On 15 November the Supreme Court ruled that the government’s plan to ‘offshore’ asylum seekers by sending them to Rwanda was unlawful. However, the Conservative Party is so wedded to the idea of transporting migrants to East Africa that the Prime Minister and latest Home Secretary immediately announced plans to carry on regardless of the court’s unanimous judgment that it is unsafe to do so. Nicki Jameson reports.
The Rwanda plan was the brainchild of former Home Secretary Priti Patel, who in April 2022 signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Rwandan government, whereby asylum seekers arriving in Britain ‘illegally’ would cease to have their claims processed here, but instead would be shipped to Rwanda. There they would either be granted asylum or be sent back to wherever they had originally migrated from. Unlike other versions of ‘offshoring’, asylum seekers would at no stage be permitted to return to Britain, even if their applications were successful. Since the first planned flight in June 2022 was grounded following direct action and intervention by the European Court of Human Rights, there have been a series of legal challenges, culminating in the Supreme Court declaring that the scheme is not lawful.
Rwanda not safe
The Supreme Court upheld an earlier Court of Appeal ruling to the effect that, although the government was entitled in general to have an offshoring policy, Rwanda was not a suitable location. Both courts found that the legal system in Rwanda did not have sufficient safeguards to prevent asylum seekers being subject to ‘refoulement’, ie being sent back to a country where they would face persecution and danger.
Despite the narrow basis of the judgment, the ruling was very clear that when the High Court had previously determined the plan was safe, it had failed to take into consideration the views of experts such as the UN, and had simply accepted the government’s reliance on assurances from its Rwandan counterparts. The Court of Appeal was therefore entitled to overturn that decision and ‘unless and until the deficiencies in the Rwandan asylum system were corrected, any removal of asylum seekers to Rwanda… would breach section 6 of the Human Rights Act 1998’.
‘Safe’ means what I say it does
There is no further court to which the government can appeal. The Supreme Court ruling is a significant victory and will come as a huge relief for asylum seekers. Any notices which have been issued regarding removal to Rwanda are now void and no deportation flights to the country can be scheduled.
However, rather than accept this defeat, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak immediately shamelessly announced that he will now somehow change the law so that, no matter what the courts say, Rwanda will be deemed to be ‘safe’. Sunak told a press conference that the government was already working on ‘a new international treaty with Rwanda’, which would now be finalised, and that he would be introducing emergency legislation, in order to ‘enable Parliament to confirm that, with our new treaty, Rwanda is safe’.
Brand new Home Secretary James Cleverly, on his third day in the job, following the sacking of Suella Braverman, took the same message to Parliament. Cleverly told the House of Commons that the Supreme Court decision was based on ‘facts from 15 months ago’ and only meant the government could ‘not yet lawfully remove people to Rwanda’. Although the ruling was inconvenient, he insisted that everything would be fine as the government would ‘upgrade our agreement to a treaty’ and the Prime Minister was ‘prepared to change our laws’, that, in any case, ‘the Rwanda plan has only ever been one tool in our toolbox’ and ‘the plan is working’, as small boat crossings have been going down in number since the agreement between Britain and Albania, which facilitated mass returns to that country, was implemented.
Bluster from the right
None of this was sufficient to reassure the extreme right of the Conservative Party. Racist MPs such as Jonathan Gullis were immediately champing at the bit for the immediate introduction of a new law to allow them ‘to disapply international treaties such as the ECHR and the refugee convention to allow us to take back control of our borders’.
Suella Braverman, who followed Patel in the role of Home Secretary until sacked by Sunak days before the Supreme Court verdict, had been a vocal champion of the Rwanda plan and continues to have a lot of support among the most virulently xenophobic sections of the Conservative Party.
Braverman was sacked following her criticisms of the police for their supposedly soft policing of pro-Palestinian protesters, compared to their treatment of the far right. These comments provoked the English Defence League and fellow travellers to turn up to ‘defend the Cenotaph’ on Armistice Day, resulting in a stand-off between them and the police. The day after her sacking she sent a public letter to Sunak, pointedly saying that she had supported him a year ago despite his ‘having been rejected by a majority of party members… and thus having no personal mandate to be prime minister’, on the basis that the two of them had agreed on a series of anti-migrant measures. These included reducing overall net migration by making it more difficult for overseas students to come here and increasing the salary thresholds on work visas, along with introducing ‘notwithstanding clauses’ into legislation to ‘stop the boats’ by ‘block[ing] off the ECHR, the HRA and any other obligations which inhibit our ability to remove those with no right to be in the UK’.
A ‘notwithstanding clause’ is of dubious legality as it involves writing law which openly disregards other legal obligations and announcing that something will be done whether it is lawful or not. The Illegal Migration Act already includes several examples of this type of pronouncement, although it uses the word ‘regardless’, rather than ‘notwithstanding’.
The ‘New Conservatives’, a right-wing Tory faction insist that a Bill must ‘come to Parliament within weeks’ so that ‘flights are in the air within months’. Braverman has demanded that MPs cancel their Christmas leave to pass the new law and thuggish Deputy Party Leader Lee Anderson has grabbed some headlines with his view that the government should ‘ignore the law’ and ‘just get the planes in the air right now’.
Neither Sunak nor Cleverly has said when their ‘if I say it’s safe, it’s safe’ legislation will be introduced or how they will deal with the Supreme Court’s view that the Rwanda plan contravenes domestic, as well as international, law. It is also not clear how any of this will work, and whether the introduction of emergency legislation will be opposed in the House of Lords or subject to further legal challenge. Braverman was probably correct in her letter when she complained that, without a ‘credible Plan B’ if the government lost in the Supreme Court, ‘there is no hope of flights this side of an election’.
Labour offers nothing different
Shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper’s contribution to the parliamentary debate was entirely predictable. She lambasted the government for having ‘no serious plan on the dangerous boat crossings that are undermining our border security and putting lives at risk’ and for having ‘let criminal gangs take hold along the Channel’.
There is no disagreement what-soever between the Conservative and Labour Parties on the apparent need for ‘action to stop the boat crossings’ and Cooper made it clear that her party supports the government’s ‘work with France along the northern coast,… work with Albania and with other countries across Europe to tackle the gangs’. Indeed Labour’s only criticism of this vicious, racist government is that it is ‘far, far too weak’ and a ‘comprehensive and massively scaled-up plan’ is needed.
Other Labour representatives followed suit in similar vein, with a few adding a little timid humanitarian concern for their constituents. Only the Scottish National Party voiced any actual opposition to the government’s racist plans, with Stuart McDonald MP going so far as to say that what the government is arguing for is ‘a system whereby rich western countries get to pack off asylum seekers and refugees to poorer countries that already bear a vastly disproportionate share of responsibility for sheltering refugees around the world’, something he described as ‘not just illegal, but immoral and impracticable’.
Racist scapegoating
Despite a 19% increase in asylum applications submitted in Britain over the 12 months to June 2023 (to 78,768), the total number of refugees arriving and being processed here remains very small compared to most countries in Europe and globally. Britain’s rate of asylum applications per head of population ranks 21st among European countries. Germany received 30,000 asylum applications in the month of August alone. Outside Europe, the figures of the displaced seeking sanctuary exceed 100 million. Pakistan is currently expelling hundreds of thousands of Afghan refugees who have fled wars and disaster in the neighbouring country.
The British government has nonetheless decided to focus heavily on depicting migrants, especially those arriving by boat, as a massive problem which can only be resolved by the most punitive of means, be that deportation to Rwanda or warehousing in army camps or the Bibby Stockholm hulk moored off Portland Harbour in Dorset. This is deliberately designed to play to the prejudices of a section of the electorate, depicting migrants as the cause of the lack of housing, jobs, amenities and healthcare for the wider working class, thus deflecting attention from the real culprits in power and their corporate pals. Having set out his stall last year, Sunak is aware that his party’s chances of continuing in government at the next election are dire and is clinging in vain to his promise to ‘stop the boats’, even though it now has them in a fix which they can only get out of by yet more reactionary and draconian legislation.
FIGHT RACISM! FIGHT IMPERIALISM! 297 December 2023/January 2024
