The UK Supreme Court has ruled that the government’s flagship Rwanda deportation plan for refugees is unlawful – a decision that will bring relief to thousands of men, women and children seeking asylum in this country who are trapped in the government’s backlog in crummy hotels or on the prison barge.

The Supreme Court found unanimously that there were clear grounds to believe refugees would not be safe in Rwanda, where 100% of people from Syria, Yemen and Afghanistan have had their asylum claims rejected, and where the government itself is accused of torture, extrajudicial killings, and enforced disappearances. The real and serious danger in which our government was aiming to put people who came to us seeking protection is unthinkable and must never be forgotten.

But while today we who defend the rights of refugees must celebrate the respite we have been given from that terrible prospect, the crucial point we must maintain our focus on tomorrow is what the court did not say.

The court did not rule that the principle of sending refugees to another country instead of looking after them ourselves would be unlawful in principle. It merely assessed that Rwanda would not be a safe country to send them to.

The government now has open to it either to work alongside the Rwandan government to improve conditions in its asylum system and obtain more trustworthy guarantees of good treatment and try again, or to find another, supposedly safer, country that we are able to bribe into taking Rwanda’s place. The principle that the UK must run an asylum system capable of receiving refugees and offering them protection at all is still completely rejected by our government and the courts will not protect it.

That principle is everything we are really fighting for, and we have to win it in the court of public opinion.

The Conservatives claim that the public overwhelmingly support their approach to refugees, but this isn’t true. The public have nuanced views, and we have every reason to believe we can persuade them, if we’re able to articulate a real vision for a humane, alternative way of doing things.

There is very little support for the government’s approach, and even less faith that their plans will work. While polling shows 38% of people would be happy for people to be deported without their asylum claims being heard, a greater proportion, 43%, support a return to the individual assessment of asylum applications rather than blanket deportation, and the right to stay for those deemed to be refugees.

In general, however, the public ultimately give less importance to immigration as an issue at all than they do to the cost of living and the state of the NHS. Suella Braverman, meanwhile, who tied herself and her political career as strongly as possible to the ‘dream’ of Rwanda deportations, has a net approval rating of -26, and over half of those polled by YouGov believe it was the right thing to sack her. There is no clear-cut support for continuing the government’s current approach.

Given this ambiguity, and the large number of people willing to consider alternatives to deportations to Rwanda in order to solve the chaos, it is a failure of campaigners that we have left the fight to the courts, and not yet won it on political grounds. We know that as long as the justice system is all we have to fight with, the government will continue to desperately pursue a workaround to today’s ruling. All the judgment today has really done is bought us some time.

Already, deputy Conservative chair Lee Anderson has openly called for the government to “ignore the law and send them anyway”, while other marginally less deranged colleagues are calling for the abandonment of international human rights conventions, or to have Parliament unilaterally declare the safety of Rwanda as a destination in defiance of the courts. We will see more and more of these efforts from a government that has staked everything on this particular brand of brutality. We will not continue to beat them through the legislative system.

We must better articulate the real alternatives. The safe and regulated routes we are capable of providing to give people an alternative to crossing on small boats need to be credible – which means they need to be broad enough to include all those who are making the crossings now, not just some more cherry-picked refugees direct from our preferred war zones. We also need to draw, clearly, the links between the asset-stripping and under-funding of our public services, and the false scarcity that is used to justify rejecting refugees.

Currently, huge profits are being made by private companies to house refugees in conditions that create misery. Further profits are made by companies selling border enforcement and surveillance technologies to governments around the world. That money should be spent in our communities instead, allowing us the means to support newcomers, and ensuring all our needs are met. This can be achieved with a new, not-for-profit asylum system run by properly funded local authorities.

It is shocking that, while the number-one target of the entire force of British state hostility has been refugees and asylum seekers for years, the sector of charities and campaign groups that support them is still so small and critically underfunded. There are huge financial interests in maintaining the cycle of misery of the status quo, but migration can and must be managed for the mutual benefit of migrants and host communities, and this message needs a much bigger platform of support in order to be heard.

The opposition has for too long hedged its position on refugees, and even activists too often fall into the trap of trying to shrink our demands to fit what is “realistic” and “sensible” in a world where there are elected MPs calling for the government to simply ignore the law and send vulnerable people to proven risk of danger.

We need to get much bolder, very quickly: make clear that people will always move to seek safety, and the UK can and must do its part to be part of the solution to this need. It is only through building much greater, vocal and unequivocal support for refugees that we will overcome this nasty point in our history and throw out the toxic idea of deportations once and for all.