Rishi Sunak challenges Lords to pass Rwanda bill – what will happen next?
Rishi Sunak’s flagship Rwanda legislation has been approved by MPs, but getting deportation flights off the ground remains far from a done deal.
Speaking the day after he saw off a rebellion from his own MPs over the bill – who wanted it to be more hardline – he has thrown down the gauntlet to the House of Lords to get the “emergency” law passed.
But what exactly happens next, can the bill be changed – and could it even be stopped from becoming law?
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Politics live: PM holds news conference
What did Rishi Sunak say?
Speaking from a lectern in Downing Street, Mr Sunak made clear he plans to heap political pressure on the upper chamber of parliament.
He said: “It’s now time for the Lords to pass this Bill. This is an urgent national priority.
“The treaty with Rwanda is signed and the legislation which deems Rwanda a safe country has been passed unamended in our elected chamber.
“There is now only one question. Will the opposition in the appointed House of Lords try and frustrate the will of the people as expressed by the elected House? Or will they get on board and do the right thing?”
He added: “Will the House of Lords understand the country’s frustration, see the will of the elected House and move as quickly as we have to support this legislation so we can get it on the statute books and then get flights up and running?”
What next?
After passing its third reading in the Commons, the bill has to go through the exact same processes in the House of Lords.
This includes an initial vote – and then if it passes, peers can propose amendments. These would then be debated and voted on.
Due to the Lords regulating itself, the restrictions on the amount of time that can be taken to debate are looser, and so things can move slightly slower than in the Commons.
Unlike in the Commons, the Lords is not bound in the same way by government restrictions on what can be discussed or how long for.
After the House votes on what substantial amendments it wants to make, members “tidy-up” the bill to make sure there are no loopholes.
It is at this point that “ping pong” begins; the bill will bounce between the Commons and Lords, with each house voting on whether to accept the other’s amendments.
There is a potential that the Lords could delay the bill until the next general election – but that is something which will be covered in a later section.
It is worth noting the government does not have a majority in the Lords – with 270 of 785 peers belonging to the Conservative Party.
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‘Is your country safe?’
Read more:
Rwanda vote is a win for Sunak, but it has come at a cost
What is the Rwanda plan and why is it controversial?
Sunak denies doubting Rwanda scheme when chancellor
Over what timeline could this proceed?
Another question is when the Lords will start considering the bill, and when voting will take place.
As with many things to do with the Westminster parliamentary process, very little is set in stone and the best we can do is take an educated guess.
One Labour source set out their expectation of how the next few months will go.
They said the earliest the Lords could have a debate and a vote is in the week starting 29 January.
The House of Lords – seen here during the King’s speech – could block the law
The next step – when the upper chamber debates the bill and any potential changes – could take place between 12 February and 14 February, when the Commons is in recess.
The next set of voting in the Lords would likely take place towards the end of February or the start of March.
Ping pong would likely begin in the second week of March. If the government gets the bill passed, then it is likely to take a few months for things to be put in place for flights to Rwanda to take off.
Could the Lords block the bill?
In short, yes.
In the first instance, members could simply vote down the legislation, although that is quite unlikely.
Labour has also indicated it plans to abide by the convention of not blocking laws passed in the Commons.
It could also be held up during the ping pong stage.
This would see the two houses adding and removing each other’s amendments on repeated occasions.
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The Lords’ ability to hold up legislation is normally balanced by the fact that a government can reintroduce a bill in a subsequent parliamentary session – which would mean after a King’s Speech – and pass it without the Lords’ consent.
But this step – included in the Parliament Act – also requires a minimum of a year between the first Commons vote on the legislation, and it passing the same House in the subsequent parliament.
Because an election needs to be called in December this year at the latest, it is possible for the Lords to wait out the clock until then – preventing the use of the Parliament Act.
In what may prove a difficult development for the government, a committee set up to evaluate international treaties on behalf of the Lords has recommended the treaty upon which the Safety of Rwanda Bill is based should not be ratified.
The International Agreements Committee said ratification “should wait until parliament is satisfied that the protections it provides have been fully implemented since parliament is being asked to make a judgement, based on the treaty, about whether Rwanda is safe“.
The US Securities and Exchange Commission’s Crypto Task Force has scheduled a roundtable discussion centered on privacy and financial surveillance for December, as a renewed focus on privacy grips the cryptocurrency industry.
The privacy roundtable is slated for Dec. 15. Like other SEC roundtables, crypto industry executives and SEC officials will discuss common pain points and solutions, but no hard policy proposals will be submitted.
Privacy has become a hot-button topic following several developments, including the partial guilty verdict in Tornado Cash developer Roman Storm’s trial in June, the Samourai Wallet developer sentencing in November and the privacy token price rally over the last two months.
“Authoritarians thrive when people have no privacy. When those in charge start being hostile to privacy protections, it is a major red flag,” said Naomi Brockwell, founder of the Ludlow Institute, an organization advocating for liberty through technology.
The renewed interest in privacy hearkens back to crypto’s cypherpunk roots, and one of the core reasons the cryptographic technology that underpins crypto was invented — to ensure secure communication channels between parties in hostile environments.
Related: Crypto investors flee visibility for anonymity as privacy coins surge 80%
Crypto community sounds the alarm about privacy following precedent-setting legal cases
The verdict in the Storm trial and other cases where open-source software developers have been convicted or imprisoned for creating non-custodial, privacy-preserving protocols has set a dangerous precedent for privacy technology in the US, legal experts have said.
Crypto industry executives and advocates argue that the prosecutions are meant to dissuade developers from building privacy-preserving tools.
The verdict in the Samourai Wallet case is analogous to the US government accusing car manufacturer Toyota of a conspiracy because terrorists and criminals also use their cars, according to journalist and crypto advocate Lola Leetz.
“People should not be held accountable for what other people do with the tools they build,” Leetz said.
In August, Matthew Galeotti, the acting assistant attorney general for the Department of Justice’s criminal division, signaled the agency would no longer prosecute open-source software developers for writing code.
“Our view is that merely writing code, without ill intent, is not a crime,” Galeotti said. “The department will not use indictments as a law-making tool. The department should not leave innovators guessing as to what could lead to criminal prosecution.”
Magazine: 2026 is the year of pragmatic privacy in crypto: Canton, Zcash, and more
Politics
All four UK governments ‘failed to appreciate’ scale of COVID pandemic threat – inquiry finds
All four UK governments failed to appreciate the scale of the threat posed by COVID-19 or the urgency of the response the pandemic required, a damning report published on Thursday has claimed.
Baroness Heather Hallett, the chair of the inquiry, described the response to the pandemic as “too little, too late”.
Tens of thousands of lives could have been saved during the first wave of COVID-19 had a mandatory lockdown been introduced a week earlier, the inquiry also found.
Noting how a “lack of urgency” made a mandatory lockdown “inevitable”, the report references modelling data to claim there could have been 23,000 fewer deaths during the first wave in England had it been introduced a week earlier.
The UK government first introduced advisory restrictions on 16 March 2020, including self-isolation, household quarantine and social distancing.
Had these measures been introduced sooner, the report states, the mandatory lockdown which followed from 23 March might not have been necessary at all.
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All four UK govts ‘failed to appreciate’ scale of pandemic
COVID-19 first emerged in the Chinese city of Wuhan at the end of 2019, and as it developed into a worldwide pandemic, the UK went in and out of unprecedented lockdown measures for two years starting from March 2020.
Lady Hallett admitted in her summary that politicians in the government and devolved administrations were forced to make decisions where “there was often no right answer or good outcome”.
“Nonetheless,” she said, “I can summarise my findings of the response as ‘too little, too late'”.
‘Toxic culture’ at the heart of UK government
The report said there was “a toxic and chaotic culture” at the heart of the UK government during the pandemic.
The inquiry heard evidence about the “destabilising behaviour of a number of individuals” – including former No 10 adviser Dominic Cummings.
It said that by failing to tackle this chaotic culture – “and, at times, actively encouraging it” – former PM Boris Johnson “reinforced a culture in which the loudest voices prevailed and the views of other colleagues, particularly women, often went ignored, to the detriment of good decision-making”.
‘Misleading assurances’
The inquiry found all four governments in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland failed to understand the urgency of response the pandemic demanded in the early part of 2020.
The report reads: “This was compounded, in part, by misleading assurances from the Department of Health and Social Care and the widely held view that the UK was well prepared for a pandemic.”
The report notes how the UK government took a “high risk” when it significantly eased restrictions in England in July 2020 – “despite scientific advisers’ concerns about the public health risks of doing so”.
Lady Hallett has made 19 key recommendations which, if followed, she believes will better protect the UK in any future pandemic and improve decision-making in a crisis.
Repeated failings ‘inexcusable’
In a statement following the publication of Thursday’s report, Lady Hallett said there was a “serious failure” by all four governments to appreciate the level of “risk and calamity” facing the UK.
She said: “The tempo of the response should have been increased. It was not. February 2020 was a lost month.”
Read more:
A timeline of the UK’s response to the pandemic
Lady Hallett said the inquiry does not advocate for national lockdowns, which she said should have been avoided if at all possible.
She said: “But to avoid them, governments must take timely and decisive action to control a spreading virus. The four governments of the UK did not.”
Lady Hallett said none of the governments were adequately prepared for the challenges and risks that a lockdown presented, and that many of the same failings were repeated later in 2020, which she said was “inexcusable”.
She added: “Each government had ample warning that the prevalence of the virus was increasing and would continue to do so into the winter months. Yet again, there was a failure to take timely and effective action.”
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