European Union (Withdrawal) Act

Debate between Diane Abbott and Chris Bryant

Wednesday 5th December 2018 Commons Chamber

[Ms Abbott]

I have to make progress.

Let me first deal with the status of EU nationals. I begin by saying how distasteful it was to many of us that the Prime Minister referred to “queue jumpers”. She seemed to be implying that there was some unfairness or illegitimacy in their role in British society, whereas EU nationals play a vital role in business, academia, agriculture and public services such as health and social care. EU citizens and their dependants living here cannot be reassured by the terms of the deal. The Home Secretary has given general assurances, but the deal says almost nothing in detail about their rights, including work, residency and access to services. No one on either side of the House who has ever had anything to do with the immigration and nationality directorate can have confidence in the Home Office’s ability to process the approximately 5 million applications that are required to process settled status applications. I am aware that the Home Secretary sets great store by his app, but he knows perfectly well that it cannot be used on iPhones, and although it has been trialled, the trials involved volunteers and only the simpler cases.

We have all seen the shameful chaos around the Windrush scandal. Today’s National Audit Office report on Windrush is comprehensively negative. It criticises the Home Office for its poor-quality data; the risky use of deportation targets; poor value for money; and a failure to respond to numerous warnings that its policies would hurt people living in the UK legally. It is a damning report, and Ministers should be ashamed. EU citizens can only await with trepidation their further and deeper engagement with the Home Office.

[Chris Bryant]

My right hon. Friend and I represent very different constituencies, but they are both among the poorest in the land. One of the ironies of the present immigration situation is that my constituency now has the lowest percentage of people living in it who were not born in it for 120 years. One of the many benefits that my constituents have enjoyed in recent years has been the ability to live, work and study elsewhere. I understand all the arguments about wanting to limit the number of people coming into this country, though I personally find it quite distressing, but should we not make sure that we do not throw the baby out with the bathwater? We need to make sure that our citizens have the right to study, work and prosper, whether they come from the poorest or the richest background in this country.

[Ms Abbott]

I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention. If Members talk to younger people, they will hear that one of their biggest doubts about Brexit is that they do not welcome the idea that they will not be able to travel, work and study in the way they have done under our membership of the EU.

Then there is the question of the missing immigration White Paper. The Home Secretary said he did not want to rush to produce it. I remind the House that we were originally promised it in summer 2017, then the Government were going to produce it this February, then it was to be published in March, before the recess, then in July, and then after the Migration Advisory Committee report in October; now the Home Secretary assures us it will be published “soon”. What confidence can anyone have in post-Brexit immigration policy when Ministers still do not seem to know what they want—or, more to the point, cannot agree on what they want? How can the House be expected to vote on this deal without detail on proposed immigration policy?

We know that the Tories are stealing some of Labour’s terminology about a rational immigration system based on our economic needs, but I suspect that Ministers mean something very different. On this issue, Government rhetoric sounding like Labour is a very insincere form of flattery. The suspicion must be that the Government’s actual policy is to begin to treat EU migrants as badly as they have treated non-EU migrants over many years.

Investigatory Powers Bill

Debate between Diane Abbott and Chris Bryant

Tuesday 1st November 2016 Commons Chamber

[Ms Abbott]

We are not in the habit of artifice or crutches. Let us see what Members in the other place do with the Bill, and then we will make our position clear.

The Opposition have consistently called for the Leveson recommendations to be implemented in full. The public have waited long enough. In 2013, following extensive consultation with victims of press intrusion, a new system of independent self-regulation was agreed by what were then the three main political parties. It is therefore disappointing that Members in the other place have had to table an amendment, and that we have to debate it, to get the Government to honour their promises. It is disappointing also that the Minister calls legitimate amendments, which have been passed in good faith in the other place, blackmail. What kind of way is that to talk about our friends in the other place?

[Chris Bryant]

Is not the point that the amendments almost exactly replicate legislation that was introduced by Conservatives in another Act? It would be bizarre in the extreme for the Government to say that they should not become law. If the Government want their Bill, they can have it today. All they have to do is say, “Yes, we agree to all the amendments.”

[Ms Abbott]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for making an important intervention. Nobody is trying to hold up or halt the Bill. If the Government wish to have it, all they have to do is agree to the amendments.

UK Citizenship

Debate between Diane Abbott and Chris Bryant

Tuesday 11th February 2014 Westminster Hall

[Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)]

It is even worse, is it not? Potentially, the only countries that would offer nationality to a person reckoned to be a suspected terrorist would be countries where we probably would not want that person to end up, because they would by definition be countries that sponsor terrorism. We would end up with people in this country who we would simply be keeping completely stateless, without any role or standing. We cannot simply banish them to France as we would have done in the middle ages.

[Ms Abbott]

My hon. Friend makes an excellent point. In saying that, I am accepting an argument that I do not really support, namely that somehow, because someone is alleged to be a terrorist, that makes them a terrorist. Even if we accept that logic, we will not be making the country any safer, because we cannot move such people on anywhere.

Statelessness is a notion that the British Government were trying to move away from for a long time. In 1930, Britain was among the first to ratify the convention on certain questions relating to the conflict of nationality, which included a protocol relating to certain cases of statelessness. The universal declaration of human rights, which was adopted by the UN General Assembly with UK support as far back as 1948, says:

“Everyone has the right to a nationality…No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality”,

yet that is what clause 60 of the Immigration Bill seeks to do.

Deprivation of citizenship is a severe sanction and statelessness is a separate and even more brutal punishment with unique practical and legal consequences. Although it is an aspiration of human rights activists that fundamental rights such as the right to life and the prohibition on torture should attach to all human beings, the reality is that we live in a world deeply divided along national borders, in which it is notoriously difficult to access redress for, or protection on, human rights matters without nationality.

Going further forward, the UN convention on the reduction of statelessness, which is where we are supposed to be going, was adopted in 1961 and ratified by the UK in 1966. It stipulates that, absent circumstances of fraudulent application or disloyalty toward the contracting state, deprivations and renunciations of citizenship will take effect only where a person has or subsequently obtains another nationality in replacement. The clause moves away from that. This country has spent a generation trying to move away from statelessness, but we are now going in reverse.

We may not have seen the end of this matter; that is why the other place should look at the provision. We had the Home Secretary saying that citizenship was a privilege, not a right, but citizenship is a fact. During the same debate, Alok Sharma MP—

Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill

Debate between Diane Abbott and Chris Bryant

Tuesday 16th July 2013 Commons Chamber

[Ms Diane Abbott (Hackney North and Stoke Newington) (Lab)]

On the question of celebration, can we spare a thought for those persons, including supporters of Stonewall, who rallied across the road while the Bill was in the other place, celebrating with rainbow flags, costumes and free ice cream from a well-known ice cream maker—

[Chris Bryant]

And carnations.

[Ms Abbott]

Yes, and carnations. At the end of the day, this is a celebratory occasion and debate.

Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Debate between Diane Abbott and Chris Bryant

Monday 18th October 2010 Commons Chamber

[Chris Bryant]

rose—

[Ms Diane Abbott (Hackney North and Stoke Newington) (Lab)]

rose—

--- Later in debate ---

[Ms Abbott]

The hour is late, but I wish to put on the record how concerned people in Hackney were by the debacle that we had at the polls earlier this year. The number of people who were turned away is an underestimate, because in my constituency hundreds of people came out after work to vote, saw the queues, went away, came back again, saw the queues and went away again, so we will never know how many people were put off voting. The cause of the queues was partly that people in Hackney were voting in three different ballots—that was one of the problems. Another cause was that the returning officer put a great deal of effort into encouraging people to cast their votes—my area had its highest ever turnout, particularly among young people who had never voted before. Another cause was the enthusiasm of people in Hackney to vote Labour.

I wish to stress that in a democracy the state has a very basic responsibility to allow people to cast their vote. These people did not come along at 9.50 pm; they had been queuing since 9 o’clock, but when 10 o’clock struck they were told that they could not cast their vote because they did not have a ballot paper in their hand. All I am saying is that this matter caused great concern in Hackney and it was very demoralising, particularly for people casting their vote for the first time. Voting is a fundamental right, and it is a fundamental duty of Government to allow people who want to vote, and who have come out in good time, to vote. We all saw last year’s American elections, where very long queues of young people wanted to vote for Barack Obama. A system was put in place that allowed people who were in a queue to vote; once the point where the queue was stopping had been marked, everybody in that queue was able to vote, even if that took hours. I do not see why we cannot have a similar system here in the United Kingdom.

[Chris Bryant]

My hon. Friend the Member for Hackney North and Stoke Newington (Ms Abbott) has exposed the problem: we do not really know the extent of the difficulties that voters had in this year’s general election. We are all deeply moved to see people voting in South Africa; they queued not just for a couple of hours, but for days when they first had the opportunity to vote. We felt moved when we saw people in the United States of America queuing to vote and we are moved when we see people in Poland, or people in other parts of the world who have not always enjoyed democratic rights, queuing to vote. So it is a bit depressing when the view that other countries had of our election night was of people queuing and not being allowed to vote. That is the simple point that Labour Members are trying to rectify by way of this amendment.

I had presumed, because the Liberal Democrat leader, the Deputy Prime Minister, said that this was something that should never happen again in our democracy, that he was going to deal with the matter rather more swiftly. The referendum will coincide with other ballots, as my hon. Friends the Members for Foyle (Mark Durkan) and for Hackney North and Stoke Newington have said. The Minister wants these combined polls next May—I would prefer not to have them—and it is therefore all the more important that we have a specific provision to deal with this matter.

If the amendment does not contain the right wording, I would be quite happy for the Minister to come back on Report and provide us with an amendment to our amendment. That is the advantage of this process, in which we debate constitutional Bills on the Floor of the House like this. That might also speed up his officials. I offer him this possibility in comradely spirit. If he were to support the amendment so that it were carried, that would spur on his officials to provide an answer to the problem before we reach the Report stage. I will, therefore, press the amendment to a vote.

Question put, That the amendment be made.