Borders and Asylum

Richard Tice Excerpts

Monday 1st September 2025 Commons Chamber

[Yvette Cooper]

Everyone has a right to be safe, and to respect. The pursuit of division, hatred and violence is never acceptable, in the immigration and asylum system or more widely across our country. It is hugely important that alongside all the reforms that we introduce—we do need reform to the system—we have clear recognition of our shared humanity and the need to prevent any kind of violence and hatred, or the tensions and problems that my hon. Friend describes.

[Richard Tice (Boston and Skegness) (Reform)]

With the number of crossings up more than 40% this year alone, at some 30,000, clearly the Government’s policies are acting as a magnet, not a deterrent. When will the Home Secretary realise that the only effective deterrent is to detain and deport everyone who comes here illegally, and that to do that, we must leave the European convention on human rights?

[Yvette Cooper]

This Government have, since the election, increased the number of returns of those who have no right to be here. There has been a 28% increase in returns of failed asylum seekers. We are strengthening enforcement and bringing in new counter-terrorism powers that allow us to go after the criminal gangs. Incomprehensibly, the hon. Gentleman’s party voted against those counter-terrorism powers. It seems to oppose the action that we need to take to go after the criminal gangs. If he and the Conservatives were to support the new powers, we could bring them in swiftly, in the course of a few months, and give our law enforcement the power to take stronger action against the criminal gangs. I hope that he supports the agreement with France, which provides for the immediate detention of people arriving in the UK, and their return to France. The trouble with his party’s policies is that they sound an awful lot like the previous Conservative Government’s policies, which totally failed. The Conservative Government were chaos; his party seems to be chaos on steroids. His party is not trying to solve the problem. All it is trying to do is exploit it. We need a properly controlled and managed system that goes after the criminal gangs, who should not be able to get away with their vile trade.