Illegal Migration Bill

Debate between John Hayes and Patrick Grady

Tuesday 11th July 2023 Commons Chamber

[Tom Hunt]

I am sorry, but I will not be taking any interventions.

Ultimately, what Brexit was about in many respects was taking back control of our borders, and controlling the migration system. If it gets to a point where we feel that, even having delivered Brexit, the popular sovereignty of the people’s wish to decrease net migration and tackle illegal migration robustly is impossible, it is only right that we then look at the legal infrastructure and the different arrangements that this country is subject to. We must listen to the British people, the vast majority of whom do support this Bill. They want to see it enacted and I will be supporting the Government every step of the way. I really hope that, before we get to the summer recess, this vital Bill gets Royal Assent.

[Patrick Grady (Glasgow North) (SNP)]

When the Minister was first appointed, I thought that he was largely going along with the Home Secretary’s language and policy on refugees and asylum seekers out of a sense of loyalty and collective responsibility. But as this Bill has progressed, it appears from the statements he has made in the Chamber and the responses he has given to questions and to Westminster Hall debates that he really has drunk the Kool-Aid. I think he genuinely believes the Government’s rhetoric: that this country is being invaded, that people who come here fleeing war, persecution and famine are actually economic migrants on the make, and that outright hostility and denial of their basic human rights is the only way to dissuade them from coming here. So hostile does he want the environment to be, he will not even allow a splash of colour and cartoons on the walls of the family reception centres. It is more than disappointing. It is worrying that the Government’s attitude seems to be that the way to stop people coming here from countries where they are at risk of oppression and human rights abuses is to create an environment that is at least as hostile as the place from which they are fleeing.

That would explain the Government’s opposition to Lords amendment 1. The safeguards that it provides should otherwise be seen as absolutely essential, and make it clear that nothing in the Bill requires the Home Secretary to break with international human rights law and the treaties and convention that this country has been signed up to for decades. Nowhere in the Conservative manifesto was there a commitment to take the UK out of these conventions, so their Lordships have every right to continue to press this and similar amendments during the next stages of their proceedings.

The Chair of the Justice Committee said earlier that this was an incorporative rather than an interpretive amendment. Perhaps the Lords will come back with something in lieu that will be more attractive to the more level-headed elements on the Conservative Back Benches. But then perhaps that is what the Government have been looking for all along—the Government want a fight with the House of Lords, they want a fight with the Supreme Court and the Home Secretary certainly wants an excuse to withdraw from the European convention on human rights. Those perhaps are the real purposes of the Bill, and the impact on refugees and asylum seekers is really only secondary.

It is ridiculous that we are being asked to consider these amendments barely 24 hours after the Lords gave the Bill its Third Reading. It shows the Government’s contempt for both Houses of Parliament. The explanatory notes and the amendment documents were only available through the Vote Office at 7.45 last night, as the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton) said, and yet the Government are proposing 58 motions to disagree with the Lords in their amendments this evening. If that is not picking a fight, I am not sure what is. Well, let us have that fight. Let us vote on all 58 of them and then see how desperate the Government and their Back Benchers are to get this Bill on to the statute book.

Almost all the amendments made in the Lords speak to a basic humanity and respect for the rule of law and the fundamental principles of the global asylum system. That is essentially what the Lord Archbishop of Canterbury’s amendment 104 calls for. Government Members may wish to wish those Lords away, but they are supposed to support the House of Lords and the system that exists. If they want to pick away at it, that is fine, because I do not think there should be a House of Lords in its current form.

[Sir John Hayes]

I do not understand the hon. Gentleman’s argument. On the one hand, Opposition Members say that the Government are not doing enough, that they need to deal with the backlog, take action and be more decisive and radical. When the Government do become decisive, however, we are told that they are rushing the House, that they are going too fast and that we need more time, more machinations, more prevarication and more delay.

[Patrick Grady]

The Government are going about this exactly the wrong way, as my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Edinburgh South West (Joanna Cherry said earlier in one of her interventions. Many Lords amendments, especially those from the Lord Bishops, propose ways to deal with the backlog and provide safe and legal routes. Those are the amendments that the Government want to vote against.

In their increasingly desperate and craven pandering to what has become the Government’s electoral base, and to those elements on their Back Benches who have been returned to this House by that electoral base, the Government seem increasingly prepared to walk away from or even rip up conventions and treaties that past Conservative Governments and Ministers once had a hand in drafting. Once again, they are using their majority to simply override the considered proposals from a House of Lords that they nevertheless want to continue to pack with their donors, cronies and assorted time-served loyalists.

Among those amendments was yet another Dubs amendment, Lords amendment 8, under which unaccompanied children would essentially continue to have the right to claim asylum in the United Kingdom and the Home Secretary would not be able to declare them inadmissible. That is what the Home Secretary wants to be able to do—to declare young children inadmissible for asylum and leave them essentially in a kind of limbo in the UK until they are old enough to be sent back to where they came from, or perhaps to Rwanda or anywhere else that the Government can pay enough money to and hopefully get a court to declare is safe.

All that is supposed to have a deterrent effect and make the UK a less attractive place to seek sanctuary, but it is not working. The Bill has failed at its first hurdle. Clause 2 of the Bill was supposed to retrospectively apply its provisions to the day it was introduced to the House, 7 March 2023, and that was supposed to start to stop the boats. That was going to create the great deterrent effect, and it simply has not worked. The Government are dressing up their proposals in lieu of Lords amendment 2 as some sort of grand compromise, but in fact they are simply acknowledging the reality that backdating the Bill was not working and maintaining the clause would only create a greater backlog of cases for processing, at even greater expense to the public purse.

Of course, it would be better if many of the powers granted, and duties required of the Home Secretary, by the Bill did not come into force at all. The Lords were not content with Lord Paddick’s amendment to decline to give the Bill a Second Reading when it was first debated in their House, but there is still an opportunity to stop this Bill, perhaps in its entirety. There are mechanisms through double insistence or further amendments in lieu to dramatically reduce, delay or even halt the provisions of this Bill.

The SNP has never taken seats in the House of Lords, and I hope it never will, but for Opposition Members in particular who defend the role that it plays in the UK’s constitution, surely this is the time to call for it to play that role to the fullest extent. The Government have no mandate for the Bill and no mandate to undermine human rights agreements that have underpinned the world order since 1945. If the Lords will not stand up on those issues, then what is even the point of the House of Lords? If the Government are so committed to getting this Bill through, they have the Parliament Acts at their disposal, or they can put their proposals to the public in a general election.

However, in any future general election I am confident that people in Glasgow North will continue to vote to be part of a country and a society that recognises the duty we have to the poorest and most vulnerable, that reciprocates the hospitality and sanctuary shown to generations before us who left our country for other shores, and that says, “Refugees are welcome here.” If that country is not the United Kingdom, it will be an independent Scotland.

Question put, That this House disagrees with Lords amendment 1.