This is the end of Sunak’s Rwanda farce

At the foundation is the Good Friday Agreement, signed by Tony Blair, and intrinsically reliant on the European Convention of Human Rights and the international court that upholds it. Built upon that is the Brexit deal agreed by Boris Johnson, for which he required Tory MPs’ unconditional support if they were to retain the whip. 

The final agreement is Rishi Sunak’s own Windsor Framework, which managed to restore the devolved power-sharing administration in the region.

The Belfast High Court essentially found that given these modern agreements form the basis of Northern Ireland’s governance agreements, and are explicitly predicated on the Good Friday and by extension the ECHR, there is no way for the government to bypass it when it comes to Northern Ireland. In essence, it argues it would be unlawful for the government to deport asylum seekers located in Northern Ireland to Rwanda.

The government has been predictably spluttering in its response, arguing that the various agreements were never intended to cover issues like migration (a simple textual reading shows otherwise) and that they will appeal and win – though in reality the court has shown up the fragile position in which the government has landed itself. 

If it wins a court case that overrides  the special status of Northern Ireland, the political settlement there would likely collapse – with consequences for UK/EU trade and relations too. If it loses, it confirms that the UK is now operating under different legal regimes in a way that (unlike for Scotland and Ireland) were never fully considered and were even fudged over. 

It would also create a sanctuary from the Rwanda bill in Northern Ireland, which could have numerous knock-on effects.

All of this farce, though, is the consequence of this government’s actions since the 2019 election. Boris Johnson bulldozed through his version of a Brexit agreement by ignoring all criticism – some of which was constructive feedback from pro-Brexit MPs and advisors. 

The result of this was that a deal that was in many ways inferior to Theresa May’s was passed with very little scrutiny of its potential consequences – which then came to plague UK politics for years to follow (and will continue to do so in the years to come).

More than that, though, the Windsor Framework is a reminder of a different era of the Rishi Sunak government, when he still seemed interested in actually getting practical things done and was willing to compromise to make those happen. 

The Windsor Framework involved having to admit the Brexit agreement created a different legal and regulatory environment for Northern Ireland, while trying to minimise those differences to the extent that would bring the Democratic Unionist Party back onside. The risk with such frameworks, of course, is that they merely paper over the cracks for a time.

But it is the chaotic and sclerotic Rishi Sunak administration of 2024 that is undermining one of the few achievements of the Rishi Sunak premiership as a whole. By passing legislation on Rwanda that explicitly seeks to bypass the rule of law and international agreements on human rights, Sunak set off alarms on his own agreements that relied on the same.

The nature of Sunak’s many reinventions means that every victory is also a defeat. The wins of his brief pragmatic era risk being undone while Sunak is still in office by his own later bids to stay in power – or at least to lose less badly.

The situation with the Northern Irish courts reflects the situation in No. 10 – it is like nothing so much as a distressed tethered animal, thrashing wildly but damaging itself far more than anything else. 

As a consequence of his own decisions, Rishi Sunak is ensuring that any possible victory he could have will also come with a loss. One wonders why he’s even dragging this all out.