After the Rwanda fiasco, the next home secretary must be bold – and boring

Braverman’s abject failure to build an effective asylum consensus and the government’s moral turpitude on the matter shows that headline-grabbing has backfired, writes Sunder Katwala

The more eye-catching the proposal, the less likely it is to be of practicable use (AP)

Rishi Sunak's pledge to “stop the boats” has been dealt a grievous blow after the Court of Appeal found that the UK-Rwanda plan is unlawful.

This will not end the arguments about Rwanda. The government will appeal to the Supreme Court, hoping to keep alive what is now a slimmer prospect of starting this policy before the general election. Home secretary Suella Braverman confirmed that she would seek to keep this drama running by saying: “It’s not over yet.” She went on to invoke a familiar theme of claiming to speak for the will of the British people – despite no poll having ever found a majority in support for the Rwanda scheme, and most people wanting a system that combines control and compassion.

Cynical Bravermanites might even prefer the political argument the court defeat gives fuel to. The government could now argue that its plan to solve Channel crossings has been blocked by judges, lawyers and NGOs, casting them as an undemocratic elite. Had the case been won, they would have had to do the hard work of finding a way to put this expensive, impractical and unethical scheme into practice.

If the UK-Rwanda scheme never happens, there will be more criticism of the cost. That was a major theme last week, before the court decision, after the government belatedly published a Home Office “impact assessment” of the illegal immigration bill.

Yet the headline figure – that it would cost £169,000 per person sent to Rwanda – was misleadingly low, because it left out the £140m start-up costs already sent to Rwanda. That means that had 300 people had been sent to Rwanda, the figure per head would have been half a million pounds higher than that. If 140 people go, the figure per head would be £1m above the government’s figure. But if the most likely scenario is that nobody goes at all, the cost would be incomprehensible.

Yet the Kagame regime in Rwanda might not be too disappointed by how things have turned out. It seems a remarkable piece of statecraft to have received £140m from the UK – which is 0.5 per cent of the country’s GDP – for doing next to nothing, beyond signing a memorandum of understanding. Had the scheme proceeded, then Rwanda might have received another £50m a year if 300 asylum seekers had gone there.

The UK government has tried hard to avoid answering the question of how many people it expects to send to Rwanda, preferring instead to say only that the scheme is “uncapped” in principle. Rwandan ministers suggested expectations of around 300 a year across the five-year agreement. The new Court of Appeal judgment, based on the evidence from the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR), finds that the Rwandan asylum system could struggle to make even as many decisions as that, making it the key factor in its determination that Rwanda is an unsafe partner.

Some liberal and progressive critics of the government worry about putting too much focus on the cost or practical difficulties of the Rwanda scheme. It is right to argue that the primary problems with the Rwanda policy are objections on principle: that it removes asylum seekers who cross the Channel to Britain without first making any attempt to differentiate between those with a valid refugee claim and those without.

Without a safe routes policy, the government’s new bill effectively abolishes asylum in Britain, after seven decades of membership of the refugee convention under governments of both parties. Yet the arguments about practicality and cost matter too – not least as a matter of opportunity-cost. Time, energy and resources have been taken away from the real-world challenges of dealing with the asylum backlog and pursuing a serious effort at international cooperation, not just to tackle traffickers but to seek to negotiate a multilateral approach to safe routes and returns that could restore order to the dangerous crossings in the Channel.

Beyond the arguments in principle against it, the Rwanda policy is largely an expensive distraction when it comes to stopping the boats, or deciding how the British government handles asylum. After all, nearly 8,000 people have crossed the Channel since 7 March. The Rwanda court battle is about whether the government will or won’t be able to send 1 per cent of them to Rwanda. There is no policy at all for the other 99 per cent. The prime minister’s pledge is that everybody will be detained and deported within weeks – something that is clearly undeliverable in practice. The government’s new bill declares that everybody will be permanently inadmissible for asylum in the UK and that, too, will be unsustainable in practice – and could also prove to be unlawful.

The likely collapse of the government’s Rwanda policy looks set to confirm a rule-of-thumb of the politics of asylum: the more eye-catching and headline-grabbing the proposal, the less likely it is to be of practicable use. The 2025 question for the next government will be how to repair and reform the framework for refugee protection in Britain, in principle and practice. If the UK recommits to playing our part, under the refugee convention, it will be necessary to rebuild public confidence in how it is possible to have an orderly, practicable and humane approach to asylum in Britain. For all of the heat and polarisation, the current politics of asylum has delivered neither control nor compassion. The next government will inherit a more chaotic situation than ever before and needs to show that asylum is manageable. It may be time to make asylum boring again.