Budget Resolutions

Debate between John Hayes and Alison Thewliss

Monday 11th March 2024 Commons Chamber

[Sir John Hayes (South Holland and The Deepings) (Con)]

The endemic problems facing Britain in the 2020s are often compared to those of 50 years ago. As was the case in the 1970s, ours is a time of great economic uncertainty at home and abroad. Now as then, faith has been lost in the dominant, prevailing economic model. In the 1970s, rising inflation, industrial strife and stop-go economic cycles led many to question Keynesian economic thinking. The Blairite model of welfare capitalism, which embraces the false promise of globalisation and is personified these days by the hon. Member for Ilford North (Wes Streeting) and others, lost all credibility after the financial crisis of 2008.

In fact, there are many key differences between the economic context of the ’70s and that of today. The Britain of the 1970s was beset by an atmosphere of constant crisis; there was the three-day week and the winter of discontent. The number of days lost to industrial action in the last couple of years bears no relation to the dark days of blackouts and rubbish piled up on the streets. However, although our problems are superficially less severe, socioeconomic problems run deep.

The 1960s and ’70s were a time of great social mobility and rising living standards, but the harsh reality is that living standards have stalled since the 2008 financial crisis. The Resolution Foundation estimates that real wages will be just 2.4% higher in 2024 than in 2008. That compares with a 36% increase in the 16 years before that. Perhaps most troubling of all, although the ’70s saw a rise in new economic thinking that, for a time, reversed what many had seen as irreversible decline, much of our politics today is stuck in the New Labour paradigm, offering the same policy formula that was discredited the best part of 20 years ago. There is no better example of that than mass migration, which began under Mr Blair and has continued ever since.

Fifty years ago, serious thought was given to how Britain could lift itself from its economic malaise. Many of our economic ills were correctly diagnosed and successfully dealt with, but though every election since 2010—and most notably, the Brexit referendum—demonstrated the public appetite for a radically new approach, it often seems that the liberal political establishment cannot see what the people it represents know so well. The malaise goes far deeper, and the relief offered by the usual Treasury medicine of looser fiscal policy is just not enough. Nor is the assumption, from shadowy bodies such as the Office for Budget Responsibility and the Migration Advisory Committee, that any growth is good growth. It was welcome that the Chancellor recognised that when he spoke about per-capita growth, rather than growth as a whole, in his Budget speech.

As W.H. Auden might have put it, our times are an age of anxiety. Deeply ingrained and destructive uncertainty prevents many people from coming close to reaching their potential, or from even thinking beyond their day-to-day existence. A growing proportion of people on low incomes live in the least secure private rented sector, are employed in unskilled work on unfair terms, and pay for electricity and gas on prepay meters. As an adviser at the Citizens Advice Bureau told one journalist, each of these problems compounds the other:

“Your income’s not stable, your work’s not stable, your housing’s not stable. Everything’s built on sand.”

Surely we know that a foundation of certainty is necessary to build social solidarity.

Additionally, heartless banks have abandoned communities, so many people find themselves driven into the arms of payday loan companies with exorbitant interest rates, or even loan sharks. The consequent economic insecurity results in many dropping out of the economy altogether. An extraordinary 5.2 million people claim some form of out-of-work benefit. Although the impact of covid has increased that figure, growth in the disparity between officially registered unemployment and actual levels of economic inactivity is a long-term trend. The inevitable result has been the breakdown of families in hollowed-out communities, which is why the Chancellor’s changes to the taxation of child benefit should be welcomed across the House. All the evidence demonstrates that married parents are much more likely to stay together than cohabiting ones. Children raised in unstable families suffer from worse health, are more likely to be excluded from school, and are more likely to join a gang or end up not in education, employment or training.

[Alison Thewliss (Glasgow Central) (SNP)]

The right hon. Gentleman is all for families staying together. What impact does he think raising the minimum visa thresholds will have?

[Sir John Hayes]

It is vital that we support stable families, and I acknowledge that stable families come in different forms. I am simply quoting the facts. Stable marriages give children the best chances, and the Government are right to emphasise families. They should now emphasise marriage, too, to a greater degree. To be fair, the Chancellor said that the Government will review the policy further, with a view to making additional changes along the lines that I have described.

Over time, fewer people have chosen to become members of clubs or groups, to volunteer, to attend a church or to engage in any form of community activity. Unsurprisingly, there is a strong link between the strength of social fabric and inequality. Areas with the strongest communities tend to be very rural places, such as my constituency in Lincolnshire, or areas in London’s wealthy commuter belt, in the south of England, or the wealthier parts of Scotland. A macroeconomic solution to our problems must be accompanied by an equally strong macro-societal approach, focusing on the root causes of social breakdown and inequality, for state support is a sticking plaster, not a cure.

Whereas the success of supply reforms enabled the Thatcher Government of the 1980s to reduce Government spending to less than 35% of GDP by 1990, sluggish economic growth since the financial crisis has meant that the Government’s share of GDP is now more than 45%. Overall, Government spending is higher than at any time since the second world war. Critically, the Chancellor recognised that by beginning the process of cutting tax. We need to give people back more of the money they earn. When we do so, we will build social responsibility over time and enjoy greater social solidarity. That is why I warmly welcome, too, the Chancellor’s focus on skills. Apprenticeships and technical education must be at the heart of our post-18 education system, as I have argued throughout my time in Parliament, and they must be fully integrated into an economic strategy that supports the creation of highly skilled work.

The era of cheap money and unsustainable profits has done great damage to our economic base. British pension funds and insurance companies once owned 52% of the FTSE; now, they own just 4%. Far too much of the savings generated by hard-working British people are invested abroad or go towards unproductive ends. As such, the measures introduced by the Chancellor are welcome, but they can only be seen as the beginning of the long-overdue process of supporting productive investment in UK businesses. Economic and macro-societal policy should be designed to ensure that business practice works in harmony with the best aspects of human nature, not against them. It should tie economic profit to ethical and social purposes. Risk must be closely linked to profit, and the Government must do more to incentivise mutual ownership and profit-sharing models.

A co-operative economic order would reinforce social solidarity. An economy must work for everyone, not just a handful of people at the top, which is why, rather than glamorising faceless global conglomerates, we must back British business, particularly the self-employed, as the Chancellor did in the Budget, and small and medium-sized enterprises. We need a more introspective economy, shorter supply lines, more domestic manufacturing and British jobs for British workers. It is through fraternal economics, in which the nobility of labour is recognised and rewarded, and which reinforces our reciprocal communal obligations, that, by contrast with the flimsy ephemera of globalisation, we can seed substantial economic resilience and spawn social renewal.

Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill

Debate between John Hayes and Alison Thewliss

Committee of the whole House
Wednesday 17th January 2024 Commons Chamber

[Sir John Hayes]

The debate on the Government side of the Chamber, as my hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton) said, is not on a difference in aims or ends; it is about the means to those ends. Government Members want to travel to the same destination; what we are debating is the journey to get there. So let us not exaggerate the differences between us. I know that the Minister shares that view. We have engaged with him and hope to continue to do so, even at this late stage, to improve the Bill and realise the delivery of those intentions—the journey to that end.

We have to do so, because mass migration is perhaps the biggest existential crisis facing this country. I do not say that blithely—unfortunately, people say things in this Chamber as though they were definitive and use all kinds of superlatives; indeed, the hon. Member for Walthamstow (Stella Creasy) has made a brand out of that, as we heard earlier. That view would be shared by a large number of my constituents and, as my hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham also said, it is now widely shared in other countries. The Bill and the amendments to it therefore affect our constituents directly and personally, contrary to the contribution of the hon. Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale (Tim Farron), who claimed that it is a distraction. Far from it; we cannot absorb into this country the number of people who are coming as a consequence of both legal and illegal migration in a short period of time without a devastating effect on public services, a displacement effect on investment in the skills of our own people, a displacement effect on the need to reform welfare and, beyond all that, the ability to integrate those incoming people into cohesive societies in which we all share a common sense of belonging.

In dealing with the amendments, we need to be realistic about the scale of the problem and the British public’s view of that problem. They know that the vast majority of people arriving here on small boats—about 75%—are men under 40. By the way, about nine out of 10 arriving are male, which is far from the picture painted by some of the critics of the Government and our policy. They know, too, that large numbers of those people are not genuine asylum seekers but economic migrants. That truth is so evident to the electors of this country that they look with bemusement at this place where it is not widely recognised. We hear speech after speech—from Opposition Members in particular, I must say—that seems to be either ignorant of those facts or unwilling to face them.

[Alison Thewliss]

rose—

--- Later in debate ---

[Sir John Hayes]

I do not know whether the hon. Lady is the first or the second, but I happily give way to her.

[Alison Thewliss]

Perhaps the right hon. Member would like to correct the record. Most people who come on small boats are in fact refugees, because the Home Office grants them that status. They are not economic migrants as they do not get economic migrant status; they get refugee status.

[Sir John Hayes]

What we certainly know about them all is that before they got here they have travelled through safe countries—more than one in many cases—and failed to claim asylum. The hon. Lady is right that we are probably too lax in how we process claims. Certainly, we offer asylum to more applicants than France. On average, we grant a higher proportion of asylum claims than most European countries.

We know, too, that the failure to remove those people costs the British taxpayer an immense amount of money. When I looked at the figures, I was staggered. The cost of asylum is now £3.97 billion. It is extraordinary that a single matter should cost so much. The need for the Bill is justified alone on the basis that we can no longer afford to deal with the current scale of illegal migration. We simply cannot afford for it to continue, as the British sense of fair play has been tested to its limits. The public see that, and they are increasingly disillusioned by the apparent inability and unwillingness of the political elite in this country—we are the political elite, like it or not—to accept the facts.

Progress has been made in clearing the backlog, largely as a result of the efforts of my right hon. Friend the Member for Newark (Robert Jenrick) and my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Fareham (Suella Braverman). During their stewardship of the Home Office, they focused resources on processing claims more quickly and had considerable success in doing so. But the problem is that as fast as we process people, more arrive.

Until we deal with the root of the problem, we can never really tackle the cost I described nor the disillusion felt by our constituents. That is why the Prime Minister pledged to stop the boats. In order to do so, we need an Act that is as effective as possible. The amendments in the name of my right hon. Friend the Member for Newark, which I strongly support, would ensure just that. Amendments 11 to 18 deal in particular with the Human Rights Act 1998. Taken together, they would fully disapply the Act from the Bill and the Illegal Migration Act 2023, particularly in relation to removals to Rwanda.

A lot of nonsense was spoken earlier about rights; indeed, a lot of nonsense prevails in this House about rights. Rights are fundamentally important. We believe in the essential rights that characterise our country: the right to a fair trial; the right to go about one’s business freely and unimpaired; the right not to be arrested without cause; the right to vote in free and fair elections. Those are important parts of what it is to be British, but they do not spring from the ether. They are not a given—it is a liberal myth that rights are natural. Rights are the product of decent Governments in decent places doing the right thing. They are special because we have chosen them, not because they were given to us by some ethereal source. The hon. Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale (Tim Farron), whom I like and respect, will know, because he knows scripture even better than me, that rights do not get a mention in the ten commandments or the Sermon on the Mount. Perhaps he can find a part in either of those to contradict me.

Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill

Debate between John Hayes and Alison Thewliss

2nd reading
Tuesday 12th December 2023 Commons Chamber

[Alison Thewliss]

The right hon. Gentleman makes an excellent point. Through the Bill, this country is turning its back on its international obligations. It is a pathetic excuse for policy—a foghorn signalling to the far right. It is too weak for some of the Home Secretary’s colleagues, but too harsh for a few exceptional others. For all the talk of full fat versus semi-skimmed, it is more akin to milk that has gone stagnant and sour—utterly repellent to decent people and best binned altogether, for everyone’s safety. For the SNP, the Bill is an abhorrence that undermines the UK’s international obligations and the principles of human rights. It costs a fortune and it is highly unlikely to achieve even its tawdry aims. We shall be tabling a prayer against the Rwanda treaty.

The legal experts I have heard from are appalled by the implications of proceeding with a Bill that, by the Home Secretary’s own frontispiece to it, cannot be declared compliant with the ECHR. The Home Secretary claims that he respects the Supreme Court’s decisions, but he comes here today with the sole purpose of overturning them and preventing the Court from ruling on anything ever again. For a Government to disapply human rights when it suits them, and instruct courts and public bodies to do likewise, is deeply troubling.

Liberty has stated that the Bill will

“tie the hands of every court in the UK while also abandoning the UK’s international commitments”.

Far be it from me to be concerned about the UK’s constitution or standing in the world, but I note that the Law Society of Scotland has questioned the UK’s rationale in disapplying a range of human rights agreements dating back 70 years, and the global implications of that departure from the international rights order. The Immigration Law Practitioners’ Association, Justice and Freedom from Torture say that the Bill

“sends a devastating signal to the world about the UK’s reliability as an international partner”.

The Bill also begs the question whether breaking international law is something that the Rwandan Government would accept. Minister Vincent Biruta reportedly said:

“Without lawful behaviour by the UK, Rwanda would not be able to continue with the Migration and Economic Development Partnership.”

It is beneath contempt for the UK Government on the one hand to say, “We are presenting a treaty with Rwanda—marvel at how solid and unbreakable it is,” while, on the other, to tell us that they want to breach the human rights convention, the refugee convention, the 1966 international covenant on civil and political rights, the 1984 United Nations convention against torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, the Council of Europe convention on action against trafficking in human beings agreed at Warsaw on 16 May 2005, as well as customary international law and any other laws that might get in their way, including from the European Court of Human Rights.

International law is binding: no welching, no backsies, no keys up. The Government are supposed to adhere to it; that is why they signed up to it in the first place. This is abject nonsense. The Law Society of England and Wales goes further, stating clearly that

“domestic legislation cannot immunise the Government from the enforcement of international law. To claim it can is disingenuous”.

It also states that refusing to comply with an interim measure would be a

“clear and serious breach of international law.”

It accuses the UK Government of using law to manufacture a reality. It is the time of year that we all indulge in some Christmas magic and imagine reindeers on the roof, but this UK Tory Government have asked the entire United Kingdom legal system to engage in a far more dangerous pretence.

The UK Supreme Court sought out the facts for itself and, upon clear and substantial evidence, found Rwanda to be unsafe. That seems most likely why the Government want to ban courts from doing that again, via this legislation. The Court spoke of the risk of refoulement and of sending people back into harm’s way. Indeed, if Rwanda were safe, why would it be able to send asylum seekers to the UK as part of the deal? The Rwandan opposition leader Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza was sentenced to 15 years in jail for speaking out against the Rwandan Government. Despite being released in 2018, to this day she still cannot exercise her political rights. She had to criticise the deal in the international media, because she says that the local media dare not give her a platform.

[Sir John Hayes]

rose—

[Alison Thewliss]

If the right hon. Member can explain how Rwanda is safe, I will certainly give way.

[Sir John Hayes]

The key thing about this whole debate is the tension that the hon. Lady has described. Is she familiar with the rulings of Lord Denning, Lord Hoffmann, Lord Bingham and, more recently, Lord Reed, all of which directly contradict what she said about the balance between international law and laws passed by this Parliament? Does she acknowledge the truth that all those very distinguished jurists say the opposite of what she said?

Population Growth: Impact of Immigration

Debate between John Hayes and Alison Thewliss

Tuesday 27th June 2023 Westminster Hall

[Alison Thewliss (Glasgow Central) (SNP)]

It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Mr Paisley. Oh my goodness, where to start with this debate? Well, I will start with my own constituency of Glasgow Central, in which 24.7% of the population were born outside the UK. In the constituency of the right hon. Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Sir John Hayes), who brought forward this debate, 8.9% of the population were born outside the UK; in the constituency of the hon. Member for Blackpool South (Scott Benton), 5.7%; in Bury North, 8.4%; in Christchurch, 5.5%; and in the Minister’s constituency, 5.7% of the population were born outside the UK. Before we get started on any of this, Mr Paisley, let me say that I will not take any criticism from anybody about immigration or attitudes towards it in Scotland, because I am in a far stronger position to talk about these issues than any of them are, given the demographics of my own constituency.

The right hon. Member for South Holland and The Deepings approached the debate by talking about the lack of housing, healthcare capacity and schools. Those infrastructure problems were caused, in huge part, by a lack of investment from the party that has been in government in the UK for the past 13 years. Investment has not kept pace with population growth in this country. The right hon. Gentleman should be addressing those concerns to this Government, because that infrastructure investment has not taken place. That is why there is not enough housing: he and his colleagues stand up and go, “Oh, we don’t want any housing in our constituencies; we don’t want housing in this place, that place or other places,” then they wonder why there are not enough houses. An absolute mystery, I must say, Mr Paisley.

[Sir John Hayes]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Alison Thewliss]

No, I will not. I listened with patience to the right hon. Gentleman’s comments, and he can listen with patience to mine.

The right hon. Gentleman talked about issues with skills and labour. I agree that there needs to be more investment in skills in the population. Again, the Government have cut back on education infrastructure over all these years at the cost of education, so people have not been able to go into it. For example, the UK Government removed nursing bursaries. We kept them in Scotland, and people are going through that system and becoming the nurses who we so need.

The right hon. Gentleman talked about the fact that people here are perhaps not having children. Gosh, is that because there are no nursery places for them because this Government have failed to invest in those places? The lack of childcare is preventing women from having children, and that is a significant problem that this Government have caused—[Interruption.] He did talk about the issue of families here not having children and those demographic challenges. Other Members talked about it too.

[Sir John Hayes]

On a point of order, Mr Paisley. Hyperbole is one thing; calumnies are another. I did not mention people in this country not having children. I did not mention families. I do not know whether that was an invention or a misunderstanding, but it was one or the other.

Illegal Migration Bill

Debate between John Hayes and Alison Thewliss

Report stage
Wednesday 26th April 2023 Commons Chamber

[Sir John Hayes (South Holland and The Deepings) (Con)]

rose—

[Alison Thewliss]

Is the right hon. Member going to disagree with the British Dental Association?

[Sir John Hayes]

The hon. Lady will know that I tabled an amendment in Committee which the Government have now refashioned and tabled on Report, precisely because there is a pedigree for such testing across European countries. Many European countries routinely use such testing to establish whether children are actually children and to avoid the eventualities that my hon. Friend the Member for Great Grimsby (Lia Nici) has just mentioned.

[Alison Thewliss]

The British Dental Association, the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, and Unison’s experts disagree with the right hon. Member. These are professionals. [Interruption.] The Minister is laughing on the Front Bench and denigrating a trade union. Given the Government’s current position with respect to industrial disputes, I do not think that that is particularly wise of him. He might want to think about that.

I acknowledge Government amendments 134 and 136, but I am afraid I have real problems trusting the Government, because detaining children is wrong: that is the fundamental point here. The Government want to make regulations specifying the circumstances in which unaccompanied children should be detained, and further regulations on time limits. They do not have the courage to put those proposals into the Bill, and they know that we cannot amend statutory instruments should they deign to introduce them at some point in the future. We do not trust them to do the right thing here, because children are children, and it would be extremely harmful for them to be detained.

We tabled amendment 47 to try to humanise the Bill. Much has been said about hordes of people coming here and trying to claim asylum, but this, fundamentally, is about individual people, many of them fleeing circumstances that Conservative Members cannot even imagine. Accordingly, the amendment seeks to disapply the provision in clause 2 from people in a range of categories. The first, in subsection (a), covers

“a person who was under the age of 18 when they arrived in the UK”,

such as Shireen, whom I mentioned earlier, and many others like him.

Subsection (b) refers to a person from Afghanistan

“where there is a real risk of persecution or serious harm…if returned to that country”.

In Committee, I tried to personalise my amendments by putting a name to each of them. I could call this “Sabir’s amendment”, after Sabir Zazai, the chief executive of the Scottish Refugee Council. He came here as a child in the back of a lorry, but he would be prevented from so doing, criminalised and removed to Rwanda if the Government had their way. He makes an outstanding contribution to Scotland. He has two letters which he said he would put on the wall in his house. One is from the Home Office, saying, “You are a person liable to be detained and removed.” The second was sent on behalf of the royal family when he was awarded the OBE.

Subsection (c) specifies

“ a person who is a refugee under the Refugee Convention or in need of humanitarian protection”.

That would cover many people who are currently fleeing from Sudan. Earlier, the Minister failed to identify a proper “safe and legal” route—