Rishi Sunak has just finished a press conference on his flagship legislation to curb illegal crossings in the Channel. The Prime Minister said the legislation would enable him to ‘keep my promise’ to the public to stop the boats and that it would ‘break the business model of the people smugglers’. He said ‘this is tough, but it is necessary and it is fair’.
Sunak set ‘stop the boats’ as one of his five priorities at the start of this year, and they are emblazoned across every press release from Downing Street. This evening, that pledge was also on his lectern in the No. 10 briefing room. He insisted that he was confident that he could deliver on this promise in time for the next election, otherwise he wouldn’t have made it a priority. He must be very confident. Unlike some of the other priorities, it is genuinely very difficult to guarantee that you can ‘stop the boats’, or indeed to ‘take back control’ of immigration when you have such a big asylum processing backlog.
Sunak did try to underline some of the qualities he is proudest of, saying he had been thinking very hard about how to make this work. It is slightly ridiculous to suggest that this is unusual in government policymaking, but it is currently, and was also a riposte to the many Tory MPs who have been nagging the Prime Minister to get the boats policy out of his intray, where they felt it was languishing for too long while he considered the detail. Many of the same Tory MPs also suspect that Sunak doesn’t really have the stomach to withdraw Britain from the European Convention on Human Rights. Ministers have tried to address that with the face of the bill statement today in which Braverman said she was ‘unable to make a statement that, in my view, the provisions of the Illegal Migration Bill are compatible with the Convention rights, but the Government nevertheless wishes the House to proceed with the Bill’. At this evening’s press conference, the Prime Minister didn’t really answer the question of whether he would actually push the matter, saying ‘we don’t believe it is necessary to leave the ECHR’.
You can see, though, how the facts might change come the next election. Sunak did tell Tory MPs at last week’s away day that he didn’t want them to make excuses to their constituents about the government failing to deliver on its priorities: the only thing to do was to deliver. But it is plausible that the next election will feature the Conservatives saying they haven’t actually been able to deliver on their boats pledge, and therefore need to withdraw from the ECHR. And that really will be a dividing line with Labour, rather than today’s debates about the workability of the proposals.
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