LONDON (Reuters) – Rishi Sunak, the British Prime Minister, won the vote on his Rwanda migration policy. The vote was the result of a day of high drama at Westminster which saw over two dozen rebels in the party’s right wing abstain from the vote. This provided the government with a comfortable win on the controversial policy of deporting asylum seekers to Rwanda.
The victory, while relieving for Sunak, is only a temporary respite. The policy has deeply divided the governing Conservative Party, undermining Sunak’s authority and putting the UK’s commitment to international treaties in doubt. This has made Sunak’s position as the fifth prime minister in seven years quite precarious.
Sunak is caught in a difficult position. If he toughens the bill to remove a migrant’s right to appeal against deportation, as demanded by the right wing, he risks losing centrist lawmakers who are appalled at the prospect of Britain breaching international law. If he leaves it as it is, the right wing has said they will vote against it.
The rebels may bet that many centrist lawmakers threatening to defeat any effort to toughen up the bill are in government jobs, making it harder for them to vote against the government if changes are made. The centrists want Sunak to ignore the rebel demands.
One lawmaker on the party’s right-wing said there was no point having a piece of legislation that would not work. He accepted that the outcome of the Rwanda bill could have further consequences than just UK migration policy.
The sight of different Conservative factions plotting in corners of Westminster as a prime minister’s fate hung in the balance brought back memories of the long-running parliamentary battles over Brexit, and underscored how the traumatic departure from the European Union had shattered the once stable nature of British politics.
While Sunak greeted the victory by hugging the man in charge of party management, many lawmakers across his party were raging at those who threaten to kill the bill, and with it quite possibly the government, before an election expected next year. One member of parliament said his colleagues had turned one of the world’s most successful political parties into a “circus” while another dismissed them as an “embarrassment”.
A former investment banker who only entered politics in 2015, Sunak has made reducing migration numbers a defining issue for his government, particularly the tens of thousands who arrive by dinghies on the English coast’s beaches.
While the 745,000 who arrived via legal routes in 2022 are far higher than the around 45,000 who arrived via small boats that year, they are a visible reminder of the government’s failure to control its borders. A plan to deport to Rwanda those asylum seekers who arrive without permission was first struck by former prime minister Boris Johnson in April 2022. But it has since been bogged down by legal appeals before it was finally rejected as unlawful at the Supreme Court last month.
In response, Sunak struck a new treaty with Rwanda and launched emergency legislation that would remove most, but not all, options for legal appeal. Britain has already paid 240 million pounds ($301 million) to Rwanda before anyone has been sent there.
With headlines dominated by political deadlock Sunak’s popularity has hit its worst ever net favorability rating in a YouGov poll, dropping 10 points from late November to -49.
The first lawmaker said right-wing colleagues would meet the minister for illegal migration, and send their lawyers to meet those advising government, to try to improve the bill. That promise of engagement from the government helped improve the mood after the right-wing lawmakers interpreted Sunak’s initial approach as “take it or leave it”. Keeping the party together may be harder than ever, as the Conservatives have for months trailed the opposition Labour Party by about 20 points in polls, and as many lawmakers have already said they will quit at the next election, giving them little reason to follow party rules.
With tempers rising, a centrist Conservative lawmaker urged Sunak to hold firm and ignore the increasingly “irrelevant” rebels who abstained after days of threatening to go further. “The rebels look churlish,” he said. “They march to the top of the hill only to look idiotic.”
($1 = 0.7982 pounds) (Writing by Kate Holton, Editing by William Maclean)
