The British government has responded to being told they can’t ship refugees to Rwanda—because it’s a human rights violation that breeches the UN Refugee Convention which we signed up to in 1951—by resurrecting a policy proposal from 2020 that aims to send them to a small, volcanic island in the South Atlantic ocean instead.
Ascension Island is a British overseas territory near St. Helena, the island where Napoleon was imprisoned after his defeat at the Battle of Waterloo. It’s about 1,000 miles from the coast of Africa in one direction and 1,400 miles from South America in the other. With no indigenous population, the island was first inhabited in 1815 by a British garrison placed there to ensure the former emperor couldn’t escape, and even now its population barely exceeds a total of 800 people.
The island’s incredibly remote location made it a tempting possibility for ministers determined to make the process of seeking asylum in the UK as difficult and unpleasant as humanly possible. That’s not hyperbole, but the actual stated purpose of the “hostile environment.” It was initially ruled out because its lack of a hospital and insufficient power and water supplies would have made it a dangerous and unsuitable location for processing people of any number.
However, according to Home Office Minister Sarah Dines the “times” have changed, even while the factors that make Ascension Island a dangerous and unsuitable choice have not; and that’s enough to make it a viable option for this government to consider if they can’t get the Rwanda decision overturned on appeal.
“Well, times change,” Dines told Sky News. “This crisis in the Channel is urgent, we need to look at all possibilities and that is what we are doing.”
The current regime has been focused on doing everything it can to prevent people from seeking asylum in the UK for years now, but it’s only recently, as their anti-refugee policies have become absurdly, cartoon villainesque, that they’ve started claiming they’re actually motivated out of concern for refugees and migrants. A claim that’s patently laughable when every relevant organization and expert has been publicly stating for years that the only way to end the “crisis in the channel” of dangerous small boat crossings is by providing people seeking asylum with safe, legal, and accessible alternatives. Instead of implementing any of that, however, the government keeps coming up with increasingly punitive “solutions” for those who manage to reach the UK through whatever, dangerous means they can, and then weaponizing their faux concern for the people they’re harming in an attempt to silence any objections.
Hopefully the government will realize the Ascension Island proposal is just as “implausible” as they decided back in 2020 (according to a source that spoke to The Guardian), but given this government has since tried to deport people seeking asylum to Rwanda despite the dangers, and the immense financial cost, that would entail, passed legislation that allows them to push boats full of potential refugees back into the ocean, and has reinvented the prison barge (a tradition that ended more than 30 years ago as people finally recognized the inhumanity of it) specifically for people waiting for a decision on their asylum claim, who knows what they’ll decide.
It seems that anything, no matter how ludicrous or cruel, is on the table when it comes to gatekeeping life in Britain from those desperate enough to want to come here.
(featured image: Finnbarr Webster/Getty Images)
