We can only control illegal migration by leaving the ECHR says Jacob Rees-Mogg

The Safety of Rwanda bill faces serious difficulties.

The minister in charge of the bill, formally Robert Jenrick, says it is fatally flawed. The former Home Secretary Suella Braverman, says it is fatally flawed. And in a characteristically erudite analysis, the Tory star chamber, led by the godfather of Euroscepticism, Sir Bill Cash, released its analysis which highlights a number of problems.

This is difficult for the Government, for if only a little under 30 Tories vote against the Government tomorrow evening, it will lose. And this matters because it would be the first time a government had lost a vote at second reading since 1986, when Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister, when changes to Sunday trading laws were defeated.

So what are the problems with the bill? Well, it doesn't exclude all personal claims. And the worry is that though Rwanda is deemed to be generically safe, it wouldn't necessarily be safe for an individual. So could those individuals clog up the system?

It doesn't authoritatively stop the European Court of Human Rights interfering. The bill's disapplication of the Human Rights Act is too limited. Bill Cash's team argue that it would still leave the bill vulnerable to international law arguments.

Yet I want the bill to get to the committee stage. It may not be perfect, but it could be amended to make it stronger.

But ultimately I don't think any of this will work. I don't think there is a single Act of Parliament that the UK can pass that will deal with illegal migration until we leave the European Convention of Human Rights and take back control of our borders.

Until we do this, we will be mired in legal squabbles over the precise meaning of words and about who is in control.

Do we maintain our system, the historic system this nation has enjoyed at least since 1688, where Parliament is sovereign and decides our law, and the judges interpret the law?

With the ECHR, we have set judges above Parliament and foreign judges at that. As with Brexit, this is about sovereignty and sovereignty is a code word, by which I mean democracy. Does your vote change the law, or can you be overruled by an unelected and unaccountable elite?

As long as we are in the European Convention of Human Rights and subject to the European Court of Human Rights, you can be overruled by your unelected masters. That is what must stop.

Once we do that, we can control our borders. Once we do that, we can stop illegal migration.

We're in a slightly medieval theological argument about how many angels can dance on the top of a pinhead.