This week, floundering Prime Minister Rishi Sunak will put forward yet another piece of legislation to save his morally and legally-challenged Rwanda plan for asylum seekers.
Labour has consistently opposed the policy, but has done so emphasising the practicalities – its costs and delays – rather than its immorality. Labour recently put out a social media advert stating “£300 million of British taxpayers’ money to Rwanda. Not a single asylum seeker sent”.
But bad value for money, or insufficient deportations, is not the problem with the policy, or what Labour should be most vocal about ahead of the vote tomorrow.
It is the principle and morality of the policy that needs to be challenged, not its implementation.
It is important to understand what the Rwanda plan is – and why it has become totemic for the increasingly far-right Conservative Party. In essence, the policy is to bribe Rwanda, a much poorer nation in sub-Saharan Africa, into becoming the UK’s penal colony for asylum seekers, branded by UK law as “illegal immigrants”.
The Conservative Party has frequently used phrases such as “small boats crisis” or most disgracefully, an “invasion” in the words of sacked ex-Home Secretary Suella Braverman. An increasingly right-wing media and political landscape is waging a campaign to stop anyone coming to the UK to claim asylum.
But in reality, despite Tory hyperbole, not many asylum seekers come to the UK at all.
According to figures collated by the House of Commons Library, in 2022 there were 13 asylum applications for every 10,000 people living in the UK. Across the EU27 there were 22 asylum applications for every 10,000 people. The UK ranked 19th among EU27 countries plus the UK for asylum applications.
We, the sixth-richest nation on Earth, are shirking our responsibilities and outsourcing our obligations under international law. The UK is a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention, which means we are obliged to provide access to the courts for refugees and prohibited from discriminating against or expelling refugees.
If the PM gets his way asylum seekers arriving in the UK will be deported to Rwanda to have their claims processed and will be settled in Rwanda if successful – or elsewise deported back to their country of origin.
It is immoral that one of the richest nations on Earth should seek to shirk its international responsibilities and pass the buck to a relatively poor sub-Saharan nation, and outright dangerous when that nation is a dictatorship which has a terrible human rights record.
Labour should be putting forward the moral case for welcoming asylum seekers, not accepting the premise that they are a problem to be dealt with – and that a Labour government would deal with them practically and effectively.
As British political discourse drifts further to the right, Labour should be turning the tide, but instead the current leadership are content to drift into the moral abyss – and focus on an amoral pragmatic approach.
Labour’s alternative policy is that they would use “British policing and British intelligence to smash the gangs trafficking people across the Channel”. But this is likely to prove as effective as British policing and intelligence has in smashing the drug traffickers in the decades long failure that is the “war on drugs”.
If the Government genuinely wanted to stop the boats, it would provide safe and legal routes for the people coming from countries like Afghanistan, Syria, Iran and Eritrea.
People from these countries who have their cases determined by the Home Office are overwhelmingly granted asylum (100 per cent in the case of Eritrea down to 86 per cent from Iran) – yet the only feasible way for them to get to this country is through illegal routes, whether that’s cross-Channel small boats or stowing away in lorries.
These options can have tragic consequences. In October 2019, 39 Vietnamese men died after suffocating in the back of a lorry that had crossed the North Sea. In November 2021, 27 asylum seekers drowned in the Channel when the boat sank – the dead included people from Iraq and Afghanistan.
Challenging this demonisation of desperate people seeking asylum in the UK is vitally important. The whipping up of division endangers people and community relations, and is being cynically used by a flailing Conservative Party seeking to change the subject from its multiple failures.
Labour must challenge this head-on. As some backbench Labour MPs like Zarah Sultana have said: “Instead of whipping up fear about a ‘migrant crisis’, we should create safe and legal routes to sanctuary in the UK.”
We then need to think about how we adjust our foreign policy to stop people needing to claim asylum in the first place – but our first duty must be to create a safe and humane asylum system for those who need it now.
Labour’s frontbench is either too timid, too dishonest, or too ambivalent to make that case.
Andrew Fisher is the former executive director of policy for the Labour Party