The government’s announcement today that it wants to send a number of those who cross the Channel in small boats to Rwanda will be subject to challenge in both the Lords and the courts. It is hard to see how the policy gets through the upper house, where the Tories do not have a majority. But, I suspect, that a fight with peers over the policy is regarded by many in government circles as a feature not a bug of this policy.
Even if the policy does get through the Lords in the end, there will almost certainly be legal challenges to it; Johnson referred to the likelihood of this in his speech this morning. Again, I suspect that there will be Tories who privately welcome this—remember how well the government’s defeat over prorogation played for Johnson in 2019. ‘He learned his lessons well from the whole Brexit period,’ observes one Secretary of State.
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