My Lords, it is a privilege to follow the noble Lord, Lord Browne of Ladyton. His persistence, his clarity and his determination have, in my view, led to a meaningful concession—and it is a concession—by the Government on a very important issue. To those who say that your Lordships’ House has not behaved legitimately and constitutionally in relation to this Bill, we can at the very least point to the concession that has been made to the noble Lord, Lord Browne, as justification for still being here debating the Bill tonight.
I stand principally to speak in total support of the admirable speech given by my noble friend Lord Anderson in favour of Motion A1. I will return briefly to Motion A1 in a few moments but, before I do, I wish to place on the record something which concerns me very much about the fact that we are debating this matter at all today. I do so with appreciation for the characteristically gracious and considerate words spoken by the Government Chief Whip earlier this afternoon. I was not in the House, because I did not know she was going to say it, but I have been able to watch it on that splendid organ, parliamentlive.tv.
I speak as a religiously confused person, born with 100% Jewish blood but brought up in the Church of England by convert parents. I note that there may well be some Jewish Peers in the House today. Others, I know, are absent on the grounds of conviction and conscience, for today is the first day of the Passover festival—of Pessach, one of the Jewish religion’s most sacred holidays. It is a day when Jewish families gather, sometimes with their friends—I should have been at one such event tonight—around a dinner table to pray, to eat, to sing and to retell the story of the exodus,
with the help of a narrative liturgy called the Haggadah. For those who have been to such a Seder, it is a joyful experience and it brings home to one the importance of the first day of Passover. I am told that strong representations were made, not least by the Labour Party, through the usual channels, to avoid the final stages of the safety of Rwanda Bill being heard today. The Jewish community, although it places great importance on the first and second days of Pessach, would have been willing to be here tomorrow or any other day this week. Unfortunately, that was refused.
I have tried hard to think of a legitimate reason for that refusal. If this debate had taken place on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday or Friday, or next week, it would not have made any material difference to the Government’s position. Nothing that was said by the Prime Minister, who on 11 November displayed, properly and rightly, his devotion to his own religion in public, has justified choosing today for this debate. I take it as an offence to our ambitions for diversity in this country— sermon over.
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I now turn to the Government’s inexplicable refusal to accept my noble and learned friend Lord Hope’s amendments and what are now my noble friend Lord Anderson’s amendments. All they would require was for a very small piece of verification to take place in Parliament—a verification that either Rwanda is a safe country or that it is not. Surely it is right that if there is to be the kind of fiction spoken of eloquently by my noble friend, there should be that verification in Parliament. At the moment, even if the Secretary of State became aware that Rwanda was non-compliant, the Bill as it stands would mean it would still be deemed compliant. Is there anybody in this House who does not honestly think that is nonsense?
Then we have the rhetoric that has been behind this. Even this morning, the Prime Minister talked about stopping the boats and claimed that the worldwide publicity this Bill has received has resulted in stopping them. Well, he has not been reading the same newspapers and watching the same websites as me, I am afraid. In the last two and a half months, the number of people on those boats has increased over the previous year. He chose to give the figures for an earlier period in his extraordinary press conference this morning. That adage—stop the boats—has become just an idle boast. I say to the Government: it is time to stop the boasts, because this is not stopping the boats.
Then we have discovered this in recent days. Do your Lordships remember that picture of then-Home Secretary Suella Braverman sitting and looking admiringly on some quite nice-looking houses which had been built in Rwanda for the refugees to come from the United Kingdom? Now we learn that a lot of them have been sold. If you tried to book a holiday and the travel agent said to you, “It’s a beautiful island, but there is no property for you to stay in and we are not sure you can get there”, you would think that travel agent was mad. Yet that is a fair metaphor for the Government’s behaviour on this Bill.
Then there is the question of the aircraft. We heard this morning from the Prime Minister that, apparently, there is a contract with a carrier. I hope the Minister,
who has treated this House with enormous care and respect on the Bill—I really admire the way that he has dealt with it—will continue to do so by telling the House some detail as to whether there really is a contract. I am afraid, given the fictions that there are around the basis and at the root of the Bill, that I am not sure I believe there is a contract. What sort of company is it with and are there pilots who have declared that they are willing to fly the planes carrying those refugees? I am far from sure that that is the case.
Would the Minister take the trouble to get someone to explain to the Prime Minister that it is deeply insulting to the jurisdiction that brings so much foreign money into the United Kingdom to describe the European Court of Human Rights as a foreign court? It is not a foreign court; it is an international court. I am sure that, somehow or other, the Government might be persuaded to get that into their heads. It is causing enormous difficulty for those of us who try to defend our jurisdiction to hear Ministers tell that untruth.
Perhaps the Minister would care to tell us how many times the United Kingdom Government have relied on the European Convention on Human Rights in international cases and in cases in this country? When I was a part-time judge I sat in the Administrative Court, which was a great privilege for any part-time judge. I am absolutely certain that the number of times the European convention was relied on by government lawyers appearing for their client, the Government, is beyond normal counting.
Finally, I ask noble Lords to reflect for a moment on the cost of this whole Bill. We have now had some accurate numbers from the relevant government accounting organisation. We were told in this very Chamber that a maximum of 300 people were going to Rwanda at a cost which, at that time a couple of weeks ago, was estimated at between £550 million and £600 million. I commented at the time that we could send them to the Ritz hotel in Paris for a couple of years and still have some change. I have been corrected; I am not sure how much change there would have been. But it is an enormous sum of money to deal with a very small number of people.
The Government have suddenly decided to do something they should have done years ago: to appoint more judges to deal with asylum and immigration cases, to have more civil servants who are specialised in dealing with these cases, and to deal with the problem they have brought on themselves. I am very disappointed that, by the end of tonight, this Bill will pass. It is an awful Bill. It is the worst Bill I have seen in my 38 years in one or the other House of Parliament. I will certainly vote in favour of Motion A1.