Borders, Citizenship and Immigration Bill [HL]

My Lords, I do not suppose that he had seen one before but he accepted it immediately as sufficient to allow me to proceed. However, in a way, that is the smallest of the matters that we are concerned about. The Minister said in Committee that it is very difficult, or effectively impossible, to impose on the land border controls of the sort that can be imposed on sea and air journeys. All of us who know the land border know that that is obvious. Anyone can wander backwards and forwards across the land border extremely freely in many, many places, and they do so all the time for every possible daily purpose. The only people who are not allowed to cross the land border are policemen on duty in either jurisdiction. They are forbidden to do so and do not do it, but everybody else wanders freely backwards and forwards for every possible purpose. When petrol is cheaper on one side or the other they buy it on the appropriate side. So, that is agreed to be an impossibility. At the same time, the Minister said in Committee—I am paraphrasing—that that was why we may have immigration controls on those going between Great Britain and Northern Ireland. He said: "““Those routes””—" the routes between Great Britain and Northern Ireland— "““offer the most suitable screening and intervention opportunities to address vulnerabilities from those crossing the land border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland””.—[Official Report, 4/3/09; col. 769.]" In other words, for this purpose the Government are moving the border between the Republic and the rest of us from the land border to the Irish Sea. That is what concerns many of those who live in Northern Ireland and who have gone to considerable trouble, to put it at its mildest, to ensure that the land border remains the border and that the crossing is not seen as the actual border, although that was the implication of the Minister’s remarks at the time. I have to report that the representatives of both the Dáil and the Senate of the Republic of Ireland, and people from various parts of the United Kingdom and the islands, were concerned about what that meant and what would happen in effect. The noble Lord, Lord Pannick, made an important point when he drew our attention to the wide powers that have been taken even though it is said that only a fraction of those powers are required or will ever be used. We have all heard Governments say, ““We will take this power but we are not going to use it very much””. But, once a Government have a power, before long there will be a temptation to use it to the full. With regard to the islands—the Crown dependencies—one of the factors that I encountered in talking to their representatives was that they feel under pressure at the moment in any case. As is well known, the economy of the Crown dependencies depends to a considerable extent on two factors—financial services on one hand and tourism on the other. If passports are required to travel to them, which is the power being taken here, they fear that tourism will be affected. At the same time, their financial services industry is under attack on grounds of tax avoidance. They are nervous that the Government are moving against them on more than one front. This is only part of the reason for their nervousness. Those problems add to the difficulties that they, like every other country, are experiencing as a result of the economic problems that we all know so much about. They are unhappy for those reasons as well as the constitutional ones advanced by my noble friend Lord Goodlad and the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, from the Cross Benches. The Government’s arguments for the clause have so far been less than satisfactory and I hope that they will rethink it.