Rwanda: We're in the endgame now

The secret calculations of power behind the final showdown

It happened in the Lords on Wednesday evening. It was a brief moment - uncommented on, unwatched, just like everything else that goes on in there. But in that moment you could learn a great deal about what will happen on the Rwanda policy, how Labour will govern, the future of our constitutional system, and the strange sad dance of practicality and principle that politics entails. It taught you infinitely more than Jeremy Hunt's disingenuous financial tricks, or the latest intellectually dilapidated interview with Suella Braverman, or the inane rictus grin of Rishi Sunak. 

It involved Ken Clarke, because of course it did. He sat in the middle of the Chamber, hunched over his walking frame, dressed as if someone had haphazardly thrown a pile of clothes into the corner of a room. But his mind operated with pinpoint clarity - quick and lacerating, able to reach the heart of an issue in moments. This well-watered, complacent right wing chancellor from my youth is now one of the few figures in our national life who is intent on thinking clearly about what this country should be and prepared to go to the line to defend it. His problem - and it is a very great one, for all of us - is that Labour is unable to show the same degree of commitment.

Here is what is about to happen with Rwanda. Brace yourself, because it isn't good. 

This week the Lords passed ten amendments by huge margins. The two Chambers will now enter ping-pong, where they bat the bill between them trying to find agreement. And after the second round, the Lords are very likely to give in. Then it will pass. Rwanda will become law and the flights will start. 

Why? Why, in the marrow of Christ, is that happening? 

Everything is in the Lords' hands. Constitutionally, there is nothing to stop them. The Salisbury Convention rules that they cannot oppose a law that was in the government's manifesto. But Rwanda was not in the manifesto. The Parliament Acts limit their ability to block legislation to just 13 months. But the government doesn't have 13 months. So they have control. They can stop it if they want to. 

In truth, peers are culturally very reticent about block government legislation. But it's quite possible that in this case they could do it - after all, they've done it before. The reason that it is not even a live issue, that no-one thinks it's possible, is because Labour will not fight to the end. It refuses to take this battle to its logical conclusion. And without them involved, there's no chance of success.

The party has stated that it will not kill the bill outright. But that doesn't matter. We don't need to kill the bill. We simply need to make it unworkable. And by that, I mean: we need to make it compliant with the law and the government's own rhetoric. 

Lord Hope's two amendments, passed this week, would ensure that the UK and Rwanda governments implement all the changes they've promised to Rwanda's asylum system before parliament decides that the country is safe. Lord Anderson's two amendments would allow the courts to challenge whether Rwanda is safe. A victory for either amendment would derail Rwanda as a proposal before the election. And they would make us compliant with the law and with the logic of the government's own promises. They are the sort of sane, reasonable thing which would be considered perfectly normal in any functioning period of British governance.

But Labour's reticence means that it is unlikely to stand up for either of these core principles. Instead, the party will almost certainly give in during ping-pong. And then Rwanda will pass.

Clarke was one of the few Conservatives, alongside figures like Lord Deben and Viscount Hailsham, who were prepared to take the fight to the bitter end. When he spoke, we witnessed the extraordinary spectacle of a Tory grandee urging the Labour party to be tougher with a government of his own party. 

He got right to the heart of the matter. This wasn't about Rwanda. It was about power.

"I share the suspicion," he said, "that the Labour Party, like every other party contemplating power, and no doubt my own in the past, is hesitant to see the influence of the House of Lords grow at this stage in case it starts exercising its influence on the successor government." The implication was that Labour was failing to fight Rwanda not out of principle, but because it feared the prospect of a powerful House of Lords once it was in government itself.

Lord Coaker responded for Labour. He was passionate and eloquent, but it was a counsel of despair. "I challenge the Government," he said. "They have challenged me and my party, our leader in the Lords and our chief whip, constantly in the papers… Even on Monday, when we debated the Rwanda bill in this Chamber, we had an article from the home secretary saying that those who sought to block the bill were encouraging right-wing extremists. How is that the action of a responsible government?"

This got to the heart of a slightly different matter. This wasn't about Rwanda. It was about Labour's election strategy.

It's these two issues - power and the election - which define the dreadful dance we're seeing over Rwanda.

Coaker's plaintive appeals for Tory decency revealed a key aspect of why the party doesn't want to fight Rwanda to the end. They can see a culture war election coming and they want to neutralise it. 

Sunak made that approach perfectly clear in a speech last January. "There is now only one question," he said. "Will the opposition in the appointed House of Lords try and frustrate the will of the people as expressed by the elected House?" He's obviously salivating for it, grubby boy-child that he is. Brexit election Version Two. 2019 all over again. Will of the people versus the elite.

Keir Starmer's strategy since the very beginning has been to sidestep precisely these sorts of culture war attacks. You see the trap, you recognise that cultural issues have the ability to divide Labour's electoral coalition, so you prevent them from taking hold. No more Brexits. 

It's easy to scoff at that. It is easy to become infuriated by it, especially when it concerns issues of supreme moral importance. But we should also recognise that this has been a powerfully effective electoral strategy for Labour which delivered it a massive lead. You do not get that lead by doing what people like me want and spending your time defending immigrants and the EU. And you do not get it doing what Corbynites want and shitting yourself in public.

There’s also something really important to keep in mind here: Labour is ultimately going to repeal Rwanda. It has committed to it. So by refusing to fight they can sidestep the culture war and repeal it later. In the meantime, what will happen? The policy will probably visibly fail. The government will only be able to send a few people to Rwanda. Depending on the weather this summer, small boat arrivals will continue and perhaps increase. It'll be shown to be the nonsense it always was. That's the plan anyway.

Then there is the power element, which is about the mathematics of the Lords. The problem lies in the fact that there are so many Tory peers. The Chamber holds 271 Conservative lords, 172 Labour lords, 80 Lib Dems and 183 crossbenchers. In practice, this hands the crossbenchers a vast amount of power, effectively as the deciding vote between two blocks - the Tories on the one hand, and Labour and the Lib Dems on the other.

The issue for Labour is what happens if the Lib Dems stop voting with them. It wouldn't happen instantly, but at some point they might peel off and start voting with the Conservatives - say over civil liberties, as they did during New Labour's time. Then Labour would be massively outgunned. 

So Labour's current strategy is to act very nice and gentlemanly and say that the Lords must never block anything. And this is because they are hoping to create a convention that the Upper House does not oppose them once they are in government. That's one of the core dynamics in what's taking place.

All of this is understandable. The problem is that all of it is wrong. 

Labour's calculations are not just overly-cautious. They are inadequate. 2024 is not 2019. Sunak cannot win an election, and is not likely to even increase his poll standing, by fighting on an anti-Lords ticket and talking about Rwanda. For a start, the public don't want to talk about Rwanda - they want to talk about public services. And secondly, Sunak is not the man to do it. He has none of the cretinous savagery of Dominic Cummings or the snake-like geniality of Boris Johnson. 

It's one thing to smartly sidestep traps. It's another to trap yourself through excessive caution. By failing to stop Rwanda, Labour is actually providing Sunak with his first win. He is about to get Rwanda through. Flights will take off. He will treat it as a triumph - against all the odds, against the right and left of his party, the Supreme Court, everyone. For Labour to sit there and actively help him secure that outcome is some 4D chess shit. To bastardise Bernard Williams: If you have decided to facilitate the precise announcement your opponent wants to make, you have just had one thought too many.

The same is true for Labour's calculations about the Lords opposing it in government. There is an easy solution to this problem. Just get rid of the hereditary peers, or at least remove their voting privileges. They are mostly Tories and they anyway have no business sitting in the legislature. Then add a couple dozen Labour peers. Job done. The numbers are equalised.

Instead, the party seems intent on neutralising the Lords altogether. I've a lot of time for Wes Streeting, but look at the abject nonsense he is speaking: "An unelected House of Lords can’t block an elected House of Commons," he said recently. To be clear, that is wrong. It is the introduction of an entirely new constitutional convention which serves to make the Upper Chamber impotent. In a Westminster system defined by the insufficient scrutiny of government, the Labour policy is to reduce scrutiny even further.

I would worry about this if I thought it would happen, but it will not happen. Labour's approach is to refuse to block anything in the Lords, negate its own power, and then hope the Conservatives will do the same in opposition. But of course they will not, because the Tories are stark raving mad. It's like placing a gentlemanly bet with Tyler Durden. He'll take the money and kick your fucking head in. Do we really think that a party headed by Suella Braverman or Kemi Badenoch is going to recognise Starmer's well-mannered equanimity? No. They'll oppose any way they can - especially once they're reduced to powerlessness in the Commons.

If Labour's no-blocking Lords policy was viable, it would be dangerous. But it is not viable, so it is simply naive.

But the primary problem is not really strategic. It is moral. We have to draw the line somewhere. There are some laws that are so bad, so wretched, that they cannot be allowed to stand. 

If that bill passes, genuine refugees are going to be sent to Rwanda. The most marginalised people on earth will be sentenced to a further punishment, simply to show our theatrical sense of sadism. And even if it's just one flight that goes to Rwanda, then that matters too. Those lives count. They must not be pawns in our bullshit Westminster games. 

We will have undermined the separation of powers in this country - a principle that has existed since Colonel Thomas Rainsborough and Henry Ireton handed the Heads of Agreement to the king during the English Civil War, and which was powerfully articulated by John Locke a generation later, in the founding document of British liberalism. 

And will have brutalised the notion of truth in British governance. We will have accepted the proposition that the executive can legislate to enforce government-approved views of objective reality and prevent independent bodies from assessing them for themselves. We will be allowing the government to legally define reality. 

If you cannot stand up to this, what is left of you really? What principles are there to fall back on? What is the point of all this? 

There is still time to apply pressure. There is still a moment, however short and unlikely, for Labour to think again. It should impose the Lords amendments on the government and hold firm when it goes to the line during ping-pong. Anything else is a failure: of strategy, of politics, of constitutional propriety, and of morality.