By Ann Higgins
Predictably, our topic this month is Rwanda, though ironically the only people from these shores to have made it there so far are a succession of Home Secretaries and their hangers-on. The latest one to make the long and expensive trip to Kigali (Therese Coffey please note that is not a different country, but the capital of Rwanda) is James Cleverly, who blew a cool £165,561 on a private jet to get there, taking the total spent on Rwandan trips for ministers and senior officials to over £400,000 according to the Guardian. (Ed: have they never heard of electronic signatures?). Of course, this pales into insignificance when the total cost of this misbegotten policy is tallied up, which according to the Institute for Public Policy Research, a “progressive” think-tank, could reach nearly £4 billion. Yep, the equivalent of the entire asylum budget for 2022-23 blown on a Tory vanity project.
Meanwhile, the government was doing its not very good best to try to get its plan onto the statute books. Despite continuing to lose MPs hand over fist it managed to achieve a third reading of the Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill in the House of Commons (though without the help of Tory MPs Braverman, Cash, Cates, Clarke, Dines, Duddridge, Francois, Jenkyns, Jenrick, Jones, and Kruger, all of whom voted with the opposition because they thought the Bill too weak), so off it went to the Lords for the first time. There it received a thorough pasting from such unlikely bedfellows as Baroness Chakrabarti for Labour, Tory Lord Hailsham, and cross-benchers ex-President of the Supreme Court Lady Brenda Hale and the Archbishop of Canterbury. Ten amendments were passed including requiring that the Rwanda treaty be fully implemented before any asylum seekers were dispatched there, full compliance with international law, removing the declaration that Rwanda could be deemed safe simply by the government saying so, (and allowing immigration officers and the courts to make their own determinations on that issue), full compliance with Modern Slavery legislation, and exception from the Act for those who have fought alongside or otherwise assisted British troops and their allies, and their families.
Not surprisingly, the Tory government was unwilling to accept any of the amendments, and on 18 March it returned to the Commons where the amendments were duly voted down by the government, with only one Tory, Sir Robert Buckland, voting with the opposition. As a result, the Bill ping-ponged back to the Lords on 20 March with very much the same outcome as before, with seven amendments very similar to the ones voted down by the Commons being passed. However, what followed was a tad surprising as, despite the stated urgency of the government to bring the Bill into effect, there it stalled, to await further consideration in the Commons on 15 April, almost a full month later. Why did the government not try to get it through the Commons again before the Easter recess? Only they know, but a cynic might conclude that while they say they are desperate to put the Bill into effect, they are worried that if they do so too soon before the general election and it is shown to fail, that will damage their electoral chances even more than not enacting it at all. Of course, they may run out of time in any event because there is no limit on the number of times during this session of Parliament that the Bill may ping-pong back and forth between the two Houses. That is because the Salisbury convention (whereby the Lords will not vote down a Bill passed by the Commons) does not apply because the Rwanda policy formed no part of the Tory manifesto in 2019. It may also depend on how many Tory peers continue to absent themselves from the Lords during these crucial votes.
And, in another twist, civil servants are threatening to sue ministers if, when the Bill is passed, it requires them to breach international law, e.g. by ignoring an injunction from the European Court of Justice in Strasbourg delaying a deportation order, as this might well be a breach of the civil service code and render them liable to prosecution. More here.
Stop press: Joshua Rosenberg explores how the Rwanda Bill may bring the UK into conflict with international law and its potential for conflict between ministers and civil servants.
