Illegal Migration Bill

Debate between Beth Winter and Patrick Grady

Consideration of Lords message
Monday 17th July 2023 Commons Chamber

[Patrick Grady]

A constituent contacted me recently and said that I seemed to be speaking an awful lot in the Chamber about immigration and asylum issues. I suppose that that is correct, but then that is because the Government allocate so much time in the Chamber to immigration and asylum issues. This is the third major piece of primary legislation on immigration since 2015. However, the majority of constituents—hundreds of constituents—who get in touch with me on each of these pieces of legislation tell me just how disappointed, if not horrified, they are at the Tory UK Government’s attitude to people who come here seeking refuge.

In rejecting all the Lords amendments before us today, the Government are showing just how hostile an environment they want to create—not just for asylum seekers, but for almost anyone who wants to make their home here in the UK. The fact that they will not accept Lords amendment 1B, which is a considerably softer version of what we discussed last week, demonstrates that. If the Government are truly committed to the international conventions listed in the amendment—particularly the 1951 refugee convention—they really should have no problem agreeing that they will form part of the interpretation of the Act when it comes into force.

I have also heard from constituents who want to ensure that LGBTQ people who arrive here from places where they can face imprisonment for simply being who they are cannot be removed to those countries. That is what the Lords are seeking to achieve in Lords amendment 23B. Accepting that amendment would save time and public money because otherwise, by the Minister’s own admission, claimants would have to make suspensive claims against removal to their country of origin. That is what the Minister says he wants to avoid. He wants to avoid loopholes and needless court cases. In that case, he should support Lords amendment 23B.

The amendments that seek to protect children from indefinite detention and that maintain human trafficking protections speak for themselves, as does the Government’s insistence on rejecting those amendments. The Government keep asking those of us who are opposed to the Bill for alternative proposals for dealing with irregular arrivals, and these are clearly outlined in Lords amendment 102B and in the Lord Archbishop of Canterbury’s amendments 107B and 107C. The Minister keeps saying that he wants to establish safe and legal routes. Well, that is what Lords amendment 102B will require him to do. I have met many asylum seekers through the Maryhill Integration Network and elsewhere who would much prefer to have come here from Eritrea, Iran or other countries that have been mentioned today through a safe and legal route, rather than the risks, costs and desperation of coming on lorries and boats.

The archbishop’s proposals for the development of a strategy on refugees and human trafficking are perhaps the most straightforward and easily implementable of all the clauses and amendments so far. The Government regularly accept amendments requiring them to publish strategies and reviews on all kinds of legislation. Perhaps they do not want to support this one because the transparency and accountability that would come with requiring the Government to undertake a long-term analysis and make a long-term plan in response to global population flows would reveal the true hollowness of the rest of their proposals—the inhumanity and the self-defeating implications of the hostile environment.

Millions of people will be on the move in the coming years and decades. They will be fleeing wars that we have financed and climate change that we have helped to cause. Experiences in southern Europe and the American midwest this week suggests that they will not just be moving from the southern hemisphere either. Nobody is saying that the United Kingdom should have completely open borders and take unlimited numbers of migrants, but we have to be prepared to take our fair share, just as other countries welcomed refugees fleeing famine and clearances on these islands not that many generations ago.

If Government Ministers and Back Benchers truly respect the role that the House of Lords is supposed to play in the UK constitution, they really ought to listen to the messages that their lordships are sending today and will send in the days to come. As it stands, people in Glasgow North and across Scotland are listening to the rhetoric of the Conservative Government and deciding that they want no more of it. They will be seeking the safe and legal route to independence as soon as possible.

[Beth Winter (Cynon Valley) (Lab)]

I will begin by putting on the record my complete opposition to this horrendous Bill in its entirety. It is cruel and inhumane. It will put people at serious risk of further exploitation. It is stoking division within our society, and it undermines constitutional principles and human rights.

We are here today to focus on amendments, so I will briefly say that I support all the Lords amendments before us, particularly Lords amendment 1B, which others have already spoken about, in the name of my friend Baroness Chakrabarti. The amendment sets out the Bill’s intention to comply with a host of human rights conventions, including those with regard to the protection of human rights and the rights of the child, and against trafficking human beings.

It is vital that we underline our commitment to human rights, and, to quote the First Minister of Wales, Mark Drakeford,

“provide a warm welcome to all of those who seek sanctuary”.

That is particularly important as accommodation sites that have been identified by the Home Office for asylum seekers become targets for protests by the far right. That is happening in Wales at the moment. Amendment 1B is a modest and uncontroversial amendment. The Lords have backed it twice. More than 70 organisations have stated their support. The Government must yield and stop voting it down. If the Government are, as they say, confident that the Bill is compatible with the UK’s international law obligations, there is nothing to fear from the amendment.

I also support Lords amendment 102B in the name of Baroness Stroud, a Conservative peer, which provides for a duty to establish safe and legal routes. This is, again, a modest and uncontroversial amendment that could make an unsupportable Bill slightly better. We need to go much further. We need to expand safe routes, as organisations such as the Refugee Council, Care4Calais and the Public and Commercial Services Union have argued, in line with the amendment. We also need to tackle the backlog with a fair, humane and speedy processing system.

The Government have lost control over the asylum system. Their “stop the boats” rhetoric will not stop the boats because people are genuinely seeking asylum from war and poverty, and nobody would go on a boat, risking their life, unless they were desperate. We should be welcoming people to our country. What is contained in the Bill does not represent the type of country that I want to live in, or that I want my children or grandchildren to live in. What I and millions of others want is a country and society that is based on care, compassion, kindness, generosity, respect, inclusivity and, yes, solidarity.

I support today’s Lords amendments, which should be accepted, but if the Bill is passed this week, I and many others in this House—and, more importantly, outside it—will continue to oppose and campaign against this appalling piece of legislation at every opportunity.

Illegal Migration Bill

Debate between Beth Winter and Patrick Grady

Committee stage
Tuesday 28th March 2023 Commons Chamber

[Patrick Grady (Glasgow North) (SNP)]

I start by congratulating Humza Yousaf on becoming Scotland’s new First Minister, and wish him every success in taking Scotland forward to independence. He, of course, comes from a heritage beyond these shores, and that should be a matter of celebration and pride.

Once again, the amendments before us today show that this Bill pleases nobody. Opposition Members are trying on a cross-party basis to restore some basic elements of humanity and decency to the process and make sure that the UK actually continues to have something that resembles an asylum system, but it seems that for many Tory Back Benchers, the Bill does not go far enough: Tory extremists want to make it even more punitive. We see that, for example, in amendment 136, tabled by the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent North (Jonathan Gullis), who is no longer in his place. Attempting to ban the use of hotels for temporary accommodation is simply gesture politics. It is probably unworkable and is certainly impractical, and is likely to further increase, not reduce, the cost to the taxpayer. I wonder how often the hon. Member and many others who have spoken today have actually met with asylum seekers who are staying in such hotels—who, incidentally, I am happy to consider as constituents of mine who have a voice that needs to be represented in this place.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow Central (Alison Thewliss) said, too many Tory Back Benchers speak of asylum seekers as some sort of amorphous, dehumanised blob, which I think is completely inappropriate. The asylum seekers I have met, through the Maryhill Integration Network and elsewhere, do not want to live in hotels: they want to be able to work and contribute to society. The way to get asylum seekers out of hotels is to give them the right to work, the right to earn a living—which, by the way, is another fundamental human right—and to let them pay for their own accommodation and pay tax into the system. At the end of their asylum process, if their claim is rejected, there have always been processes for removal and return; however, if their claim is accepted, they will be much further down the road of community integration, and at far less cost to the taxpayer. Instead, this Bill and the amendment tabled by the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent North will channel yet more money into the hands of outsourcing companies such as Mears and Serco, and many of us will continue to hear stories at our constituency surgeries of substandard and unsuitable accommodation being paid for by taxpayers.

Today’s group of new clauses and amendments really gets to the heart of what the Government say this Bill is trying to achieve. Many of us suspect that what the Government are actually trying to achieve is a fight, first with the House of Lords, then with the Supreme Court and then with the European Court of Human Rights, but much of that was covered yesterday. Clause 2 provides sweeping powers and duties that add up to what the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees has described as a ban on asylum.

During the passage of the Nationality and Borders Act, many of us asked how the United Kingdom, which is surrounded by water, can ever be the first safe country of arrival for an undocumented migrant, an issue that my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Edinburgh South West (Joanna Cherry) touched on. How can anyone traveling from Iran, Eritrea, Sudan, or practically anywhere else on the globe be expected to meet the third condition in clause 2(4) about not passing through a safe third country? Maybe there is some inventive way that the Minister can tell us about—he has paid so much attention to the debate. The hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton) should not have been surprised that the Minister was having conversations on the Front Bench, because he has spent most of the debate looking at his phone. I do not know whether there has been an update to Angry Birds or Candy Crush, or maybe it is just a particularly difficult Wordle today.

Nevertheless, what are the inventive ways in which people can reach this country without passing through a safe third country? If someone pushes off from the coast of Eritrea, navigates the horn of Africa, sails round the Cape of Good Hope, makes it up the north and south Atlantic ocean without straying into anybody else’s territorial waters and lands on the south coast of England, will they be allowed to claim asylum under clause 2? In fact, will there even be a way of knowing? That person would not even be allowed to make a claim, so when would they get the chance to prove that that was the journey they had undertaken?

In order to mitigate these ridiculous restrictions, the SNP has tabled amendments 186 to 196. I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow Central for humanising the people affected in the way that she did. The amendments would offer protection to people who are under the age of 18; people already determined as refugees under the terms of the refugee convention; people who face discrimination because of their sexual orientation; people who are victims of torture; people who have been trafficked or face slavery; people who have HIV or AIDS; and people who have come from Ukraine or from Afghanistan. Given the outrage we have heard today from sections of the Conservative party about the treatment of asylum seekers from Afghanistan, I hope the Government will be prepared to accept our amendment 189, or they will face the prospect of their Members joining us in the Lobby in support of it later on.

I asked the Minister yesterday, and he did not bother to respond—again, I am not sure he was listening—where the evidence is for the deterrent effect that these powers and the threat of immediate deportation are supposed to have. Why has the Nationality and Borders Act 2022 not had that impact? Should those powers not have already started to work, because the powers in clause 2(3) are backdated to 7 March, when the Bill was introduced? Surely there should already be a slowdown in the number of arrivals. If there is a reduction in arrivals from Albania, it is because of a separate arrangement that the Government have come to. The reality is that this clause and these powers will not have a deterrent effect.

Freedom from Torture identifies four principal reasons for its clients undertaking perilous journeys to reach these shores. One is

“to join family or community that could offer security and support”,

and another is

“because of familiarity with the UK’s language, culture and institutions”.

The UK Government spend thousands, probably millions of pounds promoting those things abroad, saying, “Britain is great. Come and get a Chevening scholarship. Come to the United Kingdom”, except when someone actually tries to apply, they cannot, unless they have an awful lot of money. Another of the reasons is

“the hope of reaching a place where human rights are respected”,

which is certainly ironic given the Bill in front of us and the clauses we are debating today. The final reason is

“a lack of safety in the countries they were passing through.”

There is very little that the Government can do to address any of those pull factors through legislation. Several stakeholders make the point that many arriving here have little or no familiarity with the asylum rules, so the punitive measures in the Bill, particularly the powers in clause 2, will do nothing to change that.

Amendments 174 and 175, which I have tabled, relate more specifically to the debate we heard yesterday about the clauses on safe and legal routes. The amendments would ensure that this House has a meaningful say on what the cap or target for entrants under safe and legal routes should be. The current proposal for a statutory instrument drafted by Ministers with no room for amendment would mean really no say at all. Brexit was supposed to be about parliamentary sovereignty and this place taking back control of decision making, so why Conservative Back Benchers are so keen to hand over powers to the Executive is not clear at all.

I also welcome new clause 29 tabled by my right hon. Friend the Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd (Liz Saville Roberts). The commitment of Welsh Ministers and Senedd Cymru to making their country a place of sanctuary is hugely encouraging, and she is right to seek to make sure that the clauses in the Bill recognise and do not interfere with that commitment. Perhaps nation of sanctuary status is something that our new First Minister and his team will consider for Scotland, because we already aspire to those ideals, even if we do not use that formal term.

In conclusion, it is worth reflecting that Greek philosophers figured out in about 500 BC that the world was round. That does not seem to have sunk in on the far reaches of the Tory Back Benches. We cannot just keep pushing people away in the expectation that they might fall off a cliff at the edge of a flat earth. If we keep pushing people around the globe, eventually they will come back to us. Migration is a global reality. It is part of human nature. Over the centuries, people had to flee these islands because their crops were devastated by blight or because they were forced from the land to make way for sheep. It is just as well that America, Canada and Australia were not implementing hostile environment immigration policies back then, and it is just as well that we have global treaties and conventions to protect human rights and regulate how refugees and asylum seekers are treated by countries of arrival. That is not for this Government, however.

The exceptionalist attitude displayed by some Tories, which first led to Brexit, and which we see in amendments that have been tabled to the Bill, now stretches beyond the European Union and the Council of Europe to key United Nations frameworks that have sought to keep everyone on this planet safe since the end of the second world war. Withdrawing from those frameworks might be their ambition, but it is not the ambition of people in Glasgow North or people across Scotland. If the Government continue down the road they are going, the international agreement we will be withdrawing from is the Treaty of Union 1707.

[Beth Winter (Cynon Valley) (Lab)]

Having studied and listened to the entire debate today has only strengthened my resolve that we must oppose this rotten Bill in its entirety. It is inhumane. It is immoral, and it demonises and scapegoats the most vulnerable, desperate people who are fleeing violence, terror and poverty. We should be welcoming them with open arms.

As others have said, I have to express my concern at some of the inflammatory and inaccurate comments by some Conservative Members this afternoon. I also want to reiterate the concerns expressed about the lack of scrutiny: 10 or 12 hours to be considering in excess of 130 amendments is totally unacceptable. Notwithstanding my belief that the Bill should be thrown out in its entirety, I want to set out my concerns about some of the clauses and to speak in support of a number of amendments before the Committee.

Elections Bill

Debate between Beth Winter and Patrick Grady

Consideration of Lords amendments
Wednesday 27th April 2022 Commons Chamber

[Beth Winter]

How do you follow that?

In the week in which the Government intend to prorogue the House, they have voted to carry over three Bills, and this is the fifth Bill they seek to force through following repeated Government defeats in the Lords. The Government really are losing their grip, and I regret that, in response, they are seeking to grab democracy by the throat.

I wish to confine my comments to Lords amendments 22, 23 and 86, which I support. First, let me highlight the extraordinary developments regarding the clauses that affect the work of the Electoral Commission. I express my support for Lords amendments 22 and 23, which removed what were clauses 15 and 16. As others have said, those clauses gave the Government the power to establish a Government strategy and policy statement for the Electoral Commission, and to place a duty on it to have regard to guidance issued by the Government relating to any of its functions.

3.30 pm

The Bill’s erosion of the commission’s independence gave rise to the letter signed by its chair and all but one of its board members on 21 February this year, which said:

“It is our firm and shared view that the introduction of a Strategy and Policy Statement—enabling the Government to guide the work of the Commission—is inconsistent with the role that an independent electoral commission plays in a healthy democracy. This independence is fundamental to maintaining confidence and legitimacy in our electoral system.”

The letter went on:

“The Commission’s accountability is direct to the UK’s parliaments and should remain so, rather than being subject to government influence.”

For that reason, I urge the Government to think again about the measures.

The Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee also wrote to the Minister only last week to strongly urge the Government to accept the amendments tabled in the House of Lords by Lord Judge that removed clauses 15 and 16, as the Committee recommended in its report. Furthermore, in lieu of any Government support for the amendments, the Committee urged the Government to consider amending the Bill

“to provide that the Electoral Commission is able to depart from the guidance set out in the Statement if it has a statutory duty to do so or if it reasonably believes it is justified in specific circumstances”.

Regrettably, the Government have not done so, which is why I support Lords amendments 22 and 23.

Let me turn to Lords amendment 86, on voter ID, in respect of which I wish to draw some parallels with the Welsh experience. Initially, the Welsh Government withheld legislative consent for the Bill because it affects Welsh elections, because there was an issue with consulting the Welsh Government and because it negatively affected devolved powers. However, the Government have since conceded on some of those concerns and it is welcome that their voter ID proposals will not now apply to Senedd or Welsh council elections.

Although the Senedd has now granted legislative consent, there are still concerns about the Bill in all sorts of respects, but specifically with regard to voter ID. The Welsh Government say that the UK Government plans for voter ID risk making voting harder. Although I welcome the fact that the provisions do not apply to Wales, the inconsistencies between UK parliamentary elections and Welsh elections will cause all sorts of confusion for electors in Wales.

I support Lords amendment 86, which was tabled by Lord Willets and adds an additional list of documents that would be accepted as a form of identification for electors, for the reasons already given. The relevant part of the Bill is discriminatory and will disenfranchise millions of people. We already have extremely low turnouts for elections—the evidence is there—which is why in Wales we are doing the opposite and looking into different methods to encourage people to turn out to vote.

I will conclude with a quote from our Counsel General, Mick Antoniw, because the Welsh Government remain opposed to the Bill, which they believe—Opposition Members share these views—

“is more about voter suppression and enabling foreign funding than enhancing electoral democracy and integrity.”

[Patrick Grady]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Cynon Valley (Beth Winter), who is essentially right in everything she says.

The scrutiny of this Bill so far has been an absolute travesty of the democracy it is supposed to regulate—the lack of engagement on the Government Benches is testimony to that. The Government changed the scope of the Bill after Second Reading, and crashed it through a Bill Committee, despite the fact that constitutional Bills should be considered in Committee of the whole House. Now the Lords, for their own mysterious reasons, have sent it back, largely with Government corrections and a few meagre concessions. We applaud the Lords on taking a stand on voter ID and the role of the Electoral Commission, but their lordships should have forced the Government into using the Parliament Acts to get the Bill through, given the damage it will do to what remains of Westminster democracy.

The amendments on the right of voters with special needs, particularly those who are blind or partially sighted, to vote independently and in secret are welcome, although they do not go as far as the Royal National Institute of Blind People has called for them to do. Indeed, they do not go as far as the original legislation that this Bill is changing, so once again this is a Bill seeking to solve problems that did not previously exist; it is creating its own problems. There must now be clear guidance on how those provisions are implemented, and careful monitoring and reporting to ensure that those with specific requirements can vote in confidence, in every sense of that word.

It appears from the Minister’s comments that the Government think we should be grateful for the various concessions that respect the devolution settlement and the right of the devolved institutions to manage and regulate their own elections. She said that she had difficulty engaging with Scottish Government Ministers and officials. Well, perhaps if this Government had started the process before the Bill was published, and perhaps if there had been proper prelegislative scrutiny, a lot of that would not have been necessary. The reality, of course, is that the Scottish Parliament has refused to give legislative consent for the Bill as a whole.

What mostly seems to be happening, through these amendments, is the result of a late realisation that all the different electoral cycles in the UK mean that we would never be out of “regulated periods” across the UK, which would make the Tories’ predilection for dark money and AstroTurf campaigning a little trickier. I am not sure that the changes have been made in the best interests of the devolved institutions.

Where the Lords have chosen to take a stand, the Government and this House should be paying close attention. The integrity of the Electoral Commission ought to be protected, and the easiest way to do that is to support the Lords in their amendment removing the two clauses that would allow Government direction and interference. We demonstrated throughout consideration in Committee and on Report the danger of the Government’s plans to allow for ministerial direction of the commission, which is pretty much unprecedented in western democracies. The Government’s amendments in lieu, such as they are, do not go nearly far enough and are themselves a concession that they were trying to overreach with the powers they put into the Bill, so we should agree with the Lords and just take those clauses out entirely.

The House should also support the Lords on their amendment 86. It is disappointing that they did not remove the clauses on photo ID altogether. Again, throughout the Bill’s progress in this House, we have heard how the requirement to present photo ID will depress turnout and make it more difficult for those who are already in marginalised groups to have their voices heard at the ballot box. We heard that repeatedly in evidence and, as we have heard from other Members, that has been heard by the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee.

We hear Members say, “Well, what level of voter fraud is acceptable?” There is no evidence that voter fraud at the moment is as rife as they are pretending.

Nationality and Borders Bill

Debate between Beth Winter and Patrick Grady

Consideration of Lords message
Tuesday 26th April 2022 Commons Chamber

[Patrick Grady (Glasgow North) (SNP)]

You are right, Madam Deputy Speaker, that the House is considering narrower and narrower aspects of the Bill, but despite the fact that this is the fifth time it has come to the House, still no Minister has been able to explain how the United Kingdom, which is surrounded by water, can ever be the first safe country of arrival for an undocumented asylum seeker.

The proposals in the Bill, and the Government’s determination to overturn repeated amendments of the House of Lords on this aspect, are literally inhumane. The Minister stands at the Dispatch Box and says that we fully comply with the refugee convention and therefore an amendment to put the refugee convention into the Bill is unnecessary. He is contradicting himself in his own terms. Instead the Government want to make criminals out of Eritrean human rights defenders fleeing for their lives, LGBT+ women and men from Rwanda seeking a more tolerant society in which to live, and Ukrainians who, for whatever reason, cannot get through the interminable Home Office visa processing system to reunite here with friends and families.

When the Minister winds up, can he explain whether the effect of the Bill and the agreement is that if a young Ukrainian man arrives at the UK border without documentation, he will be criminalised—or will he be sent to build a new life in Rwanda? Indeed, when an asylum seeker from Rwanda arrives here on a small boat, will they be sent back to Rwanda to seek asylum and rebuild their life? How is that possibly supposed to work? In what world could that possibly match with the provisions and duties that this country has under the terms of the refugee convention as outlined in Lords amendment 5?

It is not just the Archbishop of Canterbury who is speaking out on this—and incidentally he has every right to do so, because he is a member of the legislature as a Member of the House of the Lords—because religious leaders across the country have written to us. In amendment 7, the Lords calls once again for asylum seekers to be granted the right to work—not granted the right to work but for their right to work to be recognised, because the right to work is a fundamental human right that cannot be taken away. Using your labour to earn your keep is such a right. I echo the tribute that my hon. Friend the Member for Cumbernauld, Kilsyth and Kirkintilloch East (Stuart C. McDonald) paid to the work of the Maryhill Integration Network in this regard. Denying that opportunity to asylum seekers, along with the denial of access to public funds in some cases, is not only degrading to them but actively harmful to our own economy and to wider society.

This Bill has been of huge concern to constituents in Glasgow North who have followed it right the way through every single level of amendments that we have had from the House of Lords. Over the course of the Bill’s progress, I have had literally hundreds of messages, ultimately asking for the whole Bill to be withdrawn, but if not, then at least to try to humanise it wherever possible, as their lordships have tried to do this evening. If the Government will not listen to the House of Lords and will not listen to people in Scotland, where is the precious Union? Where is what we are supposed to be doing in working together? The Scottish Parliament is ready and willing to accept responsibility for immigration law, and the people of Scotland are ready to accept it and all the other powers that go along with being an independent country.

[Beth Winter (Cynon Valley) (Lab)]

I rise to speak in support of Lords amendments passed earlier today. It is clear that, even today, Members of the Lords have made efforts to table new text to find a route to conclude debate on this Bill. Let us remind ourselves that the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees has warned that the Bill undermines the 1951 refugee convention and that its policies would risk the lives and wellbeing of vulnerable people.

I wish to support, in particular, Lords amendment 5D, moved by Baroness Chakrabarti, who has worked tirelessly in her opposition in tabling significant amendments to this horrendous Bill. This amendment sets out that the provisions of this part of the Bill must be read and given effect in a way that is compatible with the refugee convention.

I express my concerns about the Bill’s compatibility with our international obligations, particularly following the announcement of the memorandum of understanding between the Home Secretary and the Rwandan Government. Senior legal representatives have commented on that agreement, including Stephanie Boyce, the president of the Law Society of England and Wales, who recently said that there are

“serious questions about whether these plans would or could comply with the UK’s promises under international treaty”.

We all know that the Government’s proposal of pushbacks of boats in the channel has been abandoned this week in the face of legal scrutiny in the courts. I put on record my thanks to the Public and Commercial Services Union—the trade union of Home Office staff, including Border Force staff—and the charities Care4Calais, Channel Rescue and Freedom from Torture for taking on this legal challenge. As PCS general secretary Mark Serwotka, a fellow Welsh person, said:

“This humiliating climbdown by the government is a stunning victory for Home Office workers and for refugees. There is little doubt that lives have been saved.”

This action has demonstrated that the Government’s bluster about a legal basis for the pushback policy was just that. Are we now meant to take at the Home Secretary’s word that the “New Plan for Immigration” and the horrendous, inhuman, unethical Rwanda policy are just as legally watertight? Forgive me if I am sceptical.