Because of an anonymous judge from the EU blocking the only flight so far to Rwanda in 2022 and because of a UK judge finding that Rwanda is not a ‘safe’ country for notional refugees, the British Government came up with the Safety in Rwanda bill to counter both objections.

The full text of the new December 2023 treaty with Rwanda is here.

The objective of sending potential refugees to Rwanda for processing is to be a deterrent to the tens of thousands of young men travelling across the Channel on dinghies every year.

The legislation passed the House of Commons on Wednesday, January 17, 2024. A few Conservative MPs proposed amendments to the bill which would have greatly strengthened it, but MPs — including a majority of Conservatives — voted these down.

Lee Anderson and Brendan Clarke-Smith both resigned their positions as Deputy Chairmen of the Conservative Party earlier this week. However, Anderson, a former Labour Party member, could not bring himself to vote against the bill when the time came. Not surprisingly, he found the chuckles from Labour MPs off-putting. This is what he told his fellow GB News presenter Christopher Hope in Westminster Hall after the vote:

His abstention is a grudging way of voting ‘Yes’, in my opinion.

Only 11 Conservatives voted against the bill. Guido Fawkes tells us who they were: Suella Braverman (former Home Secretary), Simon Clarke, Bill Cash (who came up with some of the proposed amendments), Danny Kruger, Sarah Dines, James Duddridge, David Jones, Robert Jenrick (Immigration Minister who recently resigned and who also raised amendments), Andrea Jenkyns, Mark Francois and Miriam Cates.

Guido says (red emphases his):

Rebellious Tory MPs decided earlier this evening they would back the government to prevent the whole thing falling apart. All amendments have been voted off and the bill has passed at third reading 320 to 276. The government’s majority is 44. Déjà vu…

Jenrick’s amendment to ensure the government would ignore Rule 39 injunctions from Strasbourg got 65 votes with 61 Tory rebels. Last night’s rebellion carried over…

Overall, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak must be relieved the bill is now on its way to the Lords.

Immigration in a nutshell

Britain — England, in particular — has a tremendous immigration problem.

On November 23, 2023, Migration Watch provided the total figure of net migration from June 2022 to June 2023 (purple emphases mine):

New figures from the Office for National Statistics reveal that in the year ending June 2023, net migration to the UK was 672,000.

Most of that number is comprised of legal immigrants to the United Kingdom. What follows is a partial breakdown by country. The numbers for Indians and Nigerians are especially high because they bring the most dependents with them:

Migration Watch’s press release from that day states:

Commenting, Alp Mehmet, Chairman of Migration Watch UK, said:

These figures are truly shocking. They will result in intolerable pressure on our housing and public services. The government have abandoned their promises at the last election and have simply caved in to every pro-immigration pressure group. Indeed net migration is now at four or five times the level of three years ago.

If this is allowed to continue, Britain’s population could well soar to about 85 million by 2046. This would be equivalent to 18 new cities the size of Birmingham, and would place an intolerable strain on our land, housing, transportation, and public infrastructure.

Apart from the economic pressures brought by this eyewatering net migration figure, how on earth will we integrate the 1.2 million long term migrants arriving every year? It will only add massively to the problem of integrating the millions of migrants already here.

The British people have been utterly betrayed.

On Tuesday, January 16, 2024, The Telegraph‘s Allison Pearson gave us another startling statistic about the level of migration to the United Kingdom. It is higher than that to the United States:

The UK now has a higher proportion of foreign-born residents than the United States – more than 10 million people, which is 15 per cent of our population and roughly twice as many as it was 10 years ago.

People crossing the Channel

However, the Rwanda legislation is targeted at a much smaller although no less significant group: those crossing the Channel from France in small boats, often dinghies.

Britons, especially the English, wonder how this can happen. Once here, they are put up in three- and four-star hotels commandeered by third-party services companies working for the Government.

A commenter on Guido Fawkes’s post on the Rwanda bill explains what happens and how the migrants’ legal status changes when our own Border Force accompanied by the lifeboats charity, RNLI, escorts these vessels to the UK:

Under existing British law, it’s illegal to enter the country without a visa or special permission.

However, they are protected from prosecution if once they arrive they claim asylum.

Further, they have not entered the country illegally if they have been rescued at sea and brought here by the agency that rescued them.

After the Safety in Rwanda bill passed, No. 10 issued the following statement:

The passing of the Bill tonight marks a major step in our plan to stop the boats. This is the toughest legislation ever introduced in Parliament to tackle illegal migration and will make clear that if you come here illegally you will not be able to stay. It is this government and the Conservative party who have got boat crossings down by more than a third. We have a plan, we have made progress and this landmark legislation will ensure we get flights off to Rwanda, deter people from making perilous journeys across the channel and stop the boats.

However, all of that sounds suspiciously like the statement the Government issued when the first Rwanda bill was passed when Priti Patel was Home Secretary. Labour are not wrong when they say that more Home Secretaries have visited Rwanda than asylum seekers. The sum total of the latter group is precisely zero.

Anger at Conservatives

On the morning of Wednesday, January 17, the day of the final debate and vote on the Safety in Rwanda legislation, GB News broadcasted a confrontation between Reform Party Chairman Richard Tice and Conservative MP Richard Graham from Gloucester.

Tice’s views aligned with those of much of the British public, while Graham presented the real-life nuances in processing and transporting notional refugees. I couldn’t help but agree with both:

The aforementioned column from The Telegraph‘s Allison Pearson encapsulates everything the British are angry about with regard to recent successive Conservative governments. I’ll just cover the immigration issue, for which she has a comparative graph:

It is hard to overstate the sense of betrayal and anger. Back in October, I said that the Tories would be lucky to retain 150 seats and that was before we heard the Oh-dear-God legal immigration figures.

To wilfully welcome a population the size of Birmingham when your own people are struggling to access healthcare, housing and safe maternity services, which they have paid for out of their taxes, goes beyond mere incompetence. It is plain rude.

A “kick in the teeth”, as Suella Braverman said. Oh, and massively disrespectful of your loyal supporters. Immigration at those levels undermines social cohesion and it stops social mobility in its tracks because too many of our young people, who know they will never own a home and must live in extortionate rented accommodation while they pay off their student loan (like my two, in fact), get despondent and give up …

Did any Conservative vote for that? Did they heck. But the people in whom we first placed our trust back in 2010, whose manifesto commitments we stupidly believed, went ahead and did it anyway. How did Tory MPs come to believe they were better judges of what the country needs than the British voter?

While many who came to this country as immigrants, and the children of those immigrants, are making a fantastic contribution and are every bit as British as any of us, we all know there are a horrifying number of idle ratbags sponging off the efforts of hardworking families, getting priority for social housing, university places and even hospital appointments.

A poisonous minority hates the West while living in the, er, West and enjoying its comforts and freedoms. We don’t want them here.

Record mass immigration “and under a Conservative government”. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve read or heard that incredulous rider. People say it all the time: The highest taxes for 70 years “and under a Conservative government”.

Over 40,000 migrants arriving illegally on our southern coast “and under a Conservative government” …

In November, the Home Office admitted that they do not know the whereabouts of 17,000 asylum seekers whose claims have been discontinued. In a functioning country, that scandalous admission would have seen public apologies and resignations. In Broken Britain, it was par for the course …

A poll in The Telegraph … showed that “in almost all constituencies in the country the preferred option is for quick detention and deportation (to Rwanda)”.

As Margaret Thatcher once said, ‘Weak, feeble’. What would she make of today’s Conservative ‘wets’, as she called them in her day? Ours are wetter than hers:

Blame Tony Blair for courts’ power

Remember how, in 1996 and during the general election campaign of 1997, Labour’s leader Tony Blair never spelled out any of his ideas for government?

I do. Now, looking back nearly 30 years, I see that he had plenty of ideas for governing and understand why he didn’t tell us what they were at the time. If he had, fewer people would have voted Labour in May 1997, even though the Party still would have won the election, just not by a landslide.

During his time as Prime Minister, Blair, a lawyer — his wife a Human Rights lawyer — nicely convinced voters that courts should reign supreme, something we are finding out to our peril in the second decade of the 21st century.

A November 16, 2023 article in UnHerd, ‘How the judges took back control’, explains what he did and how we are seeing it unfold in the context of the Rwanda treaty:

The Supreme Court’s ruling against the Government’s Rwanda plan may have been a foregone conclusion, but the broader political fall-out was not. Even though the Supreme Court struck down the migrant bill without relying on the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR) or the Human Rights Act, the decision is nonetheless bound to reignite the discussion about the ECHR — which is what kickstarted the British courts’ judicial review of the bill in the first place …

… The influence of the ECHR is only one part of a much bigger story: the wider judicialisation of our political and democratic systems.

Over the past few decades, an unprecedented amount of power has been transferred from representative institutions to judiciaries, transforming national and supranational courts into full-blooded political and decision-making bodies — and giving rise to a new type of political regime altogether: what some have called juristocracy. As legal scholar Ran Hirschl wrote as far back as 2004, from matters of national security to macroeconomics, “courts have become crucial for dealing with the most fundamental questions a democratic polity can contemplate”. The view that “nothing falls beyond the purview of judicial review”, as Aharon Barak, the former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Israel, said, has become widely accepted.

As a result, it has become standard practice for core political decisions relating to the very essence of public life — such as immigration policy — to be taken by courts and judges. Questions that ought to be resolved through public deliberation in the political sphere are increasingly being settled behind closed doors by a self-selecting judiciary elite …

For the UK, this journey largely accelerated with its entry into the EU in 1972, which over time transformed EU law into something akin to a higher law. The second big push towards judicialisation came in the late Nineties and early 2000s under New Labour, with the creation of the Human Rights Act [1998] and then the Constitutional Reform Act of 2005, which paved the way to the creation of the Supreme Court in 2009.

Yet for Britain’s political elites, judicialisation still carried a risk — namely, that the courts would start producing judgments that no longer reflected the ideological preferences of those who handed authority over to the judiciary in the first place. Hence, the Conservative Party finds itself unable to enforce its Rwanda policy …

Fast forward to this week, Wednesday, January 18, and UnHerd had another article about Blair’s far-reaching transformation of our government in ‘How New Labour created the Rwanda stranglehold’:

The backlash that followed last year’s Supreme Court ruling — which found the Rwanda policy to be unlawful — is a direct product of New Labour and Lord Derry Irvine’s rights-based judicial reforms. Those reforms, firstly, ensured all policy and legislation-making centred around a culture of rights-compatibility. This was to be given priority over debates regarding the merits and necessity of an elected government’s policy preferences and assessment of the public interest. Secondly, it encouraged the perception of the judiciary as being unchallengeable and hierarchically superior to other branches of the state. The result, as we’re now seeing, is the constraint of an elected government that commands a majority in Parliament.

For New Labour, the aim was to ensure that domestic policy and legislation was subject to, and heavily shaped by, the European Convention (ECHR) rights found in the Human Rights Act 1998 (HRA), regardless of whether the domestic public interest or common good, according to a democratically elected majority government, required otherwise. As such, governments of all stripes would be forced into designing and arguing for policy that sits within the HRA’s framework and adhered to decisions made by the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR). Other pertinent questions about the need, validity, strengths, weaknesses and democratic support for these proposed measures would become secondary.

Lord Irvine was clear-eyed about the types of rights-based reforms he wanted to introduce. He unequivocally claimed that New Labour’s HRA sought to mould not only the content of law in a range of areas, but also the law-making process. As such, it was New Labour’s specific intention to ensure government policy and legislation was framed around individual rights. To this end, the requirement for ministers to make statements of compatibility when introducing a Bill into Parliament was vital; the “responsible minister” would have to justify their decision in the “full glare of parliamentary and public opinion”. Strikingly, “Sovereignty”, Lord Irvine wrote, “will in future have to be exercised within an environment highly sensitive to fundamental rights”.

Moreover, because the HRA ensures executive and public bodies carry out their work under the umbrella of rights compatibility, Lord Irvine claimed such bodies would be subject to “considerably more rigorous scrutiny” than before — and he conceded the “special arena of human rights” would entail high degrees of judicial intervention.

While Lord Irvine, and New Labour, maintained that parliamentary sovereignty would be preserved, and Parliament could continue to legislate as it wished, the intention was to reposition the terrain for legislating towards matters of compatibility and away from concerns about public interest. If Parliament sought to legislate against the HRA grain, the question would not be of sovereignty or public interest but of rights-compatibility. Further, the duty on domestic courts to read legislation in a HRA-compatible way has led to a wide range of British government policies being reduced to such debates. The results, as we have seen, include well-documented cases of IRA members claiming to suffer a breach of the right to life, and the blocked deportation of suspected terrorists. Even government policies concerning public ownership and late-night flights from London Heathrow airport have been subject to questions of compatibility …

To make matters even more tiresome for any current or future government, New Labour’s HRA created the perception that the judiciary, and their judgments, were hierarchically superior to the elected majority government in Parliament. In other words, a false impression was created that framed Parliament, and the majority government within, as being unable to question or legislate against judicial decisions … New Labour encouraged an Americanised feeling of judicial supremacy by, first, reframing the role of judges and, secondly, allowing them to enter more substantive discussions about the merits of any given policy or legislative measure.

I vaguely remember the way Labour mooted the Supreme Court on current affairs programmes: ‘Why don’t we have a Supreme Court?’ in the way someone might bandy around a random topic at a dinner party. No sooner said than done. Labour did away with the perfectly serviceable Law Lords and gave us a Supreme Court, because in Blair’s mind it was what every other advanced society had. Never mind that Britain, via the Magna Carta in 1215, was the first to enshrine human rights.

What a crafty move the Supreme Court was:

Despite New Labour arguing these reforms maintained the position of Parliament as the ultimate arbiter, Lord Irvine specifically claimed there would be great pressure to concede ground to any decision that the court has made …

Indeed, the political pressure created by a “Supreme” Court ruling against a government tends to be so enormous that, in practical terms, the court, not Parliament or the government within, is viewed as supreme. In effect, such a measure is tantamount to ordering the Government and Parliament itself to halt or change direction — something which, prior to 1998, was constitutionally improper.

Moreover, when ensuring the legislation or policy in question was compatible with the HRA, Lord Irvine claimed judges would also be able to conduct a more substantive review of human rights and policy. He argued that the domestic courts would be able to examine whether it was necessary to limit a right, and whether a proposed limitation was appropriate. Therefore a moral approach to judicial decision-making was created. The courts would now have to be satisfied that any interference with a protected right was justified in the public interest of a free democratic society. The result, Lord Irvine explained, would be judicial decisions based on the morality of government policy and legislation — not simply its compliance with the bare letter of the law.

Finally, although seemingly cosmetic, New Labour’s decision to disband the Appellate Committee of the House of Lords and create a new, relocated Supreme Court — via the Constitutional Reform Act 2005 — lent further weight to its aim of fostering feelings of judicial supremacy. Instead of adhering to the unique commixture of powers in the British constitution, the Department of Constitutional Affairs explained the intention was to redraw the relationship between the judiciary and other branches of the state — in addition to enhancing judicial independence. Overall, then, an image starts to emerge of New Labour and Lord Irvine’s responsibility for those in Britain who have spent the past two decades appealing to the paramountcy of the HRA and finality of judicial decisions. This can be clearly seen in the responses to the Rwanda policy from civil society, commentators in the media, and politicians.

This next bit about the Rwanda treaty is all too true. Criticism comes from Labour along the following lines all the time:

Following the Supreme Court judgment, for example, third-sector organisations unequivocally called for the Government to abandon and draw a line under the measure. Others have also criticised the Government’s response  for “disapplying” aspects of the HRA and “disabling the courts”, while reporters have framed the Government’s response as one which “brushes the historic role of our country’s courts aside”. Similarly, among politicians, legislating against the Supreme Court has been described as “an affront to democracy”, with MPs expressing concern about “the possibility that, by effectively reversing through statute a Supreme Court judgment on the facts, the Bill could undermine the constitutional role of the judiciary”.

The ECHR and ECtHR

Both the European Convention on Human Rights and the European Court on Human Rights have been seen as roadblocks to getting Rwanda flights going.

The question is, even though Winston Churchill helped to create them, does Britain stay or does it leave both?

Even Lord Sumption KC, who sat on the Supreme Court between 2012 and 2018, thinks the UK should leave. He had this to say in an October 2023 interview with Freddie Sayers of UnHerd:

I don’t think this is likely to happen, but it would be a good thing if it did. I am not against a rule-based system and I am not against human rights. I simply think that we need to decide what human rights we want and to what degree we want them. At the moment, the problem is not the Convention itself, which is a collection of principles, not a single one of which I would question in any way. What I oppose is the legislative process by which the Strasbourg court, the European Court of Human Rights, has emancipated itself from the only thing that the states party to the Convention ever agreed, which was the text of the Convention. I do not think that it is the function of judges to revise the laws to bring them up to date — that is a function of representative institutions, certainly in a democracy.

So I would favour withdrawing from the European Convention and substituting it for an identical text, but simply interpreting it responsibly in accordance with what it’s intended to mean, and not in accordance with a wider political agenda — which I’m afraid is the animating spirit currently of the Strasbourg Court. I had hoped before that the Strasbourg Court would learn from the occasions when, particularly in this country, we have jibed at what they’ve done. I had hoped that things would improve as a result of the Brighton declaration, and its statement in favour of what was called, rather pompously, “subsidiarity”. I no longer believe that the Strasbourg Court is capable of independent reform.

I think the point about rules is that they’re designed to bring some kind of order to human affairs. If you have a rule which depends on whatever a legislator in Strasbourg thinks it ought to be, the essential predictability which rules are designed to achieve is gone. I have no problem about the notion of a foreign tribunal deciding whether our observance of human rights is adequate provided that the tribunal in question follows the rules. What I object to is a situation in which they require everyone else to follow rules of their own devising, but recognise no rules governing their own decisions.

He also thinks that the 1951 Geneva Convention on Refugees requires updating:

I certainly think that the Geneva Convention was made for a different world: a world in which travel across national borders was a lot more difficult, and a lot more expensive … in the wake of the catastrophe involving millions of displaced persons at the end of the Second World War, there was a strictly temporary Refugee Convention designed to enable these people to be resettled. In 1951, that was changed so that it became a permanent institution, and not limited to the persons displaced by the Second World War.

I think the people who agreed to that at the time did not appreciate that, with the disappearance of the European colonial empires, a lot of the world would come into chaos; that people suffering persecution would become very numerous — millions and millions in many countries of the world; and that, simultaneously, the improvements and the easing of the actual logistical difficulties of travel over long distances would enable lots of them to make their way towards the remaining ordered parts of the world.

It isn’t fit for purpose, but whether one should depart from it is a different question. I confess that I’ve not studied this as carefully as I have studied the problems associated with the European Convention on Human Rights. I think it’s obvious that the Refugee Convention was made for a world that no longer exists. I am much less certain about what we should do about that.

The NGOs

Finally, we have the non-governmental organisations — NGOs — that are working hard for migrants crossing dangerous waters.

A January 17 article on EuroNews explains how the Italian government is trying to keep them in check, and yet, they seem to prevail:

Barely one day into the new year, on 1 January, the Ocean Viking – a migrant rescue boat chartered by the NGO SOS Méditerranée – was impounded by Italian authorities for breaking the government’s strict rules on charity groups operating such ships, proving that 2024 is shaping up to look a lot like the year before.

Giorgia Meloni’s right-wing government, which was installed in late October 2022, has introduced new regulations for migrant rescue ships in January 2023 which activists have condemned, as they say it intentionally makes their job much harder and puts migrants’ lives at risk.

According to the government’s decree, NGOs must notify Italian authorities immediately after a rescue operation and head to the port indicated by officials without delay, which is often far from the ship’s location. Ships cannot embark on more than one rescue operation at a time unless authorised to do so by Italian authorities.

If an NGO boat is found in violation of these rules, the vessel can be denied access to Italian ports or blocked for up to two months, while their captains face a fine between €10,000 and €50,000. If a ship is found in violation of the decree more than once, the vessel can be seized by Italian authorities …

Upon arrival in Bari, the Ocean Viking’s crew received a 20-day detention order for the ship and a €3,300 fine. The detention order expires on Friday, when the ship hopes to get back to sea.

“We know this is a tactic to try and stop our operation rather than something that is valid in some way,” Mary Finn, another Ocean Viking rescuer, said. “And I find it painful to feel that humanity’s not on our side or that the authorities aren’t on our side, because it’s so obvious when you do this work that what we’re doing is the right thing to be doing.”

Sara Kelany, the migration policy coordinator for Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party, agreed that saving lives is a priority. But she said the presence of charity-run ships in the Mediterranean must be limited and strictly regulated.

Kelany alleged that many of the groups that organise humanitarian missions in the Mediterranean also have a stated political objective of changing the European Union’s migration policies.

“In essence, they want to be political actors within the dynamics of immigration,” she said in an interview. “Immigration is a state’s national competence, and we cannot allow private organizations to influence our migration policies with their policies.”

Once in Italy, those crossing the Mediterranean start moving westwards to France. Ventimiglia, the Italian town on the border between the two countries, has become a hotspot. French police turn the migrants back, and this video from December 30, 2023, shows a local man and NGOs aiding the migrants. The man makes daily runs picking up migrants and ferrying them back to the railway station at Ventimiglia while the NGOs have offices there where they hand out food and clothing. This is subtitled in English and is a must-watch:

Ventimiglia used to be the port of call for French day-trippers shopping for cheaper goods then settling down to a nice lunch before heading back in the late afternoon. I wonder if it still is so attractive these days.

Conclusion

When it comes to immigration, many European countries are hamstrung by courts.

It is unclear how things will turn out for the United Kingdom, where much of the public wonder why the Conservative Party, which has been in power for nearly 14 years, cannot manage to change the course of court rulings and overthrow Tony Blair’s questionable reforms.

Their best chance came with an 80-seat majority in 2019. Sadly, it has become crystal clear that many Conservative MPs just do not have the gumption for turning back the clock and restoring sovereignty to Parliament, where it rightly belongs.

Rwanda is but a small part of this picture, yet it will partially determine the Conservatives’ results at the general election later this year.