Refugee Crisis in Europe

Geraint Davies Excerpts

Tuesday 8th September 2015 Commons Chamber

[Yvette Cooper]

We agree that we want to do everything we can to help prevent traffickers from being able to prey on the situation and to prevent some of the problems we have seen, but I disagree with the hon. Gentleman if he sees that as an argument for not helping those in Europe itself. I will come to that and will give him a chance to ask a further question later.

This is where we start to disagree. We need to urge the Government to do more. The Prime Minister said yesterday that he would help up to 20,000 refugees over the five-year Parliament, but the crisis is now. Helping 4,000 refugees this year is not enough. Compare that figure of 4,000 with the 24,000 in France and the hundreds of thousands in Germany; compare it with our population of 60 million; with the 10,000 we helped in just nine months under the Kindertransport; with the 19,000 Vietnamese boat people who fled to Britain from the Vietcong; and with the 24,000 Kosovans who came to Britain in the late ’90s. We can do more than this.

The Prime Minister said yesterday that he wants to get on with it. That is good and it might mean more than 4,000 in the first year. The trouble is that when we first urged the Home Secretary to take in Syrian refugees, she said they would do it as fast as possible, but in the end the scheme proved slow—only just over 200 have been helped. If they can help a full 10,000 in the first year, why not say so and why set a cap for the whole Parliament when we have no idea what the circumstances will be in a few years’ time? In fact, why set a cap for the Parliament at all?

I am afraid that the figure of 20,000 over a Parliament has the feel of coming up with a plan to maximise the headline number but to minimise the impact year on year. That is the wrong approach. We need to know how many the Government will help this year. How many can we help before Christmas, when the crisis is now? What can Britain do to help?

I made the suggestion of 10,000 straightaway simply by asking every county and city to take 10 families. I said we should ask councils how many people they would be able to help. Has the Home Secretary asked councils whether they can help?

[Geraint Davies (Swansea West) (Lab/Co-op)]

Swansea, of course, is a city of sanctuary and the leader of the council, Rob Stewart, has said that Swansea will help in any way it can. Does my right hon. Friend agree that the issue is to establish the capacity available for people who will willingly take people, rather than just plucking numbers out of the air, and that there is a welcome home for many people in distress across the country, including in Swansea?

[Yvette Cooper]

My hon. Friend is right. Swansea and other cities, including Birmingham and Sheffield, have already said that they are cities of sanctuary and will do their bit to help. I asked councils across the country whether they would help and within 24 hours, 40 councils confirmed that they would help and a further 20 have also done so. The Welsh Assembly Government have shown great leadership, saying that they will help, and the Scottish Government have also said they will help. They need support from the Government to do so, but they really want us to do our bit. Wales, Scotland and councils across the country are all saying that they will help, but only if we can work together.

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[Geraint Davies]

rose—

[Helen Goodman (Bishop Auckland) (Lab)]

rose—

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[Sir Gerald Kaufman]

I do not find that reply convincing. I do not think that this Government have got the motivation that other countries in western and central Europe have.

What is more, the people whom the Government are ready to take in are not enduring the present hell in Europe and on the Mediterranean; they are in camps already. I am not saying they are happy in the camps; I am not saying the conditions in the camps are good. I am not saying they want to be in the camps, but at least, with all those shortcomings, they are settled. We are looking at people in Europe who, far from being settled, do not know what is going to happen to them within the next hour. It is about time that we as a country took account of that in whatever policy we have from this Government.

Even the figure of 20,000, however it is calculated and however it is limited, is bogus. Cities such as my city of Manchester are very willing indeed to take a very substantial number of refugees, but the Government’s financial arrangement is such that they will fund the refugees for the first year and after that the local authority has to pay. My city of Manchester, which has suffered the worst financial cuts of any city in the country, is being told, “Yes, we’ll fund the refugees for a year, and after that you’re on your own.”

[Geraint Davies]

The Prime Minister and the Government have said this week that it is morally right to take 20,000 people, but last week it was not morally right to take 20,000 people. In the weeks to come, what number does my right hon. Friend think will be morally right, as the Government are dragged kicking and screaming in the direction of public opinion? Does he think they will shift again, to a higher figure, or will we have to make do with that?

[Sir Gerald Kaufman]

I am afraid that the phrase “morally right” is somewhat ambiguous under this Government. My hon. Friend is perfectly right: we do not know what they will do, and one of the reasons we do not know is that they do not know what they will do themselves.

It is not only my city that will be very willing indeed to take in a far larger number of refugees than the Government would propose; it is other cities, too. I have to say, Mr Speaker, I think it is heart-rending. I do not want to dwell on my own personal experience, but my parents were refugees. When I think of people in Europe, I think of what happened to the Jews, and I believe—I am not discrediting anybody else, heaven knows—that Jews have a particular responsibility. I very much wish that the Government had that dimension of empathy that they do not appear to have.

As I have said, the Government funding is insufficient and is limited. That is dreadful. The number of refugees that this Government say they will take—although as my hon. Friend the Member for Swansea West (Geraint Davies) has pointed out, we do not really know what that number is or is going to be—is derisory compared with Germany, which in the last few days has taken in 17,000 refugees, and with France and other countries.

We will look back on this Government’s mean response to this heart-rending humanitarian crisis and we will be ashamed. This is not the will of the people of this country. Every indication, both nationally and from our constituents, demonstrates that people want to be more generous—that they will feel fulfilled by being more generous. My constituents would be ready—just as, I am sure, the constituents of hon. and right hon. Members on both sides of the House would—to open their doors and receive people who are going through privations and suffering that are very difficult indeed for any of us in this comfortable House, in this comfortable country, even to imagine.

We need an international plan. We need a European plan. The Home Secretary said that European countries are dealing with this in a variety of ways. That is because there is no co-ordination. The European Union ought to have a plan and we ought to try to instigate that plan. This is not something that feeling human beings can tolerate or live with. We need an international plan—a UN plan—and we need a European plan, but above all we need what we certainly do not have: a Government with a heart.

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[Mr Holloway]

Absolutely, and I think we have a deep moral obligation to people who find themselves caught up in the wreckage of warring nations, or who find themselves persecuted.

During the Balkan wars, I posed as a deaf and dumb Bosnian Muslim in Serb territory—from the Kosara valley, Banja Luka and over the bridge at Bosanska Gradiška. We travelled down in a great big convoy of escaping Bosnian Muslims and Croats on trains. I ended up living in a mosque with refugees and then in a refugee camp in northern Croatia, followed by a prison cell in Austria, having been arrested with the Macedonian people smugglers who were taking us into Europe. Most of the people with whom I travelled from Serb territory remained in local refugee camps until the war ended. The vast majority now remain in former Yugoslavia, if not in their old homes.

These terrified people were most certainly refugees, and I will never forget the behaviour of the soldiers, and border guards and police towards these families, including an incident in which a child was literally picked up by the hair and thrown out of a bus on to a concrete hard shoulder. With 4 million Syrians displaced outside their country, and many more within it, what will be the effect of an open door from the European Union? Can anyone tell me what number of people would understandably move west? Can anyone tell me at what point our nations would turn round and say, “Hang on, we cannot keep on taking people from poorer countries into our communities”?

[Geraint Davies]

The hon. Gentleman said that Germany was “bonkers”. Is he aware that after the second world war, Germany absorbed an extra 12 million people, mainly Germans fleeing from Czechoslovakia and elsewhere. It has an open door for another 800,000 next year—it was 300,000 last year— and it has an ageing population so it could do with the workers. It is not “bonkers”. It has an open heart and an open mind—neither of which the hon. Gentleman has.

[Mr Holloway]

Well, I think it is completely bonkers. In my view, it is also immoral because we will see more and more bodies washed up. We are just going to have to disagree on this.

I think we could help a lot more people if the international community behaved a bit more like my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister, by trying to support as many Syrian refugees as possible through helping the many, as opposed to the few—helping all those camped out across Lebanon, Turkey, Jordan and elsewhere. That would be better than focusing on a lucky minority who will get to Europe.

Back in May, the European Commission made the insane proposal that member countries should take in migrants and refugees under a quota scheme. Notwithstanding other comments that he has made, Viktor Orbán, the Prime Minister of Hungary, noted at the time:

“The proposal on the table from the European Commission…is absurd, bordering on insanity… It is an incentive for human traffickers and will simply tell people: yes, try to cross the Mediterranean at all costs.”

Our Government rightly ruled out the EU asylum policy as an open invitation to uncontrolled immigration. The Australian general Jim Molan put it like this:

“Europe needs to make a very big decision and to make it soon. If it does not want to control its borders then it should establish a sea bridge across the Mediterranean, let everyone in who wants to come, and not let these people die.”

Let us not forget that there are some very wealthy Sunni states with dogs in the Syrian fight. Refugees should be looked after in the first available country that they come to, or in their regions. There are plenty of very wealthy countries with land that is closer to those regions.