Rwanda policy won’t stop the boats, Tory voters say

Prime Minister’s key policy viewed as ineffective by over half of Conservative voters with Bill due to get royal assent

Only a third of Tory voters believe Rishi Sunak’s Rwanda deportation plan will succeed in stopping migrants crossing the Channel, a poll has revealed.
Just 36 per cent of 2019 Tory supporters believe the policy will be effective while 51 per cent believe it will not be, according to the survey of more than 4,500 adults by YouGov. Thirteen per cent said they did not know.
The finding will be a blow on the day that the Prime Minister’s Safety of Rwanda Bill is due to get its royal assent after the Lords finally dropped its opposition and allowed the legislation to pass into law.
It comes just three days after Mr Sunak revealed plans to get the first flights off the Rwanda in the next 10 to 12 weeks, which, he said, would herald a “drum beat” of multiple planes every month flying migrants to Rwanda.
The scale of the crisis was underlined on Tuesday when five migrants – a seven year old girl, three men and a woman – died after being crushed or trampled to death when a dinghy carrying an unprecedented 112 people got into trouble several 100 yards off the north French coast.
Fewer than a quarter of all those surveyed (23 per cent) believed that the Rwanda policy would be very or fairly effective in stopping migrants crossing the Channel in small boats.
This contrasted with nearly six in 10 (57 per cent) who believed it wouldn’t be very effective or not effective at all in stopping the boats.
Among Labour voters – which includes those from Red Wall constituencies where Brexit regaining control of the borders was a key message – just 12 per cent said the policy would be very or fairly effective in deterring crossings. Seventy two per cent believed it would not work.
On Monday, Home Office figures showed that the number of migrants arriving by small boats across the Channel had increased by 24 per cent to 6,265 in the first four months of this year, compared with 5,049 last year.
The poll came as James Cleverly, the Home Secretary, said work the Italians have done to stop migrant boats “mirrors” that of the UK, adding that the Government will be implementing some of their ideas after he “compared notes” with his Italian counterpart.
He visited the small island of Lampedusa on Wednesday – Italy’s busiest migration hotspot last year. The Home Office said 110,000 migrants landed on the island in 2023, and evidence of recent small boat crossings could be seen in its harbour, with abandoned vessels and items of clothing scattered along the beaches.
Mr Cleverly said: “Our friends and colleagues in the Italian authorities are very much in the front line of the European fight against people smuggling, illegal migration.
“We’re only a few kilometres from the Tunisian border and the only way that we’re going to successfully stop the boats in the UK is by working with our international partners.
“Just this week we’ve seen another five fatalities in the Channel. In the Mediterranean they have dozens of fatalities in a year, sometimes hundreds.
“So we have a real moral imperative to stop the boats, to break the business model of the people smuggling gangs.
“The Italians are being innovative, they’re coming up with ideas, they’re working very hard.
“I’ve come here to compare notes with my Italian counterpart – and of course we’ll be implementing some of the ideas that we’ve been discussing, back in the UK.”
Mr Cleverly had a tour of a police vessel and was given an operational briefing on how agencies respond to mass landings during his brief stay on the island.