UK Asylum and Refugee Policy

Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood Excerpts

Friday 9th December 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood (CB)]

My Lords, I am sorry to say that we have two atheists in a row—a bit like No. 73 buses. I greatly like the noble Lord, Lord Cashman—I would call him a friend—but I do not like following him in debate. The fact is that he was trained to hold an audience and I have not been.

I start with this story. On my maiden visit to Albania, some 20 years ago, I was driving into Tirana from the airport when I was struck by the number of high-grade fast cars that were overtaking us all the time. There they were: Maseratis, BMWs, Mercedes, Bentleys and Porsches. I pointed them out to my driver and asked about them. He said, “Well, what are you going to notice about them? Just look at their number-plates.” All of them were still bearing the number-plates and other registration marks that they had borne on the streets of the European capital cities from which they had been stolen. Nobody had thought it necessary to change them. The criminal gangs there were so powerful and established that there was no need to hide that criminality.

The fact is that, as its ambassador told a Commons Select Committee two days ago, Albania is an obviously safe country. It is not riven by civil war. It is not suffering acutely from climate change and all the perils that go with it, such as fire, flood, drought and famine. It is just a lawless, ill-governed country. The point is that, if ever one could say that the great rush of people coming here—the young, fit Albanians coming here are economic migrants; at least they should be if we are to have any credibility at all in terms of controlling our borders—should be instantly removed, it is about them. Of course you treat them with respect and compassion and do not discriminate, but let us look at the problem realistically. Above all, the reason I tell that story is this: they are crossing the channel and putting their lives at risk because they are hoping to improve their lives; how much more can one expect—how much more likely to do so—are those who are genuinely fleeing persecution?

That brings me to the point that my noble friend Lord Carlile made. The policies that this Government adopt to deter people from crossing the channel do not work, cannot work and will not work. The most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury was right to say that people trafficking must be confronted on an international basis; everything possible must be done. One would have hoped for intelligence-led attacks, given the apparent ease with which boats are still sailing from France and Belgium.

In the meantime, recognising that the policies do not work is surely a compelling reason, as so many noble Lords have argued, to relax the absurd 12-month ban on employment. These people should work. There is no point in this ban; it does not deter them, which is the only reason anybody has ever suggested having it in the first place.

On the outsourcing of our responsibilities, I must say that I take a more nuanced, less censorious view than most of your Lordships—certainly the Spiritual Benches—in this House. It is a difficult point, I think. Even if the Rwandan threat to those arriving from the channel crossings does not deter them, it does not follow that we should not be making arrangements such as those proposed here. I have read—I hope and imagine that the Bishops’ Benches have done so too—the three Oxford professorial papers that have been written about all this, circularised under the aegis of Policy Exchange. It is a much more difficult problem than is said; it is tempting and easy just to stand on one’s moral high horse and say, “It’s obviously wrong: the responsibility is ours and we can’t shift it.” Assuming that the policy is legal—of course, we still await the outcome on that—it seems to me that the argument is much deeper and more difficult than has hitherto been recognised.

The other point made in those papers is that it is all very well saying, “We must have safe routes”, but we are not alone in not having safe routes. They do not have safe routes for the general run of aspiring asylum seekers or economic migrants in Canada or America—indeed, in most other countries—because they would be swamped. The most reverend Primate is plainly right that we need a new refugee convention to meet the acute problems that are, as everybody recognises, going to get ever more acute with climate change. Migration is going to be impelled. We think that we have a problem now, but you ain’t seen nothing yet.