Amina Taylor | Rwanda plan could wreck Sunak’s boat

Rishi Sunak is Britain’s prime minister, but for how much longer? As the first British-Asian to not just lead the Conservative Party but the country, Sunak is finding out first-hand that it is indeed ‘heavy the head that wears the crown’. A series of both political battles and bitter infighting has left the PM with an almighty headache for the new year and calling into question his ability to remain in the top job for much longer.

Under electoral laws, the UK must go to the polls by January 2025 at the latest. This gives Rishi Sunak less than a year to iron out his party’s policies and address questions about his own leadership, and, indeed, his legacy.

We don’t have to cast our minds too far back to remember how Sunak landed the top job. In the absolute political circus that surrounded the ousting/resignation of Boris Johnson, Sunak was effectively seen as a traitor to the ‘BoJo’ cause. He was the first senior minister to publicly criticise his then boss. There are still parliamentarians who say they will never forgive this act and describe it still as ‘knifing Boris in the back’.

The farce that was the 42-day Liz Truss premiership is only made more painful for Sunak when he recalls that Conservative members overwhelmingly chose Truss over him when they faced off for both the leadership of the party, and, by default, the right to be prime minister.

Sunak must still bristle at the reminder that he was an imposed leader, one who entered 11 Downing Street having not even faced his party’s members for their approval, much less millions of disillusioned UK voters.

It’s clear Sunak and his advisers have gambled on kicking the election ball a little bit further down the road, the PM having admitting that Brits won’t get the opportunity to go to the polls until at least the second half of the year. Perhaps hoping that some headline-grabbing Sunak policies can turn around his flagging fortunes.

The early signs are not good. A recent YouGov showed the party under Sunak’s leadership as being electorally decimated. The current tranche of 349 Conservative MPs would witness their numbers slashed to 169. This would see the Tories out of power for at least a decade. Now, cue the desperate scramble to avoid political annihilation by any means necessary.

It appears Sunak has hitched his political future to his party’s anti-immigration policy. Under the ‘Stop the Boats’ plan (of which I’ve written previously), the Rwanda scheme is its flagship legislation. Initially announced in April 2022, the government’s Rwanda plan aims to send some asylum seekers arriving in the UK to the East African nation to have their claims processed there.

In seeking to appeal to his party’s extreme right and not haemorrhage more voters to outfits like Nigel Farage’s Reform UK (formerly the Brexit Party, a splinter group of UKIP), Sunak is hoping to appear tough on immigration. The irony, perhaps lost on Sunak, is that the Rwanda plan was actually cooked up on Boris Johnson’s watch.

When Johnson was kicked out, it would’ve been the perfect opportunity for Sunak to distance himself from what is clearly an ineffectual idea that is little more than a gimmick. The Rwanda scheme will go down in history as an absolute shambolic effort by Britain to skirt its international obligations (both legal and moral) and shamelessly pander to the most dangerous group of voters who will never accept even the most reasonable immigration policies in any case.

Sunak has endured one political black eye after the next. Had this been a boxing match, the ref would’ve stepped in, and his corner surely thrown in the towel by now. But Sunak has at least shown he can take a policy beating.

LACK OF SCRUTINY

The first attempt to send a plane full of failed asylum seekers to Rwanda was shot down in June, mere months after the policy was announced. The government has suffered legal defeats with the UK Supreme Court ruling unanimously in November 2023 that the scheme is unlawful. Rishi didn’t let a little thing like a dressing-down from the Supreme Court stop the process. After tinkering at the edges and getting assurances from Rwanda that all was indeed well, the plan passed in the House of Commons.

The next battle at the House of Lords will prove a more almighty challenge for Sunak. The PM is already pleading with the unelected Lords not to stand in the way of the ‘will of the people’. A position which is laughable, seeing that this policy has never been put to the public vote – a lack of scrutiny this prime minister knows all too well.

There are also question marks about the relatability of a multimillionaire PM to a population that is going through some of its hardest economic times. We only have to look at Sunak’s awkward interaction with a member of the public in Winchester on a walkabout. Labour and the Lib Dems have, of course, seized on the uncomfortable laugh the PM gave after being challenged on the NHS waiting times. It’s an image that will haunt the Tory Party press department, even if Conservative grandees try to dismiss it as a storm in a teacup.

But fear not, ye of little faith. The prime minister’s team has a plan. And that plan (stay with me here) is to drive home the idea that Sir Keir Starmer and Labour have no plan and would ‘take the country back to square one’. Its beauty is in its vagueness. The Conservatives have not defined what ‘square one’ is and are leaving it to panicked voters to evoke their own leftist nightmare. Boris Johnson pulled a rabbit out of a hat back in 2019 and defied the pollsters with a shock parliamentary majority. I’ll bet everything Sunak is risking his political legacy for a chance at the same.

Amina Taylor is a journalist and broadcaster. She is the former editor of Pride magazine and works as producer, presenter and correspondent with Press TV in London.