UK leader Rishi Sunak set himself a trap on Wednesday night, promising flights deporting migrants to Rwanda by “Spring next year”, but senior colleague the Home Secretary appears to have moved fast to walk back that promise.
It is wrong to “guesstimate” the timing for the first deportation flights to leave the United Kingdom but the government is “determined” to see them happen before the next UK election, new Home Secretary (interior minister) James Cleverly said on Thursday morning. The next general election could be anything up to 14 months away, so the new deadline is considerably more lenient than the Prime Minister’s strident claims of Wednesday evening.
Addressing the nation in an ’emergency’ press conference called after the UK’s Supreme Court ruled his Rwanda deportation plan illegal under present circumstances, Sunak pledged to fix that issue quickly and get planes in the sky quickly. He said: “we’ll take all the necessary steps to ensure we can remove any further blockages to us getting this policy executed, and getting planes leaving as planned in the Spring next year.”
Speaking to Times Radio on Thursday morning, James Cleverly — who has been Home Secretary since Monday and was moved to the role as a ‘moderate’ safe pair of hands following the sacking of more identifiably right-wing, pro-border control Conservative Suella Braverman — walked back the Prime Minister’s promise. He was asked by the host whether flights would leave before the next election and he responded: “Well look, we are absolutely determined to make that happen… of course”.
But Home Office boss Cleverly threw in several caveats, including the exact timescale depending on “circumstances”. He told the show: “…I don’t want to speculate, to try and guesstimate a timing, But we are working to get this done as quickly as possible.”
Speaking last night, the Prime Minister vowed to get past the legal block by introducing new emergency legislation and by signing a treaty with Rwanda. Under the plan, the United Kingdom would pay Rwanda to take failed asylum seekers and given them a new home for life. While this would be funded by UK taxpayers, it appears to be the government’s logic that paying for accommodation and food in Rwanda would be considerably better value for money than paying for the same in Britain, where the cost of living is high and soaring.
The Supreme Court blocked the plan despite finding it was generally legally sound, because it believed there was a risk Rwanda would deport the migrants it took from Britain in the future, a process it called refoulement and claimed to violate human rights. The new treaty, Sunak says, will negate this concern because Rwanda will have made a legally binding promise to not do this.
While the Rwanda policy is deeply controversial with some in the United Kingdom, including pro-mass-migration activists and lawyers, similar plans are being investigated by several European nations seeking long term answers to their mass migration problems. As reported earlier this month, the UK and Austria signed a new deal agreeing to cooperate on security matters, and vowed to investigate further potential areas of cooperation, including working together on deportations.