Ignore the technical talk about treaties, conventions and legislation. The Supreme Court ruling on the Government’s Rwanda deportation policy is just one more story of a Conservative leader dancing to Nigel Farage’s tune and falling flat on his face.
Farage may be thousands of miles away in the Australian jungle, but Rishi Sunak’s Rwandan debacle is very much his work. He did more than anyone else to make “small boats” a significant issue in British politics - or, more accurately, in Right-wing British politics. For Conservative voters today, immigration is now the No 1 political priority, but the electorate as a whole sees the economy and the NHS as more important.
The story of the Court ruling begins in 2020 when Farage began deliberately flouting lockdown rules to make social media video reports from Dover and the Kent coast about migrants crossing the Channel.
Largely overlooked by politicians and media outlets — understandably — more focussed on Covid-19, those videos racked up millions of views among a small but important segment of the electorate. Many viewers had previously alternated between voting for Farage’s old outfit, UKIP, and the Tories. Most voted Conservative in 2019, won over by Boris Johnson’s pledge to “Get Brexit Done”.
Rishi Sunak pressed ahead with an immigration policy many of his colleagues find distasteful
With both Johnson and Brexit now largely absent from UK political debate, Conservative strategists needed new reasons for those voters to stick with the blue team. Hence Rishi Sunak’s decision last year to re-hire Suella Braverman as Home Secretary and to press ahead with an immigration policy that many of his colleagues find instinctively distasteful.
So: Farage talks up the importance of an immigration issue and riles right-wing voters. An urbane Conservative leader responds with a controversial, ill-prepared and populist promise. Trouble follows.
Does that story sound familiar? David Cameron, newly returned to government as Foreign Secretary, knows it all too well — it’s the script of his Brexit disaster.
Cameron ended up promising of an EU membership referendum after years of pressure from Farage and his sympathisers on the Conservative Right. Almost from the first day of his Tory leadership in 2005, Cameron attempted to appease the Eurosceptic Right with an escalating series of promises to take harsh action on EU issues. First he promised to break ties with the Tories’ traditional Christian Democrat allies in the European Parliament. Then he promised a referendum on the EU’s Lisbon Treaty.
The trouble with feeding buns to crocodiles to keep them happy is that sooner or later you run out of buns and the crocodiles eat you instead
It was never enough, so Cameron — who once said the Tories should stop “banging on about Europe” — eventually had to make the biggest Eurosceptic bang of all with an in-out referendum.
As Ken Clarke, the former Tory Chancellor, used to note, the trouble with feeding buns to crocodiles to keep them happy is that sooner or later you run out of buns and the crocodiles eat you instead.
Rishi Sunak decided on becoming prime minister to follow the same ruinous script as David Cameron, trying to appease the Farage-curious Tory Right and its voter base with tough talk about “stopping the boats”.
The rationale for this is political necessity. If 10 per cent of the national vote goes to Reform UK, UKIP or some other Farage party, most of that vote has been diverted from the Conservatives. Those voters were a key part of Johnson’s 2019 election-winning coalition. Team Sunak’s view is that keeping that coalition together is the Tories’ only hope of clinging to power at the next election.
Hence Rwanda and making “stop the boats” one of the PM’s five key pledges for his government.
What now? The Supreme Court ruling really just demonstrates what a deep political hole Sunak has dug for himself. By trying to follow Farage’s agenda and making “small boats” a headline issue, he told the voters angry about those boats that they are right to be angry. And by concocting an unworkable policy, he has told them he is powerless to take action on the thing that makes them angry. To some, that affirms the Faragist claim that Britain is run by an unaccountable elite that dismisses the wishes of “the people” — a phrase that generally means “a minority of the people”.
To the majority of the British people, who see the economy and the NHS as much more important issues, Sunak’s Rwandan misjudgement simply sends a signal that the Conservatives’ priorities are elsewhere — and for some, that the Tories are, once more, the nasty party.
What now for the PM? Having chosen to jump into the hole that Farage dug for him, he will doubtless try to dig his way out with yet more promises of ever-tougher action. His new foreign secretary can tell him how well that is likely to work.
