A Tory bid to stop Rishi Sunak’s Safety of Rwanda Act from being torn up was dismissed by MPs – with the Conservatives branded ‘mugs’ and accused of living in ‘fantasy land’
MPs have lined up to mock the Tories after their desperate bid to save Rishi Sunak’s “hare-brained” Rwanda law failed spectacularly.
A brazen effort to stop the Safety of Rwanda Act being torn up was laughed away, with the Tories branded “mugs”. Labour Minister Dame Angela Eagle accused the Conservatives of living in a “fantasy land” after Conservative frontbencher Matt Vickers tried to save the controversial legislation.
Border Security and Asylum Minister Dame Angela said the Act would go down as “one of the most catastrophic pieces of legislation that Parliament has ever had to deal with”. The controversial Rwanda scheme cost taxpayers over £700million, but resulted in just four volunteers agreeing to go.
A cross-party committee voted down an amendment by Mr Vickers to keep the Act on the statute books by 11 to three. SNP MP Pete Wishart said: “The Tories should be apologising for the scheme and promising never to come up wtith anything as hare-brained again… they should be asking for forgiveness.”
And he concluded his withering put-down by saying: “They have a hard neck trying to bring it back.”
The Safety of Rwanda Act was pushed through by Mr Sunak after a Supreme Court ruling that asylum seekers should not be sent there. The divisive law declares it is a safe country until the end of time – despite it being sanctioned by the UK last month amid accusations it was fuelling a regional war.
Mr Wishart said: “If you look at Rwanda currently it’s so safe that it’s currently accused of supporting the M23 militia which is claimed to be recruiting child soldiers and carrying out rapes and killings in the DRC.” And referring to the agreement between the two nations, he said: “Rwanda played a blinder, they saw these mugs (the Tories) coming.”
Labour MP Kenneth Stevenson said: “Clearly they’re carrying on as they’ve done for years and insisting on making the same mistakes and spending millions from the public purse.”
Mr Vickers told MPs the decision to scrap the partnership with Rwanda had withdrawn the “only deterrent” to discourage small boat crossings. And fellow Tory Katie Lam said: “The last Conservative government didn’t get everything right, that was for sure. But the Rwanda scheme was a genuine attempt to solve this genuinely hard problem.”
Dame Angela pointed out that nearly 84,000 such crossings were recorded between the project being announced in 2022 and torpedoed last July.
She said: “I’m a bit distressed that the party opposite is continuing to assert that the Safety of Rwanda Act was just about to work and on the cusp of being able to work… It’s possible to speculate that secretly many of them are really pleased that they can assert that because it gets them out of an embarrassing and expensive farrago that will go down in history in this country as one of the most catastrophic pieces of legislation that Parliament has ever had to deal with.”
Dover MP Mike Tapp, Labour, described the project as a “legal and moral dead end”. The Act is set to repealed under Labour’s Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill, which is currently undergoing line-by-line scrutiny.
Foreign Secretary David Lammy accused the Rwandan government of a “blatant” breach of international law and warned it risked dragging the region into war. Last year The Mirror revealed Government officials secretly drew up contingency plans for the outbreak of war in Rwanda – even as Tories voted it was a safe country. Mr Lammy last month announced bilateral aid has been halted to Rwanda.
In a speech to G20 foreign ministers, he said: “I’ve called out the Rwandan Defence Force operations in the eastern DRC as a blatant breach of the UN Charter which risks spiralling into a regional conflict, and that’s why I will again make clear to President Kagame, that further breaches of DRC’s sovereignty will have consequences.”