U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s government is in crisis Friday after one right-wing cabinet member resigned and another recently-fired one sought to capitalize on the matter at hand—his government’s failure to come up with a workable scheme to ship asylum-seekers to faraway Rwanda. British media seem rather eager to see yet another paper-selling political defenestration shaping up, as the headlines above show.
Britain’s Rwanda scheme is one of the more novel responses, though critics say it’s both unethical and unworkable to send migrants — many of them fleeing conflict-scarred countries such as Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq — to a nation 6,400 kilometers (4,000 miles) away with no chance of ever settling in the U.K.
But Sunak’s main political threat comes from members of his party who think his scheme is not harsh enough. The prime minister’s authority was challenged when Immigration Minister Robert Jenrick quit the government late Wednesday, saying the government’s bill “does not go far enough” and won’t work.
The Rwanda scheme is central to the U.K. government’s self-imposed goal to keep unauthorized asylum-seekers trying to achieve England from France in small boats. More than 29,000 people have done that this year, and 46,000 in 2022.
Reuters reports on “ministerial churn,” which is also a good description of and a great name for a Christian Grindcore band.
Britain was once known for its stable politics – it had just four finance ministers in 23 years before 2016 – but the vote to leave the European Union triggered an earthquake in the governing Conservative Party and a battle to shape the country’s future outside the bloc.
England’s Supreme Court recently blocked the government’s first Rwanda scheme, and all of the options to make it work depend upon the governing Conservative Party forcing through legislation that marginalizes the court, ignores international law and scraps treaty obligations. The fight is between Sunak’s relatively moderate scheme not to explicitly defy the European Convention on Human Rights and right-wingers’ eagerness to explicitly renounce it.
Only about 4 in 10 Britons even maintain the scheme, according to YouGov, with Sunak’s party even less popular.
