At the Deanery Synod meeting on Tuesday, we welcome Vicki Offin, who works for Upbeat Communities, an East Midlands charity that works to express Christian values by providing care and support for the ‘alien and sojourner’ or, in more modern parlance, refugees. What is a refugee? The UN Refugee Convention of 1951 defines them as people with a well-founded fear of coming to harm in their nation of origin.

I almost made Vicki cry. By what perfidious means, you ask? I offered a question: “This may only require a short answer but does your organisation see any merit in the Government’s Rwanda deportation scheme?”. The short answer, from an organisation that is well acquainted with refugees and listening to their stories, was no. As she expanded, explaining that she and her colleagues are daily meeting people genuinely terrified by this policy, she visibly choked up, as did I and I think many others in the assembly.

At present, the UK Government seems quite happy to have nice, white refugees from Ukraine and that’s not a bad thing in itself, although I know that in some cases there still seems to have been a strange lack of ability to process the paperwork to respond in the hour or even month or longer of need. Those from further afield though are being viewed as so much flotsam and jetsam, to be ‘recycled’ by shipping to a nation that I imagine few of the cabinet would have much desire for themselves or their family to move to, certainly outside the bubble of diplomatic privilege.

For an excellent exploration of Christian thinking in response to the policy, we were recommended to read a recent piece by Revd Dr Samuel Wells, vicar of St Martin-in-the Fields in London (a church with a strong tradition of practical social care initiatives). This is available on the Church Times website and I concur that it is an excellent piece of analysis, exposing the iniquity of the programme. Meanwhile, the Conservative party seems to be more about the kind of “traditional British values” that led to us inventing ideas about concentration camps rather than anything worthy of celebration. Is justice (for refugees and many others) really something we need to be conservative with or wouldn’t it perhaps grow if we shared it more freely?