There is only one realistic way to reduce the number of Channel deaths

Five deaths in January’s icy waters of the English Channel on Sunday morning were a sombre reminder that dangerous journeys in small boats should be nobody’s idea of how a functioning asylum system works.

Yet Westminster arguments over the government’s troubled Rwanda policy – which returns to the House of Commons for a crucial third reading tomorrow – demonstrate how deeply divided our politicians are over either the principles or the practice of a workable alternative.

“Crucially, we cannot waste large sums of taxpayers money on the policy only to fall at the first legal hurdle,” Rishi Sunak wrote during the Conservative leadership contest. He had been considering ditching a scheme that he doubted was legal, affordable or effective – yet he was persuaded to promise, rhetorically, a massive expansion of the scheme.

Sunak argued that maybe Rwanda could be a deterrent if every single asylum seeker crossing the channel knew they would be removed to Africa, though as chancellor he had funded a scheme that could, hypothetically, send 500 people there. His campaign U-turn became the template for his later “Stop the Boats” promises as prime minister.

Sunak is again under pressure from those who still think he has not been tough enough.

Kemi Badenoch is warning that the plan needs to be harder. His semi-detached deputy party chair Lee Anderson wants to vote with the backbench rebels, led by Sunak’s former Home Office team of Suella Braverman and Robert Jenrick. The pair want to remove any option of ministers accepting an interim injunction from the European Court of Human Rights – of the type which halted a flight to Rwanda in June 2022.

Yet there is a perverse consequence of making this argument.

All the ECHR interim ruling said was that the flight should not go until British courts had ruled if the policy was lawful or not. The UK Supreme Court then found it unlawful – stressing that the legal impediments were not simply the European Convention and the UK Human Rights Act, but the commitments to the Refugee Convention itself in UK law.

The government would be in an even worse mess over the Rwanda policy if it had actually removed people to Rwanda unlawfully. Yet the ex-ministers are complaining that what would have been an unlawful removal did not proceed. Their remedy is to remove the courts from future scrutiny in every aspect.

That will certainly concentrate minds in the Lords. When peers receive the Commons bill, many will want to consider how the upper house’s scrutiny, amendment or delaying powers can defend constitutional principles of the rule of law and Britain’s commitments to international law in particular.

The government’s official position is that it accepts and respects the Supreme Court decision, so is taking steps to fix the flaws with its new UK-Rwanda Treaty and new laws in Rwanda too in the months to come. Yet if the government were confident that this had succeeded, it would not need to bar the courts from considering the evidence that Rwanda is safe.

The idea that the Rwanda plan is a deterrent is largely a bluff. Sunak pledged in March 2023 that everybody who crossed the Channel from that day onwards would be removed within weeks. Despite this, 50,000 asylum seekers have come since, making the promise entirely impossible to keep. The Rwanda scheme might or might not remove 1 per cent of them to Africa. There is little point in the government passing law after law saying asylum seekers will never be able to stay when it has no realistic prospect of removing them.

The Home Office has made significant progress on the backlog last year (despite over-spinning about it since). But its official policy now is never to consider the claims of those who have arrived since last summer. So the new backlog is a permanent limbo. Ultimately, the government knows it will have no practical or lawful alternative but to put these claims into the asylum system, too, even if it hopes to delay acknowledging that in an election year.

One problem is the lack of alternative safe routes. The government’s paper last week showed that Britain had offered sanctuary through bespoke schemes to many people from Syria, Ukraine, Hong Kong and Afghanistan in the last few years. But in 2023, just 700 people were offered a legal route to Britain from outside those countries.

Meanwhile, the initial £120m cost of the Rwanda plan has more than tripled to £400m, even if nobody ever goes to Rwanda – and a further £170,000 per person if anybody ever does. The first poll on the Rwanda plan in 2024 shows that public scepticism is growing: YouGov finds 40 per cent would scrap the scheme while 34 per cent would keep it, though opinion is divided starkly by party.

So the Rwanda plan increasingly looks less like a deterrent, than a distraction from the real-world challenges of getting a grip on asylum.

Britain and its European neighbours will need to grasp the central issues together – how to balance policing traffickers with refugee visa routes and returns policies that can see countries make a fair contribution to managing asylum effectively. That is the only realistic route to reduce the prospect of yet more deaths in the icy waters of the Channel in a way that is both controlled and compassionate.

Sunder Katwala is director of British Future