Image of the Green Party’s Carla Denyer on BBC Question Time.
Responding to the Rwanda Bill completing its parliamentary stages, Green Party co-leader Carla Denyer said:
“I don’t want people risking their lives crossing the channel in small boats. But the way to stop that isn’t this punitive, inhumane approach. It’s providing safe and legal routes for people to apply for asylum from overseas, and working to fix the reasons that people are having to claim asylum – including wars and the climate crisis.
“This new Act is simply a very expensive way to be cruel. We need to get the humanity back into our refugee policy and Green MPs will certainly seek this Act’s repeal after the General Election.”
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak speaks during a press conference in Downing Street in London, after he saw the Safety of Rwanda Bill pass its third reading in the House of Commons by a majority of 44, January 18, 2024
Lords slam ‘legal fiction’ as they inflict first defeat on cruel Tory plan for asylum-seekers, decision comes day after seven-year-old girl tragically drowns in Channel
PEERS inflicted their first defeat against PM Rishi Sunak’s proposed Rwanda asylum law today — putting the House of Lords on a collision course with the government.
The upper chamber backed by 274 votes to 172, majority 102, a move to ensure the draft legislation, aimed at clearing the way to send asylum-seekers who cross the Channel in small boats on a one-way flight to Kigali, is fully compliant with the law.
The heavy government defeat sets the stage for an extended tussle between the Commons and Lords during “ping-pong,” where legislation is batted between the two houses until agreement is reached.
Peers slammed the government’s assertion that the east African country is safe to send migrants in contrary to a Supreme Court ruling.
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Former Lord Speaker Baroness D’Souza branded the emergency legislation a “legal fiction.”
The independent cross-bench peer said it is “writing into law a demonstrably false statement that Rwanda is a safe country to receive asylum-seekers and thereby forcing all courts to treat Rwanda as a safe country, despite clear findings of fact.”
Former shadow attorney general Baroness Chakrabarti, who brought the supported amendment, told peers that Labour is calling for changes to the Bill that would ensure compliance with the rule of law.
She argued this must be “completely incontrovertible for those like the Prime Minister, who now claim to be liberal patriots.”
The Tories and Labour competing over hardline immigration policies only helps to mainstream far-right ideas
Rishi Sunak conducts a press conference in December 2023 | James Manning (WPA Pool)/Getty Images
Standing at a lectern with the familiar slogan, “STOP THE BOATS”, Rishi Sunak evoked the “will of the people” as the so-called Rwanda Bill made its fractious passage through the Commons last week.
The prime minister’s summoning of “the people” to push through an inhumane and unpopular policy smacks of the misuse of populism that we have come to associate with this government. The insistence that stopping people seeking asylum is “an urgent national issue” deliberately ignores that the priority issues for the British public remain the cost of living and the NHS.
We have seen both main political parties eagerly trading punches for the prize of who can appear most punitive on blocking people seeking asylum. Not only does this stale consensus manufacture a sense of crisis that is a distortion of public opinion, but it also pretends it has nothing to do with racism. And yet whether it’s warning about a “hurricane” or “invasion” of migrants and the failures of multiculturalism, or condemning Britain’s “immigration dependency”, the messaging relies on innuendo and euphemism that stoke racial tensions.
The Runnymede Trust, where I am the interim co-CEO, has today published a report warning of the dangers of this rotten politics that helps mainstream far-right, racist political ideas. Political debate on immigration, based on racialised ideas of who is welcome and who belongs, has become the norm. Whether directly or indirectly, historic and contemporary migration policies are predicated on the exclusion of people of colour. As exemplified by the Windrush scandal, this cheap politics has a high cost – and it is people of colour, regardless of their citizenship status, who bear the ugly consequences.
These toxic anti-migrant policies are coupled with a sustained assault on our democratic infrastructure. In 2022, the government passed the Elections Act, which made it a requirement that voters present ID at polling stations. There was strong opposition about the impact on people of colour. The first UK elections to use them – the May 2023 local elections – confirmed these fears. The Electoral Commission reported about 14,000 people were turned away, and that people of colour and disabled people were most likely to be impacted. The commission predicts 800,000 people could be blocked from voting at the next general election – an incredible price to pay when there were just six cases of voter fraud in 2019.
It’s not just legislation, but also through rhetoric that politicians have persistently attacked the right to protest. Indeed, former home secretary Suella Braverman labelled pro-Palestine marches “hate marches” and compared them with wicked vexation to Black Lives Matter protests – both causes which have high levels of support among communities of colour.
And dare I even mention the ‘culture war’ and the injuries it has inflicted on the strength of civil society? In recent years we have seen the vilification of organisations across the arts, heritage, charity sector and our higher education spaces. The targets have often been those that have dared to embark on progressive racial justice work, who have been demonised with the absurd inversion of the term ‘woke’.
The fact it is the likes of Braverman and her replacement James Cleverly – ministers of colour – who have designed and executed these policies, shows diversity at the top does not protect against racist impact, nor does it mean people in those positions won’t have divergent or indeed opposing political interests to those with whom they may share some points of affinity.
The politics of representation may prioritise superficial visibility, but we mustn’t forget people in positions of power have always designed and inflicted policies that have harmed those they are deemed to share some interest with.
As we prepare for the 2024 general election, we must act to stop the rot of our democracy. Pandering to far-right politics by creating a crisis around small boats and invoking the “will of the people” to implement punitive and racist policies while ignoring the needs of the very people they invoke is unacceptable. On every count, it is people of colour that lose.
