Illegal Migration Bill

Alison Thewliss Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 13th March 2023 Commons Chamber

[Alison Thewliss (Glasgow Central) (SNP)]

This refugee ban Bill is nothing but an abhorrent dog whistle, and my colleagues and I on the SNP Benches do not support it. We do support, however, the refugee convention, the European convention on human rights and the Human Rights Act 1998, and a functioning and fair immigration system, which is a million miles away from what we have just now.

A mosaic based on a Norman Rockwell painting hangs at the United Nations. It features the faces of people of all backgrounds and is inscribed with the caption:

“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

It is called “the golden rule”. Britain fails completely and utterly in the application of that golden rule.

I ask hon. Members and everyone listening to close their eyes. Place yourself in the shoes of a person so terrified that they must flee for their lives—a person of faith who finds themself in the wrong country, perhaps; or a woman activist facing repression in Iran; a mother desperate to protect her daughter from female genital mutilation; a boy hiding after seeing his family murdered, and facing forcible recruitment or death. You leave the world you know, travelling across mountain and desert, in trucks and cars, or on feet bleeding and sore. You face setbacks, abuse and exploitation, and use every resource you have.

Finally, you step into a flimsy dinghy, because it is the only way to cross the English channel to get to the uncle who you know lives in the UK. He is your only family member who is still alive. There is no other route. When you arrive—so close to him—what happens? You are seized, imprisoned, not permitted access to a lawyer or given the chance to plead your case. You are whisked away from sanctuary so close that you can almost touch it. This Tory Government are prepared to ignore the plight of that persecuted person of faith, those women, that child, and so many others in circumstances such as theirs. Those people will have no chance of ever finding sanctuary in the UK. The door will be closed permanently. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

The Bill is being rushed through with no proper impact assessment, on the back of legislation that is barely even in place—barely even cold—brought in last year. The Home Secretary clearly declares on the front page of this Bill:

“I am unable to make a statement that, in my view, the provisions of the Illegal Migration Bill are compatible with the Convention rights, but the Government nevertheless wishes the House to proceed with the Bill.”

This is the illegal Illegal Migration Bill. It is not legal, not just, and not compatible with the Human Rights Act 1998, which gives effect to the European convention on human rights.

As much as the Government would have us believe it, the ECHR is not a Eurocratic creation but a system championed by Winston Churchill. One of its key drafters was David Maxwell Fyfe, a former Conservative Home Secretary and one of the prosecutors at Nuremburg. The Bill is bang on form for a UK Government who have previously sought to break international law in “specific and limited ways”, but it is even more dangerous than that. The Bill undermines the fundamental international obligations that the Government’s predecessors established under the 1951 refugee convention following the horrors of world war two. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees has condemned the Bill, stating:

“The legislation, if passed, would amount to an asylum ban—extinguishing the right to seek refugee protection in the United Kingdom for those who arrive irregularly, no matter how genuine and compelling their claim may be, and with no consideration of their individual circumstances.”

I am sure that we have all been inundated with briefings and contacts from constituents and organisations on this despicable piece of legislation. I will try my best to reflect the many concerns that have been raised with me. Overwhelmingly, I thank the constituents of Glasgow Central, who—as one would expect from the city that gave us the Glasgow Girls, the Glasgow Grannies and the neighbourhood solidarity of Kenmure Street—are resolutely opposed to this cruel Bill.

The Bill is unfair in many respects, but particularly in having retrospective effect. Parliament has only just begun the process of debating this hideous legislation, yet it will impact on people who arrived from 7 March, when the Bill was introduced. People cannot yet know for certain what the Bill will look like, yet they are already severely impacted by it.

The provisions affecting children are among the more disturbing parts of a very bad piece of legislation. Clause 3(2) states:

“The Secretary of State may make arrangements for the removal of a person from the United Kingdom at a time when the person is an unaccompanied child.”

An unaccompanied child. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Children and Young People’s Commissioner Bruce Adamson has stated his clear opposition to this Bill. He said:

“The UK is required to ensure that children seeking refugee status receive appropriate protection and humanitarian assistance, under Article 22 of UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. The UNCRC also requires the UK to ensure that children are protected from exploitation and abuse, and afforded support for recovery. This Bill violates those obligations and many others. Its enactment would place the UK in clear breach of its international law obligations under a range of human rights treaties.”

The Bill reaches into Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Clauses 15 to 18 seize powers and undermine the clear protections that Scotland’s devolved institutions have established to protect all our weans.

Barnardo’s has rightly queried why the Bill gives the Home Office the power to accommodate children when hundreds of children are currently missing from Home Office accommodation and unaccounted for. It also wants to know whether an unaccompanied child who has arrived in the UK irregularly will be routinely placed into specialist foster care as a matter of policy or whether they will be eligible for adoption. If two siblings are trafficked into the UK when one is 12 and the other is 18, will both be detained and removed from the UK and denied any protection? If an unaccompanied child is trafficked into the UK and granted protection through the national referral mechanism, and a family member who they may not even have met arrives in the UK irregularly at a later point, will that disqualify the child from modern slavery protection? This whole area is deeply problematic, and even more so as the Bill allows for removal as soon as an unaccompanied child turns 18.

It is clear that the inadmissibility rules in the Nationality and Borders Act 2022 do not work. Expanding inadmissibility creates a situation where there is no right of appeal: “Do not pass Go. Do not collect a meagre £8 a week in an overcrowded hotel. Go directly to immigration jail and await removal.” There are some very tight grounds for a technical appeal, but the potential for people to be removed to places where they will be at risk of persecution is real. I would love to know how the Home Secretary will know the details of a person’s claim if it is not going to be fully assessed.

The Bill talks in clause 6 about the potential for a person to be at risk of persecution due to their sex, their language, their race, their religion, their nationality, their membership of a social or other group, their political opinion or

“any other attribute or circumstance that the Secretary of State thinks appropriate.”

Yet if there is no application, declaration or assessment, no ability to seek legal advice, and a presumption of inadmissibility, how will she know?

The former Prime Minister, the right hon. Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May), who I often disagreed with when she was Home Secretary and Prime Minister, is correct to be concerned about many of the mechanisms in the Bill. It is beyond all logic and reason that the Home Secretary should rip up these important protections. The Bill will also override the Human Trafficking and Exploitation (Scotland) Act 2015, against our will.

The Immigration Law Practitioners Association says that clauses 21 to 28, concerning modern slavery and trafficking, clearly breach the UK’s obligations to victims of trafficking under article 4 of the ECHR and the European convention on action against trafficking. The provisions will deprive victims of their right to recovery, expose them to re-exploitation and facilitate the work of trafficking gangs. I have met people who have been supported through TARA—the Trafficking Awareness Raising Alliance—in Glasgow, and I have seen how damaged some of them have been. It breaks my heart to think that this Government would lock them up and give them no support whatsoever.

Amnesty International has stated that the Bill creates a “charter for human exploitation”, placing many of the most marginalised people firmly in the hands of human traffickers, modern-day slavers and other abusers. The Bill widens the power imbalance between those being abused and their abusers, and it makes it far more difficult for people ever to break free. In so doing, they would risk being removed from the UK permanently, and you can bet that their abusers will use that threat over them. Why on earth would the Home Secretary consider this a sensible idea?

The clauses on entry into and settlement in the United Kingdom are brutal. There is no entry and no chance of settlement, permanently—forever. A person can never enter the UK if they once met the four conditions the Home Secretary is setting for illegal entry, or if they are a family member of that person. Talk about holding the child accountable for the sins of the father. I understand that that applies even if the child was born here. That will surely have the wider impact of hitting people well into the future who may wish to come as tourists, to work or to study. They may have no knowledge of the previous banning order. Why would the Home Secretary wish to deny them that opportunity? What message does she thinks this pulling up of the drawbridge sends out to the world?

Clause 51 outlines the capping of safe and legal routes. These proposed routes are to be brought forward in regulations. The Home Secretary is dangling a carrot that that may happen at some point in the future—maybe, perhaps, in the fullness of time, when parliamentary time allows. Aye, right. We need those safe and legal routes now. They are part of the solution to the small boats crisis. People who come by that route do so because there is no other option. People cannot claim asylum from abroad; they literally need to place their feet on this island. It is not by some coincidence that there are no Ukrainians paying people to come by dinghy; they can get on a plane from Poland and fly to the UK without the risk of being returned there. It is cheaper. It is safer. It is humane.

The Glasgow solicitors firm McGlashan MacKay mentioned that it was dealing with some people from El Salvador, for which there was a visa waiver scheme, so those people could get here safely. The Home Office shut it down.

Afghans do not have the privilege of getting on a plane and coming here. Just 22 people, including eight children, have been resettled in the UK under the Afghan citizens resettlement scheme, via referral from the UNHCR. Pathway 2 is the only route open for resettlement for Afghans who are not already in the UK.

[Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con)]

The hon. Lady mentions safe and legal routes. I am very keen that we need greater definition in the Bill, and I am also keen that we need greater safeguards for vulnerable children. Like the shadow Home Secretary, the right hon. Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper), the hon. Lady has focused exclusively on extreme cases of people who may fall foul of the Bill, and that is why we need those additional criteria. However—again, just like the shadow Home Secretary—the hon. Lady has made no mention of people who come across the channel who are not genuine asylum seekers and have no genuine, credible claim to come to the United Kingdom. She seems to assume that everybody coming across the channel is one of those vulnerable people. They are not, so what would she do about those people genuinely abusing our hospitality?

[Alison Thewliss]

The hon. Gentleman knows that the vast majority of people who come over are accepted as asylum seekers and get their refugee status. He also knows that without those safe and legal routes, the question that he asked the Home Secretary at the Home Affairs Committee remains unanswered. Under the Bill, the Home Secretary will not even ask to find out whether these people are genuine; everybody is deemed to be some kind of fake.

Returning to the Afghan scheme, which does not work, I spoke on Friday to my constituent Zakia, who has been trying to reunite with her sister since the fall of Afghanistan. Her sister has had the Taliban enter her home and beat her. She has played by the rules—as the Home Secretary set out and says that people should—and she has made an expression of interest, yet still nothing. If the Home Secretary was in that woman’s shoes, would she really sit tight in Afghanistan and wait for the Taliban to murder her? Because that is what happens to women in Afghanistan. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

Capping safe and legal routes—routes that do not even exist right now—would suggest that if you are person x+1, well that is just too bad for you. It is not based on need. A few years ago, I was made aware that the visitor visa scheme for Iranians was essentially being run as a lottery, with the names being drawn of lucky winners. This Government could not run a raffle, and I do not trust them to establish this scheme in a timely or fair manner.

[Scott Benton (Blackpool South) (Con)]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Alison Thewliss]

If the hon. Gentleman would like to give me some experience from his constituents of how difficult it is to come from Afghanistan, I would be glad to hear it.

[Scott Benton]

The hon. Lady is speaking of safe and legal routes. Given that there are more than 100 million displaced people globally, I wonder whether she will be kind enough to confirm how many of those people an independent Scotland would take, what tax rises she would make to fund their public services, and how many additional people she is willing to accept in central Glasgow.

[Alison Thewliss]

If the hon. Gentleman knew anything at all, he would know that my Glasgow Central constituency has the highest immigration case load of any constituency in Scotland, and we are proud that that is so. I would like to know how many are being housed in his constituency. I will say, too, that Scotland has taken the highest proportion of Ukrainian refugees and the highest proportion of Syrian refugees. We have a proud history in Scotland, and we would do much, much better than this pathetic excuse for a Government.

Let me turn to the practicalities of the Bill. There is no proof that it will work any more than the Nationality and Borders Act or the hostile environment worked. We were told at the time that those things were the solution to the problems that we had, but they have evidently failed, because the Government are back here legislating again.

There is no return agreement with the EU or anywhere else. Ironically for the Brexiteers on the Conservative Benches, leaving the EU has made this much more difficult. The Bill lists European economic area countries and Albania, but a deal does not exist. There are already countries around the world where the UK Government will not return people, and others where there are no flights and no means of return. The Bill will create an underclass of people stuck in immigration limbo indefinitely.

The Bill will detain everybody arriving in a small boat for 28 days. The UK’s current detention capacity is 2,286 beds. The number of people crossing in small boats last year was 45,755. For context, the prison population in England and Wales in 2022 was just over 81,000 people.

Where on earth does the Home Secretary suggest that the number of people she wishes to detain are kept, as well as those who are deemed inadmissible but unreturnable? Will they be in facilities such as Manston, with children sleeping on the floor; in dilapidated and crumbling facilities such as Napier barracks, where covid and scabies were rife; or in hotels, which is lining the pockets of companies such as Serco and Mears but costing the Government a fortune and putting vulnerable asylum seekers at risk, such as those being housed in Erskine in Scotland, where they are being targeted by far-right groups?

[Gavin Newlands (Paisley and Renfrewshire North) (SNP)]

My hon. Friend is indeed right. The Erskine Bridge hotel is potentially the largest such hotel in the UK, and we have another hotel in Renfrewshire, unlike the hon. Member for Gloucester (Richard Graham). This Government and Conservative Members assert that Scotland does not play its part, but that is clearly not the case. Meanwhile, Patriotic Alternative, the neo-fascist group, is blaming the SNP for these hotels being used in the first place, leading to security threats against my staff. Does my hon. Friend agree with me that any Conservative Members who support anything Patriotic Alternative has said should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves?

[Alison Thewliss]

I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend’s sentiments. We should all be very worried about the rise of these groups and how they are being fed by the rhetoric of leaders and MPs across the way. [Interruption.] Conservative Members are laughing over there at the suggestion. It is terrifying, and it is scary. People will get hurt, and they should know much better.

Perhaps if the Home Secretary cannot fit people into more asylum hotels or shabby barracks, she will place those who have survived war and persecution on the streets and just let them wander the streets, because they will not be allowed to do anything else. The Home Secretary seems to envisage this as some kind of deterrent, but she fails completely to recognise the reasons why people flee, and the ties of family and English language that people have. Afghan interpreters have said to me, “We’re here, because you were there.” As Enver Solomon, chief executive officer of the Refugee Council has said:

“The plans won’t stop the crossings but will simply leave traumatised people locked up in a state of misery being treated as criminals and suspected terrorists without a fair hearing on our soil.”

All of this comes at a financial cost, as well as a humanitarian one, and we would have imagined that the Conservatives at least cared about that. This includes about £6 million per day on hotels—including for one of my constituents who contacted me today, who has been in a B&B for 20 months waiting on a decision from the Home Office—which is exacerbated all the way by the Home Office incompetence that I see, week in and week out, at my surgeries. It includes £12.7 million to compensate the 572 people the Home Office detained unlawfully last year, at least £120 million on the failed Rwanda deal, and £480 million to France over the next three years on top of the £250 million already given since 2014. The Refugee Council estimates that it will cost in the region of £980 million to detain people under the scheme proposed in the Bill. It is chucking good money after bad policy, and it is sickening that it costs so much to treat our fellow human beings so badly.

My constituent Patricia put it to me so clearly on Saturday. She said:

“I am not ‘asylum’, I have a name, I’m a human being and every human being has a right”.

People do not need to be an exceptional athlete like Mo Farah, the chief executive of the Scottish Refugee Council like Sabir Zazai, a councillor like Roza Salih or Abdul Bostani, or even an Oscar-winning actor like Ke Huy Quan. Refugees are entitled to the right to lead an unremarkable life in peace and safety, to get an education and to provide for their family. It is not asking too much; it is the least anyone could expect. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

The SNP wholeheartedly and unequivocally condemns this cruel, shoddy, tawdry Bill. We urge the Government to scrap it, to focus instead on tackling the asylum backlog that leaves so many of our constituents in a costly and damaging limbo, and to lift the ban and let refugees work and contribute, as they so wish to do. It has been telling that the Labour party has been so weak in its opposition to this Bill as to be played off the park by football pundits, commentators and actresses such as Cate Blanchett. My credit to the principled stance taken by Gary Lineker and his colleagues in thoroughly Kenmuring the BBC, and I bet if he had tweeted in favour of the Bill, he would not have faced the red-card worthy simulation of outrage from the Tory Benches. It seems that if you are a Tory donor, you can run the BBC, but if you oppose this pathetic excuse for a Government, they do not want you to work there.

Scotland stands against this Bill. We would not have such cruel provisions in an independent Scotland. We wish to be known for our kindness, our hospitality and our compassion, not our hard-heartedness and our cruelty. We would do unto others as we would have them do unto us. Say it loud, say it clear, refugees are welcome here!

[Several hon. Members rose—]