I am most grateful to the most reverend Primate and I echo the words of my noble friend about what a fantastic job he did on Saturday. I am in strong agreement where he is concerned with issues spiritual rather than temporal. I use the word temporal in this sense because there are of course many things that we can do, but these are all going to take time. People are drowning in the English
Channel now. People are leaving a safe country in order to come here, and it is fatuous to try to present this in the way that many have done. The much-misquoted saying, often attributed to Edmund Burke but in fact from John Stuart Mill, is:
“Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing”.
That is what we are hearing today, effectively that we should do nothing about the immediate problem.
To return to the amendment, the role of this House is to give advice and make amendments. I accept there are issues with the Bill that need further scrutiny, particularly the issues of those who are already here in the United Kingdom and who are victims of slavery and placed in a position where they are unlikely to help the police, or those who are concerned, to deal with the real villains. These are the traffickers and the men and women who exploit people who are under enormous stress and strain. It is just not reasonable to criticise the Government for trying to deal with this problem. How on earth can it be justified that 40,000 Albanians are able to come to this country by crossing from France—a safe country—and to argue that this should not be tackled?
Those who criticise this country’s values need to ask themselves why so many people want to come here rather than remain in France, on the other side of the channel. It has been suggested that perhaps hubris has set in, as a result of the success of the liberals—I call them liberals because they are not liberal democrats. Democrats do not seek to use an unelected House to overturn the decisions made by an elected House. We know perfectly well that the United Kingdom has finite capacity. Our public services are under immense strain and yet there is a notion that we should be spending billions of pounds and not actually addressing the problem of stopping the boats. I say to those who oppose the Bill, by all means improve it, but I am delighted that the Official Opposition have indicated that they will not support the amendment, and the most reverend Primate said the same. We need to recognise that something needs to be done, and done now. This is something, which is an alternative to doing nothing, which is the mission of the people opposite.