On the evening of Tuesday, June 14, 2022, I sat with a handful of Tory colleagues in the smoking room of the House of Commons as the Rwanda scheme they’d worked tirelessly on for months fell apart in real time.
That evening was supposed to see the first deportation flight take off from a military airbase in Wiltshire carrying seven asylum seekers destined for the east African country, where their applications would be processed.
As it was, just three hours before take-off at 7.30pm, the European Court of Human Rights intervened on behalf of one Iraqi man claiming he was at risk of ‘harm’ if deported.
Buoyed by the court’s intervention, further legal challenges came in over the following hours and by 10.15pm all seven migrants had been removed from the plane and the flight – chartered at a cost to the taxpayer of half a million pounds – was cancelled.
At the time, my Conservative colleagues and I still believed we would get the Rwanda scheme off the ground, but I can’t deny the mood that evening was one of profound disappointment.
After months of tough talking from senior politicians and promises to finally get a grip on immigration, I felt as though we’d failed.
And so, as news of the current Government’s latest asylum overhaul leaked over the weekend, I had a creeping sense of deja vu. There was the Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, on the media round declaring that illegal migration was ‘tearing the country apart’ and promising a definitive end to border chaos.
‘I can see that it is polarising communities across the country,’ Ms Mahmood declared. ‘It is dividing people and making them estranged from one another. I don’t want to stand back and watch that happen in my country.’
She promised longer waits for ‘settled status’ for migrants, with proposals that include a 20-year wait – up from five years – before asylum seekers can apply for indefinite leave to remain here.
Also mooted was a so-called visa-ban on countries accused of stymying attempts by Britain to return illegal migrants, with plans to make it more difficult for those foreign nationals to travel to and work in the UK.
There’s also a promise to clamp down on asylum appeals and to tighten the rules around bringing family members here.
All good, tub-thumping stuff, but I’m afraid we’ve been here before.
As I learnt on that evening in June 2022, talk is cheap when it comes to immigration.
I served as Conservative MP for Redditch for seven years and as a government minister for the final four years of Tory rule up to 2024. During that time, I saw successive prime ministers and home secretaries promise to curb illegal migration and ‘stop the boats’.
Every one of those politicians had the best of intentions – just as I believe Ms Mahmood has. And yet, they all failed. Why?
The truth is that until Britain scraps the Blair-era Human Rights Act and the later Modern Slavery Act, and leaves the European Convention on Human Rights, no government or politician will have the power to turn this bold rhetoric into action.
When the public voted for Brexit, they voted to take back control. Unfortunately for democracy, true authority over much of Britain’s legislature still sits in Strasbourg with the ECHR.
I firmly believe that without the efforts of this overmighty body, the Rwandan scheme would have been a success.
Shabana Mahmood’s planned policies, including increasing the time before migrants can apply for indefinite leave to remain, will face furious challenges in the courts. And, speaking from experience, these are precisely the battles the Home Office is likely to lose.
The Home Secretary knows this. That’s why she wants, for example, to tinker with Article 8 of the Human Rights Act – the right to a private and family life – which is often exploited by migrants to ensure they can stay here and that their extended families can soon join them in the UK.
But what the Home Secretary will only learn over time is that trying to tweak this Act is grossly insufficient.
If she wants to break the cycle of over-promising and under-delivering on immigration, that so infuriates voters, she has no choice but to leave the ECHR and scrap the Human Rights and Modern Slavery Acts altogether. And here we come to the Government’s other great problem. Lawyers aside, it will have to convince its own parliamentary party to back the proposals in the Commons.
This task may yet prove even more difficult. Let’s not forget, this is a Labour Party divided. Earlier this summer naive and inexperienced backbench MPs demolished the Government’s proposed welfare reforms, forcing the Prime Minister into a humiliating climbdown that has not only cost the Exchequer around £5 billion a year but also means Labour has little choice – either in this Budget or perhaps the next – but to break its manifesto pledge not to increase any of the so-called ‘big three’ taxes (income tax, VAT and National Insurance).
A similar rebellion surely awaits on immigration reform. Labour backbenchers – 243 of whom are serving in their first Parliament – are twitchy.
More than two thirds of the British public have an unfavourable opinion of their leader, according to a YouGov poll, and many MPs fear they will soon haemorrhage votes on the Left to a resurgent Green Party whenever the public is called back to the ballot box.
The last thing Labour MPs want to do is back immigration reforms similar to those they spent years decrying under the hated Tories.
The reason Boris Johnson was able to get his Brexit Bill through Parliament is that every Tory candidate endorsed by the party at the 2019 General Election had signed up to the Brexit Pledge. Boris had support for Brexit even before Tory candidates made it onto the ballot paper, let alone into the Commons.
Labour, however, has no such consensus and certainly not on the sensitive issue of immigration.
In fact, yesterday, Labour MPs were queuing up to brief against Mahmood’s plans, with the reliably Left-wing Stella Creasy describing them as ‘performatively cruel’ and ‘economically misjudged’.
In my work as director of strategy for the Leader of the Opposition, Kemi Badenoch, I’ve learnt from the mistakes made by former Tory leaders. And what is abundantly clear is that on immigration, the Conservatives talked a good game but failed to implement genuine change.
The result, of course, was humiliation at the ballot box last year. Only now, in opposition, have we had the time to reflect on promises unkept and apologise to the nation.
How remarkable then, that after 14 years shouting from the sidelines, the Labour Party is about to make exactly the same mistake.
Baroness Maclean was a Member of Parliament for Redditch in Worcestershire from 2017 to 2024 and worked as director of strategy to the Leader of the Opposition, Kemi Badenoch.
