A Tory minister was left tongue-tied on Question Time last night after not one person in the audience said it supported the government’s Rwanda plan.
The crowd - which included many Conservative voters - failed to raise their hands when asked three times by presenter Fiona Bruce if they wanted to speak up in support for the policy.
The Question Time debate topic - “Is it time to give up on the government’s Rwanda plan?” was chosen after top judges yesterday ruled the government's plan to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda was unlawful as it could not be considered a "safe third country".
Ms Bruce asked the audience: “Is there anyone here who supports the Rwanda policy and who wants to speak up, because we have a lot of Conservative voters here in the audience?
“I mean if there’s no-one here, then let’s recognise that fact. Is there anyone here who supports the Rwanda policy?”
One man piped up to ask why people do not stay in other safe countries they cross before reaching the UK, but ultimately added: “I don’t support the Rwanda policy, as much.”
For a third time, Ms Bruce asked: “But just so I’m clear, as we’re very careful how we select our audience - and I’m not trying to overstate the importance here, this is not a YouGov poll - but what I’m seeing here is, even though we have more people who voted Conservative here who supports sending people to Rwanda.”
Not a single person raised their hand with one panel member then shouting: “Good on you”, to which the audience responded with applause.”
The BBC presenter pressed Tory MP Helen Whately for a response.
She stuttered as she began her answer: “Now, or after? I think there’s a few things to pick up here… I think this is a very hard problem to solve.”
“I think most of us feel we want to be welcoming people and understand people have made hard and difficult journeys to try to come to the UK before they choose to get into a small boat,” the Minister for Social Care went on.
“Yes, they are in France and have crossed several safe countries, but we know they have started out from places where life is very hard.”
Ms Whately said she had visited a migrant camp in Calais a few years ago and heard their reasons for wanting to come to the UK.
“I heard those stories directly but it doesn’t mean that it is morally right to continue a situation where we have people risking their lives in small boats and paying people smugglers to do that. We have to do something different to deter that,” she added.
As Ms Whately attempted to diss Labour for not having a plan, Labour MP Rosena Allin-Khan retorted back to her that the Rwanda plan was “inhumane” and “unworkable” and now it’s “unlawful”.
The Labour frontbencher said: “I just think we need to take a moment and think about what drives people to leave everything they have; take their children on treacherous journeys.
“I've been a humanitarian doctor now for over a decade. I've seen the very worst of humanity. I've seen genocide.
“I've seen parents who have to choose to flee with the children that are still alive or stay lying next to the graves of those they've had to bury.
These are the people we're talking about when we're othering them. When we're talking about them as though they are not humans.”
Looking directly at Ms Whately, she questioned “how she sleeps at night”.
Asked what Labour’s policy was to tackle the small boats crisis, Ms Allin-Khan said her party had a “border force plan” to break the business model of people smuggling gangs.
“Also, they would clear the backlog. This government is living in backlog Britain where most asylum claims haven't been dealt with and people living in inhumane conditions - women and children in hotels that are not fit for rats. That is what we're looking at,” she added.
“We will also reform legal routes as the lady already mentioned, and stop gangs exploiting people who are fleeing the very very worst of humanity.”
Chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, who was also on the panel, said he was "delighted" the Rwanda policy has been ruled unlawful.
“I was flabbergasted to hear Suella Braverman say today that she thinks most Britons are disappointed by this decision. I'm absolutely sure that most people in this room are delighted by this decision,” he said.
The campaigner quoted a Somali-British poet, who wrote in a line “no one puts a child in a boat unless the water is safer than the land”.
“I think that's both beautiful and also tragic and it expresses perfectly the plight of these people,” Mr Fearnley-Whittingstall said.
“Nobody gets on these boats unless they're desperate and to reel out a sort of shoddy bit of populism, a high profile policy that grabs the attention of the right wing press gets amplified in a really unpleasant way.”
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