Watchers of the news will have seen that the British Government’s Rwanda asylum plan has hit a hurdle, with the first plane taking asylum seekers to Rwanda being stopped at the eleventh hour by a ruling of the European Court of Human Rights.
The court found that an Iraqi asylum seeker faced "a real risk of irreversible harm" if he remained on the flight, ruling that he should not be sent to Rwanda until the full decision on whether the government's policy is legal is made by the Supreme Court in July. As a result, the whole flight was pulled.
On the face of it, the decision by the ECHR plays into the Government’s hands. Yet again, an external enemy of the Government has thwarted them from enacting the will of it’s voters- polling by Yougov suggests that, while the public in general are split fairly evenly on the policy, 74% of tory voters are in favour.
A cynic might argue that it’s is the whole point of the Government’s policy: have it struck down in the courts and blame others for the failure, making political hay in the process. This would be straight out of the 2019 playbook, when the endless battle between the Executive and Parliament culminated in a general election where the public voted to “Get Brexit Done”.
I’m not quite as cynical. I think the Tories *do* want to solve the problem. While the big political story at the moment is rising inflation and pressure on cost of living, boat migration is of huge concern to a portion of their voter base and, in particular, a big issue in several coastal constituencies.
The problem is that, given they find several potential solutions politically and morally unpalatable, they lack ideas on how to solve it. This policy is a roll of the dice that in the event it does see off these legal challenges, the reality of facing deportation to Rwanda will be enough to stem the flow of migrant boats. They just believe that it’s an added bonus that the bunfight on the way to achieving this is also helpful politically.
While this may turn out to be tactically smart, I think it plays into a wider problem that the Government has had for a while: it has no strategy. Blaming the ECHR is a useful weapon for getting yourself through a news cycle, galvanising a fractured party, and getting the leader of the Opposition to beclown himself, but it’s a weapon that can only be used a limited number of times before it loses its effectiveness.
The fact is that, setting aside the open question as to whether voters are even paying attention to this, many voters already think we’ve left this “Europe business” behind. Blaming the European Convention on Human Rights is all well and good- it might even be true as in this case- but it begs the question “why are we still in it then?”
If the Government doesn’t actually have the appetite to use its majority to leave the Convention, then it should be wary of playing this up. The overall vibe will be less “saboteurs stopping us from doing what we want” and more “yet another failure from a weak government”.
This all reveals a fundamental truth about Brexit, something that we have also seen in the furore over the Northern Ireland protocol this week: if, following Brexit, Westminster is now sovereign, problems delivering promised policy really all are on Westminster.
There are no longer any scapegoats, and voters will know this.