Rishi Sunak to face media as he forces Rwanda Bill through Parliament

Rishi Sunak is set to face the media this morning as he mounts an all-out bid to force the Rwanda plan through Parliament.

The PM will hold a press conference in Downing Street as he warns he is ready to make MPs and peers sit through the night to break an impasse on the crucial legislation.

The showdown comes after the House of Lords again refused to back down last week, passing more amendments to the Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill despite MPs repeatedly dismissing their objections.

That teed up a fourth round of ‘ping-pong’ – where legislation is batted between the two Houses until agreement is reached – which will begin in the Commons this afternoon.

Mr Sunak is expected to deliver a stern message to peers this morning that his patience has run out, with his pledge to ‘stop the boats’ on the line. He will outline the plan for getting the first flights off the ground assuming the legislation does go through.

In a round of interviews, deputy Foreign Secretary Andrew Mitchell upped the ante by branding peers’ resistance to sending asylum seekers to Rwanda ‘patronising’ and at times ‘border on racism’.

Meanwhile, a member of the House of Lords has suggested that the government is being ‘disrespectful’ to Jewish politicians by holding the vote as Passover begins.

Rishi Sunak (pictured on Friday) is set to face the media this morning as he mounts an all-out bid to force the Rwanda plan through Parliament

Mr Sunak is expected to deliver a stern message to peers this morning that his patience has run out, with his pledge to ‘stop the boats’ on the line. Pictured, migrants crossing the Channel last month

The proposed law aims to send some asylum seekers on a one-way trip to Kigali in order to deter people from crossing the Channel in small boats.

The Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill and a new treaty are intended to prevent further legal challenges to the stalled asylum scheme after the Supreme Court ruled the plan was unlawful.

As well as compelling judges to regard the east African country as safe, it would give ministers the power to ignore emergency injunctions.

Despite MPs overturning previous changes by the upper chamber, last week peers renewed their demand that Rwanda cannot be treated as a safe country until an independent monitoring body has verified that protections contained in the treaty are implemented.

The provision would also allow the Secretary of State to effectively pull the plug on the scheme if the promised safeguards were not maintained.

The Lords also reinserted an exemption from removal for those who worked with the UK military or Government overseas, such as Afghan interpreters.

Mr Mitchell rejected the calls for Afghans to get special treatment.

He insisted there was a ‘safe and legal route’ available to them to come to the UK and urged the House of Lords to ‘accept the will’ of the House of Commons and the British people.

Mr Mitchell told Times Radio: ‘We have an absolute obligation to Afghan interpreters, people who served the British Army, served our country during the Afghan crisis.

‘But I’m pleased to say that thanks to the scheme that the Government set up, the Arap (Afghan relocations and assistance policy) scheme, something like 16,100 Afghans have been given settlement in the UK.

‘So I don’t think this amendment is necessary, there is already a safe and legal route for Afghan interpreters and others who served the Army.’

Mr Mitchell said he hoped the Lords ‘will accept the will of the elected House now and let the Bill proceed’ as ‘that is what the British people want’.

The foreign minister told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: ‘I’ve listened to what has been said about the independence of the judiciary, the judicial arrangements that have been set up on Rwanda.

‘The Rwandan judge, Judge Rugege, is an enormously distinguished and respected international jurist – indeed he is an honorary fellow in law at an Oxford college.

‘Some of the discussions which have gone on in the Lords about the judicial arrangements, legal arrangements within Rwanda, have been patronising and, in my view, border on racism, so we don’t think it’s necessary to have that amendment either and that the necessary structures are in place to ensure that the scheme works properly and fairly.’

Assuming MPs remove those amendments tonight, they will send the Bill immediately back to the Upper House – and continue to sit until peers accept the will of the elected House.

The last time a standoff between the Houses went into the early hours was more than a decade ago, with politicians relying on camp beds as they batted legislation backwards and forwards.

If peers pass exactly the same amendment twice, the Commons faces the choice of either accepting the change or losing the Bill under a rarely-used process known as ‘double insistence’.

Crossbench peer and former independent reviewer of terrorism legislation Lord Anderson has raised this possibility and described the legislation as a ‘post-truth Bill’ that asks Parliament to declare Rwanda is safe when, he argued, it is not.

However, that is regarded as a ‘nuclear option’, with Labour indicating it will not try to block the legislation entirely.

Government sources have played down the impact of the wrangling, but many now believe flights cannot begin until mid-June at the earliest.

Downing Street has declined to stand by the timetable previously set out by Mr Sunak for flights to take off in the Spring, merely saying the policy will be implemented ‘as soon as possible’.

Answering questions after a speech in London on Friday, Mr Sunak stressed that this evening will be the final showdown.

‘The very simple thing here is that repeatedly, everyone has tried to block us from getting this Bill through. Yet again you saw it this week,’ he said.

The House of Lords refused to back down in the latest stage of Parliamentary wrangling last week

‘You saw Labour peers blocking us again, and that’s enormously frustrating. Everyone’s patience with this has run thin, mine certainly has.

‘So our intention now is to get this done on Monday. No more prevarication, no more delay. We will sit there and vote until it’s done.’

He continued: ‘We’re going to get this Bill passed, and then we will work to get flights off so we can build that deterrent, because that is the only way to resolve this issue. If you care about stopping the boats, you’ve got to have a deterrent.’

Ministers have been hinting that the RAF will be deployed to run the flights, instead of using a private airline.

There are reports that the Ministry of Defence is preparing to repurpose at least one RAF Voyager plane for deportations, with claims that the government has struggled to find a private airline.

Meanwhile, Suella Braverman has reiterated her view that the Bill is ‘fatally flawed’ because it has ‘too many loopholes’.

The former home secretary told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: ‘Unfortunately I voted against the legislation because I think it’s fatally flawed.

‘I don’t think it’s going to stop the boats, and that’s the test of its efficacy.’

She added the legislation had ‘too many loopholes’ which would prevent it from having the ‘deterrent effect that is necessary to break the people smuggling gangs, to send the message to the illegal migrants that it’s not worth getting on a dinghy in the first place because you’re not going to get a life in the UK’.

Ms Braverman said the current Bill was vulnerable to ‘last-minute injunctions’ by the European Court of Human Rights and susceptible to ‘illegal claims clogging up the courts’, adding: ‘The simple fact is this is our third Act of Parliament that the Government has introduced in four years to stop the boats.

‘None of them have worked – none of them have worked because they are all still susceptible to the international human rights law framework contained in the European Convention on Human Rights judged by, and adjudicated by, the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg – that’s the problem, and that’s why I’ve been calling for a few years now to leave the European Convention on Human Rights.’

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