John Hayes
Main Page: John Hayes (Conservative - South Holland and The Deepings)Department Debates - View all John Hayes's debates with the Home Office
(2 weeks, 6 days ago)
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Joy Morrissey
I agree with everything that my right hon. Friend has said, and I will echo his comments later in my speech. When we asked legitimate questions about women and girls being under threat, the Minister at the time could not find the answer. Perhaps this Minister can do so today.
The women of Piddington deserve our thanks in this House because they have made their voices heard, but they are far from alone. The women of Linton-on-Ouse in North Yorkshire are worried about the 1,200 men who are about to descend on their community. The women of Barnham in Suffolk are facing 1,250 illegal migrant men in their midst. The women of Crowborough in Sussex have been working closely with their excellent local Member of Parliament, my hon. Friend the Member for Sussex Weald (Ms Ghani), to deal with illegal migrant men who are already in their community. I pay tribute to their very hard-working local MP, who has been battling a coalition of Greens, Liberal Democrats and Labour. The Home Office, interestingly, made an application for housing for 540 asylum seekers, who moved in last January, and has now extended that application to 2030. My hon. Friend the Member for Sussex Weald has been single-handedly battling against the council and the Home Office. She is on the frontline of this issue, and I thank her for raising the voices of women and girls.
Sir John Hayes (South Holland and The Deepings) (Con)
My hon. Friend is making a powerful speech in defence of right and decency, and in defence of my constituents and hers. The problem that we face, to which she has just alluded, is that the whole of the liberal establishment either cannot see this or will not see it. The root of the problem is their failure to recognise that cultural equivalence does not exist. Some of these people are coming from countries whose values are entirely different from ours, where people regard as acceptable things that we see as either unpalatable or frankly horrendous, and the failure to accept that fact underpins the unwillingness to do anything about what my hon. Friend has just described.
Joy Morrissey
My right hon. Friend has made an excellent point, but it is not just a case of their values being different from ours; it is a case of their taking advantage of our nature, our culture and our values.
Anna Turley
I appreciate the hon. Lady. Of course, I will come on to Piddington—that is the content, the subject and the title of this debate—but it is really important to understand the people we are talking about having to house, how we are having to house them and the issues we are dealing with. I am proud of the steps we have taken to reduce that number so that we can hopefully reduce the number of people dependent on asylum accommodation as we go forward.
In partnership with French law enforcement, we have now stopped more than 50,000 attempted channel crossings. As a result, small boat arrivals are down around 40% on last year and asylum claims are down by 20%—real action, real results.
The task of responding to large-scale movements of people is one that we share with many Governments across the globe. It is, without question, one of the defining challenges of our age and to meet it we must work with source, transit and destination countries alike. That is why the Government have made it a priority to strengthen our co-operation with a range of international partners, striking new agreements and strengthening existing partnerships.
Just last month, the Home Secretary signed an agreement with her Belgian counterpart to intensify UK-Belgium co-operation and tighten the net around criminal gangs behind small boat crossings. We are taking our partnership with France further, following the new deal signed in April. French boots on the ground have already increased by 24% and a further 50 specialist officers will now be deployed on high-risk red days when conditions indicate crossings are likely, doubling the size of the current unit. First, by disrupting the movements of goods and infrastructure, tackling the gangs across borders and working with our international partners, we are reducing the flow of people heading towards our borders. Secondly, as the hon. Member for Bexhill and Battle (Dr Mullan) flagged, we are addressing the pull factors that fuel illegal migration, and we are enforcing the laws of this land.
To live in this country is a privilege, but it comes with responsibilities. When people abuse our hospitality, staying for longer than they are entitled to or committing criminal offences in our communities, the public rightly expect every effort to be made to remove them from British soil. That is why the total failure to remove illegal migrants and foreign offenders in the years before the general election was so damaging, and why the Government are putting right the wrongs of the past.
Sir John Hayes
The Minister is of course right that international co-operation matters in terms of dealing with these things, particularly channel crossings, but the point made earlier was that where countries refuse to take back their nationals who have committed crimes here, we should take further action, should we not? Part of that might be cutting aid or dealing with visas, as has been suggested. There are all kinds of other levers that can be used by Government to tell those countries, “You’ve got to take them back, because they’re not our responsibility and we’re not going to pay for them any more.”
Anna Turley
I think we are in danger of having a rare moment of cross-party consensus and agreement, because that is something the Government are already taking many steps towards. We are looking at visa enforcements. We have already had a number of successes on that front and will continue to use that, because where we see countries refusing to take people back, we have those levers within our power and we are using them.
Sir John Hayes (South Holland and The Deepings) (Con)
The growth in population in this country has been fuelled by mass migration. When I was a boy, the population was regularly cited as being about 57 million or 58 million people; the ONS now estimates that by 2035, the figure is likely to be 72.5 million people. Leaving aside the pressure that that places on public services and the economic damage it does, the truth is that the character of our country is being changed beyond recognition, and overwhelmingly the British people resist and resent that change, which has happened without their consent.
Ministers know that there is a cultural problem. In August, the Home Office published a book for newly arrived asylum seekers that said:
“If you have sex with someone”
who does not want to,
“this is called rape. Rape is a serious crime”.
The fact that the Government believed that those arriving were so primitive that they did not know that is extraordinary, but the truth suggests that they were right. There have been numerous cases.
Just this week—I am not going to get the pronunciations right—we saw the sentencing of Hossein Mohmoudi, a 36-year-old Iranian man who came to Britain. He was convicted of raping a 43-year-old woman and has been sentenced to 11 years in jail. Karin Al-Danasurt came to Britain on a small boat after fleeing Egypt, where he had been convicted of a murder. In the UK, he has been convicted of gang-raping a woman on Brighton beach. There is the Turkish asylum seeker convicted in Stafford Crown court in January for raping an 18-year-old girl. There is case after case of those coming here without our values, with no loyalty to Britain, no intention of making a positive contribution to this country, and committing serious and violent crimes, very often against women and girls.
We are now in a position where one in eight prisoners is a foreign national offender, with a total of more than 10,700 foreign nationals in our prisons. A large contingent come from Albania, whose countrymen make up 10% of foreign nationals in jail. The number of foreign nationals in UK prisons for drug offences makes up 20% of all offenders. The number of foreign sex offenders in prisons went up by 10% last year. Analysis from the Ministry of Justice last year confirmed that foreigners are convicted of up to 23% of all sex crimes. We hear from the Liberal Democrats that this issue is not about race, but it is certainly about culture.
Sir Julian Lewis
My right hon. Friend will have noticed that some Liberal Democrat Members seem to think that there is no such thing as a bogus or illegal asylum seeker, but recently there have been a number of attempted terrorist attacks, including one against a Manchester synagogue, which was fortunately foiled, but which was planned to be carried out by people who came in illegally on small boats. Are we to wait for an atrocity to occur before the appropriate remedial measures will be taken?
Sir John Hayes
My right hon. Friend—a former chair of the Intelligence and Security Committee, on which I am proud to serve—will know that this is a national security issue, as well as an issue of profound concern to our constituents. The Government should see it through that prism as well as through a number of others.
It is certain that there is a cultural mismatch between these people’s understanding of what is right, good, just and decent, and the understanding of the British people. Very often, their way of life is simply not compatible with ours. Foreign nationals are 71% more likely than Britons to be responsible for a sex crime conviction. The rates based on convictions per 10,000 of population put Afghans, with 77 convictions, at the top with a rate of 59 per 10,000, 22.3 times greater than that of Britons. This is a cultural crisis. We are admitting people to this country who do not share our values and, frankly, do not really want to share our values, so the Government need to get real and do so quickly.
There is a huge gulf here. There is the assumption of the liberal establishment, who believe in cultural equivalence, that there is no such thing as western civilisation. We heard from the Liberal Democrats’ Front Bench, with an extraordinary paucity of understanding, that human rights began in 1947. They have never heard of the English common law, it would seem. They do not know about habeas corpus. They do not understand that free and fair elections existed long before the ECHR, or indeed that the lawful entitlements we call rights did not originate with that document.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)
Order. Nor will you give way to a Member who has just come into the Chamber.
Sir John Hayes
Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker.
This is an urgent matter, because the failure of successive Governments to deal with it has created a belief among the population that Governments do not care and Parliament does not understand. Until we address that, we will undermine the very character of our democracy.
Chris Philp
I am repeating what has been publicly reported today, but I will of course take account of your advice, Madam Deputy Speaker.
In case after case, we have seen women and girls attacked by illegal small boat migrants. The data, I am afraid, is very clear: two of the three most predominant nationalities are Afghan and Eritrean. The data that my right hon. Friend the Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Sir John Hayes) referred to—data produced using freedom of information requests to the Ministry of Justice—shows that Afghan males are 22 times more likely than average to commit sex assaults, and for Eritrean men, the number is similar. That, of course, is why just a few weeks ago, the Government felt it necessary to produce a leaflet asking these illegal migrants to kindly not rape women and girls. The Government themselves know it is a problem, which is why they produced those leaflets. It is why mothers and grandmothers in Piddington are so concerned about the safety of their daughters and granddaughters. It is why parents in Crowborough are so concerned as well, because these threats are real, these crimes have happened, and these convictions have taken place.
The data is clear. What my right hon. Friend the Member for South Holland and The Deepings says is true: these men come from cultures that are alien to ours, where women are not respected. This is an immigration crisis, a border security crisis, a public safety crisis, and a crisis for women and girls. The Government are allowing 92% of small boat migrants to stay; only 8% have been deported. Yes, there are slightly fewer asylum hotels, but only because the Government are moving the illegal immigrants into flats instead—they are up by 12% since the election.
To save places such as Piddington, Crowborough, Linton-on-Ouse and Wethersfield and towns and villages up and down the country, the solution is not, as the Prime Minister said, to distribute illegal immigrants equitably across the country. It is instead to deport people who enter our country illegally, and to do so within a week of their arrival. If we did so, we would need no accommodation anywhere, whether in flats, hotels or military sites, because we would not be accommodating illegal immigrants at all. It would also deter the crossings. If the people who are leaving France—which, by the way, is a safe country; nobody needs to flee war in France—knew that they would be rapidly deported, either to their country of origin or to a safe third country such as Rwanda, the crossings would soon stop. When Australia did something similar in September 2013, its illegal maritime crossings, which had been running at levels similar to ours, stopped within about three months. It is a solution, if only the Government would grasp it.
To do that, though, it is necessary to leave the ECHR. What started in 1950 as a very well-intentioned piece of human rights legislation has subsequently been stretched and distorted beyond all recognition. Clauses that were originally intended to prevent the horrors of the second world war are now expansively interpreted to mean that rapists cannot be sent back to their country of origin because of their supposed family rights. Under article 3, which is unqualified and cannot be amended in domestic legislation, a Zimbabwean rapist was not sent back to Zimbabwe because he might face hostility there. An Iraqi drug dealer was not sent back to Iraq because he had apparently become too westernised. What started off as a sensible set of protections has been stretched beyond recognition—beyond anything common sense would recognise—and it is preventing successive Governments, the last Government as much as this one, from deporting people who cannot be here. That is why there are 21,000 serious foreign criminals still in this country. It is why the Home Office knows of 412,000 people with no right to be here who cannot be deported.
Leaving the ECHR is a necessary, but not sufficient, step. We need to do it in order to control our borders, but on its own, it is not enough. We would also have to amend domestic legislation—for example, to ban asylum claims by illegal immigrants, abolish the immigration tribunal and immigration legal aid, restrict judicial review of immigration matters to all but the narrowest grounds, and end modern slavery claims being used as a basis to oppose deportation. All of these measures would need to be taken as well as leaving the ECHR, but without leaving the ECHR none of those measures is possible.
Chris Philp
I am just going to just finish. I know that Ministers are trying hard with their Bill, but they are essentially tinkering at the edges. That was tried by the last Government and to be honest it did not work, because these legal structures prevent robust action to defend our borders.
Before concluding, I will just say that were we to leave the ECHR, which I fervently believe we must do to save places like Piddington, to protect our women and girls and to protect our borders, we would not be returning to the dark ages. Rights existed in this country long before the 1998 Human Rights Act and long before the 1950 convention was entered into. Common-law jurisdictions such as Australia, New Zealand and Canada have perfectly respectable human rights records without needing to rely on the ECHR. Indeed, this Parliament can legislate to protect human rights in whatever manner it sees fit.
What is true is that we cannot protect our borders and we cannot deport illegal immigrants and foreign criminals while we are inside the ECHR. If we are serious about border protection and protecting Piddington, Crowborough and other similar places up and down this country, we need to take that necessary step. We must leave the ECHR, reform our domestic laws and restore border control to this country.