FROM OUR REPORTER
LONDON – The good news is that, due to the coup, the possibility of moving migrants to Niger has definitively faded. The bad news? All the rest.
The record arrivals in the United Kingdom are putting a severe test on the Sunak government, even if one of the alleged advantages of Brexit was precisely that of “regaining control of the British borders” by removing them from the hated Brussels bureaucrats.
Thus the latest hypothesis is to bring thousands of people – awaiting the verdict on the asylum request – to a remote island between the African coast (1,600 km) and the South American coast (2,300 km), Ascension Island, in the Napoleonic administration of Sant’Elena. Charles Darwin, who visited it in 1836 during his voyage with the sailing ship Beagle, called it “horrible”.
Exile at the antipodes of migrants isn’t even Sunak’s most urgent problem, who is on vacation in the United States with his family, sadistically stalked by the British tabloids even at a spinning class in a luxury gym in Santa Monica with musical accompaniment by Taylor Swift.
In fact, the transfer of a few dozen migrants on a barge, the Bibby Stockholm, anchored in the port of Portland, began yesterday afternoon. They come from hotels in Oxford, Bristol, Torbay and Bournemouth: the problem of hotels is the most urgent one. In fact, the government pays six million pounds a day (seven million euros) to accommodate thousands of migrants in hotels. The idea of the barge came simply to save money while the waiting lists for asylum applications are frighteningly lengthening.
Not even the tabloids are making concessions to the government: two months ago the protest of Iranian migrants stood out on their front pages, who refused accommodation in a London hotel in Pimlico (very central, 175 euros a night) because they demanded single rooms, and for this reason they camped on the street.
The receptive capacity of the British state apparatus seems to have come out of an old Monty Python sketch, and it would be a bad gesture today to throw the old criticisms of the (effective) flaws in the EU’s reception of migrants against the pro-Brexit faction . But what is certain is that “plan B” is a priority of the Sunak government: this means the idea of transferring migrants outside national borders until the outcome of their asylum requests is defined. Only fourteen months ago, when the Johnson government, now at the end of the line, suggested using Rwanda as a parking lot for migrants wishing to live in the United Kingdom by signing a 160 million euro cooperation agreement with Kigali, the then Prince Charles with a sensational unprecedented violation of the traditional political neutrality of the Crown – always silent on governmental choices – let it leak that he was “stunned”.
A move of six thousand kilometers to the British Overseas Territory in the South Atlantic would cause, disregarding all other political and humanitarian considerations, a series of complex organizational problems, given that the 88 square kilometer island has only 800 inhabitants and is not obviously equipped to become a refugee camp. Even the Daily Mail, a newspaper not at all in favor of the opening of the borders, yesterday defined it as “a volcanic stone in the middle of nowhere”.
At the moment the collaboration plan with Kigali has been blocked by a court, but the government is awaiting the final ruling from the Supreme Court in October.