In 1933, Einstein lived in Norfolk, guarded by local residents and a Conservative MP to prevent attempts to assassinate him by the Nazis. At the time, he said:
“I shall become a naturalised Englishman as soon as is possible for my papers to go through.”
He never did get those papers, though.
Throughout this debate, I have heard Members laud our history of accepting refugees as if it somehow explains and justifies the Bill before us; as if our capacity as a nation to retrospectively see that we did the right thing means that we are doing so now. Yet even when it came to geniuses like Einstein, the term “asylum seeker” has always meant second-class citizen. There are no photographs of the parents of the Kindertransport children, the ones denied entry by Whitehall, only to be murdered by the Nazis. When it came to east African Asians, we introduced the Commonwealth Immigration Act 1968 to make it harder for them to seek sanctuary. Now we have orphaned children sleeping rough on our border with France and in Greece in overcrowded covid-ridden camps, and we say that they must be safe so they are not our problem.
Let us stop re-writing the UK’s history to provide cover for legislation like this, which makes plain the Government’s disdain for those who find themselves with little alternative but to run for their lives. They want to penalise people for how they run, creating a third class of citizens who are at perpetual risk of being deported: because they did not queue properly and fill in the appropriate form, they did not travel directly to an island nation or present themselves immediately for a claim, they must be suspect, regardless of their story or why they fled, breaching the refugee convention. I hear this a lot: “Well, they came through France, Germany, Belgium. Why should we help them?” The convention is clear that there is no requirement to claim asylum in the first safe country. It was intended to get nations to work together to help make managing those at risk possible.
It is true that it was easier to quietly ignore those in danger when there were not that many of them, before the mass refugee camps in Sudan or the Syrian civil war, but just because the challenge is harder does not mean that our response should be, too; that we should be a nation that does not keep its promises to the 3,000 children we said we would take under the Dubs scheme; we have only taken 480. Turkey is taking 4 million refugees and we are quibbling about 26,000 applications. The vast majority of refugees end up staying in the areas they have run from, displaced and living in developing countries when wealthy ones like ours want to look the other way.
Persecution does not happen in an orderly fashion. Wars are not run to a timetable to be able to make people make applications. You run, you grab your children, you flee with what you can, you try to save their lives—yes, many of them boys and young men—from certain death. What parent cannot understand that ambition? We all want to stop the traffickers, but the gangs will use these changes as a selling point to those desperate people. If we want to stop the gangs then take away the market, but there is no safe and legal route
being proposed here, no new commitments made. The vulnerable persons resettlement scheme has stopped. If we think that the only place that people are running from is Syria, we do not understand what is going on in Ethiopia, Iran, Afghanistan, to the Uyghurs, to LGBTQ people in Myanmar, or to Christians and religious minorities around the world.
Ministers claim the legislation will protect women from trafficking when it will do the reverse, because it is not based on any evidence. Their own statistics show that the majority in detention referred to the national referral mechanism are then recognised as potential victims of trafficking and that 81% of reasonable grounds rejections that are challenged are granted a positive ruling, yet many of those women would fall into that group, too. Women repeatedly abused on their journeys here, who cannot find the words to speak about the hell they have been through, will be criminalised because they did not have all their paperwork neatly folded about their person for presentation during this time. Locking them up in detention centres reinforces, not removes, the abuse they face. Yarl’s Wood is a stain on our national identity, a place where victims of sexual abuse and rape in war are jailed. Not only does it cost more than community schemes to run, but it retraumatises those women over and over again.
Home Office costs are spiralling, 40% of appeals are successful and more and more people are forced to live in misery and destitution as a result of the scheme we have. The Government’s solution is to try to house them offshore in a move that makes Yarl’s Wood look compassionate. Those who have lauded the Australians and their offshoring facility at Nauru would do well to read the horrifying accounts of the sexual abuse of women and children over the years, in addition to the hundreds of incidents of threatened and actual self-harm, and ask whether this is really the path we want to go down.
Einstein said:
“A bundle of belongings isn’t the only thing a refugee brings to his new country.”
Out there, the British public know that. They know that we need a system that can process people fairly and quickly. They know that but for the grace of God there they go. If the worst were to happen to them and they had to flee their homes, they would want a new home that saw them not as a burden, but as a benefit. Our past does not mean we cannot build a future in which we make that ambition a reality. This Bill will not stop the boats; it will encourage them. So let us not give the criminal gangs their latest recruiting tactic. I urge colleagues to vote this Bill down and stand up to those who want to demonise refugees. Let us come together to come back with something that can make Britain proud of how we treat the persecuted, not an international pariah.
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