UK Parliament / Open data

Illegal Migration Bill

My Lords, it is an honour to follow the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Browne of Ladyton, with which I thoroughly agreed.

There is little mirth to be had on the grim subject of this shabby, illegal and immoral Bill, but I did allow myself a little smile this last weekend. The chasing of easy headlines through divisive, dehumanising and xenophobic rhetoric about invasions by migrants and their threat to “our” values did not pay the electoral dividend the Conservatives were hoping for, despite claims that they are “the will of the people”. In fact, the symbolic district of Dover delivered them a big rebuff when turfing Tories out of control in favour of Labour, which I congratulate.

We saw an example this weekend of how facile tough talking coupled with hasty headline-chasing legislation backfires. At least part of the blame for what went wrong with the Met lies with the Home Secretary for her rushed, illiberal, gesture politics legislation. If you wanted an example of how to unify a country and bring people together in harmony, you had to look at the Coronation and the Coronation concert. You certainly will not get it from the modern Conservative Party, and decent Tories are grasping that and not liking it.

The Government have not deigned to give us an impact assessment, but the Refugee Council forecasts that, after three years of people being refused consideration

of their asylum claims, up to 200,000 of them could remain in this country due to the absence of return agreements. They will be part of a whole new class of destitute people that this Bill will knowingly create. They will be in limbo: legally and socially excluded, barred from making asylum claims but incapable of being deported, banned from working or claiming any normal benefits, excluded from any path to settlement or citizenship—in other words, an outcast underclass. That will hardly assist cohesion.

As to legal issues with this Bill, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd, said of the proposal to allow the Government to ignore an order from the Strasbourg court:

“Many people would say having the power to ignore a court order is something”

that,

“unless the circumstances were quite extraordinary … is a step a government should never take because it is symbolic of a breach of the rule of law”.

The legal commentator, Joshua Rozenberg, mused:

“Is the government’s new Illegal Migration Bill a bill to deal with illegal migration? Or is it a migration bill that we should regard as illegal? The lawyers who draft bills for government departments are bound by strict naming constraints, but I wouldn’t put it past them to have slipped an arcane joke into the short title”.

The fact is that the Bill drives a coach and horses through the UK’s domestic law and international legal obligations, including through trashing the separation of powers and obstructing recourse to independent judicial scrutiny. It undermines the rule of law in various ways, not least through some provisions of retrospective effect.

The Bill contravenes the refugee convention in penalising refugees, excluding most arrivals from the right to seek asylum and breaching the ban on refoulement. It fails to respect the UN conventions against statelessness and on the rights of the child. It removes protections for victims of trafficking and modern slavery, in breach of the European convention against trafficking, and protections against arbitrary, unnecessary and indefinite detention. It also undermines the universality of human rights, contravenes the Human Rights Act and risks breaching the European Convention on Human Rights.

In his recent letter to us, the Minister said of his inability to make a statement that the provisions of the Bill are compatible with convention rights:

“This does not mean that the provisions in the Bill are incompatible with the Convention rights. A section 19(1)(b) statement simply means we are unable to say decisively that this Bill is compatible with the ECHR … Indeed, the Government is satisfied that the provisions of the Bill are capable of being applied compatibly with those rights”.

He should have been a scriptwriter for Monty Python.

What will the Government tell next week’s Council of Europe summit of 46 Heads of State and Government, the first for 18 years, about their UK contribution to fighting threats to democracy, human rights and the rule of law, when they are actually committing such threats? Everyone sensible knows that solutions to the difficult and complex challenge of migration pressures are to be found not in cheap gestures, stunts and simplistic slogans but in international co-operation and investment in efficient Home Office administration.

We could usefully seek to join Europol as well, to tackle the trafficking and smuggling gangs, which the Bill does nothing about.

As Financial Times commentator Gideon Rachman has written:

“Reducing refugee numbers in a humane and effective way requires a painstaking combination of diplomacy, law enforcement and targeted development. Deportations and walls make better headlines, but worse policy”.

Would that this Government were to take note of such wise counsel.

Finally, as to the rebukes of the noble Lords, Lord Forsyth and Lord Dobbs, neither of whom are now in their place, have no Tory Peers ever voted against a Bill at Second Reading? I look forward to finding out.

1.36 pm

Type
Proceeding contribution
Reference
829 cc1816-8 
Session
2022-23
Chamber / Committee
House of Lords chamber
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