Spare a thought for the home secretary’s sleep patterns. The damage her subconscious is doing to her psyche. On her own admission she spends much of the night dreaming of asylum seekers being loaded on to planes and deported to Rwanda. Suella Braverman doesn’t count sheep. She counts human misery. Nothing can replicate the thrill of seeing a frightened and desperate person finding themselves in a processing centre in Kigali. The more she can count, the better she sleeps.
So imagine her frustration that, as yet, not a single deportation flight has left the UK for Rwanda. Her sense of powerlessness as she wakes up to find her dreams are mere unfulfilled desires. And will remain so for the foreseeable future as, on Thursday, the court of appeal ruled that the government’s Rwanda policy was unlawful. In contravention of human rights.
It was a rather subdued Braverman who appeared in the Commons shortly after 4pm to give a statement on the judgment. She appeared brittle, tetchy even, that she hadn’t got her own way. Unwilling to accept the new reality that the government’s plan was to have no plan for the next six months. The small boats would continue to arrive, the Home Office would fail to process the asylum seekers, the detention centres would become even fuller and the taxpayer would continue to pay the bill.
“Our ‘stop the boats’ policy is the only one that will work,” she began. Could have fooled me. There’s no sign of it working yet. Thank God Rishi Sunak has sneakily downgraded his five promises to five priorities. Give it a couple of months and they will be down to five vague suggestions. Braverman pressed on. She had visited Kigali earlier this year and had enjoyed herself. In fact, she had since wondered whether it might not be too nice. Soon refugees will be crossing the Channel just to get a free flight to Rwanda.
Then came the words Braverman had to spit out: she respected the court decision. She really didn’t. She couldn’t have made it clearer she had nothing but contempt for the judges. But she was at pains to point out that Rwanda hadn’t actually been declared an unsafe country in itself. Just that it couldn’t be trusted not to deport refugees to unsafe countries. So it was merely unsafe once removed. Phew! That’s a weight off all our minds.
“We have a good relationship with Rwanda,” Braverman sobbed. Too right we do. No surprise there. Let’s talk ourselves through it. The UK hands over £140m and rising to Rwanda. And Rwanda has to take absolutely no refugees in return. That’s great work if you can get it. Count me in. Obviously it’s not quite as good a deal as the one for duff PPE that the likes of Michelle Mone allegedly negotiated. But maybe that was just a one-off pandemic special.
There was a brief pause for a moment’s silence to remember the thwarted wishes of the British people. At least all those, like Braverman, who couldn’t be doing with “phoney humanitarianism” and would now have to defer their gratification at the UK turning away genuine asylum seekers. Braverman could have used this moment to talk MPs through her department’s failure to deport those we were legally allowed to deport. But for some reason she chose not to. There’s only so much disappointment she could take in a day. Plus she’s not very bright so her synapses couldn’t join the dots on the flaws and failures of her own policies. So she ended by saying everything was unfair.
Labour’s Yvette Cooper was all righteous indignation. The government’s policy was unlawful and it hadn’t got another to stop the small boats crisis. And it was currently costing the UK £169K per refugee. Hell, we might as well just have gone to Calais and given every refugee planning to cross the Channel a cheque for £85K to bugger off and not make the journey. They would take it like a shot. That way we could make a 50% saving and solve the small boats crisis. There are any number of variations on this, and none worse than anything Braverman has dreamed up.
The Rwanda policy wasn’t just unethical, it was unworkable, said Cooper. There were more small boats crossing the Channel than before and the backlog in processing claims was getting worse. It was time to touch base with reality. Never Braverman’s strong point. Had she read the bit in the court judgment that Rwanda was only geared up to take 100 refugees. What was needed was closer cooperation with the French to tackle the people traffickers.
By now Braverman was at her sulky best. She couldn’t understand why the opposition benches were so upbeat in saying they hated to say I told you so but I told you so. Instead she was going to bury her head in the sand and pretend that none of this had really happened and just trust to luck that the supreme court took a different view. And besides, losing wasn’t all bad. The Rwanda policy was never going to stop the boats anyway, so now she had somebody else to blame: lefty lawyers, AKA lawyers who care about the interpretation of international law.
Tory Tim Loughton did wonder if maybe it might be a good idea to open up some safe routes – just in case. Braverman didn’t think that was necessary. Rather, she agreed with Edward Leigh, Mark Francois and Lia Nici that the fault lay with “the establishment blob” and it was time to leave the European convention on human rights. Because nothing shouts failed state more than leaving an international legal system. Danny Kruger thought if we could get a letter from Rwanda promising not to deport refugees anywhere, maybe that might swing it at the supreme court. The intelligence on display was frightening.
Opposition MPs queued up to reacquaint Braverman with basic truths, such as, that 98% of asylum claims were granted. So how would the Rwanda policy stop the small boats? Most tellingly, Kerry McCarthy wondered if the government had a plan B if the supreme court upheld the decision. Suella looked perplexed. The thought hadn’t occurred to her. The new plan would be to have no plan.
