Sunak moved quickly past a fumbled rebellion by Tories complaining the deportation plan doesn’t go far enough on Wednesday night, saying this morning the party has “come together” and that his plan is working.
The House of Commons passed a new Rwanda deportation plan bill on Wednesday night by 320 votes to 276 votes, a rebellion by some 60 Conservatives crumbling at the last minute to just 11 government-backing members voting against. Rebels had said the government’s plan to deport migrants to Rwanda and pay for them to live there rather than pay a considerably higher amount for them to live in Britain in perpetuity was doomed to fail because the wording of the bill was insufficiently robust.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak gave a breezy press conference on Thursday morning marking his success in the vote, telling the upper House of Lords that he expected it also to pass it quickly, saying getting the Rwanda deportations underway is “an urgent national priority”, not to mention his only hope of avoiding total annihilation at this year’s coming national election. Sunak said the “appointed” Lords following the “elected” Commons would be “the right thing”.
Sunak said in his statement that “the House of Commons has spoken, the Conservative Party has come together, the Rwanda Bill has passed”, and that the government has a plan “and the plan is working”.
The Rwanda plan has been in the offing for years now, and is on its third Prime Minister since Boris Johnson’s attempt to pay the Rwandan government to look after unwanted immigrants to the UK was blocked by the courts in June 2022. Explaining the rationale of the policy, Sunak said today that to really “solve the problem” of illegal migration, “we need a clear and effective deterrent so that people know if they come here illegally they will be detained and swiftly removed. That’s what this Rwanda bill delivers.”
Sunak said he wanted to see Rwanda flights to take off “as soon as practically possible” but stopped short of saying there could even be one before the next general election, a massive climb down over previous claims that they would be flying by Spring.
It has escaped the attention of few in Westminster that while the arguments over the merits or otherwise of the Rwanda plan rumble on, large numbers of migrants continue to travel to the United Kingdom. Just yesterday eight boats carrying 358 illegals crossed the English Channel, making a mockery of the government’s claims to be deterring arrivals. Brexit leader and small boats campaigner Nigel Farage wrote: “Whilst Parliament is debating Rwanda, we hear breaking news of an 8th boat crossing the English Channel today. Has anybody heard from James Cleverly?”.
While this political energy and the last remaining weeks and months before the country goes to vote on a new government continues to be consumed by the Rwanda row, between government loyalists, leftists who call it inhumane or illegal, and right-wing rebels who say it doesn’t go far enough, a far larger migration crisis roars on unremarked. While boat migrants brought 30,000 new people to the United Kingdom last year and 45,000 the year before that, these numbers are utterly dwarfed by the major changes made to legal migration route rules by the so-called Conservative government in recent years, sending authorised arrivals soaring.
Controlling the number of migrant arrivals, be they legal thanks to totally lax rules, or illegal due to lax border control, remains an important matter to conservatively-minded voters, and the enormous shift from years of Tory promises to reduce net migration to the “tens of thousands a year” to actually increasing it to around one and a half million every two years has evidently disillusioned many. A new poll shows Reform — the party founded as The Brexit Party by Nigel Farage — had hit 12 per cent, the highest yet, and not dramatically behind the Conservatives themselves.
As reported, YouGov polling shows among 2019 Conservative voters, more now trust Nigel Farage on immigration than they do the Prime Minister himself.