A government source has confirmed to Sky News its new Illegal Migration Bill would “seal off all the loopholes” and that UK officials are “certainly working towards getting the flights off by summer”.
It comes as the home secretary signed an update to the government’s migrants agreement with Rwanda, expanding its scope to “all categories of people who pass through safe countries and make illegal and dangerous journeys to the UK”.
A Home Office statement said it would allow the government to deliver on its new legislation as it would mean those coming to the UK illegally, who “cannot be returned to their home country”, will be “in scope to be relocated to Rwanda”.
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1:09
Rwanda: Braverman visits facilities
The new bill would see those who come to the UK detained and returned to their home country – or a “safe third country such as Rwanda”.
Suella Braverman hailed the strengthening of the UK’s migration partnership with Rwanda as she paid a visit to Kigali in Rwanda for official engagements this weekend – including meeting with Rwandan President Paul Kagame and the country’s minister for foreign affairs and international cooperation, Dr Vincent Biruta.
No one has made the journey yet, after a flight was stopped at the eleventh hour in June last year following an appeal to the European Court of Human Rights.
On Saturday, Ms Braverman and Dr Biruta signed the update to the Memorandum of Understanding, expanding the partnership further.
Rwanda has ‘plentiful resources’
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Speaking to the media on Saturday, Ms Braverman said: “What the Bill does is dramatically and significantly reduces the legal routes available – the claims available to people to thwart their removal or relocation from the United Kingdom.
“To delay their detention. To undermine our rules. And what we are seeing at the moment is people using the modern slavery claims, using asylum claims, using human rights laws… just to thwart our duty to control our borders.”
She continued: “Our Bill fixes that, and we have struck the right balance between fairness, on the one hand, for delivering a robust system of legal duties and powers to detain and remove, and compassion – so that we are relocating people to a safe country.
“And as we have seen here in Rwanda, there are plentiful resources to properly support and accommodate people so that they can live safe and secure lives.”
She also took a tour of new housing developments, which will be used to relocate people, and visited new, modern, long-term accommodations that will support those who are relocated to Rwanda.
One refugee living in Rwanda, Fesseha Teame, told reporters on Saturday that he had “never felt I have been considered as a foreigner”, but said he did not see the African nation having the capacity to hold “many thousands” of migrants.
The 48-year-old, with a wife and four children, spoke to the media after the home secretary claimed: “Rwanda has the capacity to resettle many thousands of people, and can quickly stand up accommodation once flights begin.”
Ms Braverman also said the suggestion that Rwanda could only take 200 people is a “completely false narrative peddled by critics who want to scrap the deal”.
The 200 figure quoted was used by Rwandan government spokesperson Yolande Makolo when speaking to British journalists last year.
Ms Braverman met with investment start-ups as well as entrepreneurs to discuss the range of business and employment opportunities available to people in Rwanda.
Earlier this month, the prime minister announced a package that will see a new detention centre established in France as well as the deployment of more French personnel and enhanced technology to patrol beaches in a shared effort to drive down illegal migration.
Ms Braverman said she was visiting Rwanda this weekend to “reinforce the government’s commitment to the partnership as part of our plan to stop the boats and discuss plans to operationalise our agreement shortly”.
It was the first time any candidate for London mayor has won a third term in office, with Mr Khan’s predecessors Boris Johnson and Ken Livingstone both having served two terms.
As he took to the stage to make his victory speech, the re-elected mayor was booed and heckled with a shout of “Khan killed London” by the far-right Britain First candidate, who received fewer votes than Count Binface.
Speaking at City Hall, Mr Khan said: “We faced a campaign of non-stop negativity, but I couldn’t be more proud that we answered the fearmongering with facts, hate with hope, and attempts to divide with efforts to unite.
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“We ran a campaign that was in keeping with the spirit and values of this great city, a city that regards our diversity not as a weakness, but as an almighty strength – and one that rejects right hard-wing populism and looks forward, not back.”
He also thanked his family for their support, but apologised for them having to deal with “protests by our home” and “threats”.
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While congratulating Mr Khan on his victory, Ms Hall said he should stop “patronising” people who care about London.
When she had previously challenged him in a mayoral debate about “gangs running around with machetes” in the capital, he had said she should “stop watching The Wire” – a gritty US-based crime drama.
In her concession speech, she said: “The thing that matters the most, and to me, is reforming the Met and making London safe again. I hope Sadiq makes this his top priority.
“He owes it to the families of those thousands of people who have lost lives to knife crime under his mayoralty.
“And I hope too that he stops patronising people, like me, who care. This isn’t an episode of The Wire, this is real life on his watch.”
The pair had repeatedly clashed during the campaign, fought out amid concerns about knife crime and the handling of pro-Palestinian marches in the capital.
Just recently, Mr Khan had described his Conservative rival as the “most dangerous candidate I have fought against” over her past social media activity.
Hitting back, Ms Hall said she had “learnt” from her mistakes and branded his comment “outrageous”.
A clear dividing line between the candidates had been Mr Khan’s controversial expansion of the ultra low emission zone (ULEZ), which has been the subject of ongoing protests and which Ms Hall had pledged to scrap.
During the race, the Conservatives were forced to delete a clip used in an advert against Mr Khan’s record on crime after it emerged it used footage of a stampede at a New York subway station.
Meanwhile, Labour has made gains across the country, winning the Blackpool South by-election with a 26% swing from the Tories and taking control of councils in key battleground areas.
The party also picked up new mayoralties, including the critical regions of East Midlands and York and North Yorkshire, which includes Mr Sunak’s Richmond constituency.
Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer said: “This is effectively the last stop on the journey to the general election and I am really pleased to be able to show we are making progress, we have earned the trust and confidence of voters and we are making progress towards that general election.”
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Mr Sunak has taken consolation in the Conservative victory in the Tees Valley mayoral race, which was retained by Lord Houchen and seems to be enough to calm rumblings among discontented Tory MPs.
However, the crunch contest for West Midlands mayor remains on a knife-edge.
Labour has also not had it all its own way, losing control of councils in Oldham and Kirklees after victories for independent candidates opposing the party’s stance on Gaza.
Labour also lost seats on other councils including Bristol, where the Greens extended its lead as the largest party and could now be set to run the city council despite narrowly failing to win outright control.
Notably, all 14 councillors in the newly created Bristol Central constituency are now Green, where the party is looking to unseat Labour’s shadow culture secretary Thangam Debbonaire at the general election.
The Conservative Party has suffered its worst electoral defeat in years, losing more than half of its councillors who stood for re-election across England.
Labour hailed a “truly historic” result in Rishi Sunak’s own backyard of York and North Yorkshire, where David Skaith smashed Tory Keane Duncan by almost 15,000 votes.
The region, which was electing a mayor for the first time, covers Mr Sunak’s Richmond constituency and is an area Labour has historically struggled to compete in.
Speaking at Northallerton Town Football Club, Sir Keir Starmer said: “We’ve had a positive campaign here, and I am very, very proud to stand here as leader of the Labour Party to celebrate this historic victory.
“And it is a historic victory – these are places where we would not have usually had a Labour Party success but we’ve been able to create that success and persuade people to vote for us.”
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0:33
PM on ‘disappointing’ election results
Appearing alongside Lord Houchen at a victory rally, Rishi Sunak said: “I’ve got a message for the Labour Party too because they know that they have to win here in order to win a general election – they know that.
“They assumed that Tees Valley would stroll back to them – but it didn’t.”
This victory is likely to have quelled talk of rebellion among disenchanted Tory MPs who had threatened to oust the prime minister if the results proved a disaster, but it remains to be seen whether the Tories can hold on to the West Midlands mayoralty.
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3:25
Analysis: Local election results
Of the 107 councils that held elections on Thursday, 102 have declared their full results, with the Conservatives losing more than half of the seats it has been defending so far.
Some 468 Tory councillors lost their seats as the party lost control of 12 councils.
Sky’s election coverage plan – how to follow
The weekend: Sophy Ridge will host another special edition of the Politics Hub on Saturday from 7pm until 9pm. And Sunday Morning with Trevor Phillips will take a look back over what’s happened from 8.30am until 10am.
How do I watch?: Freeview 233, Sky 501, Virgin 603, BT 313, YouTube and the Sky News website and app. You can also watch Sky News live here, and on YouTube.
The Electoral Dysfunction podcast with Beth Rigby, Jess Phillips and Ruth Davidsonis out now, and Politics at Jack and Sam’s will navigate the big question of where the results leave us ahead of a general election on Sunday.
However, Labour suffered setbacks in Oldham and Kirklees, where it lost control of the councils after victories for independent candidates opposing its stance on Gaza.
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Further results are expected over the weekend, including key mayoral contests in London and the West Midlands.
Labour’s Sadiq Khan is attempting to secure re-election in London, while Conservative Andy Street is defending his position in the West Midlands.
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4:10
Sky News general election projection
Rumours had swirled in London since the polls closed that Mr Khan could have suffered a shock defeat to Conservative Susan Hall, however Sky News understands both parties now believe the incumbent will remain in City Hall.
The results of those elections are expected to arrive at 10pm in London and 2.15pm in the West Midlands.
Other results still to be announced include council elections in the South and West of England where the Liberal Democrats and Greens hope to make progress.
There are also metro mayoral elections yet to declare a winner in Greater Manchester, Liverpool City, North Tyneside, South Yorkshire and West Yorkshire.
After counting more than two million votes cast in the English council elections, a provisional National Share Estimate shows the Conservatives on just 26% of the vote, a 19-point drop compared with the 2019 general election and one of its worst ever performances in any set of local elections.
Labour‘s vote rises from 33% in 2019 to 35% on the current estimate, after more than half the wards have now declared.
The Liberal Democrats are on 16%, an increase of five percentage points on the 2019 election. This follows a familiar pattern where the party does better in council elections than in parliamentary elections.
Other parties, such as the Greens, Reform, and independents, are projected to be on 22%.
This figure assumes also that votes for the nationalist parties in Scotland and Wales, places where no local elections took place, are unchanged from the previous election. The same condition applies to the 18 seats in Northern Ireland.
Assuming these changes in vote share occur uniformly across each of the newly drawn parliamentary constituencies in place for the next general election, Labour wins 294 seats and would overtake the Conservatives – but falls 32 seats short of gaining an overall majority.
The Conservatives fall from 372 seats on the new boundaries to just 242 seats, a projected loss of 130 seats. The Liberal Democrats rise from eight to 38 seats.
As is usual in such projections, there are individual constituencies where the count of local votes shows a party “winning” a constituency when the uniform swing suggests otherwise.
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Two such examples are Aldershot and Plymouth Moor View, both of which fall to Labour when we aggregate local votes in wards lying within those constituencies.
Employing the same procedure, however, Labour’s seat tally suffers when local votes in constituencies such as Blackburn and Oldham West were “won” by independents when actual votes are counted.
Labour easily retains these constituencies when uniform swing is considered.
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