If you thought the Rwanda Bill was a headache last year, 2024 is shaping up to be no different. Rishi Sunak’s flagship legislation was debated in the House of Lords on Monday night and the government suffered no less than five defeats at the hands of the unelected chamber. While the amendments are likely to be stripped out in the Commons, defeats of such magnitude are likely to delay the implementation of the scheme…

Peers sought to amend the Rwanda Bill in a variety of different ways, by a majority of 102 voting to ensure the legislation is fully compliant with domestic and international law. Another vote, again won by a majority of 102, demanded that parliament does not declare the country ‘safe’ until the treaty signed with Rwanda in December 2023 is fully implemented.

A third amendment, voted on by a majority of 110, demanded the creation of a monitoring mechanism that could check whether Rwanda is safe. And the final two amendments requested that the courts could challenge how safe the east African nation is if ‘credible evidence’ emerges to the contrary. These are somewhat sizeable defeats for Sunak — and indeed the biggest the Prime Minister has faced in the Lords so far.

To add insult to injury, it wasn’t only Labour and crossbench peers who voted against the government. A number of Tory peers joined them, including Ken Clarke, former Conservative party chancellor and Lord Tugendhat, the uncle of security minister Tom Tugendhat. While the latter drew comparison’s between Sunak’s government and the ruling party in George Orwell’s dystopian 1984 novel, Lord Anderson, a crossbencher, told Monday’s Today programme that his unease concerned the ‘politically convenient fiction’ that Rwanda was a safe country and that the bill ‘permanently prohibits the courts’ from challenging this fact. Ex-Labour minister Lord Coaker meanwhile told the Lords on Monday that the bill proved the government ‘has said the facts are not convenient so we’ll change them by legislation’.

It’s not a good sign for the Prime Minister, who promised to tackle the small boats crisis when he took office. More recently, his illegal migration minister went a step further and vowed he can guarantee that both planes and passengers will have taken off for Rwanda this year before the general election. But with almost 50 amendments to be debated in the Lords this week, further defeats will only hinder Sunak’s chances of achieving his immigration pledge.

Never mind ‘stopping the boats’. At this rate, Sunak won’t even be starting the planes…