When you consider we have 365,262 refugees in UK, the 50 houses in Kigali for British govt to use isn’t quite enough
WE’VE been told by our glorious leaders that refugee flights to Rwanda will begin this spring.
Well might I suggest they don’t bother booking a big plane. A Cessna 172 ought to do it.
This is because Rwanda’s property spivs have started to sell off the houses that had been set aside for the refugees.
And on one of the housing estates earmarked, there are now only a handful left.
This is the latest blow to the Conservative plan which would see migrants being scooped off the beaches in Kent and flown immediately to central Africa to start a new life there.
First of all, the human rights lawyers put down their Guardians and their almond milk, nuclear-free peace coffees and said it was barbaric to make these young men — sorry, hard-working families from the Middle East community — move to Africa. And then along came the Supreme Court, which agreed.
I’ve got to be honest. I also thought the plan was a bit hare-brained.
Because if you take a fit and enterprising young man, who’s somehow got from the slums of Mogadishu to Dover, and put him in Rwanda, he’s not going to stay there, is he?
Two weeks later he’ll be back in Dover saying he’s got a hurty knee and he wants a free doctor to look at it.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not Gary Lineker. I believe there does come a point when the country is full and that we are probably there already.
We simply don’t have enough houses or doctors or hospitals — or money for that matter — to cope with a never-ending line of new arrivals.
But Rwanda was never going to be the answer. I’ve been there, and it’s a fantastic country.
People are forced by law to spend their Sundays tidying their gardens and their streets, so it’s clean and immaculate and all of the children have spotless school uniforms, and, thanks to the Chinese, the roads put ours to shame.
But there’s no free healthcare. There’s no free anything really.
And the locals aren’t quite as understanding about modern sexual thinking as, say, the people of Brighton.
And, on the Bwiza Riverside Estate in the capital, Kigali, only 50 houses now remain for the British government to use.
Which, when you consider we have 365,262 refugees in the UK, isn’t quite enough.
So what’s the answer? The Tories have no clue. Sir Starmer is a leftie so he doesn’t really mind if refugees keep on coming.
The Greens and the Liberal democrats are too busy worrying about climate change to think about anything else, so that leaves Reform, which seems to think it can hoover the incoming tide from their small boats and dump them back on the beaches of France.
I’m not sure this is true. Or we’d be doing it already.
So how’s this for a plan? Britain doesn’t have an empire any more, but it does still have 14 sovereign territories around the world.
Places like Pitcairn and Tristan Da Cunha. So if we ship the refugees off to these remote tropical islands, we aren’t technically making them leave the UK.
Which means they’d be safe and we wouldn’t be breaking any international laws. Or am I missing something here?
We’ll be dirt pour
IT started raining on October 18 and it didn’t stop until Thursday this week.
We’ve been through every kind of rain there is. Little bitty stinging rain, and big old fat rain. Rain that flew in sideways. And sometimes rain even seemed to come straight up from underneath.
Every day, the newspapers have been full of pictures of upended beach huts and crumbling cliffs and caravan parks that were under six feet of water and cars being washed out to sea.
But the really big problem has barely been getting any coverage at all.
I flew over southern Britain on Monday and couldn’t believe how many fields are still brown. It’s been too wet to plant anything.
Which means that, come the autumn, you’ll face a choice.
Replace the caravan you lost in the floods. Or buy a loaf of bread.
Because they’re going to cost about the same.
SO, Doncaster Rovers have won seven games on the trot.
The first time they’ve done this for 77 years.
So, speaking now as a Chelsea fan, can we have your manager?
Spell of bad luck
APPARENTLY, Scrabble is now being sold with alternative rules which give bonus points for words that touch the edge of the board and so on.
It’s all irrelevant for me, though, because all I ever have in my hand are six Is and an O.
While my opponent is busy writing “elephants” across two treble word scores.
It’s the same story in backgammon. My opponent sits there explaining it’s a game of skill, while throwing nothing but double sixes.
I never get anything but a two and a one.
We’re not really seeing Helen in her Pomp
EXCITING news from Pompeii, where boffins with a ton of patience and a tiny toothbrush have discovered fresco paintings that have been buried under the ash and lava for centuries.
One features Helen of Troy, and I must say, it came as a bit of a shock.
We’ve always been taught that she was the most beautiful woman to have ever lived.
But the artist shows us that, in fact, she looked like Jack Charlton.
And then there’s Apollo. The Roman and Greek god of the sun and hunting and archery. The hero god. The son of Zeus.
Yes, and now, thanks to the painstaking work done by all those archaeologists, we know he had a phenomenally tiny penis.
Camo combo is odd
SOCIAL media is awash these days with silly idiots who try to provoke authority figures like policemen by shoving a camera in their face and refusing to go away when asked.
Well this week, one of these halfwits decided to take on a Gurkha soldier.
It was all very dramatic, but what struck me as odd is that the soldier in question was wearing military camo.
And a high-vis vest. Make your mind up, mate.
Do you want to be seen? Or not seen?
IT was my birthday this week and my girlfriend Lisa said she’d booked “somewhere nice”.
It all sounded lovely, but as we plunged further and further into the Cotswolds, and she still wouldn’t tell me where we were going, I became consumed with a fear that she was taking me to a care home.
She didn’t. But the day is coming . . .
Potter duo no choice
I DON’T know what Harry Potter author JK Rowling said about transgender enthusiasts.
It’s not a subject that interests me. But she now says that she won’t forgive Emma Watson and Daniel Ratcliffe – the stars she made famous – for disagreeing with her.
I think that’s a mistake.
The problem is that people like Emma and Daniel may be closet fans of Lee Anderson.
They may wipe their bottoms on Nelson Mandela loo roll. They may have copies of Mein Kampf on their bedside tables.
But they are young, so in public, they have to toe the social media line.
Even if it means biting the hand that fed them.
They have to be pro-Hamas, anti-Russia, Tories out pronoun enthusiasts. Or they will be cancelled.