Stop all the clocks! Cancel the annual leave! After a day of fevered speculation on Wednesday (was it time for a Cabinet reshuffle? Could Rishi Sunak be premiering a new bob?), the prime minister stood in the rain outside No. 10 and announced a summer general election with all the vim of a man who’s truly given up on life.
And if calling an election while soaked to the bone, like a dog tied up outside a particularly grim Tesco, wasn’t enough of a sign that Sunak has lost faith in his own premiership – consider the precarious fate of the government’s Rwanda deportation scheme.
It wasn’t that long ago that Suella Braverman, then home secretary, told Christopher Hope that her dream was to see a Telegraph front page with a Rwanda deportation flight taking off. But since then, the government’s flagship immigration policy has been stymied by legal challenges. The supreme court ruled last year that the plan was unlawful on the grounds that asylum seekers sent to Rwanda faced a real risk of “refoulement”, meaning that they could be sent back to their home countries where they’d face persecution or other inhumane treatment.
Sunak’s solution? Just pass a law declaring Rwanda a safe country – the parliamentary equivalent of saying: “Who you gonna believe: me, or your lying eyes?”
It was looking for all the world like the government was gearing up for another clash with the courts. In late April, the Home Office announced that its officers would be rounding up asylum seekers for detention – with some to be taken to the notorious Bibby Stockholm barge. Raids were disrupted by protesters at multiple sites in England, with more than 40 arrests made in Peckham alone. And according to government sources, Sunak & co had hoped that the first Rwanda flight would take off in late June or early July.
Now with a genny lex on the cards, Sunak has confirmed that there won’t be any such deportation flights before polling day. Yesterday saw the world’s saddest connoisseur of Adidas Sambas try to present the prospect of Rwanda removals taking place after July as a reason to keep Labour out of government (Keir Starmer has repeatedly said that he would scrap the policy on day one, should he win). But while a slim majority of voters tend to support the Rwanda scheme, only 16% of them consider it good value for money. I’m no elections guru, but I’m not sure whether promising to deliver a policy that’s very expensive, and not especially popular, is the best campaigning pitch.
So far, the Rwanda scheme has cost the government hundreds of millions of pounds. But there is another toll, one that can’t be measured in monetary terms, that has been exacted. Back in December, Sunak’s government was warned that the Rwanda scheme could lead to young asylum seekers attempting or dying by suicide. That same month, a teenager threatened with the prospect of being removed to Rwanda took his own life in a Birmingham hotel; at Colnbrook removals centre, asylum seekers sounded the alarm that the Rwanda plan had led to a serious deterioration in detainee’s mental health. It’s no exaggeration to say that this policy has traumatised and ruined the lives of countless asylum seekers and their loved ones.
Farewell, Rwanda. We certainly won’t miss ya.
The article was originally published via The Cortado, a weekly shot of political analysis from Ash Sarkar. For more emails from Ash, click here.
Ash Sarkar is a contributing editor at Novara Media.
