Following on from the news that the Home Office is looking to send more than a 1,000 Zimbabwean refugees back to the Mugabe regime, you have to wonder what’s next. I supposed we should be grateful that the Home Office are showing consistency in sending people back to failed states, even if it’s not the kind of consistency we’d hope for.

The Zimbabweans are being sent back because the Home Office say they face ‘no general risk’ back home. If you’re going to be that vague we might as well say they’d face ‘no general risk’ if we made them swim home. As long as they take regular breaks and keep away from the sharks and larger waves.

But one more time, let’s do it by the numbers. Here’s the Home Office’s colleagues at the Foreign Office:

Torture occurs regularly and there is a general culture of impunity, whereby perpetrators of abuses are not prosecuted or even encouraged. ZANU-PF organised youth and war veteran groups have been used to intimidate the opposition. There are credible reports of politicisation of government food distributions. Many of the victims of Operation Murambatavina in 2005 remain homeless or destitute.

I suppose it’s less general risk the returnees will have to worry about and more the specific torture and starvation. I’d like to suggest contacting the Home Secretary but would it do any good? What’s the anti-negative approach to take on this? Any positivists out there wanting to give us the benefit of their wisdom?