Few want it, and even fewer think it will succeed. So why in the world is Sunak clinging to the Rwanda policy? | Zoe Williams

Huge costs, mounting opposition, negligible impacts: nothing about this absurd asylum bill appears to make any sense

Nobody knows exactly how the first red fire ants were imported to Australia, but it happened – and now these vicious and destructive creatures are everywhere. There’s a moral to this story: if you import one destructive insect, without the entire ecosystem, the consequences will be bad and you’ll have to live with them.

As with ants, so with policy ideas. It’s now two years since the immigration deal between the UK and Rwandan governments was inked, and it was a direct rip-off of the so-called Australian Pacific solution, where asylum seekers arriving by boat would be intercepted and sent to Papua New Guinea or Nauru. That was in 2001 – the same year the ants arrived. Neither development went well.

Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist

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