I refer the House to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests, having been a solicitor for nearly 20 years. Every lawyer I met during those 20 years of my working life disagreed with every other lawyer on the issue in front of them. I can guarantee that a lawyer’s advice tends to be somewhat in line with their client’s instruction and the ends that their client wants, so Members may want to ponder the source of some of the legal advice that has been mentioned.
I have sat on the Justice Committee for four years, and I also sit on the Home Affairs Committee. I went on a trip to Calais with my hon. Friend the Member for Barrow and Furness (Simon Fell), who is no longer in
his place, and the right hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull North (Dame Diana Johnson), the Chair of the Home Affairs Committee. We spoke to people on the beaches, and we saw what some may call France’s functioning asylum and immigration system, but that is not what I witnessed in the slightest.
Calais is effectively a waiting room with no resources, where people are directed to wait for a boat to come to the United Kingdom. We saw that immigrants are housed in tents, and they are treated in the most appalling manner. When the French authorities get fed up with them, they burn down their tents, physically attack them and throw them into the next area or field. The idea that we are an outlier in how we treat immigrants is for the birds.
Too often in this Chamber, as a number of my hon. and right hon. Friends have rightly said, we ignore the concerns of our constituents in order to pontificate about our moral and liberal conscience.