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Writer's pictureRory O'Keeffe, Koraki

The UK government: the price of racism

A new agreement with France to illegally prevent people reaching the UK to apply for safe places to live, learn and work, brings the country’s spending on unworkable illegal anti-refugee programmes to well over half a billion pounds in the last 12 months alone.


At what point does it become unacceptable to keep spending other people’s money on racist vanity projects?

The UK government has agreed to spend even more money to break international law in the name of preventing men, women and children from seeking safety in the UK, this time by paying £480m to the French government.


The money, to be paid over the next three years, will be spent on a detention centre, the point of which will be to illegally imprison people attempting to exercise their right to travel to seek safe places to live, learn and work, and hundreds more ‘border officials’ to patrol French beaches, breaking international law by preventing people from exercising their right to travel to seek safe places to live, learn and work.


The deal was agreed today by UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and French President Emmanuel Macron. It is a clear failure on the part of Sunak, who absolutely intended to gain an agreement with France and/or the wider EU to get the latter to accept the illegal return of refugees by the UK.


Of course, what has been agreed will not work, because people will simply be forced to pay ‘smugglers’ to help them avoid being jailed and to sidestep the hundreds of extra officials, just as they have done in every single previous instance of ‘joint working’ between France and the UK on this ‘issue’.


It will certainly put yet more money into the hands of people the UK government claims to ‘oppose’, and it will do absolutely nothing about the fact that there are thousands of men, women and children in France seeking safety either there or in the UK, because France is absolutely prohibited by international law – as is the UK – from ‘returning’ people to places where their lives may be in danger.


It is also important to note that this plan will mean that the UK government has, in the last 11 months alone, committed to spend well over £620m – considerably more than half a billion pounds – to prevent people from applying for and attaining safety in the UK.


This amount breaks down as follows:


> £480m agreed today with the French government


> £140m to the Rwandan government as part of the Rwanda plan, under which the government plans to illegally transport arrivals into the UK to Rwanda


> The entire cost – around £12,000 per person – of processing their asylum claims and integrating them into Rwandan society (this is the same cost as processing their claims in the UK, meaning absolutely every penny spent above that is spent solely to keep foreign people from staying in the UK). If even 200 people are sent to Rwanda, this would be a cost of £2.4m


. All related charges – for example, the cost of the flight which was in June denied the right to carry the first group of people from the UK to Rwanda cost the UK government £500,000.


As noted, the amount the government plans to spend on people’s asylum applications being processed in Rwanda is the same as it costs to process such an application in the UK. The government is saving zero money, and is in fact spending an extra £600m simply to keep people out.


Not only that, but once an asylum application is processed and approved, those approved can start working, and contributing to the wider welfare of the community in which they live.


The UK government is deliberately preventing this economic and social benefit from being realised in the UK.


This is how racism – and it is racism: it is the breaking of international law to prevent foreign people coming to the UK, with absolutely no economic or other benefit – costs everyone money.


It is beyond time people stopped being stripped of their own cash to pay for the vanity project of slavering hate-filled and -fuelled racists.

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