Oral Answers to Questions

Chris Philp Excerpts

Monday 9th February 2026 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

I call the shadow Home Secretary.

[Chris Philp (Croydon South) (Con)]

Deng Majek from Sudan is an illegal small boat migrant who was sentenced last week to 29 years in prison for the brutal murder of Rhiannon Whyte. He stabbed Rhiannon 23 times as she desperately tried to defend herself. Given timing of Majek’s arrival, in the summer of 2024, he would have been eligible for deportation to Rwanda, but Labour cancelled the Rwanda plan and instead accommodated this illegal immigrant in a hotel at taxpayers’ expense. Does the Home Secretary now accept that it was a huge mistake to cancel, just before it started, the Rwanda plan, which would have seen Majek deported, thereby preventing Rhiannon’s murder?

[Shabana Mahmood]

Let me say first and foremost that the murder of Rhiannon Whyte was an abhorrent crime and our thoughts are with her loved ones. I would caution all Members against using individual cases to make a bigger political point, as the shadow Home Secretary has just sought to do. He knows full well that his Government’s Rwanda plan was nothing more than a gimmick—£700 million was spent on four volunteers going to Rwanda. There is no silver bullet in dealing with the mess of the migration system left to us by the previous Conservative Administration, but we are taking action across every front to get illegal migration under control and to secure our border.

[Chris Philp]

The Rwanda scheme never started because this Government cancelled it. The Home Secretary talks about gimmicks. Her Government’s gimmicks have failed, and that is why cross-channel migration is up 42% since the general election.

I am afraid that this is not an isolated case. Hundreds of crimes are being committed by illegal immigrants, including a 30-year-old woman raped on a Brighton beach, a 15-year-old girl raped in Leamington Spa by two Afghan small boat migrants, and a girl aged just 12 strangled and raped by two illegal immigrants in Nuneaton. Does the Home Secretary agree that this cannot go on, that only radical action will fix it and that, just as the Father of the House said earlier, we need to leave the European convention on human rights and deport all illegal immigrants within a week of arrival, because then the crossings will stop?

[Shabana Mahmood]

The shadow Home Secretary has only picked up this new policy of leaving the ECHR in opposition; it is not one that the Conservatives took up when they were in government. [Interruption.] I am afraid he is now just carping from the sidelines, to which he has been condemned by the British people for failing to control our borders. It is this Government who are sorting out the abject mess in our migration system left by the Conservatives—[Interruption.]