Immigration is a battle the Conservatives are losing – to themselves

An unexpected new front has opened up in the battle the prime minister is fighting on the issue of immigration. The war in Ukraine has created a wave of sympathy for refugees. Before Vladimir Putin’s tanks rolled in, Boris Johnson was trying and failing to stop asylum seekers crossing the Channel in small boats. Since then, he has been trying to claim credit for asylum seekers arriving from Ukraine.

This has meant adopting some awkward straddles. First he tried to stop Priti Patel, the home secretary, being as generous as she wanted to be towards those fleeing the shelling. Then he put Michael Gove, the levelling up secretary, in charge of a plan to privatise the asylum system by asking citizens to volunteer to take Ukrainians in.

There is more awkwardness to come. On Tuesday the Nationality and Borders Bill returns to the Commons from the Lords, where it was amended by liberal peers. Now MPs will look at it again in a world that has changed.

The Lords made two changes that are contentious and that the government will try to reverse. First, they deleted the provisions for offshore processing of claims for refugee status – the “fantasy island” idea of shipping asylum seekers somewhere far away to have their applications dealt with. That is what Australia has done, using detention centres in Nauru and Papua New Guinea; the problem for the UK government – quite apart from the inhumanity of it – is that it has been unable to find anywhere to host such centres after years of trying.

Second, they inserted an amendment that would allow asylum seekers to work while they wait for their claim to be checked. The government insists that the change would encourage more people to try to get to Britain and to make false asylum claims.

On Tuesday, the prime minister’s enemies will try to defend both amendments and stop the government reversing them. His enemies, as is well known, are on his own side – the MPs on the other side of the Commons are known as the opposition. They will oppose him too, because that is their job, but the people Johnson really needs to worry about are in his own party.

Indeed, the Labour Party has been quiet on the subject of refugees. Keir Starmer hasn’t mentioned it at Prime Minister’s Questions since the invasion of Ukraine, and Angela Rayner didn’t mention it when she stood in for him last week. It is almost as if the opposition doesn’t want to interrupt the Tory civil war.

Thus it will be Andrew Mitchell, the former international development secretary, and David Davis, the former Brexit secretary, who will lead the charge. They claim that they have 50 rebels signed up to block offshore asylum processing, and 27 in favour of the right to work for asylum seekers. I am not sure that they will have enough to defeat the government on either amendment (they need 39 actually voting against the whip to overturn the government’s majority).

But it seems as if the national mood is changing. Labour’s policy of saying nothing while the Tories argue may be paying dividends. A Redfield & Wilton opinion poll last week put Labour ahead of the Tories as the party trusted most on immigration.

Yours,

John Rentoul

Chief political commentator