The Tories created this Rwanda Bill mess

Climate change minister Graham Stuart is flying back to Britain from the UAE for a matter of hours so he can cast his vote tonight for the Safety of Rwanda Bill. It’s not a great look from the green perspective, and even worse from the political one. The government is so concerned about the numbers tonight that every vote must count. This includes flying one in.

Even the best case scenario for Rishi Sunak this evening is rife with problems (Katy Balls lays out all the possible outcomes here). If the Bill passes today, it will face more hurdles at the committee stage. Neither the right nor centre is particularly happy with the Bill, so any concession to one camp risks the support of the other. It’s a terrible dilemma the government finds itself in, but there’s no sympathy to be had. The chaos, on this occasion, is completely of the government’s own making. 

The Tory party is tearing itself apart over a cruel gimmick dreamed up by Boris Johnson, which has managed to become the central plank of the government’s immigration policy. Rishi Sunak may have had to pivot towards hard-line immigration policy last year to get his second leadership bid over the line, but he did not have to turn it into one of his five priorities, which made ‘stopping the boats’ synonymous with getting a flight to Rwanda in the air.

Ministers also didn’t need to spend half the year selling the plan to deport a total of 200 undocumented migrants as the silver-bullet solution to stop illegal migration – rhetoric which was rolled back a bit when it became more obvious the Supreme Court might not rule in their favour. But the biggest mistake has always been to deliberately classify refugees and economic migrants in the same category, then drafting up plans to handle these cases in the same way. It’s a point that was made repeatedly to ministers, often from within the tent, that was sidelined so as to not complicate the politics. That attempt to avoid complication has failed badly, as the politics is now about as messy as it can get, mired with Brexit comparison and the ‘psychodramas’ that played out at the end of Johnson’s premiership. 

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The Supreme Court’s ruling suggested that the original legislation for deporting migrants would face a myriad of challenges on the domestic and international level. But it was crystal clear about the crux of its concerns: that genuine refugees could find themselves being sent back to dangerous countries – in breach of the practically universal principle that refoulement must be avoided at all costs.  

This is, and has always been, a problem that the government could solve if it wanted to: by creating legal pathways for refugees to claim asylum in the UK. If you are Ukrainian or Hong Kong Chinese, these pathways exist, but are virtually non-existent for most other nationalities. This means that, by nature of a non-existent system, refugees must show up in the UK to claim asylum – a move that, under the Rwandan scheme, would mean immediate deportation and no right to ever return to the UK. 

But rather than engage with the complexities and (no doubt difficult) choices that would be involved in looking into these routes, the government has simply insisted that legal pathways would come after the Rwanda scheme got off the ground. This timeline – flights first, legal pathways second – all but guaranteed the government’s Bill wouldn’t withstand the scrutiny of the courts.

Now the government finds itself in an even tricker position than it did when it inherited the Rwandan policy. Having spent the better part of a year insisting to colleagues that the ability for refugees to come to the UK legally was a secondary issue, it is not wholly surprising that there is a strong contingent on the Tory right now who don’t want any option for appeal. Meanwhile Tories in the centre are getting nervous that a Bill they might vote for could quickly lead to examples of some of the world’s most oppressed people being thrown into a new round of dangerous situations. 

After all, this is what happens when gimmicks turn into public policy. News broke this morning that an asylum seeker on the Bibby Stockholm barge, which is currently housing 300 migrants, died overnight. He is thought by others on board to have taken his own life. The question remains as to why migrants are on this boat in the first place: potentially deadly legionella bacteria was found on the Bibby Stockholm this summer and the asylum seekers were removed, only to be put back on board in October. It was used by the-then immigration minister Robert Jenrick as a talking point at Conservative Party Conference that same month, to show how seemingly serious the government is about cracking down on migration. 

Schemes designed to house, or deport, several hundred migrants maximum are highly unlikely to deter people who are already ready to risk their lives to pursue a better future. But they do run the high risk of creating new and unintended consequences, not to mention utter tragedies. Still, these show pieces remain the government’s priority. No surprise then, that it’s not going so well.