & the entire project was clearly not economically possible given that constraint.
If they could credibly have put all the channel boat crossers through this scheme then I agree, it might have worked. But we couldn’t afford it & so it was never going to work. Going ahead with it, given that inevitability, shows that they only cared about headlines, not doing things that might actually work. (Stopping the processing of migrants just to stuff up the next government & make things worse in the short term so that they could claim to be the ones with a plan at the GE was also the sign of a deeply unserious government but that’s a separate problem.)
Complete fallacy here.
Two issues, one is the costs change, paying for the first of anything costs much more than paying in scale.
Second issue is that numbers change. If everyone who crossed the channel knew they were guaranteed to go to Rwanda, the numbers coming would be ~0 anyway.
Object based on principles or ethics, but your numbers arguments are complete bullshit.
There's still a few Tory ministers out there trying to sell Rwanda - doesn't look like people are listening because they know its vapourware.
Support for the Rwanda plan was relatively evenly split when polled. I'd expect it to be on the side of support if re polled now
We need to stop spending money on hotels and instead spend more money on judges and lawyers to get through the backlog and either (a) permit asylum so they can start working, or (b) deport.
Isn't that essentially this government's policy ?
Yes. They seem to have been steadily churning through the backlog left them by the incompetence of the Conservative government. Not that you’d ever learn this from hysterical DM headlines.
Sometimes competent government is just getting the job that’s in front of you done, to the best of the adminstration’s ability.
That’s not going to be enough to draw the sting of the immigration figures by the next GE I suspect, because (again) the previous government f’ed things up so completely that the population has lost all trust in any current government & the continued drumbeat of headlines only reinforces that loss of faith. But Labour appear to be doing the right thing here at least.
Labour also abandoned the Rwanda plan for the boat people, which was arguably working (hence the Irish shrieking about it) and replaced it with their brilliant new plan to SMASH THE GANGS
How's that going?
The Rwanda Plan would never have worked - the agreed numbers were, what, in the low 100s? When you have 10,000s a year crossing the Channel, a 1% chance of being sent to Rwanda is no deterrant at all.
If the Conservatives had credibly set up a program to move all Channel crossers into Rwanda, then I would agree with you - that would probably have had the desired effect, if they were actually capable of mopping up all of them. Once established you’d then only need a small program “pour encourager les autres”.
But the program as actually established & funded was pitifully small compared to the size required for it to ever actually work. The Conservatives were not a serious government & the Rwanda program is just another exemplar of their fundamental failure to actually govern effectively. You either do something like that properly or not at all if you want it to be effective. The actual program as implemented was guaranteed to be woefully ineffective, therefore we must conclude that the government was not actually interested in making it succeed - they just wanted the headlines that would give the impression that they were doing something until the next GE rolled around.
Yes and No. I agree the Rwanda plan was horribly incoherent and almost built-to-fail. It's almost as if the politicians and civil servants tasked with enacting it WANTED it to fail because they are all woke wankers at heart, and it was just a gesture. But maybe that's the cynic in me
However there is evidence that even in its chaotic, half-formed and unconvincing state, the Rwanda Plan was still having a deterrent effect. The Irish certainly thought so, and said so
"Rwanda Bill causing migrants to head for Ireland instead of UK, deputy PM Micheál Martin says"
Asylum applications hit record high for 12-month period
A total of 111,084 people applied for asylum in the UK in the year to June 2025, the highest number for any 12-month period since current records began in 2001.
The number is up 14% from 97,107 in the year to June 2024, according to new figures published by the Home Office.
The previous record for a 12-month period was 109,343 in the year to March 2025.
Migrants who arrived in the UK after crossing the English Channel in small boats accounted for 39% of the total number of people claiming asylum in the year to June.
Just tell them all no. We can't accommodate everyone from every shithole on earth and its daft that we're even trying.
We're not trying to "accommodate everyone from every shithole on earth". I've told you a million times not to exaggerate.
Stick that on a bus - 'only 110k applications last year! We're doing a cracking job'
We need to stop spending money on hotels and instead spend more money on judges and lawyers to get through the backlog and either (a) permit asylum so they can start working, or (b) deport.
Isn't that essentially this government's policy ?
Yes. They seem to have been steadily churning through the backlog left them by the incompetence of the Conservative government. Not that you’d ever learn this from hysterical DM headlines.
Sometimes competent government is just getting the job that’s in front of you done, to the best of the adminstration’s ability.
That’s not going to be enough to draw the sting of the immigration figures by the next GE I suspect, because (again) the previous government f’ed things up so completely that the population has lost all trust in any current government & the continued drumbeat of headlines only reinforces that loss of faith. But Labour appear to be doing the right thing here at least.
Labour also abandoned the Rwanda plan for the boat people, which was arguably working (hence the Irish shrieking about it) and replaced it with their brilliant new plan to SMASH THE GANGS
How's that going?
The Rwanda Plan would never have worked - the agreed numbers were, what, in the low 100s? When you have 10,000s a year crossing the Channel, a 1% chance of being sent to Rwanda is no deterrant at all.
If the Conservatives had credibly set up a program to move all Channel crossers into Rwanda, then I would agree with you - that would probably have had the desired effect, if they were actually capable of mopping up all of them. Once established you’d then only need a small program “pour encourager les autres”.
But the program as actually established & funded was pitifully small compared to the size required for it to ever actually work. The Conservatives were not a serious government & the Rwanda program is just another exemplar of their fundamental failure to actually govern effectively. You either do something like that properly or not at all if you want it to be effective. The actual program as implemented was guaranteed to be woefully ineffective, therefore we must conclude that the government was not actually interested in making it succeed - they just wanted the headlines that would give the impression that they were doing something until the next GE rolled around.
Yes and No. I agree the Rwanda plan was horribly incoherent and almost built-to-fail. It's almost as if the politicians and civil servants tasked with enacting it WANTED it to fail because they are all woke wankers at heart, and it was just a gesture. But maybe that's the cynic in me
However there is evidence that even in its chaotic, half-formed and unconvincing state, the Rwanda Plan was still having a deterrent effect. The Irish certainly thought so, and said so
"Rwanda Bill causing migrants to head for Ireland instead of UK, deputy PM Micheál Martin says"
Imagine what a non half-arsed Rwanda Plan could have done, in this light. It would have probably stopped the boats
My assertion is that the Rwanda plan was half arsed because the Conservatives were not serious about it. Just like they weren’t serious about anything else.
Now the current government is left trying to pick up the pieces. Labour have their flaws, but at least they’re serious about being a government.
The French returns program seems just as half arsed as the Rwanda plan. Yes the gov't says they can scale it but any plan is, in theory, scalable - even the Rwanda one. We will never know if the Rwanda plan would have worked because there were too many vested interests in stopping it and Rishi didn't do what needed to be done in Parliament to make it work. Will Keir's "returns agreement" fare any better ? I have my doubts.
A problem with all such plans is that they imagine that people coming over on small boats are well-informed about UK immigration policy. They're not. They generally don't have the foggiest about a Rwanda plan or a France plan or what benefits are on offer or what accommodation will be used.
That's one respect in which the France plan is superior. Return sufficient numbers and they will have the foggiest idea.
Changes from 13th August [Find Out Now, 20th August, N=2,615]
Labour plus LDs plus Greens on 40% combined though, 7% more than Reform's 33%, so Labour MPs and Tory MPs in marginal seats will clearly hope for tactical voting from them to keep out Reform
I don't see tactical voting by Tory voters against Reform being a thing at all except in a very limited number of places.
If anything, I'd expect to see tactical voting of Tory voters TO reform.
The Tory Party claims to be a broad church. I suspect furnishing Farage with the keys to Downing Street might be too much of a stretch for some one nation Tories.
We need to stop spending money on hotels and instead spend more money on judges and lawyers to get through the backlog and either (a) permit asylum so they can start working, or (b) deport.
Isn't that essentially this government's policy ?
Yes. They seem to have been steadily churning through the backlog left them by the incompetence of the Conservative government. Not that you’d ever learn this from hysterical DM headlines.
Sometimes competent government is just getting the job that’s in front of you done, to the best of the adminstration’s ability.
That’s not going to be enough to draw the sting of the immigration figures by the next GE I suspect, because (again) the previous government f’ed things up so completely that the population has lost all trust in any current government & the continued drumbeat of headlines only reinforces that loss of faith. But Labour appear to be doing the right thing here at least.
Labour also abandoned the Rwanda plan for the boat people, which was arguably working (hence the Irish shrieking about it) and replaced it with their brilliant new plan to SMASH THE GANGS
How's that going?
The Rwanda Plan would never have worked - the agreed numbers were, what, in the low 100s? When you have 10,000s a year crossing the Channel, a 1% chance of being sent to Rwanda is no deterrant at all.
If the Conservatives had credibly set up a program to move all Channel crossers into Rwanda, then I would agree with you - that would probably have had the desired effect, if they were actually capable of mopping up all of them. Once established you’d then only need a small program “pour encourager les autres”.
But the program as actually established & funded was pitifully small compared to the size required for it to ever actually work. The Conservatives were not a serious government & the Rwanda program is just another exemplar of their fundamental failure to actually govern effectively. You either do something like that properly or not at all if you want it to be effective. The actual program as implemented was guaranteed to be woefully ineffective, therefore we must conclude that the government was not actually interested in making it succeed - they just wanted the headlines that would give the impression that they were doing something until the next GE rolled around.
Missing the point entirely.
The Rwanda plan could have worked, it worked in Australia where it was done.
The numbers though would have to, and could, change.
Trialling a new policy the numbers are generally low. Labor's Rudd in Australia changed their Rwanda equivalent from low numbers to everyone once the policy was operational.
The biggest hurdle is on our side, not their side, that we via our courts etc don't want to send people. Rwanda will take as many as we pay them for, and initially there's no point paying for more than small numbers but if we can sort out our side, that can change.
Never judge a policy based on trial numbers. Object to its ethics, sure, but it could and has worked elsewhere.
They would have had to have plans in place to radically increase the scope of the Rwanda plan after setting it up.
They didn’t have those plans, nor could we have afforded them at the prices the Rwandan’s were charging us IIRC. Ergo the Conservatives were not serious. I agree entirely that they could have made something like the Rwanda plan work, but they don’t appear to have wanted i to work - they just wanted it to exist so they could point to it whenever anyone asked them what they were doing about the boats.
How do you know they didn't have those plans?
Once its operational it only takes an agreement to give more money to expand it to everyone, which is exactly what Labor's policy was under Rudd.
Rudd's policy worked. No reason it couldn't work here.
The issue is the ethics, and saying we don't want to do that. That's on our side.
But there is absolutely no reason to give Rwanda more money for them to take everyone, as Rudd agreed with PNG, until the hurdles on our side have been cleared.
To say it can't work is folly. To say its unethical and you don't want to work, that has principles.
The Conservative government was never going to spend £10billion on this project, but that’s what they’d have to spend to make it work - you have to credibly be able to take the majority of the Channel crossers, otherwise your project is just another roadblock to overcome.
That’s why Rwanda was the project of an unserious government: They had to stuff the Rwandan’s mouths with silver (to paraphrase Aneurin Bevan) to get them to take 300 people because nobody else would take our money & the entire project was clearly not economically possible given that constraint.
If they could credibly have put all the channel boat crossers through this scheme then I agree, it might have worked. But we couldn’t afford it & so it was never going to work. Going ahead with it, given that inevitability, shows that they only cared about headlines, not doing things that might actually work. (Stopping the processing of migrants just to stuff up the next government & make things worse in the short term so that they could claim to be the ones with a plan at the GE was also the sign of a deeply unserious government but that’s a separate problem.)
Complete fallacy here.
Two issues, one is the costs change, paying for the first of anything costs much more than paying in scale.
Second issue is that numbers change. If everyone who crossed the channel knew they were guaranteed to go to Rwanda, the numbers coming would be ~0 anyway.
Object based on principles or ethics, but your numbers arguments are complete bullshit.
No, that number I quoted /only/ included the costs the Rwandans were charging us /per/ asylum seeker. It included none of the fixed costs, nor the bonus £120million we were going to pay them once we hit 300 migrants transferred.
Look at the migration watch figures: The costs are eye-watering & if you thing the Rwandan government would have charged us less once they realised we were willing to pay these vast sums & had no other government willing to take them I have a few bridges to sell you.
Fallacy again.
Per person for 300 or per person for 30000 are a matter for negotiations, they're not immutable laws of nature. If you negotiate for more of something you tend to pay less per unit. Scale negotiations happen across almost every industry and sector.
Rudd did the same thing, start with some as a trial, then negotiate for all.
I agree, the price would have probably changed: the sensible thing for the Rwandans to do once it became clear that we were willing to pay whatever it took to make this scheme happen would have been to put the per migrant price up. After all, they’re clearly already the lowest bidder & we had no other options - they should therefore put the price up until the buyer balks.
You are naïve, frankly, to think that this scheme would follow ordinary manufacturing economics.
Asked where you’d house migrants if they all had to leave hotels , the stock answer deport them , asked about the interim period ,more drivel . And says he wants zero legal net migration , an unworkable policy just thrown out there to appease the easily duped.
Hes on the telly on awful lot for a bloke who just does DOGE stuff
Yes he’s everywhere at the moment spouting nonsense .
We need to stop spending money on hotels and instead spend more money on judges and lawyers to get through the backlog and either (a) permit asylum so they can start working, or (b) deport.
Isn't that essentially this government's policy ?
Yes. They seem to have been steadily churning through the backlog left them by the incompetence of the Conservative government. Not that you’d ever learn this from hysterical DM headlines.
Sometimes competent government is just getting the job that’s in front of you done, to the best of the adminstration’s ability.
That’s not going to be enough to draw the sting of the immigration figures by the next GE I suspect, because (again) the previous government f’ed things up so completely that the population has lost all trust in any current government & the continued drumbeat of headlines only reinforces that loss of faith. But Labour appear to be doing the right thing here at least.
Labour also abandoned the Rwanda plan for the boat people, which was arguably working (hence the Irish shrieking about it) and replaced it with their brilliant new plan to SMASH THE GANGS
How's that going?
The Rwanda Plan would never have worked - the agreed numbers were, what, in the low 100s? When you have 10,000s a year crossing the Channel, a 1% chance of being sent to Rwanda is no deterrant at all.
If the Conservatives had credibly set up a program to move all Channel crossers into Rwanda, then I would agree with you - that would probably have had the desired effect, if they were actually capable of mopping up all of them. Once established you’d then only need a small program “pour encourager les autres”.
But the program as actually established & funded was pitifully small compared to the size required for it to ever actually work. The Conservatives were not a serious government & the Rwanda program is just another exemplar of their fundamental failure to actually govern effectively. You either do something like that properly or not at all if you want it to be effective. The actual program as implemented was guaranteed to be woefully ineffective, therefore we must conclude that the government was not actually interested in making it succeed - they just wanted the headlines that would give the impression that they were doing something until the next GE rolled around.
Missing the point entirely.
The Rwanda plan could have worked, it worked in Australia where it was done.
The numbers though would have to, and could, change.
Trialling a new policy the numbers are generally low. Labor's Rudd in Australia changed their Rwanda equivalent from low numbers to everyone once the policy was operational.
The biggest hurdle is on our side, not their side, that we via our courts etc don't want to send people. Rwanda will take as many as we pay them for, and initially there's no point paying for more than small numbers but if we can sort out our side, that can change.
Never judge a policy based on trial numbers. Object to its ethics, sure, but it could and has worked elsewhere.
They would have had to have plans in place to radically increase the scope of the Rwanda plan after setting it up.
They didn’t have those plans, nor could we have afforded them at the prices the Rwandan’s were charging us IIRC. Ergo the Conservatives were not serious. I agree entirely that they could have made something like the Rwanda plan work, but they don’t appear to have wanted i to work - they just wanted it to exist so they could point to it whenever anyone asked them what they were doing about the boats.
How do you know they didn't have those plans?
Once its operational it only takes an agreement to give more money to expand it to everyone, which is exactly what Labor's policy was under Rudd.
Rudd's policy worked. No reason it couldn't work here.
The issue is the ethics, and saying we don't want to do that. That's on our side.
But there is absolutely no reason to give Rwanda more money for them to take everyone, as Rudd agreed with PNG, until the hurdles on our side have been cleared.
To say it can't work is folly. To say its unethical and you don't want to work, that has principles.
The Conservative government was never going to spend £10billion on this project, but that’s what they’d have to spend to make it work - you have to credibly be able to take the majority of the Channel crossers, otherwise your project is just another roadblock to overcome.
That’s why Rwanda was the project of an unserious government: They had to stuff the Rwandan’s mouths with silver (to paraphrase Aneurin Bevan) to get them to take 300 people because nobody else would take our money & the entire project was clearly not economically possible given that constraint.
If they could credibly have put all the channel boat crossers through this scheme then I agree, it might have worked. But we couldn’t afford it & so it was never going to work. Going ahead with it, given that inevitability, shows that they only cared about headlines, not doing things that might actually work. (Stopping the processing of migrants just to stuff up the next government & make things worse in the short term so that they could claim to be the ones with a plan at the GE was also the sign of a deeply unserious government but that’s a separate problem.)
Complete fallacy here.
Two issues, one is the costs change, paying for the first of anything costs much more than paying in scale.
Second issue is that numbers change. If everyone who crossed the channel knew they were guaranteed to go to Rwanda, the numbers coming would be ~0 anyway.
Object based on principles or ethics, but your numbers arguments are complete bullshit.
There's still a few Tory ministers out there trying to sell Rwanda - doesn't look like people are listening because they know its vapourware.
Support for the Rwanda plan was relatively evenly split when polled. I'd expect it to be on the side of support if re polled now
They won't be when people are told that stick people in hotels is an integral part of the Rwanda plan
We need to stop spending money on hotels and instead spend more money on judges and lawyers to get through the backlog and either (a) permit asylum so they can start working, or (b) deport.
Isn't that essentially this government's policy ?
Yes. They seem to have been steadily churning through the backlog left them by the incompetence of the Conservative government. Not that you’d ever learn this from hysterical DM headlines.
Sometimes competent government is just getting the job that’s in front of you done, to the best of the adminstration’s ability.
That’s not going to be enough to draw the sting of the immigration figures by the next GE I suspect, because (again) the previous government f’ed things up so completely that the population has lost all trust in any current government & the continued drumbeat of headlines only reinforces that loss of faith. But Labour appear to be doing the right thing here at least.
Labour also abandoned the Rwanda plan for the boat people, which was arguably working (hence the Irish shrieking about it) and replaced it with their brilliant new plan to SMASH THE GANGS
How's that going?
The Rwanda Plan would never have worked - the agreed numbers were, what, in the low 100s? When you have 10,000s a year crossing the Channel, a 1% chance of being sent to Rwanda is no deterrant at all.
If the Conservatives had credibly set up a program to move all Channel crossers into Rwanda, then I would agree with you - that would probably have had the desired effect, if they were actually capable of mopping up all of them. Once established you’d then only need a small program “pour encourager les autres”.
But the program as actually established & funded was pitifully small compared to the size required for it to ever actually work. The Conservatives were not a serious government & the Rwanda program is just another exemplar of their fundamental failure to actually govern effectively. You either do something like that properly or not at all if you want it to be effective. The actual program as implemented was guaranteed to be woefully ineffective, therefore we must conclude that the government was not actually interested in making it succeed - they just wanted the headlines that would give the impression that they were doing something until the next GE rolled around.
Missing the point entirely.
The Rwanda plan could have worked, it worked in Australia where it was done.
The numbers though would have to, and could, change.
Trialling a new policy the numbers are generally low. Labor's Rudd in Australia changed their Rwanda equivalent from low numbers to everyone once the policy was operational.
The biggest hurdle is on our side, not their side, that we via our courts etc don't want to send people. Rwanda will take as many as we pay them for, and initially there's no point paying for more than small numbers but if we can sort out our side, that can change.
Never judge a policy based on trial numbers. Object to its ethics, sure, but it could and has worked elsewhere.
They would have had to have plans in place to radically increase the scope of the Rwanda plan after setting it up.
They didn’t have those plans, nor could we have afforded them at the prices the Rwandan’s were charging us IIRC. Ergo the Conservatives were not serious. I agree entirely that they could have made something like the Rwanda plan work, but they don’t appear to have wanted i to work - they just wanted it to exist so they could point to it whenever anyone asked them what they were doing about the boats.
How do you know they didn't have those plans?
Once its operational it only takes an agreement to give more money to expand it to everyone, which is exactly what Labor's policy was under Rudd.
Rudd's policy worked. No reason it couldn't work here.
The issue is the ethics, and saying we don't want to do that. That's on our side.
But there is absolutely no reason to give Rwanda more money for them to take everyone, as Rudd agreed with PNG, until the hurdles on our side have been cleared.
To say it can't work is folly. To say its unethical and you don't want to work, that has principles.
The Conservative government was never going to spend £10billion on this project, but that’s what they’d have to spend to make it work - you have to credibly be able to take the majority of the Channel crossers, otherwise your project is just another roadblock to overcome.
That’s why Rwanda was the project of an unserious government: They had to stuff the Rwandan’s mouths with silver (to paraphrase Aneurin Bevan) to get them to take 300 people because nobody else would take our money & the entire project was clearly not economically possible given that constraint.
If they could credibly have put all the channel boat crossers through this scheme then I agree, it might have worked. But we couldn’t afford it & so it was never going to work. Going ahead with it, given that inevitability, shows that they only cared about headlines, not doing things that might actually work. (Stopping the processing of migrants just to stuff up the next government & make things worse in the short term so that they could claim to be the ones with a plan at the GE was also the sign of a deeply unserious government but that’s a separate problem.)
Complete fallacy here.
Two issues, one is the costs change, paying for the first of anything costs much more than paying in scale.
Second issue is that numbers change. If everyone who crossed the channel knew they were guaranteed to go to Rwanda, the numbers coming would be ~0 anyway.
Object based on principles or ethics, but your numbers arguments are complete bullshit.
There's still a few Tory ministers out there trying to sell Rwanda - doesn't look like people are listening because they know its vapourware.
Support for the Rwanda plan was relatively evenly split when polled. I'd expect it to be on the side of support if re polled now
I don't know why Labour didn't try to convert it an offshore processing arrangement. I presume it would have been throwing good money after bad, or politically they wanted to distance themselves from anything with "Rwanda" in the name
We need to stop spending money on hotels and instead spend more money on judges and lawyers to get through the backlog and either (a) permit asylum so they can start working, or (b) deport.
Isn't that essentially this government's policy ?
Yes. They seem to have been steadily churning through the backlog left them by the incompetence of the Conservative government. Not that you’d ever learn this from hysterical DM headlines.
Sometimes competent government is just getting the job that’s in front of you done, to the best of the adminstration’s ability.
That’s not going to be enough to draw the sting of the immigration figures by the next GE I suspect, because (again) the previous government f’ed things up so completely that the population has lost all trust in any current government & the continued drumbeat of headlines only reinforces that loss of faith. But Labour appear to be doing the right thing here at least.
Labour also abandoned the Rwanda plan for the boat people, which was arguably working (hence the Irish shrieking about it) and replaced it with their brilliant new plan to SMASH THE GANGS
How's that going?
The Rwanda Plan would never have worked - the agreed numbers were, what, in the low 100s? When you have 10,000s a year crossing the Channel, a 1% chance of being sent to Rwanda is no deterrant at all.
If the Conservatives had credibly set up a program to move all Channel crossers into Rwanda, then I would agree with you - that would probably have had the desired effect, if they were actually capable of mopping up all of them. Once established you’d then only need a small program “pour encourager les autres”.
But the program as actually established & funded was pitifully small compared to the size required for it to ever actually work. The Conservatives were not a serious government & the Rwanda program is just another exemplar of their fundamental failure to actually govern effectively. You either do something like that properly or not at all if you want it to be effective. The actual program as implemented was guaranteed to be woefully ineffective, therefore we must conclude that the government was not actually interested in making it succeed - they just wanted the headlines that would give the impression that they were doing something until the next GE rolled around.
Yes and No. I agree the Rwanda plan was horribly incoherent and almost built-to-fail. It's almost as if the politicians and civil servants tasked with enacting it WANTED it to fail because they are all woke wankers at heart, and it was just a gesture. But maybe that's the cynic in me
However there is evidence that even in its chaotic, half-formed and unconvincing state, the Rwanda Plan was still having a deterrent effect. The Irish certainly thought so, and said so
"Rwanda Bill causing migrants to head for Ireland instead of UK, deputy PM Micheál Martin says"
Imagine what a non half-arsed Rwanda Plan could have done, in this light. It would have probably stopped the boats
My assertion is that the Rwanda plan was half arsed because the Conservatives were not serious about it. Just like they weren’t serious about anything else.
Now the current government is left trying to pick up the pieces. Labour have their flaws, but at least they’re serious about being a government.
The French returns program seems just as half arsed as the Rwanda plan. Yes the gov't says they can scale it but any plan is, in theory, scalable - even the Rwanda one. We will never know if the Rwanda plan would have worked because there were too many vested interests in stopping it and Rishi didn't do what needed to be done in Parliament to make it work. Will Keir's "returns agreement" fare any better ? I have my doubts.
A problem with all such plans is that they imagine that people coming over on small boats are well-informed about UK immigration policy. They're not. They generally don't have the foggiest about a Rwanda plan or a France plan or what benefits are on offer or what accommodation will be used.
That’s just not true. The Today programme was regularly reporting from the camps and interviewing potential boat people and various people working for charities there and they were clear that the Rwanda plan had cut through and was resulting in people waiting to see whether it would start or what the election result would be before paying and crossing.
The people they were interviewing were not from the Tory gov or reform but people who could easily have said it had no effect if they wanted to gaslight the public.
The people there are very well informed by tiktokkers producing updates and guides on the situation - you know this and are being disingenuous because you can’t accept that this isn’t all virtuous helping of those in danger needing asylum but is largely a massive movement of economic migrants hiding behind, and ruining it for, the people who really do deserve help.
Asylum applications hit record high for 12-month period
A total of 111,084 people applied for asylum in the UK in the year to June 2025, the highest number for any 12-month period since current records began in 2001.
The number is up 14% from 97,107 in the year to June 2024, according to new figures published by the Home Office.
The previous record for a 12-month period was 109,343 in the year to March 2025.
Migrants who arrived in the UK after crossing the English Channel in small boats accounted for 39% of the total number of people claiming asylum in the year to June.
Just tell them all no. We can't accommodate everyone from every shithole on earth and its daft that we're even trying.
The public is pretty much at that stage now. A flat NO to everyone, from now on, apart from specific exceptions - Ukraine, Hong Kong
And we need a large number of those already here to go home
It wouldn’t make any difference to a party’s election chances - for racists even a massive reduction in people of other colour wouldn’t be noticed because they would still see a lot of legal residents and ask why are they still here
This is clearly wrong. If the boats visibly stopped - as they would, if we ended the right to asylum (which we must) - the governing party responsible would get a huge boost. The boats are a smallish part of the overall migration problem, but they are totemic and conspicious
So how do you get the people back to the country they came from.
It’s perfectly legitimate for those countries to do perform a “Shamima Begum” on us and say - sorry they are your problem..
Heck if you look at what is happening on the Greek Islands at the moment that seems to be exactly what is happening
Tow them back to France
Also, open a couple of El Salvador like prisons along unsightly bits of the Thames Estuary. They can easily hold 30,000 people each. As the asylum seekers will have broken the law simply by crossing on a dinghy, we can immediately put them in these jails. Keep them there until they volunteer to go home
You'd need to keep these prisons open for about six weeks, and then all the boats would totally stop, and we would actually SAVE lives by stopping drownings, and we'd end the misery of Calais etc
You'll be gratified that the guy responsible for this is now Labour's head of communications. Presumably gunshipping refugee boats (à la 1984) is a step too far for you. For now.
For reasons I'm not clear about the photo is a whited up Sol Campbell.
We need to stop spending money on hotels and instead spend more money on judges and lawyers to get through the backlog and either (a) permit asylum so they can start working, or (b) deport.
Isn't that essentially this government's policy ?
Yes. They seem to have been steadily churning through the backlog left them by the incompetence of the Conservative government. Not that you’d ever learn this from hysterical DM headlines.
Sometimes competent government is just getting the job that’s in front of you done, to the best of the adminstration’s ability.
That’s not going to be enough to draw the sting of the immigration figures by the next GE I suspect, because (again) the previous government f’ed things up so completely that the population has lost all trust in any current government & the continued drumbeat of headlines only reinforces that loss of faith. But Labour appear to be doing the right thing here at least.
Labour also abandoned the Rwanda plan for the boat people, which was arguably working (hence the Irish shrieking about it) and replaced it with their brilliant new plan to SMASH THE GANGS
How's that going?
The Rwanda Plan would never have worked - the agreed numbers were, what, in the low 100s? When you have 10,000s a year crossing the Channel, a 1% chance of being sent to Rwanda is no deterrant at all.
If the Conservatives had credibly set up a program to move all Channel crossers into Rwanda, then I would agree with you - that would probably have had the desired effect, if they were actually capable of mopping up all of them. Once established you’d then only need a small program “pour encourager les autres”.
But the program as actually established & funded was pitifully small compared to the size required for it to ever actually work. The Conservatives were not a serious government & the Rwanda program is just another exemplar of their fundamental failure to actually govern effectively. You either do something like that properly or not at all if you want it to be effective. The actual program as implemented was guaranteed to be woefully ineffective, therefore we must conclude that the government was not actually interested in making it succeed - they just wanted the headlines that would give the impression that they were doing something until the next GE rolled around.
Missing the point entirely.
The Rwanda plan could have worked, it worked in Australia where it was done.
The numbers though would have to, and could, change.
Trialling a new policy the numbers are generally low. Labor's Rudd in Australia changed their Rwanda equivalent from low numbers to everyone once the policy was operational.
The biggest hurdle is on our side, not their side, that we via our courts etc don't want to send people. Rwanda will take as many as we pay them for, and initially there's no point paying for more than small numbers but if we can sort out our side, that can change.
Never judge a policy based on trial numbers. Object to its ethics, sure, but it could and has worked elsewhere.
They would have had to have plans in place to radically increase the scope of the Rwanda plan after setting it up.
They didn’t have those plans, nor could we have afforded them at the prices the Rwandan’s were charging us IIRC. Ergo the Conservatives were not serious. I agree entirely that they could have made something like the Rwanda plan work, but they don’t appear to have wanted i to work - they just wanted it to exist so they could point to it whenever anyone asked them what they were doing about the boats.
How do you know they didn't have those plans?
Once its operational it only takes an agreement to give more money to expand it to everyone, which is exactly what Labor's policy was under Rudd.
Rudd's policy worked. No reason it couldn't work here.
The issue is the ethics, and saying we don't want to do that. That's on our side.
But there is absolutely no reason to give Rwanda more money for them to take everyone, as Rudd agreed with PNG, until the hurdles on our side have been cleared.
To say it can't work is folly. To say its unethical and you don't want to work, that has principles.
The Conservative government was never going to spend £10billion on this project, but that’s what they’d have to spend to make it work - you have to credibly be able to take the majority of the Channel crossers, otherwise your project is just another roadblock to overcome.
That’s why Rwanda was the project of an unserious government: They had to stuff the Rwandan’s mouths with silver (to paraphrase Aneurin Bevan) to get them to take 300 people because nobody else would take our money & the entire project was clearly not economically possible given that constraint.
If they could credibly have put all the channel boat crossers through this scheme then I agree, it might have worked. But we couldn’t afford it & so it was never going to work. Going ahead with it, given that inevitability, shows that they only cared about headlines, not doing things that might actually work. (Stopping the processing of migrants just to stuff up the next government & make things worse in the short term so that they could claim to be the ones with a plan at the GE was also the sign of a deeply unserious government but that’s a separate problem.)
Complete fallacy here.
Two issues, one is the costs change, paying for the first of anything costs much more than paying in scale.
Second issue is that numbers change. If everyone who crossed the channel knew they were guaranteed to go to Rwanda, the numbers coming would be ~0 anyway.
Object based on principles or ethics, but your numbers arguments are complete bullshit.
You're missing the elementary point of geography. Indonesia and PNG have some interest in not pissing off the Australians - there are other things that they do. Rwanda and the UK, not nearly so much. No downside to taking the Tories for all they can be milked for.
Monopoly suppliers, once the first loss leaders are bought ...
We need to stop spending money on hotels and instead spend more money on judges and lawyers to get through the backlog and either (a) permit asylum so they can start working, or (b) deport.
Isn't that essentially this government's policy ?
Yes. They seem to have been steadily churning through the backlog left them by the incompetence of the Conservative government. Not that you’d ever learn this from hysterical DM headlines.
Sometimes competent government is just getting the job that’s in front of you done, to the best of the adminstration’s ability.
That’s not going to be enough to draw the sting of the immigration figures by the next GE I suspect, because (again) the previous government f’ed things up so completely that the population has lost all trust in any current government & the continued drumbeat of headlines only reinforces that loss of faith. But Labour appear to be doing the right thing here at least.
Labour also abandoned the Rwanda plan for the boat people, which was arguably working (hence the Irish shrieking about it) and replaced it with their brilliant new plan to SMASH THE GANGS
How's that going?
The Rwanda Plan would never have worked - the agreed numbers were, what, in the low 100s? When you have 10,000s a year crossing the Channel, a 1% chance of being sent to Rwanda is no deterrant at all.
If the Conservatives had credibly set up a program to move all Channel crossers into Rwanda, then I would agree with you - that would probably have had the desired effect, if they were actually capable of mopping up all of them. Once established you’d then only need a small program “pour encourager les autres”.
But the program as actually established & funded was pitifully small compared to the size required for it to ever actually work. The Conservatives were not a serious government & the Rwanda program is just another exemplar of their fundamental failure to actually govern effectively. You either do something like that properly or not at all if you want it to be effective. The actual program as implemented was guaranteed to be woefully ineffective, therefore we must conclude that the government was not actually interested in making it succeed - they just wanted the headlines that would give the impression that they were doing something until the next GE rolled around.
Missing the point entirely.
The Rwanda plan could have worked, it worked in Australia where it was done.
The numbers though would have to, and could, change.
Trialling a new policy the numbers are generally low. Labor's Rudd in Australia changed their Rwanda equivalent from low numbers to everyone once the policy was operational.
The biggest hurdle is on our side, not their side, that we via our courts etc don't want to send people. Rwanda will take as many as we pay them for, and initially there's no point paying for more than small numbers but if we can sort out our side, that can change.
Never judge a policy based on trial numbers. Object to its ethics, sure, but it could and has worked elsewhere.
They would have had to have plans in place to radically increase the scope of the Rwanda plan after setting it up.
They didn’t have those plans, nor could we have afforded them at the prices the Rwandan’s were charging us IIRC. Ergo the Conservatives were not serious. I agree entirely that they could have made something like the Rwanda plan work, but they don’t appear to have wanted i to work - they just wanted it to exist so they could point to it whenever anyone asked them what they were doing about the boats.
How do you know they didn't have those plans?
Once its operational it only takes an agreement to give more money to expand it to everyone, which is exactly what Labor's policy was under Rudd.
Rudd's policy worked. No reason it couldn't work here.
The issue is the ethics, and saying we don't want to do that. That's on our side.
But there is absolutely no reason to give Rwanda more money for them to take everyone, as Rudd agreed with PNG, until the hurdles on our side have been cleared.
To say it can't work is folly. To say its unethical and you don't want to work, that has principles.
The Conservative government was never going to spend £10billion on this project, but that’s what they’d have to spend to make it work - you have to credibly be able to take the majority of the Channel crossers, otherwise your project is just another roadblock to overcome.
That’s why Rwanda was the project of an unserious government: They had to stuff the Rwandan’s mouths with silver (to paraphrase Aneurin Bevan) to get them to take 300 people because nobody else would take our money & the entire project was clearly not economically possible given that constraint.
If they could credibly have put all the channel boat crossers through this scheme then I agree, it might have worked. But we couldn’t afford it & so it was never going to work. Going ahead with it, given that inevitability, shows that they only cared about headlines, not doing things that might actually work. (Stopping the processing of migrants just to stuff up the next government & make things worse in the short term so that they could claim to be the ones with a plan at the GE was also the sign of a deeply unserious government but that’s a separate problem.)
Complete fallacy here.
Two issues, one is the costs change, paying for the first of anything costs much more than paying in scale.
Second issue is that numbers change. If everyone who crossed the channel knew they were guaranteed to go to Rwanda, the numbers coming would be ~0 anyway.
Object based on principles or ethics, but your numbers arguments are complete bullshit.
There's still a few Tory ministers out there trying to sell Rwanda - doesn't look like people are listening because they know its vapourware.
Support for the Rwanda plan was relatively evenly split when polled. I'd expect it to be on the side of support if re polled now
I don't know why Labour didn't try to convert it an offshore processing arrangement. I presume it would have been throwing good money after bad, or politically they wanted to distance themselves from anything with "Rwanda" in the name
Because they thought the issue would just go away if they ignored it
We need to stop spending money on hotels and instead spend more money on judges and lawyers to get through the backlog and either (a) permit asylum so they can start working, or (b) deport.
Isn't that essentially this government's policy ?
Yes. They seem to have been steadily churning through the backlog left them by the incompetence of the Conservative government. Not that you’d ever learn this from hysterical DM headlines.
Sometimes competent government is just getting the job that’s in front of you done, to the best of the adminstration’s ability.
That’s not going to be enough to draw the sting of the immigration figures by the next GE I suspect, because (again) the previous government f’ed things up so completely that the population has lost all trust in any current government & the continued drumbeat of headlines only reinforces that loss of faith. But Labour appear to be doing the right thing here at least.
Labour also abandoned the Rwanda plan for the boat people, which was arguably working (hence the Irish shrieking about it) and replaced it with their brilliant new plan to SMASH THE GANGS
How's that going?
The Rwanda Plan would never have worked - the agreed numbers were, what, in the low 100s? When you have 10,000s a year crossing the Channel, a 1% chance of being sent to Rwanda is no deterrant at all.
If the Conservatives had credibly set up a program to move all Channel crossers into Rwanda, then I would agree with you - that would probably have had the desired effect, if they were actually capable of mopping up all of them. Once established you’d then only need a small program “pour encourager les autres”.
But the program as actually established & funded was pitifully small compared to the size required for it to ever actually work. The Conservatives were not a serious government & the Rwanda program is just another exemplar of their fundamental failure to actually govern effectively. You either do something like that properly or not at all if you want it to be effective. The actual program as implemented was guaranteed to be woefully ineffective, therefore we must conclude that the government was not actually interested in making it succeed - they just wanted the headlines that would give the impression that they were doing something until the next GE rolled around.
Yes and No. I agree the Rwanda plan was horribly incoherent and almost built-to-fail. It's almost as if the politicians and civil servants tasked with enacting it WANTED it to fail because they are all woke wankers at heart, and it was just a gesture. But maybe that's the cynic in me
However there is evidence that even in its chaotic, half-formed and unconvincing state, the Rwanda Plan was still having a deterrent effect. The Irish certainly thought so, and said so
"Rwanda Bill causing migrants to head for Ireland instead of UK, deputy PM Micheál Martin says"
Imagine what a non half-arsed Rwanda Plan could have done, in this light. It would have probably stopped the boats
My assertion is that the Rwanda plan was half arsed because the Conservatives were not serious about it. Just like they weren’t serious about anything else.
Now the current government is left trying to pick up the pieces. Labour have their flaws, but at least they’re serious about being a government.
The French returns program seems just as half arsed as the Rwanda plan. Yes the gov't says they can scale it but any plan is, in theory, scalable - even the Rwanda one. We will never know if the Rwanda plan would have worked because there were too many vested interests in stopping it and Rishi didn't do what needed to be done in Parliament to make it work. Will Keir's "returns agreement" fare any better ? I have my doubts.
A problem with all such plans is that they imagine that people coming over on small boats are well-informed about UK immigration policy. They're not. They generally don't have the foggiest about a Rwanda plan or a France plan or what benefits are on offer or what accommodation will be used.
I suspect the only way we can fix the problem is if we send significant numbers back to France so the story gets back that it’s not worth it you will be back here in a month.
And I know that means bringing significant numbers in quickly from France but at least those will be able to work immediately
Just return them immediately, the next day after scanning finger prints. If those in the camps in France see everyone returning 24 hours later, banned from applying for asylum for attempted illegal entry, thousands of euros poorer, and it happens non stop for a couple of months the industry dies and the migrants have no reason to stay in the area so good for the UK and good for Calais Region in the longer term.
We need to stop spending money on hotels and instead spend more money on judges and lawyers to get through the backlog and either (a) permit asylum so they can start working, or (b) deport.
Isn't that essentially this government's policy ?
Yes. They seem to have been steadily churning through the backlog left them by the incompetence of the Conservative government. Not that you’d ever learn this from hysterical DM headlines.
Sometimes competent government is just getting the job that’s in front of you done, to the best of the adminstration’s ability.
That’s not going to be enough to draw the sting of the immigration figures by the next GE I suspect, because (again) the previous government f’ed things up so completely that the population has lost all trust in any current government & the continued drumbeat of headlines only reinforces that loss of faith. But Labour appear to be doing the right thing here at least.
Labour also abandoned the Rwanda plan for the boat people, which was arguably working (hence the Irish shrieking about it) and replaced it with their brilliant new plan to SMASH THE GANGS
How's that going?
The Rwanda Plan would never have worked - the agreed numbers were, what, in the low 100s? When you have 10,000s a year crossing the Channel, a 1% chance of being sent to Rwanda is no deterrant at all.
If the Conservatives had credibly set up a program to move all Channel crossers into Rwanda, then I would agree with you - that would probably have had the desired effect, if they were actually capable of mopping up all of them. Once established you’d then only need a small program “pour encourager les autres”.
But the program as actually established & funded was pitifully small compared to the size required for it to ever actually work. The Conservatives were not a serious government & the Rwanda program is just another exemplar of their fundamental failure to actually govern effectively. You either do something like that properly or not at all if you want it to be effective. The actual program as implemented was guaranteed to be woefully ineffective, therefore we must conclude that the government was not actually interested in making it succeed - they just wanted the headlines that would give the impression that they were doing something until the next GE rolled around.
Missing the point entirely.
The Rwanda plan could have worked, it worked in Australia where it was done.
The numbers though would have to, and could, change.
Trialling a new policy the numbers are generally low. Labor's Rudd in Australia changed their Rwanda equivalent from low numbers to everyone once the policy was operational.
The biggest hurdle is on our side, not their side, that we via our courts etc don't want to send people. Rwanda will take as many as we pay them for, and initially there's no point paying for more than small numbers but if we can sort out our side, that can change.
Never judge a policy based on trial numbers. Object to its ethics, sure, but it could and has worked elsewhere.
They would have had to have plans in place to radically increase the scope of the Rwanda plan after setting it up.
They didn’t have those plans, nor could we have afforded them at the prices the Rwandan’s were charging us IIRC. Ergo the Conservatives were not serious. I agree entirely that they could have made something like the Rwanda plan work, but they don’t appear to have wanted i to work - they just wanted it to exist so they could point to it whenever anyone asked them what they were doing about the boats.
How do you know they didn't have those plans?
Once its operational it only takes an agreement to give more money to expand it to everyone, which is exactly what Labor's policy was under Rudd.
Rudd's policy worked. No reason it couldn't work here.
The issue is the ethics, and saying we don't want to do that. That's on our side.
But there is absolutely no reason to give Rwanda more money for them to take everyone, as Rudd agreed with PNG, until the hurdles on our side have been cleared.
To say it can't work is folly. To say its unethical and you don't want to work, that has principles.
The Conservative government was never going to spend £10billion on this project, but that’s what they’d have to spend to make it work - you have to credibly be able to take the majority of the Channel crossers, otherwise your project is just another roadblock to overcome.
That’s why Rwanda was the project of an unserious government: They had to stuff the Rwandan’s mouths with silver (to paraphrase Aneurin Bevan) to get them to take 300 people because nobody else would take our money & the entire project was clearly not economically possible given that constraint.
If they could credibly have put all the channel boat crossers through this scheme then I agree, it might have worked. But we couldn’t afford it & so it was never going to work. Going ahead with it, given that inevitability, shows that they only cared about headlines, not doing things that might actually work. (Stopping the processing of migrants just to stuff up the next government & make things worse in the short term so that they could claim to be the ones with a plan at the GE was also the sign of a deeply unserious government but that’s a separate problem.)
Complete fallacy here.
Two issues, one is the costs change, paying for the first of anything costs much more than paying in scale.
Second issue is that numbers change. If everyone who crossed the channel knew they were guaranteed to go to Rwanda, the numbers coming would be ~0 anyway.
Object based on principles or ethics, but your numbers arguments are complete bullshit.
There's still a few Tory ministers out there trying to sell Rwanda - doesn't look like people are listening because they know its vapourware.
Support for the Rwanda plan was relatively evenly split when polled. I'd expect it to be on the side of support if re polled now
They won't be when people are told that stick people in hotels is an integral part of the Rwanda plan
Labour own the problem/ fiasco now, but I am loving how the Tories are airbrushing themselves, Soviet-style out of recent history.
Asylum applications hit record high for 12-month period
A total of 111,084 people applied for asylum in the UK in the year to June 2025, the highest number for any 12-month period since current records began in 2001.
The number is up 14% from 97,107 in the year to June 2024, according to new figures published by the Home Office.
The previous record for a 12-month period was 109,343 in the year to March 2025.
Migrants who arrived in the UK after crossing the English Channel in small boats accounted for 39% of the total number of people claiming asylum in the year to June.
Just tell them all no. We can't accommodate everyone from every shithole on earth and its daft that we're even trying.
The public is pretty much at that stage now. A flat NO to everyone, from now on, apart from specific exceptions - Ukraine, Hong Kong
And we need a large number of those already here to go home
It wouldn’t make any difference to a party’s election chances - for racists even a massive reduction in people of other colour wouldn’t be noticed because they would still see a lot of legal residents and ask why are they still here
This is clearly wrong. If the boats visibly stopped - as they would, if we ended the right to asylum (which we must) - the governing party responsible would get a huge boost. The boats are a smallish part of the overall migration problem, but they are totemic and conspicious
So how do you get the people back to the country they came from.
It’s perfectly legitimate for those countries to do perform a “Shamima Begum” on us and say - sorry they are your problem..
Heck if you look at what is happening on the Greek Islands at the moment that seems to be exactly what is happening
Tow them back to France
Also, open a couple of El Salvador like prisons along unsightly bits of the Thames Estuary. They can easily hold 30,000 people each. As the asylum seekers will have broken the law simply by crossing on a dinghy, we can immediately put them in these jails. Keep them there until they volunteer to go home
You'd need to keep these prisons open for about six weeks, and then all the boats would totally stop, and we would actually SAVE lives by stopping drownings, and we'd end the misery of Calais etc
We can't tow back without drowning people - which is why it isn't being done. There are no "just do this" magic wand solutions that actually work.
The detention camp idea? How do you choose a place - "patriots" would protest and then attack any workers trying to construct it. I assume you propose a big razor wire enclosure and tents? Who staffs it to ensure the health and wellbeing of the detainees? Who protects the staff from attacks by "patriots"?
We're in a horrible mess here. Never mind asylum being out of control (and it demonstrably is) we also now have hate mobs being encouraged by supposedly Conservative politicians to distrust the rule of law. Riots were easier to manage - nick and jail scumbags. This? Much harder. How do you stop chunks of England turning into Ulster at the height of the troubles?
So your main objection to my “el Salvador” prison idea is “they’d be difficult to build”
I have a solution for that. It’s called mingulay. It’s the largest uninhabited island in the UK
The biggest El Salvador super prison is 0.2 sq km in size and holds 40,000 inmates. Mingulay is 10sq km so you could build four or five. Problem solved - because as soon as you started using them the boats would stop coming
There. I did it. I solved the boat people problem and I haven’t even had lunch
Asked where you’d house migrants if they all had to leave hotels , the stock answer deport them , asked about the interim period ,more drivel . And says he wants zero legal net migration , an unworkable policy just thrown out there to appease the easily duped.
Hes on the telly on awful lot for a bloke who just does DOGE stuff
Yes he’s everywhere at the moment spouting nonsense .
No one goes on Bluesky anymore or reads any of these ludicrous “xeets” so I have no idea why you guys keep linking to this drivel
Yesterday I noticed that three or four of my favourite archeaologists - I like archeology - who loudly decamped to Bluesky a year ago - have now come back to X. Quietly
Asylum applications hit record high for 12-month period
A total of 111,084 people applied for asylum in the UK in the year to June 2025, the highest number for any 12-month period since current records began in 2001.
The number is up 14% from 97,107 in the year to June 2024, according to new figures published by the Home Office.
The previous record for a 12-month period was 109,343 in the year to March 2025.
Migrants who arrived in the UK after crossing the English Channel in small boats accounted for 39% of the total number of people claiming asylum in the year to June.
Just tell them all no. We can't accommodate everyone from every shithole on earth and its daft that we're even trying.
The public is pretty much at that stage now. A flat NO to everyone, from now on, apart from specific exceptions - Ukraine, Hong Kong
And we need a large number of those already here to go home
It wouldn’t make any difference to a party’s election chances - for racists even a massive reduction in people of other colour wouldn’t be noticed because they would still see a lot of legal residents and ask why are they still here
This is clearly wrong. If the boats visibly stopped - as they would, if we ended the right to asylum (which we must) - the governing party responsible would get a huge boost. The boats are a smallish part of the overall migration problem, but they are totemic and conspicious
So how do you get the people back to the country they came from.
It’s perfectly legitimate for those countries to do perform a “Shamima Begum” on us and say - sorry they are your problem..
Heck if you look at what is happening on the Greek Islands at the moment that seems to be exactly what is happening
Tow them back to France
Also, open a couple of El Salvador like prisons along unsightly bits of the Thames Estuary. They can easily hold 30,000 people each. As the asylum seekers will have broken the law simply by crossing on a dinghy, we can immediately put them in these jails. Keep them there until they volunteer to go home
You'd need to keep these prisons open for about six weeks, and then all the boats would totally stop, and we would actually SAVE lives by stopping drownings, and we'd end the misery of Calais etc
We can't tow back without drowning people - which is why it isn't being done. There are no "just do this" magic wand solutions that actually work.
The detention camp idea? How do you choose a place - "patriots" would protest and then attack any workers trying to construct it. I assume you propose a big razor wire enclosure and tents? Who staffs it to ensure the health and wellbeing of the detainees? Who protects the staff from attacks by "patriots"?
We're in a horrible mess here. Never mind asylum being out of control (and it demonstrably is) we also now have hate mobs being encouraged by supposedly Conservative politicians to distrust the rule of law. Riots were easier to manage - nick and jail scumbags. This? Much harder. How do you stop chunks of England turning into Ulster at the height of the troubles?
So your main objection to my “el Salvador” prison idea is “they’d be difficult to build”
I have a solution for that. It’s called mingulay. It’s the largest uninhabited island in the UK
The biggest El Salvador super prison is 0.2 sq km in size and holds 40,000 inmates. Mingulay is 10sq km so you could build four or five. Problem solved - because as soon as you started using them the boats would stop coming
There. I did it. I solved the boat people problem and I haven’t even had lunch
So how are you going to feed them
How are you going to get people to work there?
You haven’t solved any problem - you just think you have.
Having the opportunity to resit is a good thing, but you also get post-16 students repeatedly taking English and Maths GCSE exams when they have minimal chance of success.
The interaction of law, funding and accountability measures sees some students on a pretty dismal treadmill. We need something different and better for those students.
Asylum applications hit record high for 12-month period
A total of 111,084 people applied for asylum in the UK in the year to June 2025, the highest number for any 12-month period since current records began in 2001.
The number is up 14% from 97,107 in the year to June 2024, according to new figures published by the Home Office.
The previous record for a 12-month period was 109,343 in the year to March 2025.
Migrants who arrived in the UK after crossing the English Channel in small boats accounted for 39% of the total number of people claiming asylum in the year to June.
Just tell them all no. We can't accommodate everyone from every shithole on earth and its daft that we're even trying.
The public is pretty much at that stage now. A flat NO to everyone, from now on, apart from specific exceptions - Ukraine, Hong Kong
And we need a large number of those already here to go home
It wouldn’t make any difference to a party’s election chances - for racists even a massive reduction in people of other colour wouldn’t be noticed because they would still see a lot of legal residents and ask why are they still here
This is clearly wrong. If the boats visibly stopped - as they would, if we ended the right to asylum (which we must) - the governing party responsible would get a huge boost. The boats are a smallish part of the overall migration problem, but they are totemic and conspicious
So how do you get the people back to the country they came from.
It’s perfectly legitimate for those countries to do perform a “Shamima Begum” on us and say - sorry they are your problem..
Heck if you look at what is happening on the Greek Islands at the moment that seems to be exactly what is happening
Tow them back to France
Also, open a couple of El Salvador like prisons along unsightly bits of the Thames Estuary. They can easily hold 30,000 people each. As the asylum seekers will have broken the law simply by crossing on a dinghy, we can immediately put them in these jails. Keep them there until they volunteer to go home
You'd need to keep these prisons open for about six weeks, and then all the boats would totally stop, and we would actually SAVE lives by stopping drownings, and we'd end the misery of Calais etc
We can't tow back without drowning people - which is why it isn't being done. There are no "just do this" magic wand solutions that actually work.
The detention camp idea? How do you choose a place - "patriots" would protest and then attack any workers trying to construct it. I assume you propose a big razor wire enclosure and tents? Who staffs it to ensure the health and wellbeing of the detainees? Who protects the staff from attacks by "patriots"?
We're in a horrible mess here. Never mind asylum being out of control (and it demonstrably is) we also now have hate mobs being encouraged by supposedly Conservative politicians to distrust the rule of law. Riots were easier to manage - nick and jail scumbags. This? Much harder. How do you stop chunks of England turning into Ulster at the height of the troubles?
So your main objection to my “el Salvador” prison idea is “they’d be difficult to build”
I have a solution for that. It’s called mingulay. It’s the largest uninhabited island in the UK
The biggest El Salvador super prison is 0.2 sq km in size and holds 40,000 inmates. Mingulay is 10sq km so you could build four or five. Problem solved - because as soon as you started using them the boats would stop coming
There. I did it. I solved the boat people problem and I haven’t even had lunch
So how are you going to feed them
How are you going to get people to work there?
You haven’t solved any problem - you just think you have.
Er, buy food and pay wages? lol
Is that it? Is that your objection? “This won’t work because there is no way to get food from supermarkets to other places quite nearby”
Asylum applications hit record high for 12-month period
A total of 111,084 people applied for asylum in the UK in the year to June 2025, the highest number for any 12-month period since current records began in 2001.
The number is up 14% from 97,107 in the year to June 2024, according to new figures published by the Home Office.
The previous record for a 12-month period was 109,343 in the year to March 2025.
Migrants who arrived in the UK after crossing the English Channel in small boats accounted for 39% of the total number of people claiming asylum in the year to June.
Just tell them all no. We can't accommodate everyone from every shithole on earth and its daft that we're even trying.
The public is pretty much at that stage now. A flat NO to everyone, from now on, apart from specific exceptions - Ukraine, Hong Kong
And we need a large number of those already here to go home
It wouldn’t make any difference to a party’s election chances - for racists even a massive reduction in people of other colour wouldn’t be noticed because they would still see a lot of legal residents and ask why are they still here
This is clearly wrong. If the boats visibly stopped - as they would, if we ended the right to asylum (which we must) - the governing party responsible would get a huge boost. The boats are a smallish part of the overall migration problem, but they are totemic and conspicious
So how do you get the people back to the country they came from.
It’s perfectly legitimate for those countries to do perform a “Shamima Begum” on us and say - sorry they are your problem..
Heck if you look at what is happening on the Greek Islands at the moment that seems to be exactly what is happening
Tow them back to France
Also, open a couple of El Salvador like prisons along unsightly bits of the Thames Estuary. They can easily hold 30,000 people each. As the asylum seekers will have broken the law simply by crossing on a dinghy, we can immediately put them in these jails. Keep them there until they volunteer to go home
You'd need to keep these prisons open for about six weeks, and then all the boats would totally stop, and we would actually SAVE lives by stopping drownings, and we'd end the misery of Calais etc
We can't tow back without drowning people - which is why it isn't being done.
This is not true. The RAN did 30+ tow backs to Indonesia and drowned nobody.
The reason it isn't done is that the government lacks the will to do it.
We need to stop spending money on hotels and instead spend more money on judges and lawyers to get through the backlog and either (a) permit asylum so they can start working, or (b) deport.
Isn't that essentially this government's policy ?
Yes. They seem to have been steadily churning through the backlog left them by the incompetence of the Conservative government. Not that you’d ever learn this from hysterical DM headlines.
Sometimes competent government is just getting the job that’s in front of you done, to the best of the adminstration’s ability.
That’s not going to be enough to draw the sting of the immigration figures by the next GE I suspect, because (again) the previous government f’ed things up so completely that the population has lost all trust in any current government & the continued drumbeat of headlines only reinforces that loss of faith. But Labour appear to be doing the right thing here at least.
Labour also abandoned the Rwanda plan for the boat people, which was arguably working (hence the Irish shrieking about it) and replaced it with their brilliant new plan to SMASH THE GANGS
How's that going?
The Rwanda Plan would never have worked - the agreed numbers were, what, in the low 100s? When you have 10,000s a year crossing the Channel, a 1% chance of being sent to Rwanda is no deterrant at all.
If the Conservatives had credibly set up a program to move all Channel crossers into Rwanda, then I would agree with you - that would probably have had the desired effect, if they were actually capable of mopping up all of them. Once established you’d then only need a small program “pour encourager les autres”.
But the program as actually established & funded was pitifully small compared to the size required for it to ever actually work. The Conservatives were not a serious government & the Rwanda program is just another exemplar of their fundamental failure to actually govern effectively. You either do something like that properly or not at all if you want it to be effective. The actual program as implemented was guaranteed to be woefully ineffective, therefore we must conclude that the government was not actually interested in making it succeed - they just wanted the headlines that would give the impression that they were doing something until the next GE rolled around.
Yes and No. I agree the Rwanda plan was horribly incoherent and almost built-to-fail. It's almost as if the politicians and civil servants tasked with enacting it WANTED it to fail because they are all woke wankers at heart, and it was just a gesture. But maybe that's the cynic in me
However there is evidence that even in its chaotic, half-formed and unconvincing state, the Rwanda Plan was still having a deterrent effect. The Irish certainly thought so, and said so
"Rwanda Bill causing migrants to head for Ireland instead of UK, deputy PM Micheál Martin says"
Imagine what a non half-arsed Rwanda Plan could have done, in this light. It would have probably stopped the boats
My assertion is that the Rwanda plan was half arsed because the Conservatives were not serious about it. Just like they weren’t serious about anything else.
Now the current government is left trying to pick up the pieces. Labour have their flaws, but at least they’re serious about being a government.
The French returns program seems just as half arsed as the Rwanda plan. Yes the gov't says they can scale it but any plan is, in theory, scalable - even the Rwanda one. We will never know if the Rwanda plan would have worked because there were too many vested interests in stopping it and Rishi didn't do what needed to be done in Parliament to make it work. Will Keir's "returns agreement" fare any better ? I have my doubts.
A problem with all such plans is that they imagine that people coming over on small boats are well-informed about UK immigration policy. They're not. They generally don't have the foggiest about a Rwanda plan or a France plan or what benefits are on offer or what accommodation will be used.
That’s just not true. The Today programme was regularly reporting from the camps and interviewing potential boat people and various people working for charities there and they were clear that the Rwanda plan had cut through and was resulting in people waiting to see whether it would start or what the election result would be before paying and crossing.
The people they were interviewing were not from the Tory gov or reform but people who could easily have said it had no effect if they wanted to gaslight the public.
The people there are very well informed by tiktokkers producing updates and guides on the situation - you know this and are being disingenuous because you can’t accept that this isn’t all virtuous helping of those in danger needing asylum but is largely a massive movement of economic migrants hiding behind, and ruining it for, the people who really do deserve help.
There are clearly many people claiming asylum with dubious claims, who we could call economic migrants. There are clearly many people claiming asylum who have come from the most horrendous circumstances. At present, about half of all claims are refused and half are accepted and I think those decisions are probably reasonably accurate. I think those who claim they are nearly all economic migrants are wrong, and those who claim they are nearly all genuine refugees are wrong. Those who don't have good claims should be processed and deported as quickly as possible, and we should work with the countries they came from to expedite that process (as with Sunak's deal with Albania).
Received wisdom suggests that asylum-seekers come to the UK because of the generosity of the welfare state and the ease of finding work in the growing informal labour market, because the UK has no identity cards, and because of a fairly poor record on sending home unsuccessful asylum applicants. Based on interviews with 87 asylum-seekers from Afghanistan, Colombia, Kosovo and Somalia, this paper suggests that the realities of asylum-seeking are quite different. Few of the respondents arrived with much knowledge of the UK, and their knowledge was limited to general impressions of the country; they knew little about asylum policy and practice. There are five main reasons why they knew so little: many had not chosen their own destination; surprisingly few had family or friends already in the UK; in some cases they had been provided with false or misleading information; many had departed their country of origin in a rush; and most were relatively poorly educated. Why they ended up in the UK was often linked to the role of smugglers, who often chose the final destination. In light of these findings, we question both the efficacy and the fairness of current UK asylum policy.
You don't solve a problem by misunderstanding what is going on in the first place. Too much asylum policy under the Tories was designed to achieve Daily Mail headlines rather than to be efficacious.
Asylum applications hit record high for 12-month period
A total of 111,084 people applied for asylum in the UK in the year to June 2025, the highest number for any 12-month period since current records began in 2001.
The number is up 14% from 97,107 in the year to June 2024, according to new figures published by the Home Office.
The previous record for a 12-month period was 109,343 in the year to March 2025.
Migrants who arrived in the UK after crossing the English Channel in small boats accounted for 39% of the total number of people claiming asylum in the year to June.
Just tell them all no. We can't accommodate everyone from every shithole on earth and its daft that we're even trying.
The public is pretty much at that stage now. A flat NO to everyone, from now on, apart from specific exceptions - Ukraine, Hong Kong
And we need a large number of those already here to go home
It wouldn’t make any difference to a party’s election chances - for racists even a massive reduction in people of other colour wouldn’t be noticed because they would still see a lot of legal residents and ask why are they still here
This is clearly wrong. If the boats visibly stopped - as they would, if we ended the right to asylum (which we must) - the governing party responsible would get a huge boost. The boats are a smallish part of the overall migration problem, but they are totemic and conspicious
So how do you get the people back to the country they came from.
It’s perfectly legitimate for those countries to do perform a “Shamima Begum” on us and say - sorry they are your problem..
Heck if you look at what is happening on the Greek Islands at the moment that seems to be exactly what is happening
Tow them back to France
Also, open a couple of El Salvador like prisons along unsightly bits of the Thames Estuary. They can easily hold 30,000 people each. As the asylum seekers will have broken the law simply by crossing on a dinghy, we can immediately put them in these jails. Keep them there until they volunteer to go home
You'd need to keep these prisons open for about six weeks, and then all the boats would totally stop, and we would actually SAVE lives by stopping drownings, and we'd end the misery of Calais etc
We can't tow back without drowning people - which is why it isn't being done.
This is not true. The RAN did 30+ tow backs to Indonesia and drowned nobody.
The reason it isn't done is that the government lacks the will to do it.
Although drowning does add to the disincentive factor.
Asylum applications hit record high for 12-month period
A total of 111,084 people applied for asylum in the UK in the year to June 2025, the highest number for any 12-month period since current records began in 2001.
The number is up 14% from 97,107 in the year to June 2024, according to new figures published by the Home Office.
The previous record for a 12-month period was 109,343 in the year to March 2025.
Migrants who arrived in the UK after crossing the English Channel in small boats accounted for 39% of the total number of people claiming asylum in the year to June.
Just tell them all no. We can't accommodate everyone from every shithole on earth and its daft that we're even trying.
The public is pretty much at that stage now. A flat NO to everyone, from now on, apart from specific exceptions - Ukraine, Hong Kong
And we need a large number of those already here to go home
It wouldn’t make any difference to a party’s election chances - for racists even a massive reduction in people of other colour wouldn’t be noticed because they would still see a lot of legal residents and ask why are they still here
This is clearly wrong. If the boats visibly stopped - as they would, if we ended the right to asylum (which we must) - the governing party responsible would get a huge boost. The boats are a smallish part of the overall migration problem, but they are totemic and conspicious
So how do you get the people back to the country they came from.
It’s perfectly legitimate for those countries to do perform a “Shamima Begum” on us and say - sorry they are your problem..
Heck if you look at what is happening on the Greek Islands at the moment that seems to be exactly what is happening
Tow them back to France
Also, open a couple of El Salvador like prisons along unsightly bits of the Thames Estuary. They can easily hold 30,000 people each. As the asylum seekers will have broken the law simply by crossing on a dinghy, we can immediately put them in these jails. Keep them there until they volunteer to go home
You'd need to keep these prisons open for about six weeks, and then all the boats would totally stop, and we would actually SAVE lives by stopping drownings, and we'd end the misery of Calais etc
We can't tow back without drowning people - which is why it isn't being done.
This is not true. The RAN did 30+ tow backs to Indonesia and drowned nobody.
The reason it isn't done is that the government lacks the will to do it.
Yes. Dominic Cummings has spoken about this. There was a concrete plan to do this - just tow them back. Safely. The navy said they could do it and were happy to do so - the plan was ready to go
Then the politicians got the collywobbles and ever since it’s been deemed “physically impossible” which is arrant nonsense
Asked where you’d house migrants if they all had to leave hotels , the stock answer deport them , asked about the interim period ,more drivel . And says he wants zero legal net migration , an unworkable policy just thrown out there to appease the easily duped.
Hes on the telly on awful lot for a bloke who just does DOGE stuff
Yes he’s everywhere at the moment spouting nonsense .
No one goes on Bluesky anymore or reads any of these ludicrous “xeets” so I have no idea why you guys keep linking to this drivel
Yesterday I noticed that three or four of my favourite archeaologists - I like archeology - who loudly decamped to Bluesky a year ago - have now come back to X. Quietly
What weirdo needs three favourite archeologists? There's only one Alice Roberts!
Comments
Once its operational it only takes an agreement to give more money to expand it to everyone, which is exactly what Labor's policy was under Rudd.
Rudd's policy worked. No reason it couldn't work here.
The issue is the ethics, and saying we don't want to do that. That's on our side.
But there is absolutely no reason to give Rwanda more money for them to take everyone, as Rudd agreed with PNG, until the hurdles on our side have been cleared.
To say it can't work is folly. To say its unethical and you don't want to work, that has principles.
How naive are you?
And we need a large number of those already here to go home
There was other evidence, as well, from charity workers on the ground in Ireland, and in Calais - Rwanda was scaring boat people
@FindoutnowUK
Find Out Now voting intention:
🟦 Reform UK: 33% (+2)
🔴 Labour: 18% (-1)
🔵 Conservatives: 17% (-2)
🟠 Lib Dems: 12% (-)
🟢 Greens: 10% (-)
Changes from 13th August
[Find Out Now, 20th August, N=2,615]"
https://x.com/FindoutnowUK/status/1958457690469827013
But to be clear there are 8.4 million asylum seekers globally. So we are not getting "everyone" but 1.3% of asylum seekers. The UK is about 1% of the global population.
The options seem to be Tory retread quitters, halfwits like Anderson or unknown business people. I am not sure the electorate will be comfortable with any of those even if they are happy with Farage as PM.
https://findoutnow.co.uk/blog/how-pollsters-may-be-understating-the-reform-vote/
Reeves et al didn't have much ministerial experience.
Can't see many NE or NW Tories going Labour and in the bulk of LD held seats the Tories will see themselves as the challenger so I agree, very few Tories voting tactically. Nor should they as Green, Lab (and LD in the main) won't come to their rescue in ConRef fights
'Tell him I'm fucking coming'
The voters believed Johnson when he said he would get it done, and so elected him, but it didn't in the end make a huge difference to the voters when it was achieved.
If the boats are stopped, but voters don't then see a difference in terms of housing, health service queues, etc, then they aren't going to be grateful for the boats stopping.
One of the reasons people are angry about the boats is because it's a simple explanation for why things aren't working in Britain. When things still don't work afterwards they will have to find a different explanation, which is unlikely to favour the incumbent government.
https://bsky.app/profile/sundersays.bsky.social/post/3lwcljaf27c22
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5gEI33klgI
3,000km range, they can hit dozens of bases and facilities currently out of range.
https://x.com/jurgen_nauditt/status/1958472304565887087
Russian sources think they might have already been used in Rostov
https://x.com/visionergeo/status/1958260755293475074
Meanwhile, there’s also rumours of long queues for fuel in Russia. I’m not too sure of these, they’re similar to images of checkpoints set up after the “Spider Web” drones operation earlier in the year.
https://x.com/bohuslavskakate/status/1958223912275489138
What’s definitely true though, is that the pipeline to Hungary is well and truly screwed.
https://x.com/sanderregter/status/1958240122039652438
Oh, and a Russian Shahed drone landed in Poland yesterday, 100km from the Ukranian border.
https://x.com/jurgen_nauditt/status/1958196502796329198
And these people are now being dispersed around the country, 110,000 a year, every year, into hotels, HMOs, and now - it seems - actual housing which the government will buy and use (even as Brits struggle to get housing)
"Government issues urgent appeal for 5,000 homes to house 20,000 migrants
Home Office turns to property specialists as councils prepare to follow Epping and attempt to stop hotels housing asylum seekers"
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2025/08/20/home-office-appeal-5000-homes-20000-migrants-hotels/
It's hard to think of a policy better designed to aggravate ordinary Britons, who are now confronting - in their own town centres - young Eritreans, Syrians, Somalians, etc, who barely speak English and have nothing to do and no obvous reasoin for being here. Not doctors or academics, And yet these people are comfortably housed for free by the taxpayer, as young taxpaying Brits have to pay huge rents or scrimp and save for a mortgage
Expect Reform to go over 35% and Labour under 15%. And I am possibly serious
(Though when a vacancy came up at the relevant school, it was Thing Two who made me promise that, no matter what, I mustn't apply for it.)
It’s perfectly legitimate for those countries to do perform a “Shamima Begum” on us and say - sorry they are your problem..
Heck if you look at what is happening on the Greek Islands at the moment that seems to be exactly what is happening
The Conservative government was never going to spend £10billion on this project, but that’s what they’d have to spend to make it work - you have to credibly be able to take the majority of the Channel crossers, otherwise your project is just another roadblock to overcome.
That’s why Rwanda was the project of an unserious government: They had to stuff the Rwandan’s mouths with silver (to paraphrase Aneurin Bevan) to get them to take 300 people because nobody else would take our money & the entire project was clearly not economically possible given that constraint.
If they could credibly have put all the channel boat crossers through this scheme then I agree, it might have worked. But we couldn’t afford it & so it was never going to work. Going ahead with it, given that inevitability, shows that they only cared about headlines, not doing things that might actually work. (Stopping the processing of migrants just to stuff up the next government & make things worse in the short term so that they could claim to be the ones with a plan at the GE was also the sign of a deeply unserious government but that’s a separate problem.)
Asked where you’d house migrants if they all had to leave hotels , the stock answer deport them , asked about the interim period ,more drivel . And says he wants zero legal net migration , an unworkable policy just thrown out there to appease the easily duped.
Would make everyone happy.
Two issues, one is the costs change, paying for the first of anything costs much more than paying in scale.
Second issue is that numbers change. If everyone who crossed the channel knew they were guaranteed to go to Rwanda, the numbers coming would be ~0 anyway.
Object based on principles or ethics, but your numbers arguments are complete bullshit.
Meanwhile OpenReach are noisily digging up the pavement outside – installing more VPNs, no doubt.
I don't agree with it, but its entirely workable.
Look at the migration watch figures: The costs are eye-watering & if you thing the Rwandan government would have charged us less once they realised we were willing to pay these vast sums & had no other government willing to take them I have a few bridges to sell you.
It's a small world.
Also, open a couple of El Salvador like prisons along unsightly bits of the Thames Estuary. They can easily hold 30,000 people each. As the asylum seekers will have broken the law simply by crossing on a dinghy, we can immediately put them in these jails. Keep them there until they volunteer to go home
You'd need to keep these prisons open for about six weeks, and then all the boats would totally stop, and we would actually SAVE lives by stopping drownings, and we'd end the misery of Calais etc
Once Rishi has his legal ducks lined up (which he had), the only thing stopping him trying for a flight was his decision.
Per person for 300 or per person for 30000 are a matter for negotiations, they're not immutable laws of nature. If you negotiate for more of something you tend to pay less per unit. Scale negotiations happen across almost every industry and sector.
Rudd did the same thing, start with some as a trial, then negotiate for all.
And I know that means bringing significant numbers in quickly from France but at least those will be able to work immediately
The detention camp idea? How do you choose a place - "patriots" would protest and then attack any workers trying to construct it. I assume you propose a big razor wire enclosure and tents? Who staffs it to ensure the health and wellbeing of the detainees? Who protects the staff from attacks by "patriots"?
We're in a horrible mess here. Never mind asylum being out of control (and it demonstrably is) we also now have hate mobs being encouraged by supposedly Conservative politicians to distrust the rule of law. Riots were easier to manage - nick and jail scumbags. This? Much harder. How do you stop chunks of England turning into Ulster at the height of the troubles?
Anyway, boing, boing.
You are naïve, frankly, to think that this scheme would follow ordinary manufacturing economics.
The people they were interviewing were not from the Tory gov or reform but people who could easily have said it had no effect if they wanted to gaslight the public.
The people there are very well informed by tiktokkers producing updates and guides on the situation - you know this and are being disingenuous because you can’t accept that this isn’t all virtuous helping of those in danger needing asylum but is largely a massive movement of economic migrants hiding behind, and ruining it for, the people who really do deserve help.
For reasons I'm not clear about the photo is a whited up Sol Campbell.
https://x.com/bellacaledonia/status/1958487139928137739
Monopoly suppliers, once the first loss leaders are bought ...
"Exam board warns of 'resit crisis'
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/cy08y5zxe0lt
I have a solution for that. It’s called mingulay. It’s the largest uninhabited island in the UK
The biggest El Salvador super prison is 0.2 sq km in size and holds 40,000 inmates. Mingulay is 10sq km so you could build four or five. Problem solved - because as soon as you started using them the boats would stop coming
There. I did it. I solved the boat people problem and I haven’t even had lunch
Pray for me!
Mamdani tells the press that Cuomo is still running because “Andrew Cuomo is someone who doesn’t understand that no means no”
https://x.com/freedlander/status/1958194305668964745
Yesterday I noticed that three or four of my favourite archeaologists - I like archeology - who loudly decamped to Bluesky a year ago - have now come back to X. Quietly
How are you going to get people to work there?
You haven’t solved any problem - you just think you have.
The interaction of law, funding and accountability measures sees some students on a pretty dismal treadmill. We need something different and better for those students.
Is that it? Is that your objection? “This won’t work because there is no way to get food from supermarkets to other places quite nearby”
The reason it isn't done is that the government lacks the will to do it.
Asylum seekers are very diverse. Some are very au fait with the process and what they want to achieve, others not. If we look at the actual research here, you see papers like https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13691830600821901
Received wisdom suggests that asylum-seekers come to the UK because of the generosity of the welfare state and the ease of finding work in the growing informal labour market, because the UK has no identity cards, and because of a fairly poor record on sending home unsuccessful asylum applicants. Based on interviews with 87 asylum-seekers from Afghanistan, Colombia, Kosovo and Somalia, this paper suggests that the realities of asylum-seeking are quite different. Few of the respondents arrived with much knowledge of the UK, and their knowledge was limited to general impressions of the country; they knew little about asylum policy and practice. There are five main reasons why they knew so little: many had not chosen their own destination; surprisingly few had family or friends already in the UK; in some cases they had been provided with false or misleading information; many had departed their country of origin in a rush; and most were relatively poorly educated. Why they ended up in the UK was often linked to the role of smugglers, who often chose the final destination. In light of these findings, we question both the efficacy and the fairness of current UK asylum policy.
You don't solve a problem by misunderstanding what is going on in the first place. Too much asylum policy under the Tories was designed to achieve Daily Mail headlines rather than to be efficacious.
Then the politicians got the collywobbles and ever since it’s been deemed “physically impossible” which is arrant nonsense
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/live/bbc_radio_fourfm