Immigration Bill

Debate between Lord Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon and Baroness Hamwee

Monday 21st March 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hamwee]

My Lords, I have added my name to the amendment. The whole of this Bill raises moral issues, and it was the simple rightness of this proposition that led me to sign the amendment.

The Daily Mail has been campaigning on this issue and recently highlighted the case of one interpreter who was injured by a bomb and accused by the Taliban of being a spy. He was at that time waiting for the UK Government’s support unit to consider his application to be relocated to the UK. He said, “They told me that after five days they would interview me but after five days I was still waiting and they said the programme has not started yet. Then they said maybe 2014, maybe 2015, but I could not wait that long, it was my life at risk”. We know that hard cases make bad law, but do they invariably make bad law? Do they not sometimes point us to what should be good with the law? The dangers to these staff and their families at home are now obvious, as they were obvious when they provided assistance.

The Minister for the Armed Forces in a Statement last August spoke of the UK team,

“which investigates thoroughly all claims of intimidation. When necessary we will put in place appropriate measures to mitigate any risks. These range from providing specific security advice, assistance to relocate the staff member and their family to a safe place in Afghanistan, or, in the most extreme cases, relocation to the UK”.

There are others in the Chamber who can speak with much more authority than I can about whether giving advice and relocation elsewhere within the country is realistic or effective.

I will finish by saying simply that it took a long campaign to recognise the contribution of the Gurkhas to this country, which was supported by David Cameron before he was Prime Minister. I think that we should put right the position for the individuals who are the subject of this amendment now.

[Lord Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon]

My Lords, the hour is late and no doubt the House does not want to sit for too long. This is an issue on which I have campaigned for the best part of 18 months. My instinct is to speak at some length to outline the individual problems that affect Afghan interpreters, but I do not think that this is the moment to do so. I shall try to be fairly brief in supporting the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, in his amendment.

The amendment cannot be seen except in the context of the United Kingdom’s policy towards Afghan interpreters. As the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, has said, a significantly more disadvantageous set of regulations applies to Afghan interpreters than existed in relation to Iraqi interpreters after the Iraq war. That is an injustice by itself, but let us leave it to one side. As my noble friend Lady Hamwee has said, this is an issue on which the Daily Mail has campaigned—no weeping liberals they, as we know. The newspaper has described the Government’s policies in respect of those to whom we owe a duty of recognition and honour as dishonourable and shameful. I do not often agree with the Daily Mail, but I certainly agree to the use of those adjectives.

I suspect that I am probably the only person in Parliament who not only has been an interpreter—not, I hasten to say, in operational conditions—but has used interpreters, in that case in operational conditions and sometimes moderately dangerous ones. Many of those who served with the front-line units were the bravest of the brave. If there is a front line, they are on it because they have to be; British soldiers cannot do their job unless they are. If there is action, they had to be there too, otherwise we could not do the task that Her Majesty sent us to Afghanistan to fulfil. When the patrol returns the soldiers go into a protected base, but not the Afghan interpreters. They have to spend the night with their families in their communities. Their families are not 10,000 miles away in safety. They too live in the community and are subject to the threat of the Taliban. They came almost by the month for every one of those 13 years and now they come virtually by the day to individual Afghan interpreters, who are beaten up and their families threatened. I have heard so many stories of this that I can barely remember the individual details.

The Afghan interpreters who served day in and day out in active service in the most hostile and dangerous positions, sometimes even with the Special Forces, do not go back after six months. They have stayed in the country for every single one of the 13 years of the Afghan conflict. Now—I have to say it bluntly—we have abandoned them. I do not think that there is a single squaddie or serviceman who served in Afghanistan alongside these interpreters who did not love them, who did not admire them, and who did not think that every single one of them on front-line duties bore a burden of risk greater even than many of our own soldiers because they had borne it for longer. And yet we have abandoned them. It is a shameful policy that shames the Government and, in my view, the nation as well.

The Government’s refuge in this, and we may well hear it from the Minister, is that they have set up their package. There are obligations of duty, honour and service here. Our soldiers could not have operated without the service of these men. They simply would have been useless. The next time our servicemen are asked to go into battle on behalf of our nation and we seek a local interpreter, given the way that we have abandoned them and in the light of the way we have treated them, what kind of response do noble Lords imagine they will get?

The Government believe that all their obligations to these brave men can be fulfilled by the Afghan intimidation scheme. When I understood that the scheme would be put into operation in the next Government, I expressed my opposition to it. I thought that it was the wrong scheme. But if it had been applied with good will, so that the burden of presumption was that the Afghan interpreter would, in the face of intimidation and threat, be allowed to return to Britain, maybe this would have been a reasonable policy—inadequate, flawed, but maybe just about acceptable. But it is not. Almost none of those who have suffered from mortal intimidation from the Taliban have been housed and not a single one has been allowed to return to Britain in the years since this Government have been in power. This policy is already flawed. It is very difficult to understand why it has been enacted with such little generosity and duty of honour, except that those interpreters, along with the honour of our country, have been sacrificed in this Government’s obsession to do not what is right but what is necessary to outflank the revolting prejudices of the right wing of the Conservative Party and UKIP.

This is a shameful policy, the price of which will be paid in the standing not only of our nation but of our own troops, when they seek to draw in the services of interpreters in the future. If we vote for the amendment we can at least make amends in this Bill for three or four years of complete failure to live up to the role that these men have played on behalf of Her Majesty and of our nation in a conflict of our choosing, and who have placed their lives at risk in doing so.