Rishi Sunak is, perhaps by force, a gambler in the big casino of politics. In his desperate bid to get British voters to give him a chance, he has attended the ballo in maschera disguised as a moderate and a radical, a technocrat and a rebel, a Trumpist and a lifelong traditional conservative. He has bet on slot machines, double pairs of aces and queens, twenty one and even the results of the Football League. And so far he has always lost (he is twenty points behind in the polls, with a forecast of electoral defeat at the very least).
Like a stoned gambler who doesn’t know when to take his losses and go home with his head down, the British Prime Minister has gone to the roulette table and placed all his remaining chips (a handful ) not in red or black, but in a somewhat esoteric box called asylum seekers in Rwanda, with the hope – perhaps a little delusional – that this will prevent the cycle from changing that is coming and stop the inclination of the voters to give the relief to the Labor Party.
After a legislative process that lasted a total of two years, with the bill passing like a ping-pong ball from the House of Commons (where it had the support of the Tory majority) to the Lords (which did not they were clear), is finally ready to receive the rubric of King Charles III. Play, gentlemen! said the croupier. The ball has started to roll and it will soon be seen if Sunak wins or is left without a rally.
Downing Street says the first batch of refugees will be flown to Kigali at the end of June or early July, and Sunak’s hope is that, when things are seen to be in earnest, Britain will cease to be a coveted destination for immigrants (it’s not the same to settle in Manchester as it is to settle in Rwanda), cherry-picking mobs won’t be offering cruises across the English Channel like holidaymakers in Benidorm, and the average voter will say : “No matter where you go, in the end the conservatives have managed to stop the arrival of illegals, while if Labor wins they will invade us again”.
It seems a bit like the story of the milkmaid, because the first plane has not yet sold a single ticket (the cost is astronomical, two million euros for the first three hundred passengers), although the British Government says it already has shortlisted the candidates, who has expanded detention centers and who has hired more officials and judges to speed up deportations (some 50,000 asylum applications are stuck in bureaucracy and pending resolution). And what is more important, it remains to be seen whether or not the demands that the pro-human rights groups will undoubtedly present to stop the forced transfers to the depths of East Africa will succeed.
The unlucky ones who won the lottery for a trip to Kigali will have eight days to appeal to the Ministry of the Interior, which in turn will have to give an answer within a week. If it is negative, they can appeal to a higher court, which will rule within three weeks. His last resort will be Strasbourg, but Sunak assures that he will ignore their orders if necessary and repudiate European legislation on human rights “to defend the national sovereignty that has worked so hard to win with Brexit”, even if this places the Kingdom United at the height of Belarus.
The premise of the legislation is a bit surreal, that Rwanda must be treated as a “safe destination” for immigrants because the Government claims it is, despite the Supreme Court saying otherwise. Sunak is not just a gambling addict, but like those gamblers who owe money to the mafia, and their creditor threatens to cut off their finger (or head) if he doesn’t pay them back with interest. And he certainly does not believe, like Schopenhauer, that compassion is the basis of morality. Compassion, zero.
