Suella Braverman tells MPs Belfast court ruling shows Sunak’s Windsor framework has ‘failed upon first contact with reality’
Suella Braverman was home secretary when the Illegal Migration Act (the legislation covered by yesterday’s court judgment) was passed.
She told MPs that the court ruling yesterday showed that government claims that the Windsor framework (the updated version of the Northern Ireland protocol, negotiated by Rishi Sunak, meaning EU law in effect still applies in Northern Ireland) would not interfer with the Rwanda policy were wrong. She said:
In the decision the judge found that section 7A of the Withdrawal Agreement Act, as amended by the Windsor framework, must be read to mean that Northern Ireland is effectively to be treated as part of the European Union.
I believed the assurances made to me at the time.
But isn’t it now patently clear that the Windsor framework has operated in a way to undermine our sovereignty, to undermine Northern Ireland’s place within the United Kingdom, and I’m afraid it has fundamentally failed upon its first contact with reality.
Key events
The DUP’s Carla Lockhart said, instead of appealing, the government should legislate to ensure that EU law now longer has supremacy in Northern Ireland. She said appealing against the decision just amounted to stringing the people of Northern Ireland along.
Pursglove said the government would take all steps to resolve this, including appealing.
Joanna Cherry (SNP), chair of the joint committee on human rights, said yesterday’s judgment confirmed her committee’s assessment that the Rwanda policy does not comply with human rights law.
Pursglove said the government was operationalising the Rwanda policy on the basis of the Nationality and Borders Act. He claimed the yesterday’s judgment was not relevant because it applied to the Illegal Migration Act.
Gregory Campbell (DUP) asked Pursglove to explain why the government did not accept the DUP amendment to the Illegal Migraton Act that might have closed this loophole.
Pursglove said he was not minister at the time. But the record of the debate would speak for itself, he said.
Mark Francois, the Tory chair of the European Research Group, said with regard to the Windsor framework, “we told you so”. And he said the Tories should now commit to renegotiate the European convention on human rights, with a view to leaving if other countries did not agree.
Theresa Villiers, a former Northern Ireland secrtary, asked what the government was doing to stop asylum seekers going to Northern Ireland to avoid deportation to Rwanda.
In reponse, Pursglove repeated the point about the Rwanda scheme being operationalised on a UK-wide basis. He claimed there would be no benefit for asylum seekers in going to Nothern Ireland.
Tim Farron, the former Lib Dem leader, asks Pursglove what would happen to the 90,000 asylum seekers in the UK who theoretically are no longer eligible for asylum in the UK under the legislation passed by the government.
Pursglove said that he did not want to discuss what “appropriate operational decisions” it might have to take.
Suella Braverman tells MPs Belfast court ruling shows Sunak’s Windsor framework has ‘failed upon first contact with reality’
Suella Braverman was home secretary when the Illegal Migration Act (the legislation covered by yesterday’s court judgment) was passed.
She told MPs that the court ruling yesterday showed that government claims that the Windsor framework (the updated version of the Northern Ireland protocol, negotiated by Rishi Sunak, meaning EU law in effect still applies in Northern Ireland) would not interfer with the Rwanda policy were wrong. She said:
In the decision the judge found that section 7A of the Withdrawal Agreement Act, as amended by the Windsor framework, must be read to mean that Northern Ireland is effectively to be treated as part of the European Union.
I believed the assurances made to me at the time.
But isn’t it now patently clear that the Windsor framework has operated in a way to undermine our sovereignty, to undermine Northern Ireland’s place within the United Kingdom, and I’m afraid it has fundamentally failed upon its first contact with reality.
Pursglove claims asylum seekers will not be able to avoid deportation to Rwanda by going to Northern Ireland
Pursglove says there will be “no benefit” to asylum seekers who go to Northern Ireland in the hope of avoiding deportation. The policy is being operationalised on a UK basis, he says.
Alison Thewliss, the SNP’s home affairs spokesperson, says her party welcomes this judgment.
And she points out that it is a UK court that as found against the government, not one of the international courts that the government routinely attacks.
Bill Cash (Con) asks if the government’s recent migration laws could have contained wording making it clear that the Good Friday agreement would not stop asylum seekers being deported to Rwanda.
Pursglove says the will of parliament has been expressed, and the government will defend it.
Stephen Kinnock, the shadow immigration minister, says Pursglove did not explain why the government ignored the warnings about the Good Friday agreement and the Northern Ireland loophole.
He says the Illegal Migration Act is one of three Acts passed by the government to make the Rwanda policy work. But the government is “clueless”, he says, and addicted to gimmicks. He urges the minister to drop this “dead horse” of a policy and adopt Labour’s approach instead.
Pursglove says Labour has no plan to stop the boats.
He says the government is operating the Rwanda policy on the basis of the Nationality and Borders Act.
Gavin Robinson, the DUP leader, told Pursglove that his party warned the government that the Good Friday agreement could lead to asylum seekers in Northern Ireland being exempt from deportation to Rwanda. He said his party tried to amend the Rwanda bill to address this.
Pursglove told Robinson the government would be appealing against the judgment.
UPDATE: Robinson said:
The issues that were elucidated yesterday by the high court and Belfast were fairly and thoroughly explored in this House, and in the other place, during both the passage of the Illegal Migration Act and the Safety of Rwanda act as well.
When I and my colleagues raised these concerns here in parliament, we were told by the government we were wrong. And, yet, the high court yesterday in Belfast said we were right.
Minister tells MPs Good Friday agreement should not be interpreted ‘creatively’ to stop Rwanda deportations
Tom Pursglove, the minister for legal migration, is responding to an urgent question in the Commons on the Belfast high court ruling yesterday saying parts of the Illegal Migration Act should not apply in Northern Ireland.
He says the government does not agree with the court’s interpretation of the Good Friday agreement. He claims the court is expanding the way rights under the GFA are interpreted beyond what was originally intended.
He says the government wants to impose the Rwanda deportation policy on a UK-wide basis.
And he says the ruling applies to the Illegal Migration Act, not the Safety of Rwanda Act. It will not stop the deportation policy being implemented, he says.
UPDATE: Pursglove said:
We’ve consistently made clear that the rights commitments in the Belfast/Good Friday agreement should be interpreted as they were always intended and not expanded to cover reserved issues like illegal migration.
We are also equally clear that immigration is a reserved matter, which has always been applied uniformly across the UK. We do not accept that the Good Friday agreement should be read so creatively as to extend to matters such as tackling illegal migration, which is a UK-wide issue and not in any way related to the original intention of the Good Friday agreement.
Public trust in government and parliament has fallen by more than quarter since 2021, survey shows
The proportion of people saying they trust the government has fallen by a quarter since the time of the last election, according to figures released today.
The report, published by the UK Statisics Authority, suggests that public trust in parliament has fallen even more sharply during the same period, which covers the Boris Johnson and Liz Truss premierships.
None of the other institutions covered by the survey have forfeited public trust so much.
The UK Statistics Authority commissioned the research to monitor how much trust people have in the Office for National Statistics. Some 87% of people said they trusted the ONS in 2023, down from 89% in 2021.
But trust in government fell from 42% to 31% during that time, the survey shows. And trust in parliament fell from 49% to 36%.
The research was carried out for the UK Statistics Authority by National Centre for Social Research. In its analysis it said:
Compared to 2021, there was a noticeable decrease in the level of trust respondents reported in a number of state-led institutions such as the UK parliament, the government, the civil service, the police, and the Bank of England. However, trust reported in ONS, the media, the courts and high street banks and financial institutions remained consistent with the answers from the previous survey year.
The analysis did not explain why trust in government and parliament fell so sharply between 2021 and 2023. But that period covers the Partygate scandal, which led to Boris Johnson resigning as PM and subsequently being found by the privileges committee to have repeatedly lied to MPs about the lockdown-busting No 10 drinks events.
And it also covers Truss’s premiership, which only lasted 49 days because her mini-budget triggered an economic crisis.
Kezia Dugdale, the former Scottish Labour leader, told Times Radio this morning that she was strongly opposed to Esther McVey’s decision to ban civil servants from wearing rainbow lanyards. (See 9.34am.) She said the same thing had happened in the Scottish parliament, and she thought it was “a retrograde step”. She explained:
To wear a lanyard like this, it’s not a political sign, it’s not like the big cancel culture debates and issues that we’re having elsewhere in the country. It’s a welcome sign, it’s about saying to people there are other people like you here and you’re welcome …
If you see it, sometimes it just lets your shoulders go back and your head go up and you feel just that bit stronger …. A simple symbol that says to people ‘you’re OK’ can go a tremendous way …
Asking people to take their lanyard off is like taking a welcome sign out of a window and you’re asking people to leave who they are at home, and that’s not cool …
Would you ask a Christian to take off a cross of a necklace? It’s just a sign. It’s a symbol of who I am. It’s part of my identity.
