The Rwanda bill is fatally flawed – never before has a law tried to alter the truth about safety

Editorial: The government hopes that the bill will be passed shortly, receive royal assent, and become law by Easter. That is an optimistic assessment of its chances – this fundamentally unconstitutional bill does not deserve to survive in anything like its present form

The government should certainly have found a way to accept the Lords amendment that seeks to protect those brave former Afghan special forces personnel who were trained and fought alongside allied troops (Getty)

After suffering some fairly rough treatment in the House of Lords, the government’s Rwanda bill returned for some emergency treatment in the Commons, where all of the Lords amendments – major and minor, destructive and constructive – were rejected.

Thanks to the Conservatives’ still substantial majority there, with most of the dissent coming from those who judge the bill to be not harsh enough, the Rwanda plan is once more in the hands of their lordships. The government hopes that the bill will be passed shortly, receive royal assent, and become law by Easter. That is an optimistic assessment of its chances; in any case, this fundamentally unconstitutional bill does not deserve to survive in anything like its present form.

It remains fatally flawed because it takes the extraordinary step of attempting to dismiss a finding of fact made by the Supreme Court. As Kenneth Clarke has argued with cruel clarity, this sets an extremely dangerous precedent in allowing parliament to override a lawful ruling by the highest court in the land, and thus undermines the independence of the judiciary and the rule of law. Parliament may be sovereign, but it cannot act outside the constitution because the UK is not (yet) a totalitarian elective dictatorship.