My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble and learned Lord, Lord Brown. We are told that this Bill is unethical, which puzzles me, because, like my noble friend and roommate Lord Forsyth, I cannot quite get my mind round the ethical nature of this bizarre proposition that unelected parliamentarians should, without any real discussion, destroy a Bill that has been passed by our elected House of Commons and for which there is very considerable public support—but heigh-ho.
I find the Bill distasteful in many ways. I wish we did not have to do it. But the issues it tries to resolve are supremely distasteful—actually, they are barbaric. We need action. We are told the Bill is full of weeds. Well, if there are weeds in the garden—knowing modern legislation, there are probably a good few—you pull them out: you replace them. You do not call in a cement truck to cover the entire thing in concrete and bury it, as this fatal amendment demands.
At its heart, the Bill aims to find a better means of fighting the modern slavers and people smugglers—saving innocent lives. That seems a most moral objective. It aims to stop the evil trade in human beings by the smugglers and slavers. It is only by beating them—crushing them, if we can—that we will put an end to the miseries and deaths we have seen all too often on the seas. If we do not act, and lose control of our borders, we will play straight into the hands of the racists and bigots who will stir up hatred on our streets and in our communities. There are terrible consequences to be paid if we fail in this.
How do we stop those who arrive here claiming to be children, with stubble on their chins, who have deliberately destroyed all their documentation and paid thousands of pounds to people traffickers, enabling them to continue their awful trade? These people—these pretenders, if you will—are the enemies of genuine refugees, because they help to create and sustain an evil system that is run by criminals of the cruellest kind, who think nothing of throwing children overboard to drown in order to save their own miserable lives. They trade in lies and in lives. It is our moral obligation to stop them—to bring an end to the unimaginable pain of mothers and fathers watching their children drowning off our shores in the channel. No amount of hand-wringing or bell-ringing will do that.
I know that at Second Reading in the other place, the Labour Party said that it wants to boost international policing to try to catch the smugglers. Let us hope they can catch the drug traffickers too while they are at it. They know that that is not a solution. This quixotic and deeply unconstitutional proposal to kill the Bill is a moral cop-out. There are no simple solutions. It is about not just small boats but jumbo jets, too, and a modern world in huge flux.