> You may not wish to suggest that Conservative voters are effectively promoting racism, but that is exactly what Wes Streeting meant to imply. He said in terms that a win for Susan Hall is a win for racists , white supremacists and Islamophobes the world over.Other than a very unlikely win from nowhere by Britain First a win for Susan Hall would be the best possible result for people with racist/supremacist/Islamaphobic views.> The clear implication was that Susan Hall is all of those things, so that if you vote for her, you are voting to put a racist into City Hall. If that is not a slur, what is?No, that's not the implication. It's simply that, of the candidates that had any possibility of winning (no matter how remote Susan Hall's chances actually were, but they were better than Britain First), Susan Hall would be the one most closely aligned with those groups.Do you see the difference?> Your observation that racists are drawn to the Conservative Party by such policies as the Rwanda scheme is provocative, to say the least.Of course it is because by my personal politics I couldn't be more opposed to it. I'd say that someone here saying that they fully support the Rwanda scheme would be equally provocative. But this is just a difference of opinion.> Perhaps you could explain why it is racist to send illegal migrants to Rwanda.It's not "racist" to send illegal immigrants to Rwanda. It's just a scheme that is designed to appeal to, amongst other groups (but not limited to), racists, white supremacists and Islamaphobes. The theory behind the scheme is that being sent to Rwanda with no chance of return to the UK is so off putting that people won't try to seek asylum in the UK.> Do you believe that everyone who wishes to come to this country, even if they have found refuge in a safe country like France, should have a right to do so?Everyone has a right to apply for asylum in any country they want to. Whether or not they are accepted is another matter. What the UK have done is make it extremely difficult (verging on nigh on impossible) to apply in a legal manner. There are no real overseas avenues to application and so the only option left is to try and make it to the UK and then start the asylum process here. It's a Catch 22.The rest is just theatre. The UK has no intention of deporting to Rwanda the tens of thousands of people who come over in boats each year. I'm sure some will go but the current scheme isn't designed for those kind of numbers, would be prohibitively expensive if it did, and those numbers would just be rejected by the Rwandan Government. Also remember that it is partly reciprocal, we will be getting refugees from Rwanda in return.The processing delays are another contrived method of making things worse than they need to be. Months and months in poor/unsuitable accommodation just to make it sound even worse to people thinking of coming here. But what they don't realise is that such appalling conditions/delays/treatment are often far better than they would have if they stayed where they were originally from, which is why the Rwanda scheme is just doomed to failure.That's the point though. The possibility of deportation to Rwanda and the poor/restrictive conditions whilst you wait are pandering to the voters, not as a real deterrent to the people who are trying to seek asylum here.It (and the "Stop the boats" sloganeering) is also a grand distraction from the fact that the number of migrants entering this country legally, with visas approved by the UK Government, absolutely dwarfs the number of people entering in a non-legal manner (by about 20:1). Also the current Government has previously said it will slow net immigration but has failed to do so, despite it being in control of the visas it is handing out. There are still huge areas of the UK workforce that are predominantly filled with migrant workers and the current Government has done little to address this in the last 12 years it has been in power. We have a shortage of doctors in this country but they chose not to raise the number of medical school places available each year. We have a shortage of nurses in this country but they chose to take away the nurses bursary reducing the incentive for people to go in to nursing. Etc.Anyone that supports a policy that is decried by many different independent international human rights organisations might need to think about what that says about themselves. Obviously the standard response is to scrabble around for some reason why the international human rights organisations are all somehow wrong. Anyone in this position doesn't need to justify it, they just have to live with their own conscience.
John Kettlekey ● 412d