Scotland must make the Home Office's fascist Rwanda plan unworkable

Britain has form for this. It did, after all, invent concentration camps during the Boer War, used them during the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya and even interned innocent people without charge in the North of Ireland as recently as 1971.

This latest edition of British cruelty would see those fleeing war and persecution, who are potentially trying to join family members already in the UK, shipped off to Rwanda and never allowed to return. That is the staggering difference from other “offshoring” processes – if an asylum claim is granted it is planned that it will be granted for Rwanda and not for the UK.

The UK has been a country of outsourcing for a long time now, our towns and cities hollowed out by de-industrialisation and the outsourcing of heavy industry, manufacturing and even call centres gone to the lowest bidder. It now seems that, not satisfied with selling off all our public assets, the Tories have now put compassion and human decency on the market. The difference here being we will be forced to pay someone to take it.

The Australian experience of offshoring, which the Tories often use as an example, was a inhumane, cruel and ridiculously expensive. The estimated cost of this was £1.6 million per asylum seeker, which could result in billions being spent during a cost of living crisis on state-sponsored people trafficking. Imagine if even a fraction of that money was spent to help integrate individuals into new communities so they could begin to put behind them whatever horrors they were fleeing.

Not only was the cost of running Australia’s programme unsustainable, it also resulted in a £43m settlement because the conditions people were held in led to the serious injury and even death of the detainees.

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The human cost of this is incalculable. The out-of-sight, out-of-mind nature of this led to people being held in what were described as torture camps. There was little in the way of medical provision, which resulted in serious illnesses going untreated, and there were allegations of rape within the camps.

With all that in mind, the UK has decided to send some of the most vulnerable people in the world to a country the Westminster government condemned less than a year ago for “a failure by authorities in Rwanda to properly investigate alleged human rights abuses and to protect and support victims of trafficking”.

This will do nothing to prevent trafficking, as was claimed by Priti Patel. It will only open up new trafficking routes from Rwanda for people to once again be exploited all over again.

If the UK Government really wanted to address people trafficking, it would provide safe and legal routes to the UK and render the business model of the smugglers redundant. But the truth of the matter is that its only concern is stopping people of colour from seeking refuge in the UK.

This has been made plain by the admission that nobody from Ukraine would be subject to rendition to Rwanda. If you are white and fleeing war you can get in, if you are brown you can’t, it is as simple as that. Just under one year on from the Kenmure Street defiance of the Home Office snatch squads it is clear that we will have to be ever-vigilant in our communities.

A campaign of maximum disruption to Home Office operations in Scotland is required so that we make it too expensive and too difficult for these policies to be enforced in our country. We must also show solidarity with groups all across the UK who are opposing the illegal detention and transportation of asylum seekers to British concentration camps in Rwanda.