Senior Tories have warned Rishi Sunak against blaming the House of Lords if his Rwanda policy stalls as an ex-attorney general urged peers to back a motion that may complicate attempts to start deportation flights.
Tory ex-Cabinet minister Baroness Morgan warned that attempts to pitch the Lords against the “will of the people” could backfire, while former immigration minister Lord Kirkhope said he was “disappointed” that the Prime Minister turned his fire on the upper house last week.
It comes as Sir Tony Blair’s former attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, urged peers to back his cross-party motion that would delay the endorsement of the UK’s new treaty with Rwanda, which is designed to convince judges the country is safe after they ruled the policy unlawful.
The Lords will on Monday debate a motion from Lord Goldsmith’s International Agreements Committee that calls for the Government to present a 10-point plan to show Rwanda is safe for asylum seekers before the treaty can be ratified.
Lords sources have told i the motion appears likely to pass as Tories could abstain or even support it alongside crossbenchers, Labour and the Liberal Democrats.
It means ministers will either have to delay treaty ratification or ignore it and risk asylum seekers using the Lords’ concerns over the safety of Rwanda to bolster appeals against deportation.
Lord Goldsmith, the Labour peer who served Sir Tony during the Iraq war, told i: “It is a unanimous report by a cross-party committee so I’d hope that many peers would support it.”
He said he would decide whether to push it to a vote during the debate, depending on the level of support.
“We were given a job to do,” the Labour peer added.
“The Home Secretary in his foreword to the papers he put to Parliament said, because of the treaty you can now definitely say that Rwanda is safe.
“So that is the question we asked ourselves – can we answer that question?
“It may be but we can’t say on the basis of this [treaty] because there’s still so much to implement.”
The vote on Monday is likely to be the first skirmish between peers and the Government as the Lords prepares to consider Mr Sunak’s separate Safety of Rwanda Bill, which alongside the treaty is designed to revive the beleaguered deportation deal after it was stuck down by the Supreme Court.
The Prime Minister last week attempted to pressure the Lords, which will begin debating the bill a week on Monday, to pass the laws “as quickly as possible” and not try to “frustrate the will of the people”.
But Baroness Morgan said the Bill would pass through the Lords as ultimately peers will back down if the Government opposes any amendments it makes.
She told the BBC’S Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg: “I would just say to No 10 that the last prime minister who used the will of the people language [Boris Johnson], it wasn’t a happy precedent.”
“If you put the House of Lords under too much pressure… if you allow them to talk, debate, scrutinise, you will get the result you want in No 10.”
Responding to Mr Sunak’s remarks during a No 10 press conference, fellow Tory Lord Kirkhope meanwhile told i: “I’m disappointed in this.
“Our job is to scrutinise legislation properly and I’m not convinced the Commons did scrutinise this very well, they seem to run their own agendas rather than looking at the actual legislation and seeing where the problems are.”
He added: “It’s either going to be the enemy of the people is the Lords or the enemy of the people is the judges.” By Arj Singh, The I
