Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill

Lord Macdonald of River Glaven Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 2nd June 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Macdonald of River Glaven (CB)]

My Lords, I also congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Harper, on an excellent maiden speech and welcome him warmly.

I broadly welcome the Bill, and I believe that many of the enforcement measures it contains will assist in the fight against organised immigration crime. They had better, because this scourge is a growing threat to the cohesion of our society and the credibility of our democratic institutions. That is true not just here in the UK but across the whole of democratic Europe. People are losing trust, so it is essential that we are realistic and honest about what we face. It is clear that mass migration on the scale we are now seeing and the organised crime gangs that profit from it are drivers of a weakening faith in democratic institutions, bringing the rise of dangerous forms of political extremism—again, not just here but across Europe.

These conditions are fuelling nationalism and xenophobia throughout the democratic world, and the failure of mainstream democratic parties and Governments to deal with the question has played an important part in the installation by popular vote of authoritarian Governments, not just on our own continent but on others. It should be clear to everyone that if parties of the centre, centre-right and centre-left do not deal with this issue and all that flows from it, there is no shortage of parties on the political extremes that will be happy to do so—and if they are ushered in by discontent over migration, they will do much else besides.

The reason why I believe the Bill can only begin to touch the hem of the problem is that the policy challenge is broader and deeper than a simple question of law enforcement. It is the context created by the United Nations refugee convention of 1951 and its protocol of 1967. The refugee convention was created in the shadow of the Second World War and was generally understood to be a response to the horrors of that conflict, particularly to the barriers faced by Jewish people seeking to flee Nazi Germany in the 1930s. The 1967 protocol broadened its terms to include within its compass the entire world.

I will make just one point to illustrate the historical context of the refugee convention and its striking contrast to the world of today. At the time of its enactment in 1951, it was considered that there were around 2.1 million refugees under the mandate of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. In 2024, according to the UNHCR, there were no fewer than 122.6 million internally displaced persons around the world and no fewer than 43.7 million refugees. In addition, in the 74 years since the adoption of the convention, the world has become smaller, knowledge of conditions in developed countries more broadly available and travel over distance across seas and whole continents far easier. In the light of that, why would millions of people not seek better lives, more opportunities, and to escape with their families from violence and oppression? What could be more natural? Why would millions of people not avail themselves of the services of organised criminal gangs promising a better future in some newly reachable, unimaginably rich country?

It is in the light of the changes since 1951 that I believe the rubric of the refugee convention must be considered. It says that anyone with a well-founded fear of persecution in their place of abode is entitled under the convention to asylum when they arrive in a contracting state, but that characterisation applies to literally tens of millions of people worldwide and may plausibly be claimed by tens of millions more.

So what are we to do? It is no answer just to shrug; again, we have to be realistic because at some stage we are going to have to deal with this. My own view is that we may have to revisit the refugee convention to make it fit for the modern world—to create an architecture that allows, for example, for the application of quotas between nations and of course the admission of those grievously at risk, so that we may fulfil our humanitarian function without damaging our own social and political cohesion. Discussions are already taking place across Europe about how arrangements under the European Convention on Human Rights may be reordered to allow countries more effectively to define and regulate their borders. As a strong supporter of the European Convention on Human Rights and the Strasbourg court, I urge the Government to become an enthusiastic participant in those discussions.

As long ago as 2016, the distinguished Columbia University academic professor Mark Lilla wrote in his fine book The Once and Future Liberal that parties of the centre-left that espouse identity politics, that atomise people by race, by so-called privilege, sex and gender, building great hierarchies of polarisation and grievance, would never be able to create winning electoral coalitions across socioeconomic divides. Indeed, such an obviously misguided and solipsistic ideology would succeed only in alienating the left’s natural supporters and ushering in an age of populism. The result would be social division and the strengthening of political reaction. Although Professor Lilla once told me that the response of some of his university colleagues to his book was to label him a white supremacist, history has plainly proved him right. Today, a weak and confused response to an unprecedented surge in mass migration holds the same danger. That danger is particularly acute for parties of the centre-left, and we are a maximum of four years away from our next general election.

King’s Speech

Lord Macdonald of River Glaven Excerpts

Wednesday 24th July 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Macdonald of River Glaven (CB)]

My Lords, I too warmly welcome the noble Lord, Lord Timpson, and I regard his appointment as Prisons Minister as one of the best decisions the new Prime Minister has made since he took office. I also welcome the noble Lord, Lord Hanson, who will be winding up this debate. I wish to address penal policy, and I declare an interest as president of the Howard League for Penal Reform.

After decades during which, if we are honest with ourselves, we have to concede that both the UK’s main political parties were occasionally prone to weaponising criminal justice for electoral gain, the chickens really have come home to roost. Successive Governments created new offences, raised sentences, reduced remission and increased tariffs, and the result has been an epic failure of public policy, filling our crumbling prisons to capacity and forcing the new Lord Chancellor to announce emergency measures on remission—just to keep the system from complete collapse, as she made clear. But this response buys just 18 months until the prisons are full again, so on its own it looks rather like the sort of sticking-plaster politics that the new Prime Minister decried so often in opposition.

It is a crisis that was foreseeable. As we know, Alex Chalk, the estimable former Secretary of State for Justice, who is a great loss to Parliament, warned the Prime Minister that this would happen, and it was left until after the election. But this is precisely how we got here. Headlines before delivery, a sporadic arms race in punitive rhetoric—these were political choices made over many years by Governments of all stripes, quite disconnected from the pragmatic delivery of justice. As everyone now sees, a particular low was the failure to increase prison capacity in the face of a rocketing prison population driven by deliberate public policy. A bit like operating a brewery without manufacturing bottles, for 30 years Governments have been drunkenly good at increasing the flow of inmates, but without creating sufficient new spaces to house them. A government spending review in 2020 promising an impressive 20,000 new prison cells by 2025 has brought us fewer than 4,000, with one year to go. They claimed the full number would be operational by 2030: did anyone really believe that?

There are two reasons why prison-building is unpopular with Governments. First, it is mind-bogglingly expensive: each new cell costs over £600,000 of capital expenditure. At this price, who would choose a prison over a school or a hospital? The second reason is that for the great majority of prisoners on short sentences—those who are not dangerous, and those who are addicts, mentally ill or just a nuisance—prison demonstrably does not work, and successive Governments have known it.

We do not just have the highest prison population in western Europe; we also have some of the worst recidivism rates. For adults released from sentences of less than two years, no less than 50% reoffend. We know from research that recidivism rates are lower for those on community punishments. Why should this be surprising? As a notably right-wing Conservative Home Secretary, Lord Waddington, said many years ago:

“Prison is an expensive way of making bad people worse”.


Bereft of proper facilities for education or rehabilitation, strained to breaking point by austerity and neglect, ludicrously portrayed by some media outlets as holiday camps, and warehousing some of the most damaged people in our society, British prisons should be a stain on our collective conscience. Many of the chief inspector’s reports should be a source of national shame. What a tragic farce, then, that in so many cases they do not even work.

Perhaps something is changing. The Prime Minister is a careful and strategic man. He will have been well aware of the history of the noble Lord, Lord Timpson, as a prison reformer, and from what we know of the Prime Minister’s attachment to planning and process, and we know quite a lot, it seems unlikely that he would have brought someone with the noble Lord’s views into government if he did not intend to give him some space to imagine a fresh penal policy, less focused on incarceration and more directed towards punishment and rehabilitation in the community.

As the noble Lord, Lord Timpson, has said in the past, only around a third of those presently in jail truly belong there: those who are dangerous, are a risk to the public and must be confined for reasons of public safety. Another third should be receiving therapeutic mental health and addiction interventions in the community, and the rest should be on proper rehabilitative community sentences.

This watershed in prison overcrowding is a shared responsibility, and it is important to note this. It will not do for the new Government to try to blame everything on their immediate predecessors. The truth is that the previous Labour Government were also culpable, frequently criticising judges, introducing the policy of imprisonment for public protection and driving up tariffs with no adequate prison building programme to house the inmates their punitive policies were creating. I am confident that under the new Prime Minister and his law officers, attacks on the judges and the Parole Board will cease, but if this new Labour Government do not understand and accept their own predecessors’ role in this debacle, they will hardly start from the right place in what must become a shared process of broad and deep reform and a real change in the way we think about crime and punishment in our country.