Time and the Rwanda policy

The government will not be able to force this Bill through the House of Lords

How does one get one’s mind around the Rwanda policy?

It really is an extraordinary thing: far more to do with lore and fantasy, than law and policy. (Perhaps I should not have changed the name of this Substack.)

Now that we have had time to digest the treaty and the Bill (and accompanying documents), a couple of features are apparent.

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First, the lack of any serious strategy.

Had the government been serious about implementing this policy - as a supposed deterrent or otherwise - the policy would now be in place.

The policy was announced back in April 2022. The government was told (now over a year ago) that the scheme needed to be done by treaty and not by a non-legal (and flimsy) Memorandum of Understanding. The government also had enough time to ensure that the arrangements in Rwanda were robust enough so as to protect the legitimate rights of the removed asylum seekers.

But the government did nothing of this crucial work. The policy essentially existed in a floating political-media mode, rather than in a grounded law-and-policy mode.

Yes, the policy is awful in moral terms; but in a way we are lucky that the government was not sufficiently competent to implement this disgusting scheme.

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Second, the lack of time left.

Despite comments to the contrary, the government now has not got enough time to force the Bill into law under the Parliament Acts if the Bill is rejected by the House of Lords.

Indeed, in legislative terms, the government has hardly any time left to do anything which can suffer a delay.

Under the relevant legislation (which admittedly is not easy to follow), it would effectively take at least a year-and-a-month to set up the necessary procedural steps to force the Bill into law against House of Lords objections - and that is with the briskest possible timetable.

But this current parliament has to end at the latest (by automatic operation of law) in a year’s time.

Unless the House of Lords promptly supports this assault on human rights which was not in the manifesto (and that is unlikely) the Bill in either its current or similar form has no real chance at becoming law.

And without the accompanying Bill, with its cynical deeming provision and other unpleasant aspects, then the treaty by itself will probably not be enough to protect the scheme from legal challenge, unless actual conditions in Rwanda substantially improve in the the next few months.

In essence: this is the worst possible stage of a parliament to introduce such contentious legislation, and only a fool or a knave would have waited this long to introduce this legislation, and not any serious law and policy maker.

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Of course, if we drop the pretence that this has anything to do with serious law and policy making, we are left with a pantomime policy.

The government wants us to boo at the desperate asylum seekers and their dastardly lawyers and for us to jeer at the national courts and the international conventions.

The government then wants the claps and cheers of political and media supporters.

This may be satisfying for some, but as many in the theatre would tell us: a good pantomime can actually be difficult to stage.

Both adults and children get restless and bored when nothing interesting is actually happening.

This pantomime policy may not even work as pantomime.

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The boats will continue to come - and the government is now wedded to a policy that cannot be implemented in time.

(And even if the policy is implemented there is no evidence that there will be any deterrent effect - which is the deeper absurdity of the situation.)

Only a deranged genius could have come up with such a counter-productive policy, which is not only wicked - but also inept.