Immigration is quite possibly the most important issue facing this Government or indeed any Government in Europe. It is the issue of our age, and mass immigration, whether legal or illegal, is undermining trust. This debate has to be held against the backdrop of the overwhelming numbers coming into our country. Sir Roger, you and I entered Parliament on the same day in 1983. During that year, net legal migration was only about 17,000. It is now 600,000. This debate about small boats is held against the backdrop of this huge influx into our society, on which the British people have not been consulted. It is changing our society and undermining
the work ethic of our own people. Too many people are languishing on benefits. Perhaps some of our public services are not paying adequate salaries. We are bringing more and more people into this country, whereas we should be encouraging and training our own people to work.
The whole small boats crisis is made much more toxic by that debate. When people say, “Well, 40,000 people a year isn’t a great deal compared with the sort of numbers coming across the Mediterranean”, we have to see it in terms of that overall debate. Unless the Government can sort this out and actually stop the boats, which was the commitment made by the Prime Minister, it will be extraordinarily politically damaging to the Conservative Government and also damaging to the public’s perception of and belief in democracy. When the Prime Minister says he wants to stop the boats, he should stop the boats. That is why, tonight and tomorrow, I will support the amendments tabled most ably by my right hon. Friend the Member for Newark (Robert Jenrick) and my hon. Friend the Member for Stone (Sir William Cash). I tabled amendments 56 and 57, which I will explain in a moment.
Against this backdrop, we have an extraordinary and absurd situation in which people are arriving in Calais having travelled through an entirely safe country. There is no threat to their human rights. They may find it difficult to speak French, or they may not want to learn to speak French, and they may not be able to find a job, but they are in an entirely safe country. They are putting their life at risk—even this week, there has been an appalling tragedy—and we are encouraging the most horrible criminal gangs to get involved in this trade. They then arrive here and claim asylum.
Unbelievably, we are putting them up comfortably in hotels, which other European countries do not do. Even more extraordinarily, and I will not labour this point because I have made it many times before, such is the crisis in our hotels that the Government are now spending tens of millions of pounds on trying to convert former military bases such as RAF Scampton in my constituency—by the way, we have now been arguing about RAF Scampton for nine months and not a single migrant has arrived there. The court cases are still ongoing.
If we put ourselves in the migrants’ place, we can see that the draw factor to this country is extraordinarily high. First, we speak English. Secondly, unlike in France or Germany, they will be put in a comfortable hotel. Thirdly, they are given benefits. Fourthly, there is probably a 95% chance that they will be given asylum at the end of the process. If they have come from a hell-hole like Syria, Iraq or Afghanistan, why would they not want to take that risk? We must be mugs, frankly, and the rest of Europe must be laughing at us.