MOD Bicester and Illegal Migrants
Debate between Kieran Mullan and Max Wilkinson(2 days, 15 hours ago)
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Max Wilkinson
Your advice is noted, Madam Deputy Speaker.
Of course it would be inappropriate to house 1,200 asylum seekers on a military base next to a village of a few hundred people, and of course it would be inappropriate to house them on a site that has never previously been used for residential accommodation. That goes without saying. The Liberal Democrats can back that element of the motion, even if we do not agree with the wording deployed by the official Opposition. I will allow my hon. Friend the Member for Bicester and Woodstock (Calum Miller) to deal with the specifics of the local matter when he contributes later.
What must be disputed, however, is the second part of this deeply harmful motion. Brexit has made us all poorer. It has reduced Britain’s standing in the world and made it more difficult for this country to run a safe and controlled asylum system. So why on earth are the Conservatives suggesting leaving the ECHR, which would be Brexit 2.0? Not only would that make the UK a pariah state, but it would likely result in the end of the Brexit deal that they negotiated. The Conservatives often tell us that the Brexit settlement must not be reopened, but that is exactly what they are suggesting.
Once again, the Conservative party is arguing that this country should pursue what would basically amount to a no-deal Brexit, except this time it is not a fringe argument being contested among factions in the Conservative party, but the position of the shadow Front Bench and the Leader of the Opposition, backed by all Conservative MPs. Indeed, their leader has told them that they will be barred from their party unless they adopt the position, which is why so many of them have now changed their mind on the issue.
The drift of the Conservatives away from the centre-right to the hard-right is a dereliction of duty. It runs counter to many of the traditions in British Conservatism. But we know why they are doing it: they are terrified of the hon. Member for Clacton (Nigel Farage) so they chase after him. They increasingly make his arguments as they prepare for their grubby deal. We all remember what happened in 2019, when the hon. Member for Clacton stood down his candidates in alliance with Boris Johnson. People up and down the country are more than aware that those two parties would engage in the same sort of stitch-up again without a second thought, no matter how much Tory MPs and their leader plead the opposite in public.
Max Wilkinson
I thank the hon. Member for his intervention. Of course, the second part of the convention does tackle those sorts of derogations. It is important that we see the convention in its entirety.
As I said earlier, all of this is before we consider the implications for Northern Ireland, which have been well rehearsed in this Chamber. When British people up and down the country hear Conservative and Reform politicians pledging to erase those rights, we must all ask ourselves whether we trust those politicians to give us back those rights when they no longer exist. The answer is, of course, that they will not give us those rights back. [Interruption.] And do not argue with me about the Wolfson report, because that is nonsense.
Leaving the ECHR will mean that we have even fewer opportunities to work on agreements with the EU—the place small boats set off from—to prevent those crossings, and that goes to the nub of the matter that we are discussing today. If we have learned one thing over the past decade, it is that the concept of the UK becoming more successful and prosperous while distancing itself from its closest allies is a total fiction. It was a lie in 2016, and it is a lie today. The only way to move towards an asylum system that works is by working with our European allies, and that means that this Government must first drop their self-defeating red lines, and secondly apply to join the EU migration and asylum pact.
While the media is excited that the Prime Minister has been more expansive in his wording on relations with Europe, it is important to note that he is pledging to retain all his red lines. He is not promising to remove any of them, even though he knows that those red lines are making us poorer and scuppering our chances of an asylum system that could, in future, command public trust, look after genuine asylum seekers and create a fair system, as this country has always had. It will also cost UK taxpayers more and more money.
Max Wilkinson
The hon. Member will know that the framework within which signatories to the EU migration and asylum pact work is different from the Dublin agreement.
Today we renew our calls for Ministers to drop their red lines on Europe and to join the EU asylum pact. We also renew our calls for the Conservatives to recognise the reality that the first Brexit they gave us has failed this country. Do not pretend that giving us Brexit 2.0 will be any better.
Dr Mullan
I wish we had a system in which we could test the hon. Member’s proposition, because at the minute, we have absolutely no idea about the attitudes and values of the people coming from those countries. She is correct to say that we have issues of misogyny in this country, but for our country the equivalent figures to those I have just mentioned are significantly lower. That is the point: these cultures are worse than ours on the many issues we care about in relation to women and girls.
On the one hand, the Government are pledging action on women and girls and driving improvements in that area—we have done so in our society for many decades—but on the other hand they are pretending that the citizens of those countries, which have done none of that work, are exactly the same as us and will come over and treat our women exactly the same. I am afraid that flies in the face of common sense and the clear statistical evidence I gave about rates of crime and the social attitudes of those people.
I am not afraid to say that there is a lot to do when it comes to women and girls in our culture, but we have a significantly better culture towards women and girls than countries such as Eritrea, Sudan, Afghanistan, Pakistan and a whole range of others, so it is perfectly reasonable for women being asked to live alongside huge numbers of unvetted people from those countries to be concerned and to have worries.
We should not be afraid to call that out, and it has nothing to do with racism. We have a culture of football hooliganism in this country, and it is predominantly white people who engage in that football hooliganism. I am happy to say that; it does not make me racist towards white people. It does not make me racist towards other cultures when I point out the issues and problems that they have, which we should not be afraid to call out.
Max Wilkinson
I think the hon. Member mentioned that 80% of women in one country said they had been sexually harassed in public. What is the rate of women in the UK who report being sexually harassed in public?
Dr Mullan
It is around one in four. It was 80% in the country I referenced, which is significantly more. The equivalent figure for this country is much, much too high—I would want it to be zero—but that makes the exact point, which I think the hon. Member did not want to draw out, that those countries are worse than we are. We should not be importing large quantities of unvetted young men from those cultures without a proper way of dealing with that. We do not have a way of doing that.
The Government inadvertently admitted that, as they have had to actively tell those people not to rape women. That is because they know the things I have said about the differences in attitudes towards women in many of those countries. The question is: what do we do about it? I am clear that it should be up to us to decide who comes here from what countries and on what basis. We should decide asylum policy—not the people smugglers—and the routes on which people come. The Conservatives have been clear and admitted that we should have been quicker in bringing in our own deterrence policy, but we are committed to doing that now and have a plan for it. That is what actually counts.
The only country that has successfully dealt with this issue is Australia. It saw a decrease of more than 90% in the number of people crossing the sea and entering illegally by saying, “If you come here illegally under that method, you don’t get to stay—end of story.” That worked, and we should do exactly the same thing. The Government like to talk about the failure of the Rwanda plan and the four people sent as volunteers. They know that those people went voluntarily. It is clearly not a deterrent if someone goes voluntarily, but we were never allowed to use the scheme as a deterrent to deport people whether they wanted to go or not.
The Government can do everything they want to reform and tweak the operation of human rights laws in this country, but there are two ways in which that approach is fundamentally flawed. First, it does not matter if a claim can be successfully rejected if someone cannot be deported to the country they came from. It is completely futile. Unless the hon. Member for South Norfolk (Ben Goldsborough) thinks that we will deport people en masse to Afghanistan or some other third world, war-torn country, clearly, whatever we might want to do around the validity of their claim is worthless if we cannot send them to another country or back to the country they came from. Secondly, we have talked about the nature of the claims and how we might tweak them. The European Court of Human Rights is a precedent-setting Court. If it makes a ruling and sets a precedent, ultimately, that will hold sway.
I asked the hon. Member for South Norfolk to comment on article 3, which he failed to do. That is just one example of how the European convention on human rights has become totally distorted. Article 3 was originally envisioned to prevent people from being deported to a country where they might face torture. That was the aim of the article. It is now used to say that when someone comes to our country and commits horrendous crimes such as rape, but they have a psychiatric illness, it is torture if the country we seek to deport them to does not have adequate healthcare provision. Under article 3, that is not allowed. Who can reasonably argue that that was envisioned by all the people the hon. Member referenced when they created a set of rights which, at the time, were appropriate and applied appropriately? Does he really think that those people envisioned that, 50 years later, that would mean we could not deport a rapist because he would not get adequate healthcare in the country that we were deporting him to?
The article has been totally distorted from its original purpose, and the question of whether we can operate a safe and decent framework of rights in this country without the use of the ECHR is quite clearly scaremongering. Canada manages it, New Zealand manages it, Australia manages it. They all manage to have a framework of rights and international agreements, and that includes Canada, which is seeking a closer relationship with the EU, which is not part of the ECHR.