MPs have wasted no time in tearing into the Tories after their last-ditch attempt to salvage Rishi Sunak’s doomed Rwanda asylum scheme was shot down in flames. A desperate effort to keep the Safety of Rwanda Act on the books was dismissed outright, with Labour Minister Dame Angela Eagle branding the Conservatives as living in a “fantasy land” for trying to defend the controversial policy. She didn’t hold back, calling the Act “one of the most catastrophic pieces of legislation that Parliament has ever had to deal with.”
The scheme has already cost taxpayers a staggering £700 million, yet it resulted in just four people voluntarily agreeing to be sent to Rwanda. Now, with Labour preparing to repeal the Act under its Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill, Tory MP Matt Vickers attempted to push through an amendment to keep it alive. The response? Total rejection. A cross-party committee voted it down by 11 votes to three, effectively putting the final nail in the coffin.
SNP MP Pete Wishart didn’t mince his words, calling the entire project “hare-brained” and mocking the Conservatives for even trying to revive it. “They should be apologising for the scheme and promising never to come up with anything as ridiculous again… they should be asking for forgiveness,” he said, reported the Mirror.
Labour MP Kenneth Stevenson piled on, saying the Tories had “carried on making the same mistakes for years” and were simply wasting more public money. Meanwhile, Dover MP Mike Tapp dismissed the plan as a “legal and moral dead end.”
Despite the backlash, Vickers tried to argue that scrapping the Rwanda deal had removed the “only deterrent” against illegal small boat crossings. Fellow Tory MP Katie Lam backed him up, admitting the last Conservative government “didn’t get everything right” but insisting the Rwanda plan was a “genuine attempt” to tackle the issue.
Dame Angela, however, pointed out that nearly 84,000 people had crossed the Channel in small boats between the scheme’s announcement in 2022 and its eventual collapse last year. “I’m a bit distressed that the party opposite is continuing to claim the Safety of Rwanda Act was just about to work,” she said, calling the entire ordeal an “embarrassing and expensive farrago” that would be remembered as one of Parliament’s biggest legislative failures.
On the international stage, Foreign Secretary David Lammy has taken a hard line against Rwanda’s government, accusing it of a “blatant” breach of international law and warning it risks dragging the region into war. The UK has now halted bilateral aid to Rwanda, with Lammy making it clear to President Kagame that any further violations of the Democratic Republic of Congo’s sovereignty will come with consequences.
For now, it looks like the Rwanda plan is finally dead—but the fallout from this costly and controversial experiment is far from over.
