The UK and Rwanda Migration and Economic Development Partnership has rightly come under heavy criticism from lawyers, activists, politicians, and asylum seekers themselves. Identified by its critiques as illegal, immoral, and unworkable, a legal battle has morphed into a race to the bottom as the UK Government threatens to withdraw from its obligations under international law. Recent opinion polls in the UK show that support or opposition to the plan are divided along political party lines, hinting at the fact that this plan is not about migration, development, or partnership in any meaningful sense. It is a battleground over human rights, humanitarian principles, and what the United Kingdom stands for.

If we take a closer look at the elements of this plan – migration, economic development, partnership – we can see how the UK Government is retreating into problematic nationalist rhetoric. This reflects a weakening of the country as a global actor with the privilege and responsibility of being able to determine the trajectory of human society and individual lives. With regards to migration, this plan does not address the pressing need for humane and workable systems to process arrivals and asylum claims on UK soil; with regards to economic development this plan sacrifices human development and wellbeing at the altar of division; with regards to partnership this plan is designed to solve UK ‘problems’ and is not the outcome of a genuinely collaborative and mutually beneficial dialogue.

The debate about this plan is taking place in the law courts, and in the legislative bodies of the UK, but at its heart it needs to be a debate about the moral standards we have and wish to set, about a global social contract, and about what kind of role the UK should be playing. This is apparently a plan to ‘stop the boats’ but we know that the number of individual asylum seekers that we are talking about are minimal in comparison to the scale of the challenges around welcoming and processing asylum claims. The real challenge is in stopping human suffering and dismantling the systems and prejudices which produce and sustain it.