If the five pledges on which Rishi Sunak has pinned Conservative hopes of re-election were already looking shaky, the appeal court ruling on the government’s Rwanda asylum policy is a major setback ahead of a general election that must take place before January 2025.
With promises to halve inflation this year, reduce national debt and shorten NHS waiting lists all in doubt, his “stop the boats” pledge is now bereft of the supposed deterrent effect of being able to send asylum seekers to Rwanda to have their claims processed.
An appeal against the judge’s ruling on Thursday that the policy is unlawful now looms, yet the political landscape is not entirely unfavourable to the prime minister.
After last week’s economic travails, one Tory MP saw the ruling through the prism of the Lloyd George comment: “With me a change of trouble is as good as a vacation.”
With legal battles continuing to frustrate a flagship government policy, some Tories will probably seek to place the blame elsewhere, even if they may be reluctant to revisit previous attacks on the judiciary.
Predictably, the home secretary, Suella Braverman, sought to cast the judgment as a “good day for the people smugglers, a good day for Labour, and a bad day for the British people”.
Yet if YouGov polling from last year is anything to go by, the public is divided, with 42% in favour of the policy and 37% opposed. Polling from this month finds that more than half of those surveyed think it is unlikely migrants will ever be deported to Rwanda.
Meanwhile, in the hours after the ruling there was an increase in chatter on Tory MPs’ WhatsApp groups about suggestions the UK should withdraw from the European convention on human rights (ECHR). Such a move is seen as a way of overcoming legal objections to the deportation of asylum seekers, even if it would place the UK in the company of states such as Russia.
On the airwaves – and on his own Twitter account where he criticised a “deeply disappointing ruling in the face of the clear will of parliament” – the MP and former minister Simon Clarke was not shy about promoting the idea, even if he still described it as a “worst case scenario”.
Another MP and former minister, David Jones, was more circumspect, telling the Guardian the judge’s decision had to be respected “because they are wise people.”
“Really if the government wishes to resolve it, it can do so by legislation and I have a feeling that it’s going to be legislation that addresses this,” said Jones, who suggested the government might seek to “disapply” from some aspects of the ECHR rather than withdraw outright.
Legal experts in the UK and European officials will regard attempts to pick and choose parts of the convention as unacceptable.
Charities and campaigners celebrated the ruling, and Human Rights Watch expressed the hope that it might spell the end of the “hostile environment” approach applied by the government to refugees.
For Labour, however, the situation is not without risk. The shadow home secretary, Yvette Cooper, took a pragmatic line, telling MPs the judgment showed that Sunak’s plan to fix “the Tories’ small boats chaos” was unravelling.
The Rwanda scheme was “unworkable, unethical and extortionate,” she said, referencing the moral case against the policy alongside the practical arguments.
However, during an election campaign in which Tory campaigners might be keen to cast their frustrated plans as a standoff between “the people” and “the “establishment,” Labour will have to decide about the language it uses and how it presents its opposition to the Rwanda proposals.
