UK-Rwanda Partnership

Yvette Cooper Excerpts

Wednesday 6th December 2023 Commons Chamber

[Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab)]

I thank the Home Secretary for advance sight of the statement.

There is total chaos in the Government and the Conservative party. These are the desperate dying days of a party ripping itself apart. It is clearly totally out of ideas and has lost any sense of leadership or direction. We have the Home Secretary making a statement, but there are rumours that the Immigration Minister has resigned. Where is he? Perhaps the Home Secretary could make that the first question he answers: does he still have an Immigration Minister in place? The Conservatives have open warfare on their Back Benches, the starting gun has been fired on the next leadership election and, once again, the whole country is paying the price for this chaos.

This is the third Home Secretary to go to Rwanda with a cheque book and come back waving a piece of paper making grand promises. This is the third piece of new Tory legislation on channel crossings in two years. Each time, they have told us that new laws would stop all the boat crossings and send everyone who arrived to another country, but they had to partially revoke the first law because it was making things worse and they have not implemented the second one because they know it will not work. Now, they are on their third new law. Forgive us for not believing that this one is going to solve anything, either.

The previous Home Secretary seems to agree with us, because she is already saying tonight that the Bill is “fatally flawed” and that it will not stop the boats. One side of the Conservative party is warning that it does not come close to meeting Suella’s test; the other side is appalled that the Home Secretary, who used to wander round the world promoting international law, just boasted in his statement about a new British Bill that tells the courts not just to ignore international law, but to ignore the facts. What kind of party have they become?

What of the view from No. 10? The Prime Minister has just met his Back Benchers, and the official briefing from that meeting says that he has told MPs that the Government have gone as far as possible, but Rwanda did not want to be part of anything that broke or disapplied international law. The statement from the Rwandan Government says:

“Without lawful behaviour by the UK, Rwanda would not be able to continue with the Migration and Economic Development Partnership.”

You could not make this up!

Our Supreme Court says that the Rwanda scheme is a problem because of evidence that Rwanda is not complying with international treaties on the treatment of asylum seekers, but the only thing stopping the British Government ignoring international law completely is the Rwandan Government. It is the Rwandan Government keeping us on the straight and narrow. The Prime Minister is too scared to defend a policy in its own terms and too scared to tell his Back Benchers what he really thinks—too scared to take a view. Instead, he is hiding behind President Kagame. Weak, weak, weak. He does not deserve to be running the country if he cannot even sort out the issues and the divisions on his flagship policy in his own party.

And all of this for what? For a scheme that will likely cover less than 1% of the people who arrive in this country to claim asylum and will cost hundreds of millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money. Will the Home Secretary tell us about the cost? In 2022, the UK taxpayer paid Rwanda £140 million, but the permanent secretary has said that there are additional payments each year. Will the Home Secretary tell us, on top of that £140 million, how much more has already been sent as an additional payment this year? Is there a secret commitment to make annual payments under the migration and economic development partnership even if no asylum seekers are sent to Rwanda? Will he confirm that the British taxpayer will also have to pay additional millions to sort out the problems in the Rwandan asylum system, even though the Government are totally failing to sort out the problems and delays in the British asylum system, which the Conservatives broke? Will he also confirm that the UK is paying costs for people sent to Rwanda for five years? Will he tell us how much that will cost? Will he confirm that it will be at least twice as much as dealing with those cases here? Will he also tell us, instead of trying to hide the information, the total sum that he will be paying to Rwanda?

Will the Home Secretary tell us how many people are going to be covered? The treaty says that it is limited by capacity in Rwanda, and the Court of Appeal said that it would be 100 people and that talk of thousands of people was “political hyperbole”. Will he now admit that even if he ever gets this failing scheme off the ground, it will cover less than 1% of the people who applied for asylum last year? Will he tell us how many Rwandan refugees the UK is going to take, and who is going to pay for them?

The Home Secretary has a treaty and a law that he knows will not stop dangerous boat crossings. We should be taking action to stop those crossings, to go after the criminal gangs and to clear the asylum backlog, and he knows that Labour’s plan to set up a new cross-border unit would have far more effect than the things that he has been talking about today. He says Rwanda is not the “be-all and end-all”, but his Back Benchers think it is do or die—that is why he is in so much chaos. He thinks—he has said it privately—that this whole thing is “batshit”. That is nothing on what he has had to swallow to come forward and make this statement today.

This is total chaos. The Government are arguing about full-fat, semi-skimmed or skimmed options—it is a full-on milk war in the Tory party, which sums up this failing Government. They cannot solve their own Tory boats crisis. They cannot defend our border security. They cannot solve their broken asylum system, and they cannot hold their party together. They do not deserve to run the country. Britain deserves better than this.

[Hon. Members]

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