Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill

Stephen Kinnock Excerpts

Consideration of Lords message
Monday 22nd April 2024 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

I call the shadow Minister

[Stephen Kinnock (Aberavon) (Lab)]

There is not a huge amount more to be said about this sham, this con of a Bill, that has not already been said. The plan is as unworkable as it is unaffordable. That is why Labour would instead repurpose the money that is being squandered and set aside for the scheme into a cross-border police unit and security partnership, which would go after the criminal gangs upstream and restore order to our border.

--- Later in debate ---

[Florence Eshalomi (Vauxhall) (Lab/Co-op)]

Given that a permanent secretary has said that there is no evidence the plan will work as a deterrent, as it will account for just 1% of those crossing the channel, does my hon. agree that it is just a gimmick?

[Stephen Kinnock]

My hon. Friend is right: the test of such a policy is whether it will work as a deterrent. When we are dealing with people who have risked life and limb to cross continents, they are not going to be put off by a 1% chance of being sent to Rwanda. The policy fails on its own terms, and the permanent secretary was absolutely right to put that red flag on it two years ago. It is extraordinary that we are where we are today.

[Paula Barker (Liverpool, Wavertree) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend is making an excellent speech. Does he agree that the tokenism of the worst sort that he spoke about was carried on by the Prime Minister’s announcement that 25 courtrooms and 150 judges will be available to deal with legal challenges from asylum seekers? Given that our courts are struggling with backlogs, partly due to not having enough barristers and courts, does he agree that it would be interesting to know how the Government would achieve that?

[Stephen Kinnock]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right about that, although I had forgotten chapter 562 in this never-ending story. My recollection is that the Prime Minister was then slapped down by the judiciary, who said, “We have a huge backlog to get through and this is not a priority.” We should thank my hon. Friend for reminding the House of yet another disastrous chapter in this story.

[Sir Edward Leigh (Gainsborough) (Con)]

In the unlikely event that we have a Labour Government, would the shadow Minister be happy if future Opposition parties, which necessarily and usually dominate the House of Lords, frustrated them? Will he advise his friends up there to respect the will of the elected House?

[Stephen Kinnock]

I will advise the other place to do what it is doing, as a revising Chamber: standing up for its constitutional obligations to look at every piece of legislation that we send to it from this place and take the measures that it feels strongly about. This set of amendments in no way prevents this policy from being enacted or flights from taking off; what we are seeing is simply those Members in the other place doing their constitutional duty.

The plan is not only completely unworkable, but shockingly unaffordable. It is likely to cost an astonishing £2 million per deportee. To add insult to injury, it puts the tens of thousands of asylum seekers who are deemed inadmissible and yet cannot be sent to Rwanda, because of the lack of capacity there, into limbo, in expensive hotels, stuck in a perma-backlog at a staggering cost to the taxpayer. This is a dreadful policy and it is shameful politics.

When the Bill was first introduced, the Prime Minister described it as “emergency legislation”, yet the Government’s management of the parliamentary timetable would suggest that the opposite is the case. Ministers had ample opportunity to schedule debates and votes on 25 and 26 March, before the Easter recess, but they chose not to do so. Indeed, there was plenty of scope to accelerate the process last week. People could be forgiven for concluding that the truth of the matter is that Ministers have been deliberately stringing this out for two reasons: first, because they thought they could make some grubby political capital from the delay; and, secondly, because they have been scrambling to organise a flight and all the other logistics that are not in place. The Prime Minister, in his somewhat whinging and buck-passing press conference this morning, admitted that the first flight to Rwanda will not take off until—checks notes—July.

Today is 22 April. We were initially told that this was “emergency legislation”, yet we are now being told that there will be a 10 to 12-week delay in getting the first flight off the ground. I do not know what your definition of an emergency is, Madam Deputy Speaker, but a 10 to 12-week response time seems a bit of a stretch. Given that none of the amendments to the Bill could be seen as wrecking amendments by any stretch of the imagination, it is difficult to see why those on the Government Benches could not just accept the amendments and get on with it. The fundamental point is that not one of the amendments that have been coming to us from the other place would prevent planes from getting into the air.

Turning first to the amendment in the name of the noble Lord Hope, this amendment simply reflects what the Government have already said: that court judgments are taken at a moment in time and that a country may well be safe at a given point, but not at another. If the Bill passes unamended, this House will, in essence, be asserting that Rwanda will be a safe country for ever more. Surely the indisputable lesson of recent times is that we live in a dangerous and turbulent world, where authoritarians are on the march and the rules-based order is under threat. Who knows what might happen in Rwanda in the future, or in any other country for that matter?

[Imran Hussain]

The Minister made the point that we have entered into a treaty and been told that Rwanda is safe. Does my hon. Friend agree that sets a very serious and dangerous precedent for the future, because that may not always be the case? How will we be able to work our way out of any unsafe country where we have such a treaty in place?

[Stephen Kinnock]

I agree with my hon. Friend. One reason we are seeing such a strong pushback from the other place is precisely that its Members are deeply uncomfortable with trying to make something true that is not true. The Supreme Court ruled unanimously that Rwanda is not a safe country, yet we are being asked to legislate to say that it is. We can legislate to say that the sky is green and the grass is blue, but that does not make it so, and that is why we have such an important point of principle in the Bill.

[Paula Barker]

On that point, will my hon. Friend give way?

--- Later in debate ---

[Madam Deputy Speaker]

I thank the hon. Lady for her courtesy.

[Stephen Kinnock]

The amendment in the name of the noble Lord Hope simply requires the Home Secretary to lay a statement before Parliament confirming that the Rwanda treaty has been implemented and that the country is safe. Prior to issuing his statement, the Home Secretary would presumably take account of advice provided by the Government’s hand-picked monitoring committee, as specified in the treaty.

Lord Hope’s amendment also allows the Home Secretary to lay a statement making clear that Rwanda is no longer safe, should the situation on the ground in Rwanda change. This “trust but verify” approach is embedded in countless pieces of legislation that have made their way on to the statute book over the centuries. It is a perfectly fair, measured, reasonable and non-controversial proposal, and it is simply bizarre and incomprehensible that the Government are refusing to accept it.

Let me turn now to the noble Lord Browne’s amendment. Frankly, I just do not know where to start with this one, Madam Deputy Speaker. It beggars belief that the Government are still insisting on being able to deport to Rwanda Afghans who have bravely fought alongside British forces against the Taliban. It really is shameful that we are still debating what should be a given. We owe a debt of gratitude to the Afghans who stood shoulder to shoulder with our troops, yet this Government are seeking to trash our reputation as a country that honours its debts. What a disgrace. Ministers should hang their heads in shame.

Over the course of the past few weeks, Ministers have deployed a variety of spurious and mealy-mouthed arguments to defend their position, but the one that they have most frequently used is that there are already safe and legal routes in place in the shape of the ARAP and the Afghan citizens resettlement scheme, but that is simply not the case. Operation Warm Welcome became operation cold shoulder when the Prime Minister torpedoed both schemes and left these Afghans stranded—shocking but true.

Court documents show that, in November 2022, the Prime Minister issued instructions to halt flights from neighbouring Pakistan for an entire year for Afghans who had already been granted resettlement rights in the UK, and only restarted them when the Pakistani Government threatened to send these heroic individuals back across the border to meet their fate at the hands of the Taliban. Let the content of those court documents sink in: the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom explicitly instructed the Ministry of Defence and the Home Office to stop assisting Afghans who had put their lives on the line for our country. What a disgrace. What a betrayal of British values. What a hammer blow to our moral standing in the world, but the noble Lord Browne’s amendment is driven not only by a basic moral imperative, but by our national interest and military logic for the simple and obvious reason that the ability of our armed forces to recruit local allies to support us in the future will be severely constrained if this Bill passes unamended. It should therefore not come as a surprise to anyone that our armed forces are outraged and repelled by the Government’s refusal to accept Lord Browne’s amendment.

Indeed, just last weekend, 13 senior military figures signed a letter to the Sunday Telegraph stating robustly that

“any brave men and women who have fought alongside our armed forces or served the UK Government overseas”

must be exempt from removal to Rwanda. I urge Members across the House to join me in supporting the two amendments that are in front of us today. This whole process has been a farce, but if we just pass these amendments we can at least send the message that we are not a country that chooses to deport its military allies to a country on the other side of the world and that we are a country that cares about whether we are sending some of the most vulnerable people on the planet to a place that is safe for them. At the very least, we owe that basic level of respect and decency to ourselves as a nation and to the people whom this policy will affect. Unfortunately, respect and decency for anyone, whether in relation to our nation, to asylum seekers or to the British taxpayer, is not something that this Prime Minister and his Government hold in any regard whatever. That is why their time is up. They are not fit to govern. I fear that tonight, yet again, they will demonstrate that point in spades.

[Madam Deputy Speaker]

As I have just intimated, there will be an immediate time limit on Back-Bench speeches of three minutes.