If Rishi Sunak’s five key pledges already looked in terrible shape at the start of the week – which they did – then today’s events have placed one of them on its deathbed.
The promise to ‘stop the boats’ was administered its last rites in the Court of Appeal this morning when Lord Chief Justice Lord Burnett announced:
‘The High Court’s decision that Rwanda is a safe third country is reversed. Unless and until the deficiencies in its asylum processes are corrected, removal of asylum seekers to Rwanda will be unlawful.’
So the only country thus far identified as a destination for those many illegal arrivals to the UK who cannot be returned to their country of origin is now off-limits. The much-heralded deterrent effect of certain removal to central Africa is no more. Government policy literally has nowhere to go.
The stench of a more general political death suddenly surrounds Sunak
The devastating Court of Appeal ruling comes hard on the heels of a series of damaging defeats for the Government in the House of Lords last night which ripped the guts out of its flagship Illegal Migration Bill. While ministers will bring the legislation back to the Commons to have the relevant clauses re-inserted, Sunak simply does not have the political time and space for an extended game of parliamentary ping pong with the Upper Chamber.
Ministers had confidently expected the Court of Appeal to uphold the High Court’s original decision that the Rwanda policy was legal – though heaven knows why – and were hoping that having this confirmed would preclude a final legal battle in the Supreme Court. They further hoped to get deportation flights underway by the end of the summer to the backdrop of much rejoicing among Tory-leaning voters.
Suddenly an appeal to the Supreme Court is their last remaining hope – along with Bob Hope and no hope, as the old joke would have it.
The stench of a more general political death suddenly surrounds Sunak, who performed disastrously in Prime Minister’s Questions yesterday. Morale is collapsing among ministers and backbenchers alike. Health service productivity is slumping to such an extent – amid endless industrial disputes – that there is little chance of his pledge to reduce waiting lists and times coming good.
Meanwhile interest rate policy is pitching the economy into a deliberate recession, inflation seems unlikely to be halved by the end of the year and debt has risen as a share of GDP. The scorecard reads zero out of five.
But it is on the emotive issue of stopping the boats – the thing that so many Tory voters of 2019 vintage care most about – where Sunak is most severely damaged. His claim of two weeks ago that his policy was working and arrivals were down 20 per cent has already been debunked. Better weather in the Channel has seen a lot of catching up in June and 2023 is now on course to match 2022 for small boat arrivals.
Many Tory MPs have poo-pooed the Rwanda plan from the start. The party does not seem coherent enough to deliver the revolution in asylum processes required to stop their rampant exploitation by irregular economic migrants.
Where are we heading? Almost certainly to a Conservative manifesto which pledges to withdraw the UK from the European Convention on Human Rights and its supervisory court. Will that cut the mustard after all the years of failure, from Johnson and Patel, to Sunak and Braverman?
That would now seem most unlikely to me. Instead the prospects grow ever rosier for a new Farage-led political insurrection on the Right. A technocratic gradualist such as Sunak, hemmed in as he is by the institutions of the liberal establishment, is not going to give millions of migration-sceptic voters what they are after and most of them have realised this. The small boats still come, the Sunak ship of state is sinking fast.
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