Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill

Baroness Fox of Buckley Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 29th January 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Brixton, for that speech. He did not pull any punches, which I liked, but I did not like anything else that he said. I find myself with “Sophie’s Choice” here. This is a Bill that I intensely dislike, but I dislike the Opposition’s arguments against the Bill even more.

I am no fan of the Rwanda plan. The absence of a much-promised review of safe routes means that there is no flexibility about who is permanently deported, and there is no ability to appeal. The Bills feels performative, very expensive and unworkable, but mainly I object to a narrow discussion on Rwanda as a substitute for tackling what should be obvious to all by now: the need for a complete overhaul of our current asylum system and a review of often outdated international laws and treaties that are regularly used to limit sovereign law-making.

Here is my dilemma: too often, opposition to any or all government proposals on migration—certainly since I have been in this House—leads to swathes of immovable blocks that effectively tell voters, “You can’t do that”. I am worried when this House plays that role itself, of being one of those blocks. Certainly, treaties and laws internationally made that no one in the UK voted for feel like a slap in the face of the electorate. I am glad to hear that, across the House, there is an understanding that the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord German, is potentially improper overreach, a sort of cancel culture applied to the scrutiny of legislation. Despite this, however, when the noble Lord, Lord Ponsonby, told the House that the Labour Benches would treat the Bill like any other Bill, I am just not convinced that this Bill is being treated like any other Bill. In fact, all migration legislation and debates that I have sat through have felt less like scrutiny and revising in good faith, and more as though they are opposing because of a fundamental disagreement on immigration. Amendments that are being put forward even now, I fear, will gut the original aim of the legislation, and that seems to me to be anti-democratic.

There has been a lot of noise ahead of today’s debate. In fact, I was reading Politico, and one anonymous Labour Peer told that publication that the Lords were preparing for “trench warfare.” He then listed the Bill’s sins: overturning the Supreme Court, being contrary to international law and human rights and so on. He said:

“All these things are likely to put lead in the Lords’ pencil.”


It is interesting that those tools of governance are what excite the juices of noble Lords in this House and get them worked up, whereas they seem rather indifferent to public concerns and rarely reference them, and then only to dismiss with a sneer the “will of the people” phrase.

The most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury stressed the important issue of individual dignity and the value of each and every individual, and of course, he is right. However, that was very much with a focus on those seeking asylum. I ask noble Lords to broaden their focus. It insults the dignity of the British public when their concerns about the potential security threat posed by those entering the country illegally in the absence of proper checks are given second-class status versus international treaties. I can also imagine how vulnerable people feel when they discover that, for example, universities are offering visas to overseas students for lower grades than their kids need to get on to a degree course in this country.

Just a few other issues are bothering me. We are trapped here for hours and hours debating the safety of one African country. I feel uncomfortable reading the plethora of briefings sent out by NGOs detailing horror stories from Rwanda full of human misery, even with accusations of torture, but I seriously worry about demonising a country for the purposes of opposing a UK policy and defeating a Bill. Maybe I am being too cynical, but I cannot help but notice that, only recently, many of the same NGOs and commentators were cheering on and lionising another African country for taking Israel to The Hague. Why did they then turn a blind eye to South Africa’s horrendous record of corruption, massacres of its own workers and standing by during pogroms of Zimbabwean immigrants, and so on? It just seems a bit like picking and choosing.

Then there is the focus on whether the Bill will damage our reputation with international institutions. Should such institutions be treated as sacrosanct? Much play has been made of the condemnation of the Bill by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, and the fact that he denounced any UK lawmaking that wants

“to keep people away from your borders”,

saying that that “will always meet” with the UN’s disapproval. It would mean we would never be able to control our borders. However, I object to taking moral instructions from the UN on refugees after the weekend’s exposé that one of its agencies was implicated in the 7 October anti-Jewish pogrom. I will leave it there.