The government’s current position on the Rwanda scheme is unlikely to boost its electoral hopes – and to understand why, we should look to David Cameron and a particular pre-Brexit failure. Cast your mind back to the moment the former Tory prime minister’s renegotiated deal for our EU membership “exploded on the launchpad” ahead of the referendum. He and his team had worked very, very hard. While they hadn’t got what they had set out to gain, the deal they came back with (the “emergency break” on EU migration) felt like a significant achievement. Perhaps it was, amid the constraints imposed on him in Brussels.
But voters don’t grade politicians on effort, they judge by results. And compared with what they wanted – and indeed, what Cameron had promised – the terms he came back with were entirely inadequate. Instead of a definite end to freedom of movement, there was a time-limited and arcane mechanism that might never have been used at all. What was supposed to be the foundation of his referendum campaign turned into a self-inflicted disaster.
Rishi Sunak looks increasingly to have fallen into the same trap. The sheer difficulty of delivering the Rwanda scheme means that getting that first plane off the ground (if it ever happens) will feel like a triumph to those who have made it happen – a well-earned reward for a herculean effort.
But it isn’t going to stop the boats. It couldn’t, even if it worked perfectly. The number of deportees Rwanda has agreed to take is only a fraction of those that would be needed to create a credible deterrent. At its best, Rwanda would have been a better policy for the start of a parliament; a pilot, an opportunity to work out the kinks and refine the model before negotiating other, larger deals. As a result, Sunak is now staring down the same barrel as Cameron in 2016. The electorate is likely to take a cold, hard look at his best effort and decide it isn’t close to good enough.
Each man reached this point by the same road, too. They have both tried to find a way to do something about an issue that didn’t actually bother them personally, without challenging any of the fundamentals of the status quo. The best explanation for why Sunak has gone so hard on Channel crossings is that he knows he needs to have something to say about immigration, but doesn’t want to talk about legal immigration, which has risen dramatically over the course of the current parliament and far outstrips the crossings of those on small boats.
Who can blame him? It’s a problem on a much vaster scale than illegal entry; tackling it would be much more difficult (in theory), and, as a creature of the Treasury, Sunak probably doesn’t really see anything fundamentally wrong with the current setup anyway. In the absence of real, per-capita growth, immigration helps to massage the GDP figures. The impression from speaking to MPs is that he wouldn’t be talking about immigration at all, if he could help it.
We can see the same dynamic playing out in the tortured progress of the Rwanda scheme. Downing Street hoped to get the legislation through the courts without having to confront the serious conflict between its aspirations on border control and the UK’s present international commitments. Despite an initial victory in the high court, this strategy failed. Now, there’s chatter that the Conservatives might try to make an election issue of the European court of human rights (ECHR) if it continues to stymie deportations.
Even those on the right of the Conservative party who want Britain to pull out of the court’s binding treaty, the European convention on human rights, should see that this would be an absurd, self-defeating strategy. Sunak clearly has no personal interest in our relationship with the ECHR: rightwingers have seen in Brexit what happens when a major constitutional change is pushed forward by a reluctant prime minister who doesn’t believe in it. Fighting the election on the ECHR would do nothing to change the outcome – arcane constitutional policy (and I speak as someone with a deep interest in it) is seldom what animates the electorate. An election defeat would just allow defenders of the status quo to paint the result as a rejection of change.
There are a few things the government could do that might make the policy more effective. Most obviously, it could (at least initially) restrict the pool of people eligible to be sent to Rwanda to those who cross after the bill becomes law. This has the potential to alter the calculation for those in France weighing up whether to make the crossing.
But the chance of that transforming it into an election-winning policy are slim. Few Conservatives, at least outside the leadership’s bunker, think otherwise. Indeed, one reason I and others didn’t completely discount the idea of a May election was the reverse argument: that if the bill did get through, Sunak might prefer to go to the country before the policy’s limited impact on Channel crossings became apparent in the summer.
It’s also been suggested to me that some in Downing Street hoped, if not expected, the legislation to fail, allowing them to run an election against the blockers in the House of Lords rather than on the results of the policy itself.
Regardless, we are where we are. With the legislation in place, the next few months will reveal whether all this effort has been enough to give the government a policy that is at the very least operational. If so, we’ll then find out just how much weight the voters give to a handful of planes taking off if, as seems very likely, it doesn’t stop the boats.
Henry Hill is deputy editor of ConservativeHome