Stephen Paton: Liberal hand-wringing on Rwanda scheme misses truth of horror

Priti Patel’s latest foul ministerial direction has been the catalyst for much liberal hand-wringing of commentators, draped in dramatic poise with hand raised to forehead, insisting that Britain is “better than this”. This isn’t who we are. O woe. O cursed spite, that ever I was born to set it right.

But ... when was Britain ever better than this? Violence has been a defining trait of the British state for centuries, and all the misplaced theatrics of surprise at this latest outrage only serves to paper over the UK’s blood-soaked history.

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Britain’s colonial past surrounds us. It is in the stone of the buildings we walk past and the names of streets we wander down. It is in the stolen wealth that we still benefit from without really understanding how much of what we have was built with resources taken by force.

Britain is a parasite that stretched itself across a sun-filled empire and stole away the people and riches of other nations before smugly retreating behind its own walls once it had taken all it could. The museums of the United Kingdom are a testament to its history, filled with artefacts and art that was taken by force and which curators still refuse to hand back, lest our cultural institutions stand empty; a stark symbol of a union that stole more than it ever created itself.

The British Empire oversaw the subjugation of a quarter of the world, and committed endless atrocities that even now we are still uncovering. Well before the Nazis broke ground on Auschwitz-Birkenau, British soldiers were running concentration camps in South Africa during the Boer War. Between 18,000 and 28,000 Boers died in these camps, 80% of them children. It’s understood that a similar number of Africans also died here, however the soldiers never bothered to keep records of them.

And when the Nazis did follow suit and build their own, the rhetoric used to justify the detention of their victims was seemingly as prevalent in the corridors of Westminster as it was in the Reichstag. Churchill too appeared to believe in a vast antisemitic conspiracy by Jewish people “for the overthrow of civilisation”, and spoke positively about the use of poison gas being deployed “against uncivilised tribes”.

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When the British Empire had finally taken all it could, it destroyed the evidence of its various massacres and atrocities through Operation Legacy – the planned destruction of documents that would have revealed the true scale of Britain’s shameful deeds. This decision is perhaps the greatest implicit acknowledgement of the Empire’s barbarism – that it would be compelled to hide the truth to protect its reputation.

Britain’s relationship with its history, and its contemporary policies around immigration, all suffer from the same obfuscation – a connection to reality as tenuous as claiming credit for “abolishing slavery” after having proliferated and profited by it for almost 200 years. Westminster has a long history of fudging how it talks about immigration and its treatment of refugees. In 2021, Sajid Javid (below) claimed that the UK had settled more people than any other country in Europe “through refugee programmes”. That final qualifier plays an important role in the accuracy of this statement.

Resettlement schemes are just one small part of the asylum system, and outwith these specific schemes, the UK had actually taken in significantly fewer refugees than our neighbours.

As we watched the horrors unfold at the hands of Russian troops in Ukraine, again the UK played a silly linguistic game, boasting of launching the world’s first visa scheme for those fleeing the war. Again, this is true – but only because other countries didn’t feel the need to set up any visa scheme at all before opening their doors to people displaced by the invasion. As a result, the UK remains far behind in efforts to rehouse Ukrainian refugees.

Throw into that mix of misleading statements the Windrush scandal, the Iraq War and the deplorable state of British detention centres – with conditions so bad in 2018 that there were on average two suicide attempts behind their barbed wire fences every single day – and you have a country with a damning history of state-inflicted violence on refugees, asylum seekers and foreign nations that spans hundreds of years.

Britain isn’t “better than this”. Priti Patel and Boris Johnson’s foul Rwanda deportation scheme is entirely in line with the nature of the British state – and to think otherwise betrays ignorance of the soul of British politics, or at the very least, it presents a faux rose-tinted nostalgia that helps Britain continue to evade responsibility for its shameful history.

The state has often rationalised its colonial past and contemporary policy through the lens of British liberal imperialism, portraying itself as a force for good. All in all, when discussing historical atrocities around the world, Britain has managed to so far broadly shield itself from any real introspection.

That is changing though, and throughout history there have always been those in the UK who have fought the state and campaigned for better – but those wins never came easy, and never by pretending like Britain was anything other than what it still is today.