Feuding parties never win, No 10’s flailing political guru, Isaac Levido, warned rebellious MPs last week. Though the prime minister’s position is already so pitiful that Tuesday’s rebellion by 61 of his MPs could hardly shift his dial any lower.
The bill passed. The question is, what next? The best hope, devoutly prayed for, lies with the Lords blocking or delaying it: a delay is as good as a block, with time running out. By that, I mean that’s the best hope for Rishi Sunak and his government. Not, of course, through any moral repugnance at having to carry it out, but because everyone knows this fantasia of a policy needs to stay in the realms of political miasma, where it was born.
Rwanda is Suella Braverman dreaming her impossible dream. No element of it exists in the real world. Rwanda doesn’t, and can’t in law, become a “safe country” by fiat of the British government. That will be challenged in law here and in international courts. Parliament might be sovereign, but sovereigns can’t command everything. Rwanda is not safe, says the supreme court. The US has granted 38 fleeing Rwandan asylum seekers refugee status.
The country won’t take LGBT arrivals, so have these 100 selected for the first flight been vetted as straight? The British police don’t regard the president of Rwanda, Paul Kagame, as “safe”, as they have warned Rwandans living in Britain in fear of their lives of threats from Kagame’s agents.
If No 10’s private prayers for a delay in the Lords go unanswered, never mind: there’s a plan B. Instead, they will relish seeing it blocked in those hated “foreign” courts. All obstacles to its progress will be celebrated with quiet whoops of glee, blaming those lefty lawyers, “enemies of the people” judges, unelected lords and yet another conspiracy of the deep socialist state. This will be a Brexit reprise, they imagine – pure political gold.
Forget their claim to want at least one flight off the ground before the election. Privately they pray to be prevented (but not by their own party). To be stopped by the opposition: that’s the real dream. Here’s the fear. As soon as that plane takes off, those 100 asylum seekers stop being an unidentified hostile alien force of illegal small boat “invaders” of our shores. They become flesh-and-blood human beings, just as those who die in the Channel suddenly turn real. We hear from families who weep; we learn their stories of torture and oppression from wars and dictators, and of the skills they bring with them. Once they arrive in Kigali, the brief TV moment displaying them in the show homes Braverman said she would love to live in won’t last. Reporters will find hard truths of their life and treatment. And only a token 200 are expected in all, out of nearly 30,000 boat arrivals last year.
Ah, but most voters don’t care about that human rights stuff in faraway lands – that’s the Tory calculation. Yet the public has a habit of turning soft when exposed to real human lives. Even now, at the height of drumming up hatred for the small boat people, only 42% back deporting people immediately. Another 42% oppose the policy or say they should have the right to appeal first. That’s according to the YouGov poll last week that terrified Tory MPs with news that only 169 of them would survive slaughter at the next election. It found 60% of voters don’t believe the Rwanda bill will reduce the number of small boats crossing the Channel.
Savanta today finds almost three-quarters of voters, 72%, think the “stop the boats” policy has gone badly. What’s more, 34% say Labour would be best placed to stop the boats, while only 26% think the Tories would handle it best. Most people by now know all this noise is for nothing. The big immigration numbers will stay high, 672,000 net last year, with visas granted to work in jobs most voters know we need filled: vets, care workers, scientists, medics, nurses, construction workers and graphic designers.
This government seems to have abandoned any interest in governing. All is gesture and political positioning, sometimes against the opposition, more often against one another over the succession. The Rwanda dream was intended as the great distraction from the real world. But voters still put the cost of living and the state of the NHS top of their concerns, with immigration further down in fourth place.
The government has abdicated on that real stuff, while a million or more struggle to renegotiate mortgages with new, unaffordable rates. Sunak’s empty boasts about vanquishing inflation fall flat: only 32% say that pledge has gone well. The Savanta pollster Chris Hopkins points to the government’s yawning “competence and credibility deficit”, so Rwanda needs to stay in the realm of fantasy, where a few diehard Tory voters can still dream of what might have been, but for all the lefty enemies. If it’s not blocked, the last shreds of that “competence and credibility” risk flying off with any attempt to make the dream come true.
Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist
