Baroness Ruth Davidson has cast doubt on whether Rishi Sunak’s flagship Rwanda plan will ever get off the ground.
The former Scottish Tory leader who now sits in the House of Lords said that “there are dogs in the street that know” the migrant deportation flights are “probably never going to happen”.
The comments, made during an appearance on the BBC’s The Today Podcast, came as the Lords prepares to debate and vote on the Rwanda Bill in the coming weeks after the legislation cleared the House of Commons earlier this week.
Lady Davidson questioned why both the Tories and Labour had “completely ceded the ground in terms of making a positive case for immigration in this country”.
She said: “Let’s have a debate about immigration, absolutely. Every sovereign nation should be in charge of who comes in; not everybody has a right to go to every country in the world – I completely get all of that.
“But where is the balance in this, rather than some of the language that is being used, some of the knots that people are getting into? And this thing about putting people on planes to Rwanda. I mean, there are dogs in the street that know that, one, it is probably never going to happen and two, if it does, it is going to be a number so small that it makes very little difference to the bottom line.”
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