A view of the House of Lords in London.

Britain’s House of Lords, the upper House of Parliament, has refused to ratify the Conservative government of Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s plan to deport illegal immigrants to Rwanda through an inter-governmental agreement between the two countries. The Supreme Court had quashed the legislation saying that those being deported are not guaranteed safety.

Prime Minister Sunak pushed through the Bill in the House of Commons because he is determined to stop the ‘boat people’ coming to Britain. The Conservatives are of the view that Britain is not in a position to absorb the immigrants. Ordinarily, the people coming illegally into Britain can only be sent back to the countries of origin. The issue is that people who are fleeing repressive regimes to save their lives cannot be pushed back to the very places where their lives are under threat.

So Britain’s conservative government found a way out by choosing a third country like Rwanda which had agreed to accept the deported immigrants because of a financial deal with Britain. The question on which the House of Lords had decided to hold back the deportation bill is that the safeguards for protecting the lives of the asylum-seekers are not robust enough.

The House of Lords does not have the right to veto a Bill passed by the popularly elected House of Commons. It can only delay it by a year. But Sunak is keen to push it as soon as he can in the runup to the general election in the year. He wants to fight the next election on the plank of stopping the illegal immigrants. The Conservatives who had won the election under Boris Johnson’s leadership on the Brexit plank in 2019 are trailing behind the Labour Party in the poll surveys. Sunak is fighting with his back to the wall, and it is not certain that he can lead Conservatives to a third win in a row. The deportation Bill is a sort of a last straw for the Conservatives’ sinking electoral fortunes.

It is however the case that Labour seems to be serving as a robust opposition under Keir Starmer but whether it can provide a strong government to tackles Britain’s many domestic crises, including that of illegal immigration, remains a big question. Labour has not so far offered a good enough alternative agenda to make it electable. And perhaps the opposition party cannot be blamed because the problems that Britain faces on its many fronts are indeed much too complex.

It is however possible that a Labour without a plan of governance can still hope to dislodge the Conservatives from office because people are desperately wanting to see the back of the Conservatives with their troublesome and weak prime ministers like Boris Johnson and Liz Truss. And also the Conservatives’ first term in office under prime ministers David Cameron and Theresa May have turned to be rather rudderless.

Conservatives were divided on whether to leave the European Union or not, and when there was a narrow win for the Brexit supporters in a referendum, Cameron and May wanted to implement rather half-heartedly. Johnson, a late convert to the Brexit agenda, won the election for Conservatives by going all for it.

Johnson was rhetorical in his commitment to leaving the EU, and pushed for it all the way; he wanted to play a heroic Churchillian role of reviving Britain’s heroic status. But now many Britons in an opinion poll have showed that they think that leaving the EU was not very beneficial to the country and its people. So, Sunak wants to fight the Conservative battle on stopping the entry of illegal immigrants in the hope that it will appeal to most Britons.