LAWSON: Lords must now drop insincere objections about Rwanda bill (2024)

Long after sensible readers of this newspaper are tucked up in bed, MPs and peers will late tonight, or even in the early hours of tomorrow morning, be concluding a high-stakes series of 'parliamentary ping-pong'.

This is the term given for the to-and-fro when the House of Lords repeatedly rejects or amends legislation passed by the House of Commons. But convention dictates that, eventually, the Lords must recognise that the elected House's will must prevail.

In this case, the ball has been ping- ponging back and forth between the two Houses over the Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration Bill).

After the Government's measure — to make all those coming illegally across the Channel subject to removal to Rwanda — was yet again knocked back in the Lords last week, the Prime Minister said he would 'accept no more delay' and warned that Parliament must 'sit there and vote until it's done'.

A member of the Government told the Mail that, today, peers 'should bring their sleeping bags' if they plan to defy the Commons yet again.

One of the two remaining Lords amendments seems, on the face of it, to be quite reasonable.

Backed by a number of former military figures and ex-defence ministers in the Lords, it would make any Afghans arriving in 'the small boats' who had served alongside British forces in that ill-fated military campaign exempt from deportation to Rwanda.

But there already exists a number of schemes, notably the Afghan Relocations and Assistance Policy, giving those who assisted our troops (for example, interpreters) the right to relocate to the UK, along with 'a partner, dependent children and additional family members also deemed eligible'.

By the end of last year, the number of Afghans who have been legally re-located here via these schemes had reached almost 28,000.

Doubtless there will be more who are eligible. It is possible that some have been rejected who should not have been. The point, however, is that there already exists a safe and legal route for such Afghans and their families — who may indeed be at risk from the Taliban government because of their work with the British Army — to settle here.

And the refusal of many Labour and crossbench peers to accept this argument raises doubts about the sincerity of those same people when they argue that the answer to the small boats crisis is, as the Refugee Council repeatedly urges, 'to expand safe and legal routes'. That is precisely what is being provided for Afghans who worked with our forces. And if there are shortcomings in its implementation, that should be dealt with at source, not via a form of people trafficking.

There is a second point against the apparently minor amendment being put forward tonight (yet again) in the Lords. If, as the Government intends, the scheme operates as a deterrent to the business model of the people smugglers, it needs to be clear that there will be absolutely no exemptions: that anyone who attempts to come here by such illegal means faces deportation to Rwanda. The policy has a chance to work only if it is seen to be free of loopholes.

It is questionable whether, if a few flights do begin to take place in the summer, the Rwanda scheme really will, as Rishi Sunak somewhat rashly promised, 'stop the boats'. But it is notable that a number of European countries — for this is far from just a problem here in Britain — are looking at similar schemes. They, too, perceive the need for some such deterrent.

It is not just from the likes of the Refugee Council that the Rwanda policy has come in for harsh criticism. The Reform Party UK, which, by complete contrast, regards the Conservatives as having been altogether too soft on the matter, also denounces it.

On BBC's Question Time last week, the party's leader, Richard Tice, said the Rwanda policy, even if passed by the legislature in its entirety, would be completely ineffectual.

He argued that we should do 'what Australia did ten years ago': to 'turn back' the boats full of migrants heading their way. Actually, this policy had been called 'Stop the Boats', which was copied word for word by the Conservatives to describe its Rwanda scheme.

And the Aussie policy was highly effective in discouraging the people-smuggling operation. In fact, when she was Home Secretary, Priti Patel had attempted to emulate the Aussie method. But it foundered for several good reasons.

First, it ran into her opposite number in Paris, Gerald Darmanin, who declared, on what was then called Twitter (for all the world to note): 'France will not accept any practice contrary to the law of the sea … I made it clear to my counterpart.'

It wasn't just the French government that kicked off. Our own Royal Navy point-blank refused to carry out any 'turn-round' operations; and the idea was even denounced by the Royal National Lifeboat Institution — not an organisation which any government in its right mind would go to war with.

Tice claimed blithely that such 'turn-arounds' would be 'legal under international law', but he would — in the entirely inconceivable circ*mstance of becoming Prime Minister — similarly find himself on the other side to the Royal Navy and the RNLI on this point.

There is a very significant difference between the Australian situation and that in the Channel. The Aussies were dealing with large vessels coming across hundreds of miles of ocean. They could be safely redirected to detention centres in Papua New Guinea and Nauru.

But the 'boats' which are coming here across the Channel are flimsy dinghies. A prod from a large naval vessel would as likely as not turn the thing over, with consequences that could all too easily be imagined. That was why our own military declared such seaborne manoeuvres to be 'inappropriate' in these circ*mstances.

Indeed, the Rwanda scheme was initiated when Priti Patel was Home Secretary precisely because she — and the then-PM Boris Johnson — had been forced to abandon the idea of imitating the Australian 'stop the boats' policy.

So, after the Lords are finally forced to concede to the Commons in the wee hours — and I imagine that many of the elderly peers will also be struggling with their waterworks as the hours go by in the voting lobbies — there will, finally, be a chance to find out if the Rwanda scheme really does turn out to be the deterrent it is claimed to be by Rishi Sunak.

Because the next hurdle would be to find firms prepared to fly the deportees to Rwanda, given the controversy and possibly even violence that could be involved.

Airlines have not exactly been queueing up for the business. Even RwandAir, the country's national airline, is one of those companies who are said to have rejected the idea of participating.

In short, the battle is soon to move from the Palace of Westminster to the airfields. Fasten your seatbelts: it's going to be a bumpy ride.