I would say it is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Glasgow North (Patrick Grady), who served with me on the Westminster Foundation for Democracy, but he rehashed quite a lot of what has been said from the Opposition Benches, with various misunderstandings and inaccuracies. He had his moment of fun trying to describe different groups of colleagues on the Government Benches, but let me pull him back to something that he will recognise, as I think all colleagues in the House will.
I recently had a conversation with a distinguished recently retired UN senior official who was previously the British ambassador in several countries in Africa. He not only painted for me, but described for me factually the statistical possibilities of what is going on in that great continent at the moment. He described vividly the combination of civil wars, mismanagement, instability, insecurity, climate change challenges and food shortages that are affecting millions of people in Africa. Of course, we know that has added to the incredible level of insecurity in the middle east and, indeed, further east from there.
All of this amounts to one of the great challenges for democracy in our time. We are dealing with a huge issue that will get bigger, and we are all going to be stretched in our answers to those challenges. It is not just us in the United Kingdom; as we know, there are issues in the Netherlands, Hungary, Italy, France, Denmark—you name it, all our European neighbours are wrestling with similar challenges. Therefore, it is simply not enough for Opposition Members to point at various things that they do not like about this Bill without really considering what a constructive alternative might look like.
The hon. Member for Edinburgh East (Tommy Sheppard) said earlier that immigration should be looked at as an opportunity to be seized, not a problem to be managed. He is partly right, but he would be more convincing if county after county in Scotland were taking more asylum seekers and putting up their hands to the Government of the United Kingdom in order to take more, because the truth is that it is a challenge to be managed.
We need a practical response, because we do not outsource immigration to people smugglers. The point of stopping the boats, and the point of the Bill, is to play a trailblazing role, not just for us but for other countries. On balance, I believe that we will see more such agreements, and that this will not be the only one. While I have always taken the view that none of us can be sure that the Rwanda scheme will work in terms of the number of asylum seekers who will transfer to Kigali, we should keep an open mind and not assume, to quote Labour’s amendment, that the Bill
“will not work to tackle people smuggling gangs, end small boat crossings or achieve the core purposes of the Bill…whilst applying to less than one per cent of those who claim asylum”.
That is fundamentally wrong, and we can show so in a number of different ways.
First, will the Bill actually act as a deterrent? Migration Watch says it will be a powerful deterrent if illegal migrants are swiftly and continually sent to Rwanda. How many would we be able to send? The Rwandan spokesperson said himself only a few days ago that the country is
“ready, and willing, to take in as many people as the UK is able to send”.
All those Opposition Members talked about 100 or 200 people going there, but that is not at all the potential of the scheme. As other people have mentioned, Rwanda is already hosting 130,000 asylum seekers and the UNHCR has 1,700 Libyans there, so clearly the numbers are not the fundamental issue with the proposal.
We have had a lot of red-herring soundbites—“can’t work”, “won’t work”, “unprecedented”—but there are precedents. In fact, the Labour party knows that better than anyone, because in 2001 the Mother of the House, the right hon. and learned Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman), was in a very similar position in not being able to confirm to the ECHR that the Government were necessarily compliant in a proposal that she was putting forward. We know that the Blair Government talked to Tanzania about something similar; in fact, the Nationality and Borders Act 2022 built on the Asylum and Immigration (Treatment of Claimants, etc.) Act 2004. So there are precedents and reasons to believe that the Bill might work. It will be awkward, and it is an issue that we and many other Governments will have to tackle, but the most important thing is that we get behind the Bill and see it through safely.
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