Illegal Migration Bill

Lord Howarth of Newport Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 10th May 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Howarth of Newport (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, on Saturday morning, I watched the Coronation. The ceremony affirmed that we are an inclusive and humane country that aspires to be a community in which people of all religions and ethnicities live harmoniously together. The King swore to govern the people with justice and mercy. The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of London read, from St Luke’s Gospel, of how Christ came

“to heal the brokenhearted … to set at liberty them that are bruised”.

The ceremony was uplifting and made me proud to be British. On Saturday afternoon, I turned to considering what I might say about the Illegal Migration Bill. It was depressing and made me ashamed of our Government.

The Bill is merciless. It removes modern slavery protections and deprives people fleeing suffering and persecution of any realistic possibility of refuge in our country. The Home Secretary prated of our “proud and extensive tradition” of offering refuge, even as she introduced legislation that repudiates that tradition. Under pressure from MPs, the Government have said that new safe and legal routes for asylum seekers will be opened; we will see what they offer. They have made it clear that they will not set up a scheme for people fleeing Sudan, and they are making it as difficult as possible even for Sudanese entitled to family reunion in the UK. The Bill as it is creates a Kafkaesque regime under which asylum seekers who enter the UK illegally are immediately to be deported and never again permitted to apply for asylum here, while there are no safe and legal routes for entry for almost all asylum seekers.

The Bill is particularly cruel towards children. Asylum seekers under the age of 18 will be separated from their parents; they will be detained until they are 18 and then deported. During their detention, they will be subject to a special regime administered by the Home Office. The Home Office does not have the skills to look after children. Too much of what we know about the character of the Home Office and its contractors tells us that their so-called care of these vulnerable children will be brutal.

We have been shocked by reports of the squalid and demoralising conditions in which asylum seekers are forced to exist: in seedy hotels, with filthy food, in enforced idleness and, on occasion, besieged by racist mobs. The prospect the Bill provides is of traumatised, frightened people warehoused in putative detention centres for far longer than the 28 days envisaged, while official incompetence perpetuates their limbo. If the Government succeed in deporting these poor people, it will most likely be to Rwanda, a country with a terrible history of racial strife and where human rights are not respected. Only this Government could describe Rwanda as a safe country.

The Prime Minister is obsessed with “stopping the boats”. Presumably, this is a dead cat tactic to distract attention from the Government’s failure to turn the tide of net migration running at half a million a year. He calculates that it will make his party popular among red wall voters, readers of red top papers and people who have been given to understand by the Home Secretary that the arrival of asylum seekers in small boats is an “invasion”. The stratagem did not seem to work last Thursday in the local elections.

I remind the proponents of this legislation that Mrs Thatcher used to say that, in politics, you have a choice: you can appeal to the better part of human nature or the worse. She was no softy, but she did not practise cruelty out of a cynical notion of electoral expediency. She would have understood that the policy will not work at any level. The asylum seekers will not be deterred from getting into the boats, because they will not know what our law is, and the people traffickers will continue to take their money and shove them out to sea.

True leadership would remind us that we have a duty of compassion and help to people thus broken-hearted and bruised. It would also explain that, historically, our country has been greatly enriched by immigration, that we now need an influx of young, enterprising, resilient people to eke out the demographic imbalance of our ageing population, and that we should therefore invest in the asset that asylum seekers are. On that basis, a leader can decently accept that both the pace and amount of immigration must be controlled and go on to acknowledge that there are indeed problems with the operation of the European Court of Human Rights and with the open-ended commitment of the UN Convention on Refugees, framed in very different circumstances in 1951. The way to address these problems is not to breach international law or, in effect, to secede but to engage in serious negotiations to achieve reform.

I am ashamed, too, of the Government’s attitude to justice; the Bill reprises their familiar contempt for the courts and their resentment of judicial review. In this legislation, the Home Secretary is seeking to make human rights claims inadmissible, to remove the practical possibility of appeal, and to curtail the oversight of our domestic courts and the European Court of Human Rights. If we consider the brazen statement by the Home Secretary that she cannot certify that the Bill is compatible with the European Convention on Human Rights, together with the obvious breaches in the Bill of the UN Convention on Refugees and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, it is clear that the Government disdain the rule of law. The Bill is disgusting and demeans us all.