Rwanda: A day of shame

A national obscenity and an affront to our better nature.

Photo by Jure Tufekcic on Unsplash

No sunlight out there this morning. Just the cold grey clouds. Just the horror of what we are now. The very worst of us pursue the most reprehensible schemes and those who hold a better judgement are too afraid to take them on. Our moral and constitutional reputation lies in tatters in the street, with the bin juice and the petrol fumes, a husk of what it once was.

The Rwanda bill passed late last night. Shortly beforehand, Rishi Sunak held drinks in his Commons office. So that's how it happened: some of the most marginalised people on earth, who once thought this country a safe haven, will be forcibly sent to an unsafe dictatorship while a multimillionaire and his colleagues toast their suffering. A spectacle so obscene it approximates a James Bond villain explaining his dastardly plan. I hope Sunak got Larry the Cat and stroked him as he raised his glass, just to complete the look.

There was one last-minute concession, but the closer you look at it, the weaker it appears. Peers had been fighting for Afghans who had helped Britain during the war to be exempt. In the end, the government pledged that veterans with a "credible link" to Afghan special forces would have their claims assessed by an independent body and those verified would not be removed. Lord Browne, who had fought the Afghan issue, said it was an "extremely important" concession" and dropped his amendment. 

Is it? Not really. It's just words. It's not written into the bill. There is nothing to stop them going back on it. Perhaps that sounds paranoid, but this is a bill built on lies. Its entire premise is a lie: it seeks to claim that Rwanda is safe and then actively blocks any attempt to establish that as a point of factual truth. A government putting forward a bill of this nature has lost the right to be trusted. They are liars, and if an assurance they make is not written into legislation then it doesn't mean a damn thing.

The restricted definition of who would be protected from Afghanistan is anyway pitiful. The protections are for those on the Afghan Relocations and Assistance Policy (Arap) scheme. This was the programme to assist Afghans who had been directly employed helping Britain. But the vast majority of those who helped us did not have that kind of formal status. They were judges, writers, interpreters outside the military structure, human rights campaigners, women's rights leaders, journalists. They were all at threat when Britain left Afghanistan. They were all at the mercy of the Taliban. They believed our promises about individual freedom and democracy. And then, when the barbarians returned, we cut them adrift.

In the aftermath of that moment, ministers were asked questions about how they were going to help those left behind. They promised they would do what they could. Even now, they insist that there are safe routes for Afghans to get here. But in reality, both Arap and the Afghan Citizens Resettlement Scheme (ACRS) are hopelessly strict, restrictive and inaccessible. And even that is now considered too generous. We won't even pretend to be decent anymore. We'll fight tooth-and-nail to send those who believed in us to Rwanda, to package off those who risked their lives for us in a war of our choosing. We will grind our reputation into the fucking earth in order to appear tough on refugees.

The second amendment last night was from Lord Anderson, who has fought a valiant battle against the bill. It tried to provide safeguards based on a principle of unassailable logic. The bill "gives effect to the judgement of parliament that the Republic of Rwanda is a safe country". How do we know it's safe? Because of the separate treaty with Rwanda providing an “effective system” to ensure it is. And yet ministers have repeatedly refused to confirm that this system exists. The bill also states that Rwanda will continue to be safe into the future. If something dreadful were to occur there, Britain would be legally unable to decide that Rwanda is no longer safe without passing a new Act of primary legislation. It is a madness. It is not so much a lie as the reversal of the conditions by which truth might exist. It is a fiction which is so constitutionally grand and ostentatious that it threatens to drag our entire political and legal system into the abyss.

"We are asked to be complicit in a present-day untruth and a future fantasy," Anderson said last night, "by making a factual judgement not backed by evidence, then by declaring that this judgement must stand for all time, irrespective of the true facts - this in the context not of some technical deeming provision in the tax code but of a factual determination on a matter of huge controversy on which the safety of human beings will depend." 

Who failed last night? How did this come to pass? There were three groups of parliamentarians who could have stopped the bill: First, Tory moderates in the Commons, who ostensibly number up to 110 MPs. Second, opposition Lords, predominantly Labour but also the Lib Dems and Greens. And finally, the cross-bench peers - non-party lords with background expertise in their chosen area. As long as the final two groups stuck together, they could defeat the bill. And the Lords ultimately held the power. If there was double insistence - both Houses sticking to their guns and refusing an alternative form of words - the bill would have died. The government could not have been able to bring it back to parliament for 13 months, which, given where we are in the electoral cycle, would have been game over. 

But it wasn't. Peers wouldn't take it to the bitter end.

Why didn't they fight? Some cross-benchers are too frightened of overruling the Commons so explicitly. It's not what they are there to do. They're supposed to revise - to suggest changes, to tidy up, to address concerns, not to oppose something from the elected Chamber. It's just too extreme and counter-cultural for them to kill a bill outright. And how could they possibly do so, when they had been failed by Labour Lords and Tory MPs? They cannot operate independently. They need other parts of the system to be operating properly for them to fulfil their role.

The official opposition simply gave up the ghost. Labour’s Lord Coaker has been good value through this battle, but he was pitiful last night. He'd brought a fencing sword to a gunfight. "I have said numerous times… that we will not block the bill," he said. "Yet we see consistently from the prime minister, including today, claims that Labour peers in this place seek to block the bill." This, apparently, was his thinking: that Labour should not oppose it in case Sunak was cynical about it, seemingly blind to the fact that Sunak would be cynical about it regardless of what Labour did. Indeed, the only reason Sunak could confidently hold his drinks reception last night was because he knew Labour would give way. 

And then the real reason for Labour's hesitance emerged. Coaker started to imagine out loud what might happen when Labour forms a government. "If that happens, I hope that, when we put forward various pieces of legislation to do with trade union rights, for example… noble Lords will remember that the role of the House of Lords in those circumstances will be to challenge the Labour government… but not seek to block or undermine the elected will of the people. That is not what we have sought to do."

In other words, Labour had neutralised the possibility of Lords opposition against the Conservative government in the present in a desperate attempt to neutralise Lords opposition to a Labour government in future. They don't want to encourage the House to stand up to the executive when they are about to form it. They have basically created a new precedent that the Lords must never defeat the government. They have sabotaged one of the few mechanisms for effective scrutiny and opposition in our system.

But the main blame does not lie with Labour. They did not propose this bill and they have committed to repeal it. The blame lies with the Conservatives. The only group which could really have killed this bill are the moderate Tories in the One Nation caucus. Unelected peers need signs from the Commons that they are proposing changes and fighting for principles that are shared in the elected Chamber, but there was simply none of that. Apart from the honourable examples of Robert Buckland and Jeremy Wright, there were no Tory rebellions. 

"Many people," Lord Anderson said at the end of the debate, "some of them perhaps still watching even now, will have wished us to keep on fighting, but without the threat of double insistence - which remains part of our constitutional armoury, but which did not command the necessary political support on this occasion - there would have been no point in doing so. The purpose of ping-pong is to persuade the government, through force of argument, to come to the table and agree a compromise. They have refused pointedly to do so, and after four rounds of ping-pong, their control of the Commons remains as solid as ever."

We can wish that cross-bench peers were more militant in their opposition, given the severity of what is in that bill. We can wish that Labour had less self-interested position. But none of it is possible without Commons support. They key to what took place lies in Anderson's comment - "their control of the Commons remains as solid as ever". While that is the case, there is a limit to what can be done.

Moderate conservatism is dead. All that is best and most honourable in the Conservative tradition has been annihilated in the House of Commons. This is the era of populist conservatism. And there was therefore nothing for peers to work with.

What is there to feel better about this morning? Not much, although there is I suppose one small measure of satisfaction. Rwanda will not work. It will not stop the boats. It will not have the capacity to lighten the burden of asylum processing. It was only ever supposed to be one of Boris Johnson's half-arsed wheezes, a clever little culture war trick to sound hard and hateful without any functional element to deliver it. Now, hopeless moral vacuity that he is, Sunak has pinned all his hopes to this plan. His entire election platform rests on this pisspoor little piece of moral brutalism, this theatrical act of cruelty. And as it fails, he will too.

Small assurances. Tiny. But they're all we have, on a bleak and shameful morning.