My Lords, I start where the noble Lord, Lord Dobbs, finished. Some asylum seekers clearly are non-religious. It is worth repeating that, of the so-called safe countries in the Bill, at least 10 have on-book prison sentences for blasphemy and apostasy. As my noble friend said, the president of the Nigerian Humanist Association, Mubarak Bala, is serving 24 years for blasphemy—you would have to be a pretty nasty piece of work to support that as a policy.
I want to go back to new Labour—I know that is not popular with recent Labour leaders. Between June 2001 and June 2002, I was privileged to work under my noble friend Lord Blunkett as Minister for Immigration, Citizenship and Nationality at the Home Office. I was responsible for sending people and families who had arrived illegally in the UK out of the UK. I was criticised by many, including my good friend Chris Mullin in one of his many successful diaries. Chris did say, however, that I was operating the law, and the destination of such families was to safe European countries from which they had travelled to the UK. I recall that they included France and Spain.
I know that it has become unfashionable to praise new Labour, but it remains the case that we were able to use the Dublin convention—not massively, but from time to time—to return people who had no case to be in the UK to whence they came. This Tory Government ripped up the Dublin convention when they organised and controlled the Brexit decisions, including getting rid of freedom of movement. It was a deliberate policy, and everybody knew that Dublin would go without any alternative being in place. As of today, there is still nothing in place. Why? We hear constant talk of popping across the channel and meetings between Ministers, but there is no agreement. The present situation is entirely of this Tory Government’s own making. They own Brexit. They own the actions of the coalition Government—I notice, by the way, that the world started in 2015 according to the Minister today; for most of us it started in 2010, because that is when the Tories came into power. This Government have left the UK unsupported and friendless among our geographic neighbours.
I recall the arguments and briefings in the Home Office about why the UK was a target for illegal migration. Other than the English language there were, and remain, two reasons. The first is that the UK is the easiest European country in which it is possible to work illegally and the second—which helps the first—is that there is no identity system. In 2001-02, we started work on the ID system in the Home Office, and it was pursued by others after my noble friend and I had left the Home Office. It was within sight of implementation
when the Tory-led coalition, as one of its first actions under the deal with the Lib Dems in 2010, scrapped it. The Government today own that decision. Of course, that pleased the CBI and other employer bodies, as well as the Tories, because illegal working keeps wages down across the economy. That remains the case today.
New Labour stuck to legal frameworks, which meant that we could talk to our EU partners and not become friendless. While there is not time to go into it, I recall a couple of occasions when the Civil Service had to warn us that we were on the verge of breaking the law —“possible malfeasance” was the phrase used. So we changed policy, unlike the present Tory Government, who simply change the Ministerial Code.
Of course, the routes then were via the Channel Tunnel in lorries. We worked with the French, including visits to Sandgate, to seek to close these routes safely. But we had a large backlog of cases—it was huge. The Home Office employed an expert in operational research from the Ministry of Defence—in fact, I think professionally he was a rocket scientist—who sorted out the flow of work in the Home Office, which vastly reduced the case load. We were actively doing something, and we used external civil servants who were experts in making sure that that was the case. This Government own the present situation in its entirety; the case load has grown due to incompetence. Deliberately shunning friends and breaking international law is not the solution—it is time for another new Labour Government to sort it out.
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