Immigration and Social Security Co-ordination (EU Withdrawal) Bill

Lord Adonis Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading (Hansard) & 2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 22nd July 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Adonis (Lab)]

My Lords, immigration policy has been controversial, often bitterly controversial, in this country for more than 130 years, since the waves of Jewish immigration in response to the pogroms in Russia in the 1890s. Looking at policy since then, we see that there have been periods of substantial immigration that have led to civic reactions against it and then a closing down of immigration.

The last time we went through a process similar to the one we are going through at the moment was in the 1960s when, in response to the substantial immigration from the Commonwealth, there was a big social reaction, bitter political controversy caused by it and, in the two Commonwealth immigration Acts of the 1960s, an almost complete cessation of immigration. From the late 1960s until the expansion of the European Union in the early 2000s, there was almost no net migration into this country. Looking at the challenges that we have faced and the situation the Government are responding to in the context of Brexit, it is always important to get the history right to understand what the right policy is for the future.

What went wrong after 2003 was not too much Europe but too little. What we should have done with the expansion of the European Union to central and eastern Europe—I bear my share of responsibility for this—was to have implemented the same seven-year transitional controls as virtually the whole of the rest of the European Union implemented. If we had actually been a team player in the European Union, which we have been so bad at doing for almost the entirety of our membership, I do not believe we would have had the social pressures which led to the big immigration concerns about Brexit after 2010. We were at fault in that, which is why Britain became the overwhelming focus of immigration after 2004, and it was not properly managed.

However, two things were going on at that time. One was net migration into this country from central and eastern Europe, predominantly—although there had been earlier waves from Italy and Spain, they were of smaller numbers. However, the other crucial development, which is why the whole system is unstable is, of course, that Brits were going freely to travel, live, study and settle abroad. The bit which will make this system entirely unstable is that anything we do in response to migrants coming from the rest of the European Union will be done in respect of the more than 1 million Brits who have already settled and many others who want to take advantage of similar rights in the future. When the public wake up to the fact that their own rights to travel, study, settle and work across the European continent will suffer in exactly the same ways we restrict rights to others in Europe coming here, this situation will become controversial in this country and not just internationally.

Of all the speeches made so far, the one which the noble Baroness and the Home Secretary should be really worried about is that of the noble Lord, Lord Green. He is correct. My analysis of the points-based system with the salary threshold is that the Government do not in fact have any control. In the guise of taking back control, they do not have control over the situation hereafter. We now have a massively unstable system, potentially millions of new immigrants coming from the wider world beyond the European Union, and a British population that will be increasingly disgruntled when they realise that their own emigration and travel rights across the rest of Europe will suffer. I therefore see this as a staging post in a very unstable situation with regard to immigration in the future.