It’s pretty fair to say that the current Conservative Government in the UK is not very popular. True, the past few Conservative Governments have also not been the most well-received, with Johnson and Truss setting a spectacularly low bar for Sunak. One would think that from the nethermost reaches of low poll ratings into which Liz Truss plunged the Tories, Sunak would have no other direction to go but up. Even so, somehow, he’s managed to stay down there.
The air of calm, technocratic competence Sunak hoped to achieve has been overshadowed by an exceedingly bleak picture of the UK’s immediate future, and a continuation of deep intra-party divisions that have plagued the Tories since the early 2010s. Sunak has presented no radical solutions to free us from this decade-long rut we seem to be stuck in, and the pollsters have picked up on it.
Realistic solutions to issues aside, he and his Cabinet don’t even seem to be offering any retail policies to win over voters. Even after the Autumn Statement last month, Sunak and his rhyming slang Chancellor Jeremy Hunt freely admit in media interviews that the statement did not offer any big vote-winning tax cuts. One of Starmer’s recent attack lines seems to be ringing true; they know they’re toast, so they’ve just given up.
In spite of the rapidly approaching electoral Spartan kick to the chest almost everyone is predicting is heading for them, Sunak and his cabinet have poured their last drops of political capital into one policy; the Rwanda asylum plan.
On 4 January, Rishi Sunak was a little over 2 months into the job as Prime Minister, and he set himself and his Government 5 targets to hit by the next general election. You might have missed them as he’s stopped talking about them so much recently (mainly because most of them aren’t going so well). They are: 1) halve inflation, 2) grow the economy, 3) reduce debt, 4) cut NHS waiting lists, and 5) stop small boat crossings in the English Channel.
The first happened almost by accident, as it was projected to without major Government intervention by most economists. Economic growth, as it has been for the past 13 years, is sluggishly slow, with forecasts for the next 2 years under the Tories looking equally bad. Government debt has risen under Rishi Sunak, and he is not projected to achieve the levels of reductions that he seeks. NHS waiting lists are the longest they have ever been and no action the Government takes seems to reverse that.
The 5th pledge, to stop the boats, is going about as well as the rest of them, but according to Sunak and his last 3 Home Secretaries, the Rwanda plan is the key to meeting this goal. The plan, in essence, seeks to deport anyone who enters the UK in a small boat to Rwanda in central Africa, where they will stay, never to return to the UK. The idea of deporting asylum seekers to third countries was originally a fringe idea, dwelling only in the furthest right-wing reaches of the Tory backbenches. But, like Brexit before it, found its way into frontbench policy, and was introduced 2 Home Secretaries ago by Priti Patel.
The fact that the plan was first introduced by Patel, who stopped being Home Secretary in 2022, should tell you how successful the Government has been in implementing this policy. It has been subject to legal challenges since its inception, with the first scheduled flights in June 2022 prevented by a last minute intervention by the European Court of Human Rights. Originally ruled lawful by the UK High Court, this decision was taken to appeal in June 2023, where is was found to be unlawful, a decision which was upheld by the UK Supreme Court in November.
It’s not controversial to say that the current levels of migration into the UK are far too high, by regular or irregular means. Net migration in 2022 was 745,000, and that number is widely estimated to be even larger for 2023. The irony that these increases come after Brexit should not be lost on anyone. I would say that for a majority of those who voted to leave the EU, Brexit was a single-issue vote on immigration, and as they were told by oxygen thieves like Farage and Johnson, Brexit would give the UK greater control over its borders. Even though you’d scare find a bitterer remoaner than me, I can at least enjoy a crumb of schadenfreude from these figures.
Whilst I am of the opinion that migration into the UK is a positive thing, not just to add to our workforce in crucial areas like health and social care and to bolster the economy, but because a diverse and inclusive population is something to be desired, migration at these levels is not sustainable. We need sensible and thoughtful controls to address this issue, but the Rwanda plan is not only not sensible or thoughtful, it will also not control migration.
This is a scheme aimed squarely at immigration by irregular means; those entering the UK across the Channel in small boats organised mainly by illegal people smuggling operations. Firstly, Priti Patel and Boris Johnson floated this idea as a way to deport all those who came to the UK this way, but it has since been revealed that we would only be able to send around 200 a year. So far this year, 29,090 migrants crossed the Channel in a small boat. If that trend stays the same (it’s widely expected to increase), we’d sent about 0.7% of those people to Rwanda, and that’s if the planes even get off the ground.
So, with the argument that this would be a solution debunked, the Government changed tack and started saying it would act as a deterrent, striking fear into the hearts of these most vulnerable people that they could be sent to Rwanda if they cross the Channel. However, journalistic vox pops conducted among migrants at camps in Calais revealed that almost none of them knew about this policy, and even fewer were deterred by the proposition. These are people who have escaped persecution of the worst kind; they have travelled from Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Eritrea, Iran, some of the most oppressive states on the planet, to reach the UK. They are willing to risk their lives once again to float across icy seas to get into the UK. The 0.7% chance that they might be sent to Rwanda is not enough to phase them.
If Rwanda, as the Government keeps insisting, is such a nice place to be as a refugee, then why should it be a deterrent? What the Government wants to say is; “Rwanda has a strong track record of human rights abuses, including the extra-judicial killing of refugees, and we’ll send you there if you try to come to the UK.”
This policy has already cost the taxpayer £290 million, and not a single plane has taken off yet. If this policy actually gets through Parliament and planes actually take off before the next election, the Government also has to contend with the contents of the treaty it has signed with the Rwandan Government.
On top of that eye-watering sum, the UK would also pay for room and board for migrants shipped to Rwanda. According to the Home Office itself, migrants would be shipped to Rwanda at a cost of £169,000 per head. At 200 per year, that’s £33,800,000 each year to fuel this policy. Also, we would have to accept a certain number of migrants from Rwanda each year as part of this deal, a number as yet unspecified by the Government, which will go down with the Tory base as well as a cup of cold sick.
Any migrant we send to Rwanda will be sent back to the UK if they commit a crime, a loophole I expect will be exploited by many who are sent there. With these points in mind, its very unlikely this policy will have any effect at all on irregular migration into the UK, and will certainly have no effect on regular migration, which the Government has no advertised plan to address (in the interest of balance, neither has Labour, but I’ll save that for after the election).
Speaking of, another layer of irrelevance emerges from this policy when Labour is added to the picture, as Keir Starmer has pledged to immediately repeal it once Labour forms a Government.
This scheme is part of the slow and painful decline of the modern Conservative party that began with Thatcher’s late premiership and was sent into overdrive by Brexit. Ideas that began on the right-wing fringes creep into the mainstream in an attempt to galvanise the most toxic kind of voters and appease the most unpleasant and noxious MPs and commentators. Those whose entire political identity is driven by xenophobia, like Farage, and those to whom the concepts of sovereignty and individual freedom matter more than the material wellbeing of the many, like Truss and Sunak.
The first major stumbling block of this policy was when the ECHR’s timely intervention prevented the first flights from taking off. MPs on the Conservative right wing, naturally fearful and distrustful of anything non-British, have long argued that the UK should leave the convention, and now that it has prevented them from ejecting foreigners from our shores, their hatred for the court has only increased. If the UK was to leave the ECHR, we would be in the auspicious company of such European nations as Russia and Belarus, the last two true dictatorships in Europe, the only European nations not party to the ECHR.
The Conservative party is now essentially many parties in one, with many right-wing populist factions springing up pre and post-Brexit to influence Government policy. Some, like the so-called European Research Group, or ERG, even run their own whipping operations on important votes. It is groups like these that elevated Boris Johnson to leadership, that replaced him with Liz Truss and directed the tanking of the UK economy with an economic experiment, and now seek to cut the last bonds tying the UK to Europe, just to fly a few hundred terrified and desperate refugees to Rwanda for the rest of their lives.
Sunak’s Government has bet its last few quid of political credibility on this horse. The recent vote on this policy passed with a very slim margin of just 44 votes, and although no Tory MP voted against it, many abstained. Sunak, despite his confident public rhetoric, is desperate. He knows his only hope now is to divide the public as much as possible and try to scrape through a minority Government after the next election, perhaps form a coalition with the DUP, or Reform, should they win any seats.
The cracks in the Tory party have only widened with this Rwanda vote. Some are even saying that should Labour win a large enough landslide next year, the Conservative Party will cease to exist, broken up into its many sub-parts never to be whole again. On the Rwanda plan, the right-wing factions want a harder line taken, the central factions like the One Nation group are more sceptical about the plan and want it softened, and Sunak is left in the middle, pulled between the two sides, seeming weaker and weaker with each piece of ground his gives to either side.
The majority of Britons are very hostile to this plan. They see it for what it is, for its many, many flaws, and know it is not only impractical, but superfluously cruel. If it is put on the statute books before the nest election, Labour have pledged to repeal it as soon as they can, if they form a Government in 2024, a line that resonates with the people. The basis of Labour’s migration plans, striking a deal with Brussels to accept a quota of the EU’s migrants in exchange for returning those who cross the Channel, will not go down as well come the election. But this will raise a question for the British people to answer when choosing between the two main parties on migration; cruelty, or practicality?
stay safe
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