Rishi Sunak defends Rwanda asylum policy as Tory split deepens – UK politics live | Politics

Ben Quinn

While it is Conservative MPs whose positions will determine the fate of Sunak’s legislation, the views of the party’s membership, who have tended to be more rightwing than those in parliament, is harder to quantify

Paul Goodman, the editor of ConservativeHome, said a survey which the website had carried out in July found seven out of 10 Conservative activists believe the UK should leave the European convention on human rights. He said:

In terms of how they feel about this legislation now, a certain amount depends on what positions they see Eurosceptics they support taking. Though her support among MPs may be limited, some members will look for a lead from Suella Braverman, although the picture there is also complicated.

When members were surveyed on whether Sunak was right to sack her as home secretary, half said he was wrong but two in five said he was right, which is a substantial minority.

Aletha Adu

The Conservative party chair, Richard Holden, told reporters at a press gallery lunch his party still has a “fighting chance” of winning the next general election. He said:

I wanted to come in here today to tell you and especially my colleagues in the room, that the fight is not over, despite what Labour seem to think …

Our opponents may think it is a forgone conclusion and try to keep their heads down because whenever they put them up, they make a mistake. But it’s clear to me that the fight isn’t over and it has a few facets to it.

Holden criticised Keir Starmer for making a number of U-turns and not standing up to Jeremy Corbyn when antisemitism was at its peak in the party.

On Starmer’s praise for Margaret Thatcher, Holden said the “public see him as a shapeshifting child. A major issue for him is that he means to stand for something that he can’t stand for.”

The Tory chair also said his party would be ready for a general election from February 2024.

Northern Research Group Tories likely to support Rwanda bill, says its chair

Ben Quinn

The chair of an influential group of Conservative MPs who include many from “red wall” constituencies said he believes they would support Rishi Sunak’s Rwanda legislation.

John Stevenson, the Carlisle MP who chairs the Northern Research Group, said:

I think that it will be overwhelmingly supported by northern MPs. Some may have wanted it to be more robust but I think that most will support it and I would be surprised if anybody went against it.

Immigration a big issue in all of seats in the north of England and I view this as another stage in the government approach, so let’s bring forward the legislation. My attitude is that if it doesn’t work then you would need to revisit the whole issue.

George Osborne has suggested that one reason Boris Johnson was not fully focused on Covid in early 2020 was because he was working out how to pay off a big tax bill.

The former Tory chancellor floated the theory, without offering any firm evidence to back it up, on his Political Currency podcast which he co-hosts with Ed Balls. Osborne and Johnson have a rivalry dating back to the time when they were both seen as likely successors to David Cameron as prime minister, and Johnson’s successful leadership of the leave campaign in 2016 in effect killed off Osborne’s political career.

In February 2020 Johnson spent a long period at Chevening, a government grace-and-favour country home, while Chequers was being refurbished. In his witness statement to the Covid inquiry, Dominic Cummings, Johnson’s former chief adviser, said Johnson was “on holiday for a fortnight” dealing with his divorce, the announcement of his engagement, and accusations about him in the media from an ex-girlfriend. Cummings also said Johnson wanted to work on his Shakespeare biography.

Johnson’s allies have dismissed the Shakespeare book claim, and at the Covid inquiry yesterday Johnson said he was holding some work meetings during the Chevening period. But the former PM has not given a full account of how he spent that time.

Osborne said on his podcast:

I think he [Johnson] hits a kind of financial crunch in early 2020. Because he’s basically taken the job of prime minister, which is a big pay cut for him. He has a big tax bill to pay, because he was giving speeches for money in that period between when he was foreign secretary and prime minister. And he wouldn’t have put aside money to pay HMRC a few years later …

Because he’s bust he can’t deal with Covid. That is a theory about what happened in February. It didn’t really surface, put it this way, at the Covid inquiry, but it’s a personal pet theory of mine of why he disappears in February.

In response, a spokesperson for Johnson said:

This is total and transparent nonsense and is also in contradiction of the evidence which was presented at the inquiry; it shows that Mr Johnson was working in this period, including attending meetings in person in Downing Street, receiving box work and taking part in Covid-relevant discussions.

Humza Yousaf, Scotland’s first minister, has described the UK government’s plan to slash immigration as marking a “real dark day” for Britain.

Speaking at first minister’s questions, in response to a question from the SNP MSP Clare Haughey specifically about the plan to stop people on care worker visas bringing dependants with them, Yousaf said:

It’s a real dark day for the UK, a country that once welcomed immigrants, including my grandfather, to the country. In fact, begged him to come and others to come to work in their factories, to drive buses, due to the labour shortages that were seen at that time.

As PA Media reports, Yousaf’s grandfather came to Scotland from Pakistan in the 1960s to work in a sewing machine factory in Clydebank.

Yousaf argued that Labour and Conservative governments were both responsible over the years for making immigration rules increasingly restrictive. He said:

What successive UK governments have done – Labour and Conservatives – is they have, bit by bit, dismantled our immigration and indeed our asylum processes.

On immigration, the latest announcements mean that we’re asking – the UK government is asking – migrants to come here to look after our own family members but doing so by abandoning their own family members back home.

On asylum, the UK government has virtually eliminated any practical legal route for those that are fleeing war or persecution.

The policies of the UK government in this respect are not only morally repugnant, but they are economically illiterate.

The SNP, the Scottish government, values migration. We value the importance of it to our social fabric but also to our economy, and let me say unequivocally that in Scotland, the Scottish government will always say that we are proud of the benefits that migrants bring to this country, and we are proud that they have chosen Scotland to be their home.

The BBC licence fee will rise by £10.50 to £169.50 a year, the culture secretary, Lucy Frazer, has confirmed.

In a statement to MPs, Frazer also announced a review of the licence fee that will consider alternative funding models. In a news release the Department for Culture, Media and Sport said:

The review, supported by a panel of independent experts soon to be announced from across the broadcasting sector and wider business world, will assess a range of options for funding the BBC. It will look at how alternative models could help secure the broadcaster’s long-term sustainability amid an evolving media landscape, increased competition and changing audience behaviour, while reducing the burden on licence fee payers.

Under its terms of reference, the review will consider various issues including “whether the BBC should provide more services to audiences on a fully commercial basis, and what those services could be” and “how the BBC could transition to any new funding model”.

The names of those leading the review have not yet been announced.

This was the second press conference Rishi Sunak has held at No 10 within a month about the Rwanda deportation policy. The first came on the day of the supreme court judgment saying the policy was unlawful and on that occasion he sought to win over Tory MPs by promising “emergency legislation” (even though the emergency bill he was proposing was not the same as what they wanted). Today the bill is out, and Sunak stressed that it included “notwithstanding clauses”, even though they are not the hardcore “notwithstanding clauses” sought by rightwingers. Sunak’s will disapply parts of the Human Rights Act; Suella Braverman and her allies want clauses that will disapply all or parts of the European convention on human rights.

Sunak was eloquent today when arguing that his bill is strong enough to ensure deportation flights to Rwanda will take off. But it is not yet clear whether his legal arguments are as robust as his rhetoric, and today he sounded more uncertain and defensive than he did when going over this ground last month. He said four times that he was “confident” his plan would work, but the more he said it, the less confident he sounded. And perhaps the biggest takeaway of all came from the questions; the Daily Mail, the Sun and the GB News, which are normally quite favourable to the Tories, all asked sceptical or hostile questions.

Here is the text of Sunak’s opening statement. And here are the main points from the statement and the Q&A.

Let me just go through the ways individual illegal migrants try and stay.

Claiming asylum – that’s now blocked.

Abuse of our Modern Slavery rules – blocked.

The idea that Rwanda isn’t safe – blocked.

The risk of being sent on to some other country – blocked.

And spurious Human Rights claims – you’d better believe we’ve blocked those too … because we’re completely disapplying all the relevant sections of the Human Rights Act.

And not only have we blocked all these ways illegal migrants will try and stay.

We’ve also blocked their ability to try and stay by bringing a Judicial Review on any of those grounds.

That means that this bill blocks every single reason that has ever been used to prevent flights to Rwanda from taking off.

The only, extremely narrow exception will be if you can prove with credible and compelling evidence …. that you specifically have a real and imminent risk of serious and irreversible harm …

I am telling you now, we have set the bar so high that it will be vanishingly rare for anyone to meet it.

I will not allow a foreign court to block these flights.

If the Strasbourg court chooses to intervene against the express wishes of our sovereign parliament, I will do what is necessary to get flights off.

And today’s new law already makes clear that the decision on whether to comply with interim measures issued by the European court is a decision for British government ministers – and British government ministers alone.

Ignoring injunctions from the ECtHR is not the same as ignoring all judgments from it.

• He claimed that there was only “an inch” between his stance and that of his Tory critics who want a tougher bill. And if he agreed to their demand (for a bill allowing the UK to ignore the ECHR), Rwanda would pull out, he said.

For the people who say ‘you should do something different’, the difference between them and me is an inch, given everything that we have closed. We’re talking about an inch.

That inch by the way is the difference between the Rwandans participating in this scheme and not.

At his press conference Rishi Sunak was asked if No 10 would treat next week’s vote on the Rwanda bill as a confidence vote. His answer was not entirely clear, but No 10 has confirmed that he said no.

Treating the second reading vote as a confidence vote would mean that any Tory MP who voted against, or perhaps even abstained, would lose the whip, and could be banned from standing as a candidate at the next election.

That might seem like an attractive option for No 10, but designating a division as a confidence vote can easily backfire because MPs view it as an extreme measure, and an act of desperation. Liz Truss resigned as PM the day after a bungled threat to treat a vote on fracking as a confidence issue.