Prime Minister Rishi Sunak faces the
most dangerous moment of his term as the top leadership this week, when he is
due to appear before a Covid inquiry and must win a crunch vote in Parliament
on his plan to revive a policy to send asylum seekers to Rwanda.
Just over a year since he became the PM,
Rishi Sunak is struggling to maintain his authority, as politicians on both the
left and the right of his Conservative Party are threatening to vote against
his flagship asylum policy.
Parliament will hold a first vote on
Tuesday on the legislation that would override some human rights law with the
intention that this would allow the first deportation flights to leave for Rwanda
before a national election expected next year.
The proposed law is objected by some
moderate Conservative politicians, who are worried about Britain breaching its
human rights obligations and also by right-wing lawmakers who want the
government to go further. Both sides are taking legal advice before deciding
how to vote.
For Sunak, struggling to revive a weak
UK economy and heavily trailing the main Opposition party in opinion polls, the
Rwanda policy has become the defining issue for his government, despite lawyers
saying at every stage that it will not work.
“The Rwanda policy has become a totemic
struggle and it has liberated the factions in the Conservative Party to
continue their all-out war,” said Tony Travers, a politics professor at the
London School of Economics.
The plan was ruled unlawful by the UK’s
Supreme Court last month, which said genuine refugees would be at risk of being
returned to their home countries where they might face potential violence or
ill-treatment, which would breach British and international law.
The government has spent about a quarter
of a billion pounds on the scheme in the hope it will deter the tens of
thousands of people – including from Afghanistan, Iran and Iraq – who arrive on
the south coast of England after crossing in small boats from France.
In a sign of how uncertain Sunak is
about the size of any parliamentary rebellion, he decided against making it a
confidence vote. If Sunak had done so and lost, he would have faced calls to
hold a general election.
But the prime minister stands to be
badly weakened if he loses any vote on the legislation. Only 29 Conservative
members of parliament would need to rebel to defeat the government.
Divisions
Sunak finds himself in a similar crisis
that engulfed the Conservative Party under former Prime Minister Theresa May
during the 2016-19 fight to implement Brexit.
Once again a PM is facing a revolt from
backbench Members of Parliament, there are rumours of colleagues plotting a
leadership challenge, there are concerns about Britain abandoning its
international promises, and questions about the power of parliament versus the
judiciary.
Ahead of Tuesday’s vote, Sunak will on
Monday appear at the official Covid inquiry for a day-long hearing examining
his role in response to the pandemic.
Sunak, who was finance minister at the
time, has been accused by one former government adviser of saying the
government should “just let people die” rather than impose a lockdown because
he was worried about the impact on the economy.
But the bigger danger for Sunak will
come from the parliamentary battles over his Rwanda policy.
Agency
