The government’s current position on the Rwanda scheme is unlikely to boost its electoral hopes – and to understand why, we should look to David Cameron and a particular pre-Brexit failure.
Cast your mind back to the moment the former Tory prime minister’s renegotiated deal for our EU membership “exploded on the launchpad” ahead of the referendum.
He and his team had worked very, very hard. While they hadn’t got what they had set out to gain, the deal they came back with (the “emergency break” on EU migration) felt like a significant achievement. Perhaps it was, amid the constraints imposed on him in Brussels.
However, voters judge politicians not by their efforts but by their results. And compared to what they had hoped for, and indeed compared to what Prime Minister Cameron had promised, the terms on which he returned were woefully inadequate. Rather than freedom of movement being permanently eliminated, there was a temporary and mysterious mechanism that was never used. What was supposed to be the basis of his referendum campaign turned into a self-inflicted disaster.
Rishi Sunak seems to have fallen into the same trap. The sheer difficulty of implementing the Rwanda plan means that the launch of the first plane (if it actually happens) will feel like a victory for those who made it possible, and it will be a huge effort. This is a natural reward for
But the boat won’t stop. Even if it worked perfectly, it didn’t work. The number of deportations that Rwanda has agreed to accept is only a fraction of the number needed to provide a credible deterrent. At best, it would have been better policy for Rwanda to establish a parliament. It’s a pilot project, an opportunity to iron out any kinks and refine the model before negotiating another big deal. As a result, Mr Sunak is now heading in the same direction as Mr Cameron was in 2016. Voters are likely to take a cold look at his best performance and conclude that it wasn’t good enough.
Each person arrived at this point by the same route. They were both trying to find a way to do something about issues that didn’t really concern them personally, without challenging the fundamentals of the status quo. The best explanation for why Mr Sunak has been so tough on people crossing the Channel is that he knows he has to say something about immigration, but he has He doesn’t want to talk about increased legal immigration. He crosses in a small boat.
Who can blame him? It’s a problem on a much vaster scale than illegal entry; tackling it would be much more difficult (in theory), and, as a creature of the Treasury, Sunak probably doesn’t really see anything fundamentally wrong with the current setup anyway. In the absence of real, per-capita growth, immigration helps to massage the GDP figures. The impression from speaking to MPs is that he wouldn’t be talking about immigration at all, if he could help it.
We can see the same dynamic playing out in the tortured progress of the Rwanda scheme. Downing Street hoped to get the legislation through the courts without having to confront the serious conflict between its aspirations on border control and the UK’s present international commitments. Despite an initial victory in the high court, this strategy failed. Now, there’s chatter that the Conservatives might try to make an election issue of the European court of human rights (ECHR) if it continues to stymie deportations.
Even those on the right of the Conservative party who want Britain to pull out of the court’s binding treaty, the European convention on human rights, should see that this would be an absurd, self-defeating strategy.
Sunak clearly has no personal interest in our relationship with the ECHR: rightwingers have seen in Brexit what happens when a major constitutional change is pushed forward by a reluctant prime minister who doesn’t believe in it.
Fighting the election on the ECHR would do nothing to change the outcome – arcane constitutional policy (and I speak as someone with a deep interest in it) is seldom what animates the electorate. An election defeat would just allow defenders of the status quo to paint the result as a rejection of change.
There are several things governments can do to make this policy more effective. Most obviously, this could (at least initially) limit the range of people sent to Rwanda to those who cross the border after the law comes into force. This could change the calculations of people considering whether to cross in France.
However, this is unlikely to be an election-winning policy. Few conservatives, at least outside leadership circles, think otherwise. In fact, one of the reasons I and others didn’t reject the idea of a May election outright was the argument to the contrary. If the bill does pass, Mr Sunak may prefer to enter the country before the policy has a limited impact across the Channel. Obviously in the summer.
And some in Downing Street are hoping that the failure of this bill will allow them to hold an election against the blocking forces in the House of Lords, rather than relying on the outcome of the policy itself, even if it is unexpected. It was also suggested to me that he hopes to become To leave.
Anyway, we’re where we are now. Once the bill comes into force, the coming months will reveal whether all these efforts are enough to give the government at least a workable policy. If so, perhaps we’ll learn how much weight voters place on a few planes taking off if they don’t stop the boats.