Few want it, and even fewer think it will succeed. So why in the world is Sunak clinging to the Rwanda policy?

‘Rishi Sunak has made Rwanda the litmus test of his government’s competence and success.’ A protest over the Rwanda bill, London, 11 March 2024. Photograph: Tayfun Salcı/ZUMA Press Wire/REX/Shutterstock

Nobody knows exactly how the first red fire ants were imported to Australia, but it happened – and now these vicious and destructive creatures are everywhere. There’s a moral to this story: if you import one destructive insect, without the entire ecosystem, the consequences will be bad and you’ll have to live with them.

As with ants, so with policy ideas. It’s now two years since the immigration deal between the UK and Rwandan governments was inked, and it was a direct rip-off of the so-called Australian Pacific solution, where asylum seekers arriving by boat would be intercepted and sent to Papua New Guinea or Nauru. That was in 2001 – the same year the ants arrived. Neither development went well.

But those are their problems, and here are ours: the Lords fired the Rwanda bill back to the commons at the start of the week, with amendments that MPs in the commons rejected. Now the the government has been defeated once again in the Lords, as peers insisted that the legislation must have “due regard” for domestic and international law. Rishi Sunak had previously urged the second chamber not to frustrate the “will of the people”, but most people agree with a majority of the amendments, so – not for the first time – we’re left wondering which British people the prime minister is thinking of.

The amendments weren’t complicated in the sense that, say, bond yields are complicated when you’re only half listening. But they were fiddly. Steps must be taken to establish that Rwanda is, indeed, safe; international and domestic law cannot be breached; victims of modern slavery, and children wrongly assessed as adults, must be exempt, as must anyone who has been imperilled in their home country by helping the British armed forces. It all sounds pretty reasonable; and support, particularly for the safety clause, is overwhelming, at 75%.

That’s heartening, but still the surprise in all this is that people are engaging at such a granular level of detail with a scheme that nobody thinks will happen. It has become a totem, an article of faith. How? Why?

In 2022, the rightwing media sought doughtily to sell the policy as the resounding will of the authentic people – but the numbers never quite backed that up. One poll, a year in, found that double the number of people supported it than opposed it, but the same poll found that most people didn’t think it would do anything to the number of small boats. What question did it answer, then? “How can we make life more unpleasant for refugees than it already is?” A year on, in June 2023, a different poll found the numbers who strongly opposed the policy higher than those who strongly supported it, but those who somewhat supported or opposed the policy led to an overall picture of 39% against, 42% for it.

The same people who called the Brexit vote resounding would probably call this a clear majority, but it isn’t really, is it? A full fifth of people answered “don’t know”, which I imagine was delivered in the tone of, “I don’t know, stop asking me.” Those don’t-knows have remained stable into this year, while the number of people who think the policy should be scrapped altogether is now 27%, higher than the 24% who think they should keep trying to push it through.

The truly ridiculous part, though, is the National Audit Office’s finding that, even if the Rwanda policy got off the ground, it would cost £1.8m for each of the first 300 asylum seekers deported. The NAO followed that up on Wednesday with the finding that another policy – moving asylum seekers on to barges and into army barracks – would cost £46m more than the hotels they’re currently housed in.

Still, in the face of minority support, significant opposition, a Lords fightback that isn’t yet over, and gargantuan cost, Sunak has made Rwanda the litmus test of his government’s competence and success. Rightwing commentators line up to support the baseless idea that if they can just get one person on to one flight, which takes off, the Conservative party will come back from the brink of ruin.

In fact, in the best-case scenario, 24% of Britons would cheer the bill going through, which is roughly where Sunak is polling anyway. The elation would fade pretty fast, as it transpired that any material benefit from the scheme had accrued only to the Rwandan government. It’s vanishingly unlikely to have any deterrent effect, so the final impact would be more of what we can already observe: a waste of money and parliamentary time, the further erosion of Britain’s civility, kindness and international standing, and a declining faith in Sunak’s competence and priorities.

The question for Sunak is how did he get into this mess – where his signal policy is something few want, and which he probably can’t deliver? And there is also a question for us: why are we playing along with this?

There are plenty of decent ideas the prime minister could cut-and-paste from Australia – this isn’t counsel against taking international inspiration. Policies that are clearly intended as hostile and punitive, however, rarely travel in a way that you can anticipate, let alone control. They are a bit like red fire ants.

Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist