Spoiler alert: the Rwanda policy will not stop the boats. I know this. You know this. One hopes Rishi Sunak knows this. He is not an idiot. If he does know that his signature policy on illegal crossings will not work as an effective deterrent, he is being disingenuous. If he does not, then he is being delusional. The truth is that even if flights take off, the crossings will continue, and get worse under Labour, whether they cancel the scheme or not.
The timetable has already fallen back from the spring to within the next three months. Bearing in mind that the first flight was supposed to take off in June 2022, one gets a sense of the time and bandwidth that has been invested in getting illegal immigrants and asylum seekers to Kigali. The Prime Minister’s ‘Stop the Boats’ pledge has been pointless without it, reliant instead on Albanian goodwill and the wind.
“No ifs, no buts, these flights are going to Rwanda,” were Sunak’s words on Monday. He has planes chartered, airfields booked, and a list of migrants scheduled for deportation. Now the Rwanda Bill has passed, despite the best efforts of charities and activists, we can expect flights to take off at some point this summer. They might be half full. But Sunak will have done the bare minimum to have something to point to when sceptical voters ask how he will stop the crossings.
But what is the point? If the number that will be deported can be measured in the dozens, the sustained deterrent effect required to discourage crossings and smash the business model of the people smugglers will never be achieved. No wonder potential crossers loitering around in Calais are unfazed. They know their chances of ending up in Rwanda are effectively zero. Why be scared?
Suella Braverman and Robert Jenrick warned that the Bill, as tabled, was still open to judicial highjack. Despite the Prime Minister’s promises that sufficient courts and judges have been put aside to deal with potential challenges, Care4Calais et al will be pouring over loopholes and identifying those to whom they will proffer their legal support. It will all end up in the courts again.
But even if the Government could have got a cask strength Bill to their satisfaction past pearl-clutching Tory backbenchers and indignant peers, the policy itself remains fundamentally flawed. Even before the Rwanda government started selling off accommodation, it had suggested only 200 or so asylum seekers could be accommodated. 29, 437 people crossed the Channel last year.
Don’t get me wrong: I approve of the policy in principle. Whilst I find declaring a country safe by legislation a little eyebrow-raising, in our imperfect world, with courts, conventions, and civil servants ranged against any attempt to secure our borders, any policy that might make the dangerous and expensive journey to Britain a little less appetising is a good idea.
It is better than nothing. The Government spent £2.5 billion on hotel accommodation last year. Anything to reduce that bill seems sensible, even if a programme of deportations en masse may prove expensive in the short-term. There is no prospect of doing nothing, since crossings are already up 25 per cent this year on the same point in 2023. For all the opprobrium it has courted, the Rwanda policy has attracted praise from the Danes, the Germans, and elsewhere.
It is also true that there are no obvious alternatives currently on the table. Labour’s policy amounts to little more than being a bit nicer to the European Union in the hope they will throw us a bone in the form of a non-existent continent-wide sharing agreement. Such a deal with Brussels will almost certainly end up in us taking more illegal arrivals than we remove. Even if the Europeans might welcome a Labour government, their electorates are hardly going to be grateful for Britain’s asylum seekers.
Whether Yvette Cooper likes it or not, the migration issue is not going to go away. As Africa’s population explodes, the world becomes ever more volatile, and the ubiquity of smartphone access makes coordinating a trip across the Mediterranean increasingly easy, the numbers seeking to arrive in Britain are only going to grow. We are only currently at the sack of Lindisfarne.
Current complaints about cost, complexity, and ‘cruelty’ are for the birds. Sorting the small boats problem is going to be vastly more expensive, difficult, and tough than anything either party has yet contemplated. Take a look at Stopping the Crossings by the masterful Nick Timothy and Karl Williams for a good idea of the actions that are required.
ID cards, further Rwanda-style routes, a cap of 20,000, a potential exit from the European Convention of Human Rights: these are measures one would struggle to get past the current Tory parliamentary party, let alone a Labour government led by a man who, until recently, going out to bat for freedom of movement. For all their faults, Reform UK do get very lucky with their opponents.
Still. We have Rwanda. Sunak can stand on the stump and tell voters he has done something to stop the boats, even as numbers tick up towards a record high. They won’t believe him. Voters may like the policy in principle but have little belief that it will be effective. Even with a few token flights, another summer of legal challenges and surging arrivals will leave that unchanged.
Few think Keir Starmer would do be any better. But the country is now so disillusioned with our ability to deliver anything we promise or go a week without stripping the whip from an MP found doing something dubious, that they will vote Labour in, on the assumption that they can’t possibly do any worse. They will be, one expects. But trying saying that on the doorstep.
Perhaps I’m being too cynical. The charity-judge axis may prove less successful in stopping deportations than I have assumed. Labour Home Secretaries do tend to become more right-wing in office. Maybe rather than immediately scrap Rwanda, Cooper will listen to Telegraph readers, and leave it up and running. Perhaps Paul Kagame will build hundreds of thousands of new accommodation units for our tired, poor, and huddled masses aiming to enter the shadow economy.
But it’s nonsense, right? The Rwanda policy won’t change anything. Sunak has passed it because he had no better ideas, and because junking another aspect of Boris Johnson’s legacy would have courted even more backbench ire. He should stop pretending that it will change anything, call a general election, and run on a platform promising to take the measures that are required.
If nothing else, it might put us out of our collective misery, and free up a few planes just ahead of the summer holidays. It would also – if the election result is as expected – allow the Conservative Party to go and look at itself in the mirror, head the wise words of Timothy, Williams, Robert Jenrick, Neil O’Brien, and many others, and work out a policy on both illegal and legal immigration that doesn’t make a mockery of our borders, our voters, and our country’s future.
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Author: William Atkinson
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