UK/RWANDA IMMIGRATION PARTNERSHIP AND THE CLERGY

In the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Easter Day sermon, which lasted around 6 minutes, Justin Welby devoted one paragraph to the UK Government’s recent response to the illegal immigrant invasion across the English Channel – that many of them would be sent to Rwanda. He said:

‘And this season is also why there are such serious ethical questions about sending asylum seekers overseas. The details are for politics and politicians. The principle must stand the judgement of God and it cannot. It  cannot carry the weight of resurrection justice, of life conquering death. It cannot carry the weight of the resurrection that was first to the least valued, for it privileges the rich and strong. And it cannot carry the weight of our national responsibility as a country formed by Christian values, because sub-contracting out our responsibilities, even to a country that seeks to do well like Rwanda, is the opposite of the nature of God who himself took responsibility for our failures.’

The Archbishop of York, Stephen Cottrell, joined in with his own address at York Minster in which he said:

‘There is, in law, no such thing as an illegal asylum seeker. It is the people who exploit them that we need to crack down on, not our sisters and brothers in their need. We don’t need to build more barriers and cower in the darkness of the shadows they create … So this is my question this Easter day: Do I want to be part of a nation that is hopeful, enterprising, that cares for those in need; that supports those who are in poverty because they can’t afford the heating, or food for the table and offers them genuine help? Do we want to be a nation that seeks to build and make peace, not merely enjoy it; that builds an international consensus about what it means to live alongside our neighbour? Do we want to continue to be known as a country that opens proper legitimate pathways for all who flee violence, conflict and oppression – not just those from Ukraine, but also those fleeing other conflicts and the effect of climate change?’

In a Radio 4 interview before his sermon, the Archbishop of York described the Government’s proposals as being ‘appalling’ and ‘unethical’. He continued:

‘This seems to me to be entirely tackling the wrong end of the problem. The people traffickers will carry on trafficking people, whatever we do, and we must crack down on them, but the people who come to us need to be dealt with, with dignity and compassion. I think actually the government is out of tune with British people at the moment. I think what’s happened in Ukraine has been a wake up call for us. British people have shown incredible generosity in wanting to open their homes to Ukrainian refugees. We now need to make that step of understanding that… people coming from Syria and Yemen are in just as much need as the people in Ukraine and need to be treated with the same dignity and the same compassion.’

Subsequently, in the Daily Telegraph, Justin Welby wrote:

‘The Church of England is not a passive observer of migration policy. Some of my fellow bishops, clergy and worshippers came to the UK escaping persecution of conflict. We welcome and serve asylum seekers at every level of society – from providing housing, food banks, social support and friendship, to scrutinising legislation in the Lords. We partner with Government to settle refugees from Syria, Afghanistan and Ukraine … Government and Church are not the same, but we must surely all want to put humanity and fairness at the heart of the asylum system.’

In The Hegemony of Political Correctness: and the rise of the woke-Right, I said that someone rightly described today’s liberal-Left as being the spoilt brat of the Welfare State. The two archbishops are a prime example of that observation. They blithely assume that they should help themselves to the welfare monies and facilities, which are presumed to be unlimited, to fund their desire to promote the continuance of the illegal immigrant invasion.

With his demand that ‘all’ those fleeing the problems of their own countries, and those claiming to be victims of climate change, should just barge into England, the Archbishop of York is certainly ambitious in his proposed largesse.

The archbishops rely upon the ‘we’ argument. ‘We’ should do this and that and spend such and so forth. By ‘we’, the archbishops mean the taxpayer. They are keen to spend other peoples’ monies.

Those crossing the English Channel are illegal immigrants. There is such a thing as an illegal immigrant, whether he claims asylum or not. The archbishops assume that anyone who invades England across the English Channel is a genuine refugee, and do not bother to consider the most effective way of helping genuine refugees.

The poorest in the Third World struggle to survive on around $1 per day. Those paying people smugglers many thousands of pounds are not the most vulnerable. They are mostly the relatively better off. They are mostly fit young men. The poorest are more likely to be the elderly, women and children. The poorest remain in their own or neighbouring countries.

Despite being archbishops, neither Justin Welby nor Stephen Cottrell understand the difference between Christians and being politically correct. Furthermore, they take no account of English interests.

In June 2022, as days before the first flight to Rwanda was due to take off, as the television mainstream media grew increasingly outraged, a letter from a multitude of Church of England clergy (including the two mentioned above) was sent to The Times. That letter said that the Rwanda policy ‘should shame us as a nation … because our Christian heritage should inspire us to treat asylum seekers with compassion, fairness and justice, as we have for centuries’.

This claim of the UK accepting refugees ‘for centuries’ is misleading. Between 1066 and 1950, the total number of immigrants entering the UK was around 250,000. These were mainly Hugeunots and Jews. The most recent figures for immigration showed that the UK had admitted one million immigrants in 12 months. The current scale of immigration is unprecedented and continues to rise. England is being colonised.

The Church of England letter proceeded to admit that there was a need to end ‘the evil of trafficking’. The letter continued: ‘We cannot offer asylum to everyone, but we must not outsource our ethical responsibilities, or discard international law — which protects the right to claim asylum … To reduce dangerous journeys to the UK we need safe routes: the church will continue to advocate for them. But deportations — and the potential forced return of asylum seekers to their home countries — are not the way. This immoral policy shames Britain.’

Thus the letter revealed the naiveté and globalism of its authors. The UK has no ‘responsibilities’ to the inhabitants of other countries. The British Empire no longer exists. There is no such thing as ‘international law’, only treaty agreements between sovereign countries. Such treaties can be exited when in the national interest. Withdrawing from the various treaties concerning asylum seeking and human rights is most definitely in the UK’s national interests – in particular the 1951 UN Convention on Refugees that was written to deal with the situation in Europe following WWII, and explicitly stated that it only applied only to those who were refugees ‘as a result of events occurring before 1^st January 1951’. It was only intended to have a temporary effect and the damaging consequences of its warped implementation today should be reason enough to exit that treaty forthwith.

By advocating so-called ‘safe routes’ and the cessation of ‘forced return of asylum seekers to their home counties’ means that there will be an unlimited number of immigrants entering the UK who will never leave regardless of the merits of any claims of the need for asylum.

The letter betrays the false morality of political correctness, which is what the clergymen are advocating. What the clergymen object to is the notion that there is an alternative to mass immigration. They object to helping genuine refugees in their own or neighbouring countries, where help is most effective and reaches those in most need (ie the elderly, women and children scraping by on $1 per day).

The clergymen make the mistake of measuring their self-appointed morality by how much harm they inflict on the UK. Further, they are spoilt brats of the welfare state.

In the event, as legal applications reduced the original number due to be deported on the first flight from 130 to single figures, ‘last minute injunctions’ issued by ‘an out-of-hours judge’ of the European Court of Human Rights led to the cancellation of the flight. So much for taking back control.