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Come on, you know it’s not that easy. I have no love for our current government but the Afghans are coming of their own accord.
The options are:
The general public won’t stand for 1 and 2, the left and half the right won’t stand for 3, so we get 4.
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Edit: the Mauritius stuff really is unforgivably stupid. Stopping it certainly won’t save Britain but spending the 10bn it’s going to cost us on 50m small business investment per year for 20 years would certainly be nice. Doesn’t change the fundamentals though. Britain isn’t poor because the government is wasteful, it’s poor because the alternative is letting people freeze/starve/die of illness while we could save them and choose not to, and we aren’t prepared for that.
Turn backs worked extremely well for Australia. And I really doubt that the public would erupt into anger that these poor defenceless 25 year old men were getting sent back to the hellscape that is...France.
Also, the government did literally import Afghans in secret, in addition to letting them come across in small boats.
The turnbacks worked in Australia because they towed the boats out into international waters, and left them with enough fuel to reach only Papua New Guinea. I guess we could technically do the same with France - and would even be up for trying - but the French have a lot more tools to make their displeasure known.
If Britain didn't make their displeasure with France known, why would it go the other way around? If the French are so displeased, they can stop letting these people into France to begin with.
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They're coming "on their own accord" because they know they will be welcomed by the government.
If the general public can tolerate how the rape gangs were being handled, surely they can handle either of these two. At the very least it's worth a try.
What's the logic here? Too expensive?
Also what happened to "send them back directly where they came from. Don't ask any questions, don't bother with process, just send them back"? There's no way a plane ticket costs more than these hotels.
Broadly my model is that 95% of the Labour party and 35% of the Tory party don't want restrictions on 'refugees' no matter what, so they're a dead loss. 3 is therefore viable but very difficult to get through Parliament in its current configuration.
The public does want something done, but balks if it's visibly violent or leads to deaths. So 1 and 2 are out.
is difficult practically. There are three questions: how do you get them on the planes, how do you make the planes carry them, and how do you make the destination let the planes land / take them off the planes?
Mostly the relevant countries don't want these people back and / or it would be unpopular to be seen to take them back. So dedicated transports are unlikely to be permitted to land. For weaker countries you could always start landing unapproved somewhere, but that is difficult and expensive and technically an act of war. If you can't do that, you could put them on passenger jets, but that's expensive and you need a minder to supervise them and passengers / airlines are likely to protest or grandstand.
Not saying it's impossible with enough will, but it's not straightforward. By and large it doesn't beat the Rwanda plan.
I'd like to see some evidence that this is an organic property of "the public", rather than a media enviroent imposed top-down. Again it would be a bit odd if there reaction to it would be greater than the reaction to the rape gang scandal.
The same way you do with every deported individual.
In the case of Afghans, the Taliban is perfectly happy to take their people back, it's the western governments that don't want to do it.
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