Rishi Sunak’s strategic genius

The conservative party has changed Britain profoundly during its 13 years in office. One such change is that it has made the absence of chaos seem like competence and the previously unthinkable seem acceptable. A prime minister should not be a relief because he did not blow up the financial markets within a month, yet Rishi Sunak was just that. Governments with large majorities should not lose votes in the early stages of legislation, yet the fact that the new Rwanda bill passed a second reading this week was greeted as a triumph of Tory party management. It is not normal for a British government to suspend human-rights legislation, ignore international law or set Parliament in opposition to the judiciary, yet moderate Tory MPs cravenly go along with it. Britain needs stability. The Rwanda row underlines that neither Mr Sunak nor the Tories can provide it.

The Rwanda policy itself is both impractical and unprincipled. Boris Johnson’s government struck an agreement to deport to Rwanda asylum-seekers who arrive in Britain on small boats. Their claims would be heard in the African country; if successful, the claimants would be settled in Rwanda, too. That prospect would, the scheme’s backers say, deter people from illegally crossing the English Channel.

Yet no plane has yet taken off; the plan was declared unlawful by Britain’s Supreme Court on November 15th on the basis that Rwanda was not a safe destination to send asylum-seekers. Britain has thus far paid Rwanda £240m ($302m, or 2.3% of Rwandan GDP) without dispatching a single migrant to Kigali. Although illegal immigration is a genuine concern and many other governments like the idea of processing refugees offshore, this scheme is unusually mean. The government’s desire to deport people to a penurious police state that British courts have found to be unsafe is shameful.

To turn that desire into reality, the government has made things even worse. It claims that a new treaty with Rwanda deals with the Supreme Court’s concerns. But it does not trust the judges to agree. The new bill stipulates that decision-makers, including judges, “must conclusively treat the Republic of Rwanda as a safe country”. It also prevents courts from applying elements of the Human Rights Act, which implements the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) in Britain, when dealing with Rwanda deportees.

All this is justified on the ground that Parliament can make and unmake any law it wishes. So it can; so it always could. But that does not mean it should. For Parliament has long sought to legislate in accordance with other principles which are fundamental to the rule of law. Parliament’s own joint committee on human rights says that requiring judges to follow a law that tells them to ignore the country’s highest court “undermines the constitutional role of the judiciary”. During the Brexit negotiations in 2016-19 the principle of parliamentary sovereignty became a battering ram in the hands of ministers; the same tactic is being used today and is again causing wider damage.

A sensible prime minister in charge of a sensible party might long ago have made a judicious retreat on Rwanda—not least because the number of small-boat crossings has actually been falling as a result of other measures. Mr Sunak, regrettably, is not that prime minister, and the Tories are definitely not that party.

The prime minister has notched up some successes in office, most notably the agreement he made with the EU earlier this year on trading arrangements for Northern Ireland. But a plausibly technocratic manner disguises two truths about him. The first is that he has a weakness for silly ideas. He is a true believer in Brexit and was a supporter of Mr Johnson becoming prime minister. He is a big fan of freeports, which tend only to displace economic activity. The Rwanda policy is another gimmick, first conjured up around the same time as officials were wondering whether to install wave machines in the Channel. (He is capable of killing schemes but the biggest thing he has amputated—HS2, a high-speed rail project—was worth keeping.)

The second truth about Mr Sunak is that he is not very good at politics. In the past few weeks he has set himself up as an agent of change only to bring David Cameron back into the cabinet; picked a pointless row with the Greek prime minister over some 2,500-year-old bits of stone; and sacked a home secretary he should never have appointed. Rwanda started out as a policy whim; Mr Sunak has stupidly turned it into a totem.

In so doing, he has elevated the need to maintain Tory unity into an organising principle of government. All of the Brexit behaviours were back on view this week. “Star chambers” were convened. Hardliners chuntered that an already-extreme position does not go far enough: they want to close down avenues for individual asylum-seekers to appeal against deportation. Centrist MPs meekly fell into line because they do not want to bring down their own government.

This week’s vote does not end that drama but extends it. As it makes its way through Parliament next year, radicals will push to make the bill tougher, widening Tory splits. If it gets past the House of Commons, the bill is likely to get mired in the House of Lords: Parliament will then be accused of undermining the sovereignty of Parliament. The likelihood that the Tories will lose the next election, which must take place before the end of January 2025, incentivises radicalism. Being a hardliner on Rwanda could be useful in winning the backing of Tory members, who will make the final choice on the next party leader. Opposition to the ECHR will become a test of purity in some quarters, even though the last country to leave it was Russia. And all this for a policy that is not that popular with the public and won’t “stop the boats”: Rwanda can take only a few hundred of the thousands of asylum-seekers who cross the Channel each year.

The new abnormal

The tale of Tory factionalism is very familiar. But that is the tragedy. Mr Sunak is using a deeply flawed bill to try to force through a bad policy. The Rwanda debate is sucking up political oxygen, stopping the government from doing more useful things and giving the Labour Party an easier ride than it deserves. None of this is normal. Only this government makes it seem so. ■

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