The Lords’ debate exposed the holes in the Tories’ Rwanda Bill

What sort of trouble is the Rwanda deportation legislation going to get into in the Lords? It passed its second reading last night, as expected, and peers also defeated an attempt by the Liberal Democrats to block the legislation entirely. But the debate gave us some idea of the problems the Safety of Rwanda Bill will encounter when the noble Lords really get down to business. 

There were truly stinging speeches from some peers who are not given to melodrama. Lord Hennessy, the foremost historian of the British constitution, has been increasingly frustrated by the ways in which he feels the past few iterations of Conservative government have been undermining constitutional norms. His speech last night went much further than his previous criticisms, though. Hennessy described this legislation as a ‘first-order matter’ because it undermined the rule of law:

‘By rushing this emergency legislation through Parliament with the intention of getting the deportation flights to Kigali underway by late spring, the government have already secured for themselves a special place in British political history. The day may not be far off when the Rwanda Bill, having cleared all its parliamentary stages, will be forwarded from the Cabinet Office to Buckingham Palace to receive Royal Assent. In the few minutes that it takes to pass down the Mall and across the tip of St James’s Park on its return journey to Whitehall, our country will change, for the Government will have removed us from the list of rule-of-law nations. We shall be living in a different land, breathing different air in a significantly diminished kingdom.’

Other figures, such as the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby, were more predictable in their opposition to the legislation. The Conservatives have long been battling with the leader of the Church of England on whether he is right to speak out against the Rwanda policy. He addressed this straight on, saying ‘we on these benches have been criticised many times over many decades by those thinking that defence of the government of the day should be our highest virtue and aspiration’.

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That they bother to attack him shows that Welby’s arguments do still rattle them, and that they don’t believe him to be an irrelevance in the minds of voters. He suggested that he might try to block the bill in its later stages, saying that while he would not vote against the killing motion, ‘we must wait until third reading (when) we have done our revising work’. 

Another problem is that even Conservative supporters of the overall deportation policy aren’t happy with the legislation as drafted. Ken Clarke told the Chamber that he had previously backed the idea, but then described the government’s reaction to the Supreme Court ruling as ‘quite startling to me’ because the way the legislation declared Rwanda a safe country was a ‘very dangerous constitutional provision’. He said he had no way of testing whether the government’s claim that things have changed and that Rwanda was now a safe country was in fact true. He argued against the Lib Dem amendment, not on the basis that it was wrong for peers to block something the Commons had passed, but for this reason: 

‘Although I would love to see the Conservative Party got out of this particular mess, the main effect of the amendment would be to get the government out of the hole they have dug for themselves. They have based far too much on this Rwanda policy, putting it at the heart of their political ambitions for the election. To be able to turn around and say that they would have stopped the boats but the unelected House of Lords, the Liberal Democrat’s and the metropolitan elite stopped them would say this government from what I think are their follies in crashing on with this policy in this way, and I hope we will not fall into that trap, at least, in our proceedings.’

That is not the only trap that opponents of the Bill could walk into. Liberal Democrats such as Lord German (who tabled the amendment to kill it yesterday) have said explicitly that they at least want to delay the Bill so that the flights aren’t taking off by the spring.

Some Labour peers are sympathetic to this, but Conservative peer Lord Dobson outlined why this would be a mistake. He argued:

‘The Opposition, so silent about what they would do, say that we are rushing things through – words from the noble Lord, Lord Ponsonby, on the Opposition Front Bench. Delay, delay, they insist – or do nothing. It is the silence of the lambs. Ordinary, decent British people want us to do things more rapidly and believe that we have not moved fast enough.’

It would be all too easy for the government to blame the unelected Lords for delaying the flights against the will of the people; much easier than, say, finding planes that will actually take the first deportees, or indeed producing any proof that the policy is stopping the boats. The greatest political problem this legislation could encounter might be a smooth and swift passage through the Lords, meaning ministers have to deal with reality, rather than fighting political phantoms.