Another week, another crisis in the Conservative party. This time, it was prompted by the resignation of the immigration minister, Robert Jenrick, who claimed that Rishi Sunak’s emergency legislation to enact his plan to fly asylum seekers to Rwanda was a “triumph of hope over experience”. Rival Tory factions reportedly spent the rest of the week plotting opposing amendments to the bill for when it is introduced to the Commons on Tuesday. It is the latest manifestation of the weakness of a government riven by internal division, led by a prime minister with no strategic purpose save holding his party and his premiership together.
This is a crisis of Sunak’s own making. He is an unelected prime minister with no mandate, no coherent agenda and no answer to the profound challenges facing the country, from sluggish productivity and poor growth, to the dire state of social care, to the climate crisis. Devoid of substance, and fearful of the country’s likely verdict on his party’s increasingly wretched period in office, he is determined to make reducing migration a key election battleground.
There are two aspects to this: first, record net migration levels are the product of Sunak’s own policies. Migration is high mainly because after Brexit, the government significantly liberalised the migration regime for people coming to work in the UK on skilled worker visas, reducing salary thresholds and skill requirements, particularly for shortage jobs such as care work. Four in 10 skilled worker visas now go to care workers; six in 10 to workers in the health sector more broadly.
Instead of investing in the skills, qualification levels and pay of the domestic health and social care workforce to reduce staff shortages, the government is simply looking to reverse its own policy and make it harder for people to come here to fill those gaps; last week, the home secretary James Cleverly announced the government will significantly increase the minimum salary threshold for skilled worker visas, with the exemption of those for health and social care, prevent people coming to the UK to work in health and social care from bringing their children with them, and also, significantly, double the minimum income that British citizens need to earn in order to sponsor their spouses or children for family visas. These policies will depress net migration, but at what human cost? None of this gets to the heart of the British economy’s fundamental problems: medium-term skill shortages but also an ageing population that, in the long run, creates a choice between higher tax rates for working-age citizens or expanding the working population through migration.
The second thrust of Sunak’s migration agenda addresses asylum seekers: Sunak has pledged to “stop” the small boats carrying people across the Channel to claim refuge in the UK. These movements are notoriously difficult to prevent; if he was really interested in reducing the tragic loss of life in the Channel, he could try to negotiate a returns agreement with France in exchange for taking an agreed number of their asylum seekers.
Instead, he has inexplicably hitched his fortunes to a scheme to detain every asylum seeker on arrival in the UK, and deport them to a third safe country in an attempt to deter people from making the crossing in the first place, despite evidence suggesting any deterrent effect would be minimal. The only country the government struck a deal with was Rwanda; but last month, the supreme court ruled it would be unlawful to deport asylum seekers there because there would be a danger of them being returned to their home countries where they would face persecution or inhumane treatment.
Sunak’s hare-brained plan to get round the supreme court is an emergency bill that designates Rwanda as safe despite the judgment of the British courts, and disapplies the Human Rights Act for the purposes of the legislation. Legal experts still think it would be in breach of international law, and so subject to challenge in the European Court of Human Rights. But the bill allows ministers to ignore any interim measures issued by the EHCR as a matter of domestic law.
This is a dishonest fudge, which not only undermines the separation of powers between parliament and the courts, but is contingent on the UK breaching its obligations under international law. All for a scheme that even if it came off, and it seems highly unlikely the bill will survive passage through the Lords before an election, would lead to at most a handful of vulnerable people being deported even as the government has to permanently detain tens of thousands of asylum seekers at great expense to the taxpayer.
It beggars belief that Sunak has made this a defining pledge of his premiership. It has divided his party, between those like Jenrick and former home secretary Suella Braverman who want the bill to go even further in closing off any form of challenge to deportation, and those on its more moderate wing rightly appalled at its disregard for the UK’s international obligations. It is a manufactured row over something that will make no substantive difference to the UK, or the wellbeing of its citizens: political posturing by the same old Conservative party that imploded over a hard Brexit, which has permanently damaged Britain’s economic potential. This is a rotten government led by a prime minister incapable of governing and wholly unsuited to confronting the huge challenges we face. The country can ill afford to wait any longer for a general election.
