The hardline conservative wing panics and quells its rebellion against Sunak

Rishi Sunak has used the fear factor to his advantage to save this Wednesday his law on the deportation of immigrants to Rwanda, which the hard wing of the party threatened to overturn because they did not consider it tough enough. The text has passed in second reading, with 320 votes in favor and 276 against. In the end, there were just over twenty votes against or abstentions.

Many British Conservative MPs are aware that it is highly possible that before the end of the year they will have lost their seats. The polls predict an electoral debacle on the right, and the desire to mess internally, as many have been doing in recent years, or to organize a new riot against the tenant of Downing Street, is no longer so urgent.

Just over 60 deputies from the parliamentary group, those most inclined to the right – and also the most aware of their voters' obsessions and fears with immigrants – had defended during the debate on the law a series of amendments that placed the Government in an uncomfortable position, both in the face of the majority and moderate part of the party, which considered that the text already went as far as it could go to force deportations and avoid their judicial stop, and for its own international prestige. The amendments practically prohibited immigrants from appealing their expulsion, except in the event that their physical condition prevented them from flying, and forced the Sunak Government to automatically ignore any attempt by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg to stop flights to the African country.

“We committed to British citizens to stop the arrival of the boats [con inmigrantes irregulares que cruzan el canal de la Mancha]. A solemn promise that I take very seriously, and that practically represents what a majority voted for in 2016 in the Brexit referendum,” argued Suella Braverman, the former Home Secretary who has decided to lead the rebellion against Sunak to account of irregular immigration and the everlasting mania of Eurosceptics towards everything that arrives from the continent. Although in this case the Strasbourg Court has nothing to do with the EU, much less with Brexit, but with the judicial supervision of a European Convention on Human Rights of which the United Kingdom was one of the first signatories. “I refuse for this matter to be in the hands of a foreign court, or of a distant and unidentified judge, who will never have the same ambition or aspiration that the British Government has to stop the arrival of these vessels,” he defiantly proclaimed. Braverman.

The Sunak Government's attempt at compromise and appeasement has helped curb the rebellion. His Secretary of State for Immigration, Michael Tomlinson, assured the rebels that, with the law in hand, the decision of whether or not to ignore any order from the ECHR would be up to the Minister of the Interior, regardless of what senior officials said. of the government.

But above all, it has been the feeling, widespread among the deputies most in favor of toughening the law, that their rebellion would be interpreted as a vote of confidence against Sunak that would jeopardize his permanence in Downing Street, which has stopped the revolt.

The paradox of this whole conflict, in which the prime minister and the rebels have respectively saved their necks, is that it has left senior officials with the feeling that they are the ones who have been placed in the crosshairs, with a law that It will force us to look the other way when the Government ignores international legality, in its efforts to begin sending the first irregular immigrants to Rwanda at all costs. And in that the president of Rwanda himself, Paul Kagame, present this Wednesday at the World Economic Forum in Davos, showed how fed up he was with the matter: “There is a limit to how long this matter can drag on,” he said.

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