Migration minister insists Party is 'united' after rebellion
Illegal Migration Minister Michael Tomlinson says he was "sorry" after two Tory deputy chairmen resigned last night to join the biggest Conservative rebellion of Rishi Sunak's leadership over the Rwanda bill. Mr Tomlinson however insists that the Party is "united" in wanting to see the policy work and adds that he is "confident" the crunch vote tonight will pass. Report by Czubalam. Like us on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/itn and follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/itn
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00:00 I was very sorry to see that they resigned. I didn't feel that they had to do so.
00:04 But actually we are united on our benches in our determination to see this policy work.
00:09 You're right, there were amendments last night and some colleagues,
00:12 not every colleague, voted with the government last night. My job is to encourage as many of
00:17 them to do so. But I'm very clear that we are united on our side in our plan to stop the boats.
00:23 What we haven't seen, because Labour can't say what their plan is, Labour don't have a plan.
00:28 We have a plan and a determination to make sure that this Rwanda scheme works and we're going to
00:32 make it work. The detail of the debate was very interesting yesterday. Every single Conservative
00:37 Member of Parliament who stood up in the Chamber of the House of Commons stated that they wanted
00:41 this policy to work. They understand the deterrent effect of this policy and we've seen that in
00:46 relation to the other schemes such as Albania, where Albanians crossing is down by 94%. And so
00:53 it's really important to get this deterrent effect up and running. It's my job to persuade
00:58 as many of my colleagues as possible to be with us in the Division lobbies. We'll be having those
01:02 conversations today and we've got further debate this afternoon in the House of Commons.