Truss Says She Will Expand Rwanda Deportation Scheme, Sunak Says Illegals ‘Not Bad People’

The Race For The Conservative Leadership
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Jack Montgomery

Tory leadership hopefuls Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak, one of whom will succeed Boris Johnson as Prime Minister, have finally addressed the issue of mass migration, largely ignored throughout their contest until now.

Foreign Secretary Liz Truss has backed the Australia-style plan to transfer asylum seekers landing in Britain — mostly bogus, given they are arriving mainly arriving from safe EU member-states France and Belgium — to Rwanda for processing and resettlement, although the scheme is yet to get off the ground, literally, due to the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) blocking removal flights.

“As Prime Minister, I am determined to see the Rwanda policy through to full implementation as well as exploring other countries where we can work on similar partnerships,” Truss insisted, indicating that she would strike more Rwanda-style agreements with third countries.

“I’ll make sure we have the right levels of force and protection at our borders,” she claimed.

Rishi Sunak, the former Chancellor of the Exchequer, also said that “thousands of people come into the UK illegally” every year, and that “[o]ften we don’t know who they are, where they’re from and why they’re here.”

“These are not bad people, but it makes a mockery of our system and it must stop,” he added — the former statement raising eyebrows, considering at least one boat migrant, who turned out to be wanted for raping and murdering a child in Austria, very much does appear to have been “bad people”.

Sunak described immigration as an “emergency” and said “we do not have control of our borders”, proposing solutions such as a refugee cap to be set by Parliament and holding migrants off-shore on cruise ships — which Truss’s team argued would violate the Human Rights Act.

“We need to break the cycle of these appalling gangs and stop people taking dangerous journeys across the Channel,” Truss said of her own plans to tackle illegal immigration.

“I’ll make sure we have the right levels of force and protection at our borders. I will not cower to the [European Court of Human Rights] and its continued efforts to try and control immigration policy,” she added, likely referring to the fact that flights taking migrants from Britain to Rwanda were blocked by an anonymous European judge even after the British courts had approved them.

Neither she nor Sunak have said they would end the European Court of Human Rights’ jurisdiction — which persists despite Brexit — however, as Attorney-General Suella Braverman had done while she was still in the Tory leadership race.

Notably, senior Tories’ private views in immigration often do not match their public promises to reduce it. Boris Johnson did not do so, and neither did Theresa May or David Cameron, despite an election pledge — eventually dropped by Johnson — to reduce immigration “from the hundreds of thousands”.

George Osborne, Cameron’s Chancellor of the Exchequer and right-hand man, revealed after exiting parliamentary politics that top Conservative politicians opposed fulfilling that public pledge in private, and actively decided not to reduce non-EU immigration “though we could [have]”.

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