Sunak doubles down and Braverman discovers the real solution

Well, what a week that was! Braverman was gone on Monday, the entire Rwanda policy was declared unlawful on Wednesday and Sunak, instead of admitting defeat has doubled down. He claims he is already negotiating a new ‘treaty’ with Rwanda and he has pledged to pass ‘emergency legislation’ getting parliament to declare the Central African country a safe place for asylum seekers. The Supreme Court expressly said that it wasn't. 

Here's Sunak's press conference response:

My response to the judgment of the Supreme Court https://t.co/HHHsXUQ8GA

— Rishi Sunak (@RishiSunak) November 15, 2023

Braverman’s letter accused Sunak of magical thinking and you have to admit she has a point. Even Lord Sumption, a former Supreme Court judge himself and not always quite rational, said declaring the facts were not as the SC found them would be “profoundly discreditable” and “constitutionally really quite extraordinary”.

Nobody as far as I can see thinks the legislation has a snowball’s chance in hell of becoming law on this side of an election and even less on the other side.

But as several people have noted that isn’t the point of the Rwanda policy and never was. Don’t forget, Rwanda was never going to take more than 200 asylum seekers, an almost insignificant figure compared to the thousands crossing the Channel every year. The cost is around £140 million or about £700,000 each. Plus, Rwanda is entitled to send some of its refugees to Britain.

Further, all the evidence is that the policy won’t deter people from attempting the dangerous crossing in any case.

The government has confirmed the emergency legislation will be primary legislation meaning it will have to go to the Lords and since the policy wasn’t in the 2019 Tory manifesto, peers can hold it up for a year if they have a mind to (and they almost certainly do).

Also, if after all that you still doubt it was all performative, note that Sunak also said he would not “allow foreign courts” to "block our ability to get these flights off [to Rwanda]." 

He must have known the UK Supreme Court isn’t foreign and the unanimous judgment of the five law lords confirmed that the issue wouldn’t be solved by leaving the ECHR in any case. They explained Britain was a signatory to other international treaties on asylum to which we would remain bound.  They were using British law to declare the policy unlawful.

Sunak would also know - in fact, he was relying on - plenty of people wouldn’t bother to read the judgment and would blame the ECHR in Strasbourg. That makes Sunak almost as bad as Johnson for gaslighting in my opinion.

It is all for show, designed to prop up Sunak’s tottering premiership against the party’s far right.

And I see that the chair of The Bar Council Nick Vineall KC has said: “If parliament were to pass legislation the effect of which was to reverse a finding of fact made by a court of competent jurisdiction, that would raise profound and important questions about the respective role of the courts and parliament in countries that subscribe to the Rule of Law."

It's just insane. Sunak is rampaging through Britain's constitutional settlement to save his own skin and doing profound damage just by suggesting it.

Braverman has written an article for The Telegraph this morning where she describes the Rwandan policy to be a "failed plan" as if it had nothing at all to do with her. She shreds the notion of another treaty with Rwanda resolving the  problem:

"We lost in the Supreme Court because the judges determined that Rwanda cannot be trusted to fulfil the commitments we asked of them on non-refoulement, not because those promises were embodied in one type of legal instrument, a memorandum, rather than another, a treaty."

But again she blames the ECHR:

"Even if we won in the domestic court, the saga would simply relocate to Strasbourg where the European court would take its time deciding if it liked our laws."

Then in the final paragraph, Braverman actually sets out what the government should have done from the start:

"Having committed to emergency legislation, the Prime Minister must now give Parliamentarians a clear choice: to either properly control illegal migration, or explain to the British people why they are powerless under international law and must simply accept ever greater numbers of illegal arrivals on these shores."

Quite. They should have explained why we need to accept a greater number of asylum seekers and then committed the resources to process them here or in France as every other reasonable European country has done.

Instead, the Tories have used it as a wedge issue for a decade, pandering to the closet racists from UKIP and latterly The Reform Party.  It's another reason why they must go.