Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill

Lord Macdonald of River Glaven Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 2nd June 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Macdonald of River Glaven (CB)]

My Lords, I also congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Harper, on an excellent maiden speech and welcome him warmly.

I broadly welcome the Bill, and I believe that many of the enforcement measures it contains will assist in the fight against organised immigration crime. They had better, because this scourge is a growing threat to the cohesion of our society and the credibility of our democratic institutions. That is true not just here in the UK but across the whole of democratic Europe. People are losing trust, so it is essential that we are realistic and honest about what we face. It is clear that mass migration on the scale we are now seeing and the organised crime gangs that profit from it are drivers of a weakening faith in democratic institutions, bringing the rise of dangerous forms of political extremism—again, not just here but across Europe.

These conditions are fuelling nationalism and xenophobia throughout the democratic world, and the failure of mainstream democratic parties and Governments to deal with the question has played an important part in the installation by popular vote of authoritarian Governments, not just on our own continent but on others. It should be clear to everyone that if parties of the centre, centre-right and centre-left do not deal with this issue and all that flows from it, there is no shortage of parties on the political extremes that will be happy to do so—and if they are ushered in by discontent over migration, they will do much else besides.

The reason why I believe the Bill can only begin to touch the hem of the problem is that the policy challenge is broader and deeper than a simple question of law enforcement. It is the context created by the United Nations refugee convention of 1951 and its protocol of 1967. The refugee convention was created in the shadow of the Second World War and was generally understood to be a response to the horrors of that conflict, particularly to the barriers faced by Jewish people seeking to flee Nazi Germany in the 1930s. The 1967 protocol broadened its terms to include within its compass the entire world.

I will make just one point to illustrate the historical context of the refugee convention and its striking contrast to the world of today. At the time of its enactment in 1951, it was considered that there were around 2.1 million refugees under the mandate of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. In 2024, according to the UNHCR, there were no fewer than 122.6 million internally displaced persons around the world and no fewer than 43.7 million refugees. In addition, in the 74 years since the adoption of the convention, the world has become smaller, knowledge of conditions in developed countries more broadly available and travel over distance across seas and whole continents far easier. In the light of that, why would millions of people not seek better lives, more opportunities, and to escape with their families from violence and oppression? What could be more natural? Why would millions of people not avail themselves of the services of organised criminal gangs promising a better future in some newly reachable, unimaginably rich country?

It is in the light of the changes since 1951 that I believe the rubric of the refugee convention must be considered. It says that anyone with a well-founded fear of persecution in their place of abode is entitled under the convention to asylum when they arrive in a contracting state, but that characterisation applies to literally tens of millions of people worldwide and may plausibly be claimed by tens of millions more.

So what are we to do? It is no answer just to shrug; again, we have to be realistic because at some stage we are going to have to deal with this. My own view is that we may have to revisit the refugee convention to make it fit for the modern world—to create an architecture that allows, for example, for the application of quotas between nations and of course the admission of those grievously at risk, so that we may fulfil our humanitarian function without damaging our own social and political cohesion. Discussions are already taking place across Europe about how arrangements under the European Convention on Human Rights may be reordered to allow countries more effectively to define and regulate their borders. As a strong supporter of the European Convention on Human Rights and the Strasbourg court, I urge the Government to become an enthusiastic participant in those discussions.

As long ago as 2016, the distinguished Columbia University academic professor Mark Lilla wrote in his fine book The Once and Future Liberal that parties of the centre-left that espouse identity politics, that atomise people by race, by so-called privilege, sex and gender, building great hierarchies of polarisation and grievance, would never be able to create winning electoral coalitions across socioeconomic divides. Indeed, such an obviously misguided and solipsistic ideology would succeed only in alienating the left’s natural supporters and ushering in an age of populism. The result would be social division and the strengthening of political reaction. Although Professor Lilla once told me that the response of some of his university colleagues to his book was to label him a white supremacist, history has plainly proved him right. Today, a weak and confused response to an unprecedented surge in mass migration holds the same danger. That danger is particularly acute for parties of the centre-left, and we are a maximum of four years away from our next general election.