Yemen

Debate between Keith Vaz and Mark Field

Tuesday 26th March 2019 Commons Chamber

[Mark Field]

I thank my hon. Friend for her question. She will be aware that this war did not begin with a Saudi-led intervention. This whole matter began six months after Houthi rebels, representing no more than 15% of the Yemeni population, captured most of the capital, Sana’a, and expelled the internationally recognised Government. As she alludes to, they have been supported by Iran, and clearly the international community needs to try to come together. It is a desperate humanitarian situation on a scale that few of us can comprehend. I have been out to Cox’s Bazar, where the Rohingya are living, but this is on a scale literally 30 times as great; it is really quite horrific.

[Keith Vaz (Leicester East) (Lab)]

I join the shadow Foreign Secretary and others in commending the incredible work of the right hon. Member for North East Bedfordshire (Alistair Burt).

This is a grim anniversary. Since the ceasefire was announced, three civilians have died in this conflict every single day, and there are 110,000 cases of cholera. Three dates are essential: the date that we can have the next meeting of the Quad, the date when the peace talks will resume and the date for the appointment of a new Minister with responsibility for Yemen. When will those be? It is important that we have proper ministerial focus. The Minister cannot run the whole world. We need someone as focused as the right hon. Member for North East Bedfordshire.

[Mark Field]

That is a fair question. I would like to think that I can do the job at least for urgent questions and the like, but I take on board what the right hon. Gentleman says. As far as a date for peace talks is concerned, we are desperate to ensure at the UN and with all our partners that there is momentum from what happened in Stockholm, which was very positive, but we feel that the momentum is coming to an end. As far as the Quad is concerned, there are ongoing discussions, and no doubt we will again try to get more movement and momentum to ensure that the progress made is built upon and does not dwindle away.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Keith Vaz and Mark Field

Tuesday 22nd January 2019 Commons Chamber

[The Minister for Asia and the Pacific (Mark Field)]

We also have strong relations with the Malaysian Government, and I am very disappointed that they have made what I feel is a fundamentally wrong decision. As my hon. Friend has rightly pointed out, those Israeli Paralympic athletes should not be banned from competing. I shall be seeing the Malaysian Education Minister this afternoon—with, I think, a senior representative of the high commission—and I promise to ask for an assurance that this will be dealt with properly, as a matter of urgency.

[Keith Vaz (Leicester East) (Lab)]

T4. I thank the Foreign Secretary for travelling to Stockholm for the peace talks, and for resolution 2452. Yesterday, however, five aid workers were killed in Yemen as they tried to de-mine parts of the country. Will the Foreign Secretary ensure that the safety of aid workers is a priority during the talks? [R]

Immigration

Debate between Keith Vaz and Mark Field

Thursday 9th July 2015 Westminster Hall

[Keith Vaz]

Perhaps I am being unkind to the hon. Gentleman. I do not know his position on the EU. I have never believed that enlargement was wrong. That is partly because, of course, I was Minister for Europe at the time. I do not believe that we should constantly say “mea culpa”, and I signed some of the documents that allowed people from Poland, Hungary and other countries in. I think that the arrival of the eastern Europeans helped our economy. It boosted it enormously. It was different from migration from south Asia, because people from eastern Europe tend not to stay. They tend to want to go back—it is only two hours to Warsaw—but people from the subcontinent wanted to stay longer and put down roots. That does not apply to the eastern Europeans.

[Mark Field (Cities of London and Westminster) (Con)]

I do not disagree that the Polish, Hungarian and Lithuanian migrants from 2004 made a tremendous contribution to the British economy, but we were lulled into a false sense of security and have not ensured that the indigenous population are sufficiently skilled to claim the wages that they desire and that are needed in a globally competitive economy. Much of the debate about that is now being conducted in the context of child tax credits and the Budget. What happened was not an entirely unalloyed good, but I am not blaming either the Government or the employers who lulled themselves into that false sense of security.

[Keith Vaz]

The right hon. Gentleman is right. How many times have we heard that we should deal with shortages of chefs in high street restaurants by opening a training school for them, so that people do not need to go to Dhaka or Sylhet to bring in chefs? We just did not do it, and that is a challenge to our education system. To be fair, that is what he has said all along. If we had the skills here, we would not need to bring in people from abroad.

My final point—this is where I am in total agreement with the hon. Member for Isle of Wight—is on the management of the immigration service under the previous Labour Government and, indeed, the Conservative Government before that. There has been a long period of mismanagement. In my very first campaign, under the last but one Conservative Government, bags of unopened mail were discovered in Lunar House in Croydon. He may remember that. We found that there were about half a million unopened letters from solicitors, MPs and others, and the people at Lunar House just did not bother to open them. That was the first real crisis.

Things have improved in the past five years. They are moving in the right direction with regard to the standard of officials, whether at the old UK Border Agency, at UK Visas and Immigration—particularly the international section—or at Border Force. Things are also moving in the right direction with the structural changes of the past four or five years. Perhaps I may mention that all of those were recommended by the Home Affairs Committee, which had called for the abolition of the UKBA for many years. That is why every three months in the previous Parliament—and we will do this again—we published indicators of how the Home Office has been doing on immigration. How big is the backlog? How long does it take to decide on asylum cases? How many people have been removed? Only 3% of people reported to be working and acting illegally have been removed from the country.

The answer is not to send round vans telling people to leave the country. The answer is to ensure that we have an efficient system in which letters from MPs are replied to quickly and decisions are reached. That is the best thing that the Government and the coalition have done in the past five years. They did it much better than the Labour Government, who did not put enough pressure in Parliament on officials and Ministers. The work is bearing fruit. I say to the Minister—the Committee has already said this in our reports—that if the system is managed better, sometimes it is necessary to say no.

I am also fed up with constituents who come in and say, “I’ve been waiting for a reply from the Home Office.” I ask, “How long have you been waiting?” and they say, “Oh, five years.” I say, “Okay. How long have you been in the country?” They say, “10 years.” I ask, “Why did you come to this country?” They say, “I came on a visit.” I then ask, “Why are you still here?” Maybe it is the fact that I am getting older that I am getting grumpier, but what I am really grumpy about is when people do not reply to letters. If they do not reply to solicitors’ letters, people come to see MPs. We have to write and we expect a reply.

The Minister was very helpful in a case I brought to him just two days ago—he rang me up very late at night and I was very grateful that he did. You, Sir Alan, will remember the days when MPs used to be able to go to Immigration Ministers about particular cases and say, “Look, this is really a genuine case. Look at it again and I think you will find that this person ought to be allowed in the country or ought to be allowed to stay here.” Unfortunately, those days are gone, because we regularly ask Immigration Ministers how many times they meet MPs to discuss cases and we do not really get replies. I am afraid that that applies to Immigration Ministers in the last Government as well as in this one. Of course, I shall ask the Minister for more meetings with him. As I said, to give him his due when I ring him up and ask him about a problem, he answers or rings back, and that has not happened very often in the past.

Let us look at the management of the system as well. Let us allow people to stay who genuinely should stay, and people who are working the system should be asked to leave. However, let us do so in a reasonably decent time frame. That would give the best possible impression that the Home Office is acting in a proper way.

These are important issues. The Committee will return to them regularly and we will ensure that we produce reports that will be of value to Parliament. Regarding almost all the reports we have produced on immigration, I say to the hon. Member for Isle of Wight that, if he looks at the personalities of those who sit on the Home Affairs Committee, he will see that those Members have almost always been unanimous, because we want common sense and truth on immigration. That is what we really want.

UK-India Trade

Debate between Keith Vaz and Mark Field

Wednesday 25th January 2012 Westminster Hall

[Mark Field (Cities of London and Westminster) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to be here under your chairmanship, Mr Walker, and in a debate initiated by one of my close friends in Parliament, my hon. Friend the Member for Wimbledon (Stephen Hammond). I will speak, if I may, very briefly.

I have made two visits to India—in 2003 and in 2006. Between those years, there was a change in Government. What struck me was the confidence of the business and political classes in New Delhi and Bombay. I suspect that, six years on, there will be an even greater sense of a country that is forward looking and confident of the future, notwithstanding all of the issues that have been raised by hon. Members in this debate.

Above all, it is important that we do not see India as just another Asian nation. Both UKTI and the Foreign Office have tended to regard Asia as just one area, which is what we tend to do with eastern Europe as well; we see it as an homogenous area rather than recognising its great historical importance.

One of the issues that I hear time and again, particularly where our companies are competing against German companies, is that the German embassies based in India, China or South Korea recognise that their role is not to be some sort of propagandist for their country but to drill down and work out who is really important in the local community. Therefore, it is important to have attached to the embassies people who are there for many years, developing long-term relationships.

[Keith Vaz (Leicester East) (Lab)]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Mark Field]

If the right hon. Gentleman does not mind, I will not give way, because other Members wish to speak.

There is a lot of doom and gloom at the moment. We have seen today that our economy has contracted by 0.2% in the past three months, which I suspect may be the precursor to a fully fledged recession in this country in the next few months. Clearly, there are major problems in the eurozone market, which are not going to go away any time soon. In fact, I fear that they will be there for a long time to come, because there is not the political will to drive forward. As a result, it is perhaps easy to be gloomy about the economic situation. One of the interesting things about the IMF report yesterday was that it was presented as being very negative, but even the most pessimistic scenario suggested that there would be global growth of 3.3% next year. Indeed, some 4% was suggested during 2011.

In a conversation with one of the two Chinese law firms that have opened in London in the past couple of years I mentioned the global economic recession. A partner, who was a Chinese native with perfect English, smiled and said, “Back home, we call it the north Atlantic crisis”. There is a very important lesson for us to learn. Amid all that doom and gloom, let us get out there and recognise that we have great strengths.

In relation to India, some of the important issues have already been mentioned. We clearly have some good connections on the manufacturing side, especially in the technology and bio-technology sphere. There is much that India can teach us. Nehru has that legacy of those five great technology universities that remain a great success.

The Minister has done a phenomenal amount of work in this area in often difficult circumstances. Privately, he knows that I do not entirely support our immigration policy and I suspect that, behind closed doors, he has some sympathy with my views. We need to be a beacon for the brightest and the best. We must encourage young Indian, South Korean and Chinese people to come to this country. If they spend two or three years as students here, they will be ambassadors for this country for the rest of their lives. I am afraid that our policy on the headline figures is wrong. [Interruption.] I do not wish totally to eliminate the Minister’s career, and I am sure that he has a few words to say.