Immigration Bill

Lord Judd Excerpts

Wednesday 5th March 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Roberts of Llandudno]

My Lords, I am delighted to support this amendment from another part of the Celtic community. I do so because the Bill says that you can integrate more easily if you speak English, but that is not so in many of our Welsh communities. There are still 600,000 people in Wales alone who speak the Welsh language and in some villages and areas of Wales it is the first language. It is the language of the community, the chapel, the church and the pub. It is their language. If someone came from a distant place and wanted to settle there, they would feel lost. They would need to be able to speak that local Welsh language.

As has already been said, we battle on to maintain the language. About 21% of the people of Wales speak Welsh and the Government of Wales have a Welsh Language Policy Unit, which spends about £14.5 million a year to promote the Welsh language. We also have Welsh television, S4C—S Pedwar C yn Gymraeg—which will claim £90 million to £100 million per year. This is all investment in the language. If somebody came from a distant place to a Welsh village without any knowledge of the Welsh language, you might say that they should learn English. However, we have only one other Welsh settlement of any size in the world, which is Patagonia. That is where 10,000 people speak Welsh and Spanish. What if one of those people—it happens—wanted to become a teacher or a church minister in Wales? They would not be accepted unless the amendment were also accepted by the Committee.

There does not need to be a great fuss about this. We do not have millions of people speaking Welsh in the world, but we do have a certain number who might well be interested in coming to the homeland—to the land of their fathers and grandfathers—and they would not be welcome because they do not speak English. I will not go to Patagonia to invite them to come over immediately, but if this amendment is passed, I would be delighted to go to Patagonia and invite those people from the Welsh tradition to come up.

[Lord Judd (Lab)]

The noble Lord makes a powerful and emotional, in the best sense, statement in favour of the amendment. Will he tell me what its implications would be for an Englishman wanting to settle in that community?

[Lord Roberts of Llandudno]

It would not hurt that Englishman in any way at all. We would still allow people who speak only English to come into Wales, but we would allow those who do not speak English but who do speak Welsh or even Scottish Gaelic—we might have one or two from the highlands wanting to come to Wales—to come in. I urge the Minister, as a fellow Celt, who I know has the well-being of our communities at heart, to give a thought to this, although perhaps not in the wording of this particular amendment. Is there no way that we could allow those who do not speak English but who do speak Welsh, Scottish Gaelic or Ulster Gaelic to come along? I am sure that there is a way, and we can show the nations of Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland that we still consider them brothers and partners in this United Kingdom.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Judd]

My Lords, I am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, for introducing this amendment. He has raised a crucial matter. I have no legal qualifications whatever but as a citizen I care about the operation of the law. It is one thing for legislation to stipulate what issues should be taken into account, but to start saying how much weight a judge should give to particular considerations seems a dangerous precedent. Where is this going to stop? One of the things that is crucial to our understanding of justice and the operation of the law in this country is the independence and objectivity of the judge within the law.

This matters as a principle for all citizens in Britain because this move, if implemented, is a precedent, but it also matters very much in terms of community relations. How are we going to build positive relationships with our ethnic minorities if they feel that the Government are issuing such instructions to judges on how they must behave? The good will of ethnic-minority communities depends on their being able to depend on the law and the principles of the law as we like to claim they traditionally operate in this country.

I will not repeat all the anxieties that I have expressed at other points in consideration of the Bill, but all I can say is that we live in very dangerous times. I worry about the alienation of young people when they begin to say, “Look what is happening in reality”. This plays into the hands of sinister elements and I really think that this revision is an unfortunate and dangerous precedent. The whole House should be grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, for having alerted us, in his usual expert and convincing way, to the need to oppose Clause 14.