The UK government overcame opposition from within the ruling Conservative party on Wednesday to drive divisive new legislation aimed at deterring asylum seekers from crossing the Channel to the UK through the House of Commons.
The bill will bar from claiming asylum almost anyone entering Britain on small boats or without prior permission, imposing a “legal duty” on the home secretary to detain and remove such people to a “safe” third country or to their country of origin.
After days of wrangling in which prime minister Rishi Sunak made concessions to both the right and centre of the Tory party to head off rebellions, MPs supported the legislation by a majority of 289 to 230. It will now go to the House of Lords, where senior Tories acknowledge it will face stiffer opposition.
Sunak has made stopping cross-Channel migration a priority after a record 45,000 people arrived in the UK on small boats last year. His government is testing the boundaries of international law in order to do that.
Suella Braverman, the home secretary, claimed on Wednesday that the UK would remain compliant with international obligations. But the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Britain’s Equalities and Rights Commission and opposition parties say the legislation, if passed, will put the country in clear breach of the UN Convention on Refugees and several other treaties.
Alison Thewliss, home affairs spokesperson for the Scottish National party, said after the vote that MPs had in effect voted to “break the law”.
Despite initial opposition on Tory backbenches, MPs voted in favour of last-minute amendments that would allow the home secretary to override judges at the European Court of Justice in Strasbourg should they seek to block deportations to Rwanda, as they did last year.
Geoffrey Cox, a former Tory attorney-general, said in parliament that this was tantamount to giving “legislative sanction to at least the possibility that the minister of the crown will deliberately disobey the international law obligations of this country”.
Another amendment passed that former Conservative prime minister Theresa May said risked driving the victims of modern slavery “back into the arms of slave drivers”.
Introducing the bill, immigration minister Robert Jenrick claimed that the majority of those people crossing the Channel to the UK using small boats were “essentially asylum shoppers”.
The bill, he said, would “send a clear message that if you enter the UK illegally, you will not be able to build a life here. Instead, you’re liable to be detained and you will be removed either back to your home country if it’s safe to do so or a safe third country such as Rwanda,” he said.
He added, however, that by pledging the creation of new safe and legal routes for asylum seekers to reach the UK, the government also wanted to preserve Britain’s reputation “for the way in which we provide sanctuary to those people who are genuinely in need”.
Labour’s shadow immigration minister Stephen Kinnock said “the entire bill is unworkable, unaffordable, unethical”.
“A vast amount of taxpayers’ money is being squandered on a profoundly unethical policy that is designed to fail on its own terms,” he said.
