The government’s Rwanda refugee scheme is an outrageous smokescreen

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Boris Johnson delivers a speech at Lydd airport in Kent on Thursday (PA)

The government’s plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda is immoral, impractical and stupid, but it’s also a blatant smokescreen to divert from the Conservative Party’s troubles.

I really hope that the media and the public aren’t deceived, and they press harder to hold the Right Dishonourable Boris Johnson and co’s feet to the coals.

I’m also intrigued to know what outrageous schemes they come up with to deflect attention the next time Johnson and others are shown to be criminals. Further privatisation of the NHS?  Fagging in comprehensive schools? Hard labour for the unemployed? Tax breaks on top hats?

Tim Sidaway

Abbots Langley

The government scheme to send asylum seekers to Rwanda is truly a massive distraction from its domestic failures, from the increasing reliance on food banks to housing shortages, Islamophobic attitudes, the curtailment of social welfare, inflation, soaring rental prices and child poverty.

If the government is unwilling or unable to accommodate asylum seekers, could someone tell me please how then would it manage to bring thousands of Ukrainian citizens to the UK?

Dr Munjed Farid Al Qutob

London

April Fool’s Day

Johnson and Patel are so hopelessly clueless that they don’t even appear to know that 1 April, not 14 April, is April Fool’s Day.

Do they really expect us to believe that a British government could be so viciously xenophobic, so contemptuous of decency and international law, and so profligately wasteful of taxpayers’ money, that it could seriously contemplate sending vulnerable and potentially traumatised asylum seekers to Rwanda to be “processed”?

D Maughan Brown

York

Sheer lunacy

If more evidence of the current evil, uncaring ethos of the Conservative Party was needed, look no further than the inimitable pairing of Boris Johnson and Priti Patel.

To consider desperate refugees crossing the Channel or riding in the back of a truck to gain sanctuary here as deserving of deportation to Rwanda sums up their totally barbaric understanding of how to solve a self-inflicted problem.

The Home Office, during the tenure of Patel, has become broken, beset by misguided dogma instead of positive, practical help for desperate refugees. During her reign she has been shown to be unfit to lead her own department. Aided by Boris Johnson, she has overseen the demise of yet another British institution that has aided those in peril across the world for years.

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To send refugees thousands of miles away to a country known for its lack of human rights activities at vast cost is sheer lunacy. Other countries have used this method to stop immigration without success, at a high cost both financial and human. It did not work there and it will not work here.

I trust that the country will be galvanised into rejecting this absurd, cruel idea.

Keith Poole

Basingstoke

Infection control fund

The ending of the infection control fund, set up to help care providers cope with staffing issues caused by the pandemic, poses a real threat. Social care staff, in common with everyone else in the community, are still getting Covid-19.

Because the infection control fund has stopped, care providers cannot afford to pay those staff for the three days of sickness that have to elapse before statutory sick pay kicks in, and because of the tight margins the majority of providers operate under, they cannot make up the shortfall.

Some of these staff are choosing to come to work, even though they have Covid because they cannot afford not to be paid. This will potentially have a devastating impact on care settings, with the obvious risks of spreading Covid to their residents, homecare clients and colleagues.

The Independent Care Group has written to the secretary of state urging him to reinstate the fund, as they have in Scotland. A loss of social care provision has dire consequences for NHS care, delaying hospital discharges and adding to the risk of hospitals being overwhelmed this spring and summer.

Mike Padgham

Chair of the Independent Care Group