Britain’s Parliament should have killed Rishi Sunak’s Rwanda bill

Editor’s note: On December 12th mps voted through Rishi Sunak’s Rwanda bill on its second reading. Here’s why we think that was the wrong thing to do.

Rishi sunak became Britain’s prime minister on the promise of responsibility. After the chaos of Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, he would restore fiscal rectitude, reimpose ethical standards and patch up relations with Britain’s allies. Yet right at the outset, while first running for leadership of the Conservative Party in the summer of 2022, he made a reckless promise: to “make the Rwanda policy work”.

Mr Johnson’s government had struck an agreement to deport to Rwanda asylum-seekers who arrive in Britain on small boats. Their claims would be heard in the African country; if successful, they would be settled in Rwanda, too. That prospect would, the scheme’s backers say, deter people from illegally crossing the English Channel. Yet no plane has taken off; the plan was declared unlawful by Britain’s Supreme Court on November 15th on the basis that Rwanda was not a safe destination to send asylum-seekers.

A sensible prime minister in charge of a sensible party might long ago have made a judicious retreat, not least because the number of small-boat crossings has fallen as a result of other measures. Mr Sunak, regrettably, is not that prime minister, and the Tories are definitely not that party. On December 5th he introduced a bill designed to swat the judges’ concerns aside and ensure deportations to Rwanda can go ahead. A failure to pass the bill would threaten Mr Sunak’s premiership. Yet the alternative—passing a rotten law—is worse.

Mr Sunak’s Rwanda pledge is profoundly irresponsible in three ways. The first concerns the policy itself, which manages to be both unworkable and unprincipled. Britain has thus far paid Rwanda £240m ($302m, or 2.3% of Rwandan gdp) without dispatching a single migrant. There is no real evidence that it would have a deterrent effect if such flights ever were to take off. The government’s desire to deport people to an autocratic country that British courts have found to be unsafe is shameful.

To turn that desire into reality, the government has piled on a second layer of irresponsibility. It claims that a new treaty struck with Rwanda on December 6th deals with the Supreme Court’s concerns. But it does not trust the judges to agree. The new bill stipulates that decision-makers, including judges, “must conclusively treat the Republic of Rwanda as a safe country”; it also prevents courts from applying elements of the Human Rights Act, which implements the European Convention on Human Rights in Britain, when dealing with Rwanda deportees.

All this is justified on the ground that Parliament can make and unmake any law it wishes. So it can; so it always could. But that does not mean it should. For Parliament has long sought to legislate in accordance with other principles which are fundamental to the rule of law: among them the ability of courts to review the decisions of the executive, the protection of basic human rights and compliance with Britain’s international-law obligations. Mr Sunak is using parliamentary sovereignty as a cudgel, and causing wider damage in the process.

That Mr Sunak is willing to do so is due in part to a third form of irresponsibility—the elevation of narrow Tory concerns into an organising principle of government. Rwanda started out as a policy whim; Mr Sunak has stupidly turned it into a totem. As a result he has found himself advocating an extreme position only to be told by some on his own side that it does not go far enough.

One group of Tory backbenchers has declared that the bill still leaves too many avenues open for individual asylum-seekers to appeal against deportation; some would like to see Britain withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights entirely. The likelihood that the Tories will lose the next election incentivises such radicalism. Being a purist on Rwanda could be useful in winning the backing of Tory members, who will make the final choice on the next party leader.

mps had their first substantive debate on the Rwanda bill on December 12th. A defeat for the government would have shattered Mr Sunak’s authority: no government bill has been defeated at this stage in the legislative process since 1986. In the event, the bill’s passing, despite the abstentions of a number of Tory mps, does not guarantee stability. Weeks, even months, of Tory infighting loom as the bill makes its way through Parliament. Mr Sunak is using a deeply flawed bill to force through a bad policy. The responsible choice would have been for mps to kill it.