As I wrote last night for Byline Times, the Government’s new ‘Illegal Immigration Bill’ is both unworkable and likely unlawful. As even Suella Braverman admitted in her letter to MPs yesterday, there is a “more than 50% chance” that her plan to effectively ban most refugees from coming to the UK, is incompatible with our international obligations. This is likely an underestimate. No reading of the multiple human rights conventions that the UK is signed up to gives much confidence that this plan will hold up in court. 100% could, after all, also be described as “more than 50%”.
As well as being on shaky legal ground it is also on shaky moral ground. The plan has already been condemned by, among others, the UN’s Refugee Agency, and the Government’s own Children’s Commissioner. When a government starts publicly boasting about the fact that they will no longer help actual slaves, then you know that it has lost its way.
Yet while this Bill appears to fail on moral, legal and practical grounds, is it possible that it could be successful on political grounds?