It was the opening skirmish in the Lords battle over the Rwanda bill. Last night, peers defeated the Government by 214 to 171 over a motion about ratifying the treaty with Rwanda. A jab to the face. A bloody nose. And a reminder of what the upcoming fight will entail.
Monday’s vote was not on the Rwanda bill itself. It was on a motion concerning a report by the Lords International Agreements Committee, which came out last week. This report was damning in the extreme.
It was damning about the reliability of the words spoken by Home Secretary James Cleverly, damning about the Government’s commitment to human rights, and damning about the entire intellectual justification for the Rwanda project.
Last month, Cleverly flew to Rwanda and returned with an assurance that the country had committed to address the concerns of the Supreme Court when it ruled the policy unlawful. The country had made “a clear and unambiguous commitment to the safety of people who come here”, he said. Afterwards, the Government published two documents: the treaty between the UK and Rwanda outlining those commitments, and a separate Rwanda bill, which has been going through the Commons in recent weeks.
But there was a hitch. The treaty Cleverly agreed would demand all sorts of deep structural reforms to Rwanda’s asylum processing systems. It would need to pass a new law, create a system for ensuring asylum seekers are not sent to their country of origin, establish a process for individuals to submit complaints, recruit personnel for a monitoring system, hire independent experts to assess the first instance and appeals bodies, appoint co-presidents and international judges, and train all of them, alongside Rwandan officials considering the asylum cases.
In short, it needed to do lots of work, which would take much longer than the few weeks Sunak is willing to wait if he’s to get flights taking off by spring.
This, ultimately, is the Catch-22 of the Rwandan policy. It does not suit the Prime Minister’s electoral timetable. He claims that Rwanda is safe and that he can get flights started before the election. But if flights take place before the election, it’s because the country is not safe. And if the country can be made safe, flights won’t start until after the election.
This was the weak spot the international agreement committee aimed for. Its members, including Tory peers, unanimously concluded that ratification of the Rwanda treaty must be delayed until the proposed reforms had been implemented. Last night, the Lords voted to support that proposition.
What happens now? On the face of it, nothing. The Lords vote does not have any power. Under section 20 of the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act, the Government can basically ignore it, as long as it explains why. But this vote was not merely symbolic. To understand it, we need to grasp how the relationship between the Lords and the Commons works.
The Lords cannot really kill legislation that has been passed by the Commons. It’s technically possible, but they hate doing it. Most peers have internalised the constitutional view that they should not defeat the Government. So the Lords isn’t really about outright opposition. It’s about revision, in dialogue with the Commons.
Next week, peers will start looking at the Rwanda bill itself. And even if they’re not going to kill it stone dead, they are going to start proposing amendments. Last night’s motion is a very good example of a change which does not stop Rwanda, but makes it practically impossible in the time frame the Government desires.
Eventually those amendments are going to go back to the Commons. This is the process known as ping-pong. The Lords makes a suggestion, the Commons accepts or rejects it, or makes a suggestion in return. And this strange game plays out until one side or the other backs down or reaches an impasse. In practice, it nearly always ends when the Lords backs down.
This is where the Commons is crucial. The Lords pay careful attention to what the Commons is doing. They will not push an issue if there is no support for it in the Commons. But if there is – if the Opposition and Government backbenchers are supporting their proposals – they will keep going. It hands them the democratic legitimacy to press their case.
So how will this all ultimately play out? The Tory hardliners will never back the Lords arrangements. They want change to go in the other direction. But the Tory One Nation group really should be supporting this kind of change. Figures like Robert Buckland, who are standing up for traditional law-abiding constitutional Conservatism, have made this point repeatedly.
“If we are to rely on the processes of another country,” he said in the Commons last week, “getting them right in order to be compliant seems to be the best way forward. That is why the Government’s treaty approach is to be commended.” What could be better evidence of “getting them right” than asking for a delay to treaty ratification until we’ve seen them put in place?
There will be many amendments over the next few weeks, which may or may not involve the ratification of the treaty, but they are all likely to follow that imaginative pattern of trying to fix the obvious flaws of the Rwanda argument without killing it altogether. And they are likely to all come down to this one dynamic: to what extent do One Nation Tories have the courage of their convictions? Will they stand up for what they believe in? Or will they buckle to the whips and support the Government?
Personally, I’ve very little faith in them. Ever since Boris Johnson purged the party of moderates during the Brexit wars, that part of its heritage has been supine. But I would very much like to be mistaken. We’ll find out soon enough. Round two starts next week.
Another bloody nose for Sunak and his doomed Rwanda bill
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23.01.2024
It was the opening skirmish in the Lords battle over the Rwanda bill. Last night, peers defeated the Government by 214 to 171 over a motion about ratifying the treaty with Rwanda. A jab to the face. A bloody nose. And a reminder of what the upcoming fight will entail.
Monday’s vote was not on the Rwanda bill itself. It was on a motion concerning a report by the Lords International Agreements Committee, which came out last week. This report was damning in the extreme.
It was damning about the reliability of the words spoken by Home Secretary James Cleverly, damning about the Government’s commitment to human rights, and damning about the entire intellectual justification for the Rwanda project.
Last month, Cleverly flew to Rwanda and returned with an assurance that the country had committed to address the concerns of the Supreme Court when it ruled the policy unlawful. The country had made “a clear and unambiguous commitment to the safety of people who come here”, he said. Afterwards, the Government published two documents: the treaty between the UK and Rwanda outlining those commitments, and a separate Rwanda bill, which has been going through the Commons in recent weeks.
But there was a hitch. The treaty Cleverly agreed would demand all sorts of deep structural reforms to Rwanda’s asylum processing systems. It would need to pass a new law, create a system for ensuring asylum seekers are not sent to their country........
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