Western Jet Foil and Manston Asylum Processing Centres

Stephen Farry Excerpts

Monday 31st October 2022 Commons Chamber

[Suella Braverman]

What a great question from my hon. Friend, and he is absolutely right. What is more, we are identifying, particularly with the young, single men who are coming from Albania, that they are either part of organised criminal gangs and procuring their journey through those nefarious means, or they are coming here and partaking in criminal activity, particularly related to drugs—supply and otherwise. In fact, a few weeks ago I attended a raid with members of the National Crime Agency where they arrested a suspected Albanian people smuggler in Banbury. This is a criminal problem. There are many people coming here with criminal intent and behaving in a criminal way. We need to stop it.

[Stephen Farry (North Down) (Alliance)]

At the recent Conservative party conference, the Home Secretary said that it was her “dream”, indeed her “obsession”, to see pictures of planes taking off for Rwanda on the front page of The Daily Telegraph—it had to be the Telegraph, of course. Does she appreciate how offensive, disturbing and anti-humanitarian that statement is, particularly when we bear in mind the true perspective that there are more than 80 million refugees and internally displaced people in the world, that the UK takes proportionally fewer refugees than many other European countries, and that the Home Office’s own figures from this year show that over 70% of asylum claims are successful, which belies all the propaganda that these are economic migrants?

[Suella Braverman]

I will tell the hon. Gentleman what I find offensive and disturbing. It is the sight of thousands of people coming to these shores illegally without a valid asylum claim, taking advantage of our generosity, abusing our laws and being accommodated free of charge. It is unfair, it is unacceptable and it is not right.