Clause 4 Survives
When the Rwanda Bill first went before Parliament, Robert Jenrick resigned as a minister because he felt that the proposals were not tough enough.
The Bill returned to Parliament this evening and there were three more casualties. Lee Anderson and Brendan Clarke-Smith resigned as Deputy Chairs of the Conservative party and Jane Stevenson resigned as a parliamentary private secretary.
The group of rebels, totalling about 55 MPs, wanted to change clause 4 of the Bill. Currently this would allow appeals against a decision to send someone to Rwanda but, as I wrote about at the time, severely curtails what can and cannot be considered by a court or tribunal after the government was burned by the Supreme Court in R (AAA) v Secretary of State for the Home Department last year.
Even those restrictions were not good enough for a more right-wing section of the party. Their amendments, put to a vote in the House of Commons this evening, would have essentially prohibited all challenges to decisions made by the Home Secretary.
The desire to get the policy over the line and put planes to Rwanda in the air is clear but we are talking about prohibiting legal challenges by vulnerable people who are being denied the most basic protections available under international law. This is not something that can be casually swept under the rug and would certainly make its way to the European Court of Human Rights anyway, despite the best efforts of maverick Tories.
In any case, the proposed amendments to the Bill were rejected and the rebels were defeated. Attention will now turn to a broader vote tomorrow on whether the Bill should proceed at all. The legislation has next to zero support from opposition parties so the government is already walking a fine line. A lot will depend on whether the rebels get back in line by tomorrow evening so that the Bill does not fall.
I concluded my piece in December by saying:
“The government is continuing to try and make this unworkable policy work and is instead setting itself up for more embarrassing failures.”
This has been proven true this evening. Planes are no closer to the runway yet Rishi Sunak’s government appears more divided than ever.