It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Sir Robert Neill), Chair of the Justice Committee. He said that at times we will see a collision between, or an interface with, politics and the law, and I hope that what arises from my contribution is that there is a third element, which is principle.
Throughout the passage of this Bill, and indeed some of the precursors to it, we have advanced a number of principled positions, one of which challenges the basis
of the legal aspiration contained in the Bill, while another rightly makes the challenge that it does not matter how hard some might suggest that this is the most robust piece of legislation if it does not do what it is intended to do and is not going to work, and that it is an unprincipled place to be with the British electorate to suggest that all these steps are in earnest and have some virtue while knowing that they are inconsistent and will not work. I made those points during the passage of the Nationality and Borders Act 2022, and Ministers on the Front Bench at the time told me that I was entirely wrong, that there was no need to strengthen the provisions and that that Bill would do what they said it would. Yet now I hear, throughout discussions on this Bill and in this Committee, the very same people who then occupied the Front Bench adopting the same arguments that we deployed for the Nationality and Borders Bill.
I still find it thoroughly inconsistent in the context of this Bill that our Government have reached the position where they have an agreement with Rwanda that also involves our country accepting refugees from Rwanda, which is therefore a country deemed capable of producing refugees. It is incongruous to me that a country deemed safe by this Parliament should be capable of producing refugees from that very same country. I have not heard a robust argument as to how that is not an inconsistent position.