Rishi Sunak may have won the vote on Rwanda but he’s lost the moral argument

Editorial: Some votes will be won, and some will be lost, but the Rwandan plan will never be useful or morally sound. Sooner or later, the prime minister will suffer humiliation as a result

Many Tory MPs abstained from the Rwanda bill vote (PA)

Whatever the parliamentary career of the Rwanda bill turns out to be, what is clear already is that the government has lost both the moral and the practical arguments surrounding it; and that it will in any case, even if passed, not stand for long.

On the very day that an asylum seeker was found dead on the Bibby Stockholm barge in Dorset, the government seeks to disapply human rights that remain guaranteed internationally under conventions to which the UK is a party.

Such rights are universal – they apply to all persons irrespective of their legal status, their present location, or indeed their motives, honourable or otherwise. They are absolute. Morally, they occupy a space separate from concepts of legality or sovereignty, let alone politics. Our human rights are, according to taste and preference, God-given, natural and inherent to humanity.