Last night I voted against the Third Reading of the Safety of Rwanda Bill. It passed, however, and now proceeds to the House of Lords.
I spoke briefly in the Third Reading debate, explaining my reasons and my hope that, if the Bill becomes law, it works in its aim of deterring people from illegally crossing the English Channel to claim asylum in the UK (watch my speech above). My fear is that it won’t work, because it still allows for migrants’ lawyers to claim that their removal to Rwanda would breach their human rights. The consequence will be that migrants’ removals will be delayed by the courts. Even if some are successfully put on planes to Rwanda, the policy in practice will be slow and small-scale, the deterrent will be inadequate, and the boats will still come.
The foundational problem we have is that since Tony Blair incorporated the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) into UK law in 1998, the notion has grown in the judiciary and, sadly, in Parliament itself that the true test of a case before the courts is not the actual law made by Parliament and by the judgements of British courts on previous cases, but the court’s understanding of an individual’s rights as expressed in ECHR.
While the ECHR itself is a noble statement of rights and freedoms, its jurisprudence - the way the European Court in Strasbourg and our own courts since 1998 have interpreted it - has made it antipathetic to our constitutional model. It allows for a soup of contradictory claims, without the ‘true north’ of statute and the common law that courts were formerly obliged to navigate with.
I firmly believe we need proper protections for human rights - of our own citizens, of stateless migrants, and of people everywhere. I want to see proper safe and legal routes for genuine asylum seekers; more support to help displaced people in their own regions; and effective international agreements on the management of the vast population movements that the modern world is seeing. But human rights do not include the obligation on the UK to give a home to anyone who manages to enter our country illegally.
I recognise that by voting against the Government on this Bill I have helped create unhelpful headlines for my Party, which I regret. But as I said to my colleagues yesterday, “We have heard a great deal about party unity. But what actually matters is delivering for our constituents and country. The doomed pursuit of unity as an end in itself will mean nothing if, as we sadly anticipate, this bill fails to deliver on the promises we have made to those who send us here.”
A Parliamentary system depends on parties - without them, we would be unable to form stable governments or honour promises made at elections. But being in a party does not mean giving your proxy to the party leader - simply doing everything the whips tell you to do. We are sent to Parliament to exercise our judgement, not just to vote in a bloc.
I very much hope I am wrong and the Government is right about the Safety of Rwanda Bill. They are trying to do the right thing - and as I said in my speech, the opposition parties have no credible alternative plan to cope with illegal migration.
