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LONDON – Government crisis narrowly avoided: the Westminster Parliament tonight narrowly approved the bill on sending migrants to Rwanda. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who has spent the entire day in tense negotiations with different factions of the Conservative Party, can breathe a sigh of relief, at least for now.
After a long and heated parliamentary debate, 313 deputies voted in favor and 269 voted against. There have been several sharpshooters in the Tory ranks, so we can speak of a danger averted rather than a victory for Sunak. The main opposition parties – Labour, Liberal Democrats and Scottish independence parties – voted unitedly against the bill.
The “Rwanda Safety Bill” is the attempt to resurrect the Government’s plan to deport migrants who land on the English coast in the African country without the possibility of return. The plan, originally proposed in April 2022, got stuck in various legal disputes and then last month was finally rejected by the British Supreme Court, which in its verdict established that Rwanda cannot be considered a “safe asylum” .
The Government, instead of abandoning the plan, decided to proceed anyway. In recent days he has modified the bill which now, according to what Interior Minister James Cleverly assured today, responds to all the doubts raised by the Supreme Court.
The problem is that the Conservative Party is divided into two factions with diametrically opposed views on how to proceed, as seen in today’s debate in Parliament.