The British government has earmarked over a billion pounds sterling to deal with illegal migrants crossing the English Channel in small boats over the next decade, indicating that despite promises from politicians to the public, they do not have faith in their plans to solve the crisis.
Amid a brewing civil war within the governing Conservative Party over Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s supposed legislative fix to the long-delayed scheme to send illegal migrants to the East African nation of Rwanda to have their asylum claims processed rather than putting them up in hotels in Britain, leaked documents have shown that even if the Rwanda plan were to go forward, the government still expects to be dealing with the crisis over at least the next ten years.
According to the BBC, the Home Office has earmarked £700 million over the next six years and up to a total of £1.16 billion over the next ten to manage the arrival of illegal boat migrants from France, which they predicted could continue to cross the English Channel until 2034. The documents revealed by the public broadcaster were contracts with private firms tapped for the establishment of migrant holding centres on British territory, further casting doubt on the ability of the government to remove illegals at scale to Rwanda.
Shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said: “This shows even the Home Office doesn’t believe Rishi Sunak’s Rwanda plan is going to work. This is total Tory chaos and it’s letting the country down.
“Instead of sending nearly £300m of taxpayers money to Rwanda for a failing scheme, the prime minister should be using the money to stop the criminal smuggling gangs who are organising boat crossings in the first place,” the Labour politician said in reference to the Home Office admitting last week that it has paid £100 million more to Rwanda than initially disclosed despite zero migrants being removed to the country so far.
The latest revelations come amid a contentious battle within the Conservative Party over proposed legislation to sure up the legal footing of the Rwanda scheme, which was rejected by the Supreme Court last month.
Critics, including former Immigration Minister Robert Jenrick, who resigned from his government post last week in protest over the bill, have argued that the legislation still leaves too much room for illegals to launch individual challenges against their removal from the country and therefore dooming the system to continue to be mired in legal mud by activist lawyers and left-wing justices.
Jenrick and former Home Secretary Suella Braverman have also both argued that the legislation does not prevent the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) from stepping in again and preventing migrant removal flights to Rwanda, as it did last year. Over the weekend, Braverman redoubled her call for the UK to officially withdraw from the Strasbourg-based court, which Britain is still a member of despite Brexit as it is technically a separate body from the European Union.
On Monday, a “star chamber” of Conservative legal experts, led by senior Tory MP Sir Bill Cash, concluded that the legislation does not go far enough, arguing that it only “provides a partial and incomplete solution to the problem of legal challenges in the UK courts being used as stratagems to delay or defeat the removal of illegal migrants to Rwanda,” The Telegraph reports.
“The Prime Minister may well be right when he claims that this is the ‘toughest piece of migration legislation ever put forward by a UK Government’, but we do not believe that it goes far enough to deliver the policy as intended,” their assessment stated.
The chamber findings were provided to the European Research Group (ERG) of Tory Brexiteer MPs ahead of a first vote on the proposed legislation on Tuesday. Following the consultation, the ERG did not reveal how the bloc would vote in the parliament but said that “the government would be best advised to pull” the legislation until it could be strengthened.