Rishi Sunak’s Rwanda bill might have got through parliament, but are his own ministers convinced it will work? Among the skeptics appears to be Lord Cameron, who seemed a little apprehensive this morning when grilled on the government’s immigration plan. It’s hardly the best look when your own Foreign Secretary appears unconvinced…
Cameron was asked by interviewer Anushka Asthana on ITV’s Peston show whether he would have pursued this same policy if he still was in the top job. A rather reluctant Cameron replied: ‘Well, we had a totally different situation where you could return people directly to France. I’d love that situation to be the case again.’ Hardly a full-throated defence. The newly-created peer continued:
That’s the most sensible thing. People land on a beach in Kent, take them straight back to France, you therefore break the model of the people smugglers. But that’s not available at the moment.
Asthana suggested that Brexit might be to blame. ‘Because of the situation we’re in, because of the attitude of the others and all the rest of it,’ Lord Cameron replied, in a less than robust reply. The Foreign Secretary seems to be harking back to the days of the Dublin Agreement when the UK was allowed to return asylum seekers to the EU as part of its membership of the EU.
Yet Mr S isn’t sure that a return to the pre-Brexit system would do much to help the current crisis. After all, the Dublin Agreement never amounted to more than a few hundred removals, with a rather miserable net sum of 36 migrants being transferred out of the UK overall between 2015-17. How would it cope with 50,000 arriving on small boats?
Still, anything is better than Labour’s plan – or, er, lack thereof. The Foreign Secretary was quick to turn the guns on the Opposition to blast the stance of Sir Keir Starmer. The Labour leader with a penchant for U-turns would, for all his talk, ‘do nothing’ about the migrant crisis, Cameron believes – in contrast to the ‘innovative action’ of Sunak. Quite.
Watch the clip here:
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