December 7, 2023 - 5:15pm
Robert Jenrick’s decision to resign over the Government’s Rwanda policy, which he argues does not go “far enough”, is a serious signal of trouble ahead.
Indeed, this departure should be taken more seriously than Suella Braverman’s a few weeks before. The former Home Secretary held the more senior post, to be sure. But Braverman was never an ally of the Prime Minister, and had been pushing the boundaries on all sorts of fronts in the weeks leading up to her dismissal from government.
Jenrick is a different beast. He has not been part of the politics-as-punditry wing of the Tory Right.
Indeed, he has a reputation for actually trying to get to grips with difficult issues in government: when Boris Johnson tasked him with taking forward planning reform, he actually did it, even though his ultimate reward was getting dismissed from the Cabinet when his boss got cold feet.
When he was first sent to the Home Office last October, it was widely viewed as Sunak installing a loyalist in the department to keep an eye on Braverman (perhaps mindful of the promises he had apparently made to her during the leadership contest).
So that Jenrick has ended up, after a year in post as immigration minister, on the side of the argument calling for much more radical action is significant. If anyone would know whether the UK can control its borders under our present legal framework, he would.
At the Home Office, he will have seen first hand how the easy answers often peddled by critics of the Government’s approach are no answers at all.
Without an effective legal means to limit the number of people able to claim asylum here, and effective means for deporting those who fail, setting up safe and legal routes risks the number of applications running out of control.
Talk of clearing the processing backlog is all very well, but the only way any government could be certain to do that would be waiving people through. Each case officials try to reject is subject to repeated legal challenge, and once those are exhausted, it is often extremely difficult to deport the claimant — especially if they have taken the smugglers’ advice and destroyed their passport.
However, it’s also likely that his resignation is not just about the alleged shortcomings in the Safety of Rwanda Bill. Jenrick was Minister for Immigration, not illegal immigration. His resignation letter refers to the much bigger problem of overall numbers; when he wrote that he refuses to be “yet another politician who makes promises to the British public on immigration but does not keep them”, last year’s eye-watering net immigration figures must have been uppermost in his mind.
That highlights the other big problem for Sunak. Yes, voters concerned about immigration are angry about channel crossings, a visible loss of control. But focusing on that cannot paper over the fact that net immigration was 257,000 per annum when the Tories took power in 2010 — and 745,000 in 2022.
As a result, if Sunak wants to fight the next election on immigration then he has to do so in a way that doesn’t draw attention to the fact it has almost tripled under the Conservatives. Hence his relentless focus, despite all the setbacks, on Rwanda.
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SubscribeAren’t a lot of these ministers making big political statements to set themselves up as a possible punt for the future post of leader ? The government appears to be toast so what have they got to lose?
A distressingly-large number of Tory MPs suffer from the “woke mind virus” and so are incapable of countenancing the changes required.
So Sunak’s latest attempt is designed to fail heroically. Somehow he thinks it will keep us in-side.
Immigration makes the metropolitan class richer by inflating house prices and rents and compressing wages and otherwise has little or no impact in Putney or Barnes.
Change that and the opposition to effective border control will disappear.
For goodness sake, Braverman didn’t resign, she was sacked! Who writes these nonsense headlines?
Ah… it’s now been adjusted to “departure”.
It was “resignation” to begin with.
So he got a grip on planning? By their overturning planning refusals for multi millionaire developers. Not for a hung mind you. No, heaven forbid. Honest Bob. Snake Oil Salesman.
Do you re-read your stuff before posting? You should. That way we wouldn’t have to read your posts several times to figure out what you’re saying.
‘So that Jenrick has ended up, after a year in post as immigration minister, on the side of the argument calling for much more radical action is significant. If anyone would know whether the UK can control its borders under our present legal framework, he would.’
This seems to me to be a bit of a stretch. After all, Labour are calling for migration reductions that are far from trivial and Starmer doesn’t seem to be disputing significant parts of the plans recently announced by the Conservatives or the arguments. This matter is less partisan along party lines than is credited.
It seems to me that Jenrick is really just a victim of the fundamental fault with the Conservatives over the past 15 years – a tendency to hyperactivty and to just blurt things out without nearly enough thought. Cameron’s thinking about ‘tens of thousands’ was certainly just something he blurted out and it became (reasonably) a party and media totem. Rwanda was just a thing that got blurted out and again quite avoidably became a totem. Jenrick just got stuck with a bad idea that can’t be made to work on any scale or timeline that matters and all with a blaze of media.
I do wonder how far the hyperactivity post 2010 is a bad reflection on special advisors at least as much as politicians. If they are advising, far too often that advice seems to be poor or craven.
It’s just been hyperactive quantity over quality for years. So even some things that are on some level in certain circumstances good ideas – academy schools for example – get pushed hyperactively and we then end up with schools as academies where there is little to no capacity to make them work as they should do.
I suppose that in a way it is fitting that the ultimate hyperactive – Liz Truss – got to lead this Conservative Party and show us all exactly why a hyperactive government is a bad thing.
In fairness of course hyperactivity and pet project bad ideas did not just start in 2010. And it may be that Labour can’t resist the temptation. But 2010 on Conservatives are the ideas we have now.
But in my mind immigration and Rwanda are symptoms of a far more serious problem in our government.
Not clear why Jenrick didn’t resign when he saw PM (and no doubt Treasury) overriding Braverman’s approach to ‘legal’ migration – i.e: salary limit, dependents/family and priority industries. Of course the fact she didn’t resign them probably meant it never crossed his mind!
It just shows how much the Tories fixated on the Boats to the detriment of other strategies to reduce legal net migration.
As regards the ‘Boats’, I suspect a majority don’t have a problem with the principle at all and would welcome it. But I suspect majority also increasingly aware what a hash we are making and that the ‘grifters’ in Rwanda saw this likelihood all along and will keep ‘milking the cow’. Was predicted wasn’t it.