A BARRISTER who came to the UK as a child refugee has been praised for their “brilliant and truthful” takedown of the Tory government’s Rwanda policy on Question Time.
Hashi Mohamed, now a barrister at No5 Chambers in London, appeared on the BBC show as it was broadcast from Peterborough on Thursday night.
Mohamed, the author of People Like Us: What It Takes to Make It in Modern Britain, raised work he had done with a refugee in Dresden, who had been through Israel’s own Rwanda deportation scheme.
The barrister told the Question Time audience: “Two years ago, I travelled to Dresden, the German town, and I met an Eritrean man who had been deported from Israel to Rwanda. He'd been paid to go to Rwanda. Rwanda had a reciprocal arrangement with Israel to take refugees.
“They are dividing a society, they are making us feel like refugees are the scum”
— BBC Question Time (@bbcquestiontime) January 18, 2024
Barrister Hashi Mohamed says the rhetoric created by the Rwanda policy is “poison” and describes the policy as “unconscionable”#bbcqt https://t.co/10QmerjvLX pic.twitter.com/aE5DPaUdDg
“When he got there, the Rwandans said, ‘you don't need to stay, there's the door’. And he used the money that he was given to make his way back, that treacherous journey, and he made his way to Dresden, where he sought asylum again.
“The Supreme Court in Israel struck down that law and when we got to our Supreme Court, there's a passage by our learned judges where they said the Home Office hadn't even assessed the Israel Rwanda policy before they decided to adopt it, so we know it's not going to work.
“It's unviable, it's expensive, and the only person it's working for is the Rwandans.”
Mohamed went on to attack the Tory government, saying that instead of presenting “real ideas”: “They’re attacking our judges. They're attacking our rule of law.
“They are dividing our society. They are making us feel like refugees are the scum and who are foreign. They refer to the European courts that we are a part of, that have United Kingdom judges, as foreign courts.
“It's not only just disgusting, as this young lady was saying, it's unconscionable. The rhetoric is poison and we have to acknowledge that.”
Mohamed asked how much better the £400 million the Tories have sent to Rwanda without deporting a single asylum seeker, could have been if it was spent developing proper monitoring systems on the French coast.
The barrister’s contribution was praised on social media, with campaigner and author Dan White calling it “just brilliant and truthful”.
READ MORE: Joanna Cherry: Scotland could provide grounds to challenge Tories’ vile Rwanda Bill
Scottish Social Care Minister Maree Todd shared the clip and commented: “Well said.”
“If you watch one thing today, it should be this. The Rwanda Scheme is totally ripped apart," another user wrote, as KC Jessica Timor added: "Please make this go viral. It’s never been articulated better than this."
A fifth wrote: “When they tell you about their ‘groundbreaking, never been tried before, Rwanda plan’ remember this. Remember Israel have already been there, tried it and failed.
“How have they been able to waste so much of our money, our time and bandwidth on this dead donkey while more have died?”
Sharing the clip himself, Mohamed wrote: "I enjoyed taking part in last night’s @bbcquestiontime – I finally got a chance to get this off my chest."
Elsewhere in the Question Time show, Fiona Bruce (above) asked the audience who supported the Rwanda policy in order to get one of them to speak.
No hands could be seen to go up in the audience, but Bruce chose a man who was off-camera.
The audience member said he backed the policy because “the question is there are about 500 million distressed and traumatised people in the world, so how many do we want to come to the UK”.
He added that we “might as well try everything”.
According to an interview with the Guardian from 2020, around the publication of his first book, Mohamed was sent as a refugee from Kenya to the UK after his father’s death in 1993.
He studied at the University of Hertfordshire before a postgraduate scholarship at Oxford, and now works as an author and a planning barrister.
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