Asylum: UK-Rwanda Agreement

Lord Balfe Excerpts

Monday 22nd January 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, I am reminded of a saying of John Major’s: if you are in a hole, stop digging. I will be supporting the Government tonight. I am not sure that this is the solution to the problem that we have before us. There is a big contradiction: we hear about vulnerable immigrants in Calais, but we also hear about migrants who spent thousands of dollars to get there. The prospect of a trip to Rwanda is not going to put them off getting a boat across the channel, so let us regard that as a starter.

Let us look at what Rwanda is actually up to. It was very anxious to get into the Commonwealth—virtually the only Commonwealth country that we did not manage to colonise, but we let it in. Now, I see the Rwanda business as being rather like putting old people into private equity homes. Rwanda has spotted that there might be an opportunity for making quite a bit of money out of the West—particularly the United Kingdom—and so it has signed up to this. We can well ask: is it a safe country? Is anywhere in Africa particularly safe? I cannot think of any country in Africa that I would wish to go and live in. Perhaps it is safe: we do not know. That, however, is not the point. The fact of the matter is that even if it is declared safe, we are going to get 200 to 300 people there out of thousands who are coming to Britain.

We need to look at this more widely, as one or two noble Lords have mentioned. We need to realise that the whole international migration system has got out of hand. It is not whether or not people are any more vulnerable, it is the fact that, with modern technology, they can look at their iPads and work out that this would be a much better place to live than where many of them are at the moment. That is why there are smuggling gangs: they are catering to the market. It is as simple as that. They set up in business, saying, “What shall I do? Shall I run a bike repair shop? Shall I sell chapatis on the corner of the street? Oh no, I think I could make a lot more if I got a smuggling operation together”. That is what is happening. If we are going to cure it, we have to do it as a European entity.

I noticed today that Prime Minister Meloni of Italy has gone to see President Erdoğan in Turkey to talk about migration. But it is no good just one Prime Minister and one President talking about migration. This has to be a European step forward. We have to start off by rebuilding the countries of the Middle East that we smashed to pieces. We caused Libya to be a failed state; we were the people who went into Iraq in very dubious circumstances; we were the people who, I was assured by the last Foreign Secretary-but-eight, had to get rid of Bashar al-Assad, even though he was running a country that was certainly authoritarian but was pretty peaceful. What did we do? We bombed it to bits. So the first thing we have to do is get prosperity back and the second thing is to get agreements at a European level on a much wider basis. That is the solution.

I have read the report and I think it is very good. I am not going to vote for it, however, because I am going to support the Government in their attempts—which probably will not work—to deal with this problem. We have to decide whether we wish these efforts well or ill.

We seldom talk about the famed people of Britain, but I can tell you that in Cambridge, where I live, there is no big queue of people saying, “Can we have a few more boats? Can we have an asylum centre in Cambridge?” It is just not there. So we should come to terms with reality. These are my final words: the difference between this and another system is that in a democracy the people vote, and they are entitled to have their votes translated into action. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that the people want illegal migration to stop. The job of the Government is to do that.