On 15 January 2024, five people drowned in the icy waters off the coast of northern France, having set sail towards Britain. The following day the government began debating the Safety of Rwanda Bill, a draconian measure aimed at ensuring that anyone who does make it across the Channel will immediately be flown to East Africa and banned from returning. Harsh as it is, the current version of the ‘Rwanda Plan’ was insufficiently vicious for the extreme right wing of the Conservative Party, whose members clamoured for Britain to disregard entirely any obligations under international law. NICKI JAMESON reports.
As we reported in the last issue of FRFI, on 15 November 2023 the Supreme Court ruled that the Conservative government’s plan to remove asylum seekers arriving ‘illegally’ in Britain to Rwanda in East Africa was unlawful as, although the government was entitled in principle to ‘offshore’ asylum claimants, Rwanda was not a safe country for the purpose. Rather than throw in the towel at this point, the government having been unsuccessfully pursuing the plan since 2022, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Home Secretary James Cleverly instead announced new steps which would officially confirm the ‘safety’ of Rwanda and put the deportation plan back on track.
Rwanda Treaty and Bill
To this end, on 5 December 2023 Cleverly signed the UK-Rwanda Treaty, and on 6 December the government introduced the Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill to Parliament. The Treaty makes legally binding parts of the original agreement contained in the Memorandum of Understanding signed with the Rwandan government by then Home Secretary Priti Patel in April 2022 and clarifies that nobody removed from Britain to Rwanda will subsequently be deported elsewhere, whether or not their asylum claim is successful. Those accepted as refugees will be granted appropriate status in Rwanda; others who are not accepted as such but have ‘another humanitarian protection need’ will be provided with ‘support and accommodation’; those who come under neither heading will nonetheless be allowed to remain in the country. In short, people packed off to Rwanda will not be returning to live in Britain as refugees, satisfying the demands of the ‘stop the boats’ lobby – but nor will they be sent back to the countries they have originally fled, thus supposedly reassuring the courts.
The Safety of Rwanda Bill is currently with the House of Lords for discussion. The government had hoped to have the legislation passed by 30 January, but this is clearly not going to happen, and the process looks unlikely to be complete before March.
The aim of the Bill is to make water-tight the notion that Rwanda is a safe place for Britain to send asylum seekers and to that end contains clauses making it incumbent on all British decision-makers involved in the immigration process, from Home Office officials up to the courts to ‘conclusively treat the Republic of Rwanda as a safe country’. The Bill disapplies sections of the Human Rights Act (HRA) and says that if the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) intervenes to prevent a removal to Rwanda, it is up to a ‘Minister of the Crown’ to decide whether to comply with this or not. As with the Illegal Migration Act, the government cannot pretend this legislation is compatible with the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and by law has been compelled to state this on the front page of the Bill.
Not enough for the extreme right
The enforced acceptance of the safety of Rwanda and removal of adherence to international conventions which might protect the rights of migrants were insufficient for sections of the Tory right, who proposed their own, even more draconian version of the Bill. The rebellion was led by former Immigration Minister Robert Jenrick, who in early December resigned from the Cabinet in order to push forward a set of amendments to the proposed legislation. These were designed to allow the government to disregard entirely the HRA and any intervention by the ECtHR, and to prevent the domestic courts from overturning decisions to remove asylum seekers to Rwanda under almost any circumstance whatsoever.
Jenrick was backed by some 70 hard-right headbangers, including Conservatives Suella Braverman, Jacob Rees-Mogg and Lee Anderson, together with all the MPs of the north of Ireland loyalist Democratic Unionist Party. Vocal as this group were in their demand for more comprehensive repression, their amendments were easily defeated in the House of Commons vote on them. The majority of this group then went on to vote for the substantive Bill, with only Jenrick, Braverman and nine other Tory hard-liners voting against, as a point of principle. All remaining Conservative MPs voted in favour of the Bill, while the overwhelming majority of those from other parliamentary parties opposed it – for reasons ranging from the SNP’s generally humanitarian approach to Labour’s ‘This is not a workable policy; it is a massive, costly con’, meaning ‘Vote for us and we will be just as racist but more efficient’.
Where now?
In January 2023, three months after Sunak became Prime Minister, he outlined five ‘key priorities’. Reducing policy to a meme, he vowed to halve inflation, grow the economy, reduce national debt, cut NHS waiting lists and Stop the Boats. These pledges were specifically pitched at the section of the electorate whose votes the Conservatives need to retain at the next election. Sunak and his cronies perceive these voters to be understandably concerned about their own falling standard of living and disintegrating services, and easily convinced that responsibility for much of their hardship lies not with the ruling elite in Parliament or industry, but with people fleeing war, economic hardship and climate destruction, who risk their lives to get to a place of safety.
No deportations!
FIGHT RACISM! FIGHT IMPERIALISM! 298 February/March 2024
