Like a cowboy builder sucking his teeth about unanticipated complications on the job, Rishi Sunak has just pushed back another deadline. The Prime Minister was meant to get flights off to Rwanda this spring but has now given himself until July. And this isn’t even the main job. The actual grand design he is supposed to be working towards is to ‘stop the boats’.
If sending irregular migrants off to Rwanda helps secure that then so much the better, but it would be remiss not to point out that illegal arrivals via cross-Channel dinghies have increased this year, more than wiping out the limited and wind-assisted progress made in 2023.
The decidedly punchy performance Sunak put in at a press conference this morning was surely designed to get him through the local elections on Thursday next week. ‘If Labour peers had not spent weeks holding up the Bill in the House of Lords to try to block these flights altogether, we would have begun this process weeks ago,’ he claimed.
Despite his timeline having turned to dust once already, Sunak was again unequivocal: no foreign court would be allowed to get in the way. An airfield had been put on standby and slots booked with commercial charter planes. ‘No ifs, no buts, these flights are going to Rwanda,’ he said.
Since the Rwanda scheme was launched by Boris Johnson and Priti Patel on 14 April 2022, nobody has lost money or credibility by predicting it would fail. Two years later and opposition figures from Left and Right continue to load their chips onto red.
Nigel Farage led the way, telling GB News: ‘I promise you, not a single person is going to Rwanda. This is a complete charade.’
In an article for the Daily Telegraph, Labour’s shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper had already branded the Rwanda removals plan a ‘gimmick…distracting everyone from the serious policies we need to tackle the problem’. To judge from damning reader comments, many people had spotted that her own approach to combating illegal immigration was so threadbare as to make The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists sound like a luxury interiors catalogue. ‘The only way Labour will stop the boats is to give them all asylum from France,’ one correspondent pithily observed.
Yet there is no doubt that public support for the Rwanda plan has ebbed away over two years of predictable legal setbacks and missed deadlines. For Labour a no-score draw on the issue, in the sense of the public have zero faith in the approach of either main party, will be a favourable result, allowing it to emerge unscathed on its weakest suit.
Farage’s rationale for being certain that nobody will be sent is based on the Human Rights Act having already incorporated the standards set in Strasbourg into British law. So British judges are bound to find in favour of those appealing against removal to Kigali, he reckons.
In his shoes I would not be quite so certain that nobody at all is going to be removed. That sets Sunak a very low bar for proving him wrong. But what is now clear is that the Rwanda plan is not going to provide a durable deterrent at sufficient scale to ‘stop the boats’.
To go into the next election having just got it underway and without it yet being seen to have failed is probably as good as things can get for Sunak. In which case my own money would be on the job falling even further behind schedule.
A couple of flights sparsely populated by a few dozen migrants who carelessly failed to engage sufficiently canny lawyers may get airborne around September time. But they’ll be back when Labour pulls the plug on the whole scheme.
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