EU Nationals in the UK

Debate between Peter Kyle and Yvette Cooper

Wednesday 6th July 2016 Commons Chamber

[Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab)]

I feel slightly sorry for the Immigration Minister, who has been sent out to defend the indefensible for the second time this week by his Home Secretary. I hope that he has got a very good promise of a very good job out of this. It is not the first time that he and I have debated in this House when he has been sent out while the Home Secretary has gone to hide.

The Minister’s position is still indefensible, though it has moved in the past few days alone. The Home Secretary said on Sunday that there could be no movement until the negotiations had started, and one of her aides said that the issue was a “negotiating point”, even though there was all that stuff about this not being a bargaining chip. The Foreign Secretary said that it was “absurd” to agree on the status of EU citizens before anything could be agreed in wider negotiations, and the Minister himself said that it would be “unwise” to agree the status of EU citizens before wider negotiations had taken place.

Here is where I would probably disagree with the hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire (Heidi Allen), with whom I have agreed many times on other issues: I do not think that it is okay to leave this issue to become the first priority for a new Prime Minister in many weeks’ time. It is not okay simply to leave this question to the process of EU negotiations, when we have no idea how long that will take, given that people are worried about their jobs, homes and kids’ futures right now.

[Peter Kyle (Hove) (Lab)]

Does my right hon. Friend agree that the issue is not just the terms that will need to be negotiated for people from the EU who are living here? The leadership that is needed is about the welcome that we give to people, who should be treated as equals in this country. She might be shocked to know that I spoke to the manager of a coffee chain recently, who was worried about the name badges that his staff wear because so many customers are making terrible comments to people serving coffee, such as “When are you going home?” Such comments have become regular now. Leadership is needed to set the tone that we have as a country, not just in relation to the nuts and bolts of people’s status in this country. It is about the welcome and what kind of country we are now, after Brexit.

[Yvette Cooper]

My hon. Friend is right. This is an immensely sensitive period and all of us have a responsibility not to give succour to extremists who want to exploit it. That should mean giving confidence to people who have been settled here, often for many years, contributing to our public services or working setting up businesses.

Refugee Crisis in Europe

Debate between Peter Kyle and Yvette Cooper

Tuesday 8th September 2015 Commons Chamber

[Yvette Cooper]

My hon. Friend is right, because people want to help. They want to be able to do their bit and they want us to show that we are also prepared to do our bit from this Parliament. One million people have signed petitions in the past week alone and £500,000 has been raised in 24 hours for Save the Children. Almost 4,000 people have offered to open their homes for refugees. Earlier this week, a convoy of 15 cars travelled from Birmingham to Calais filled with donations for refugees in camps there. Faith groups, community groups, workplaces, businesses and councils are also involved. A business contacted me this morning to ask how it could offer jobs to refugees and give them a new start. That is the kind of country we are—this is the best of Britain. We have to now make this the best of the House of Commons as well by responding to that demand for help and action from our country.

I urge the Home Secretary to ask communities and councils how much they are able to do to help, and to call an urgent meeting with councils, community organisations, charities and faith groups to ask how we can work together to address this crisis. I will hold such a meeting on Thursday, but they could come to her instead and be part of a Home Office and Government-led programme across the country, showing the leadership we need.

We need a clear plan. We need the Home Secretary to spend the next month working across the country to draw up a serious plan for how we in Britain can help and to address the target of how many people we can take before Christmas and over the next 12 months. Britain is showing how much it wants to do; now we need a Government who want to do their bit, too, and who are ready to live up to the country they represent.

There is a second area of disagreement. The Government have said that they want to take only refugees from the camps near Syria, not those who are already in Europe. They have said—this point has already been raised—that they do not want to give people an incentive to travel through Europe in order to get asylum in Britain. The trouble is that people are travelling already. They did not wait for any asylum statement by the British Government before deciding to pack their bags and flee. Rations have halved in some of the Syrian border camps. Parents are despairing that their children will never go to school. They cannot work or go home and they are fleeing to Europe whatever we in Britain do or say.

Let us remember that Britain has already used the incentive argument in relation to search and rescue. The boats were withdrawn to deter people from travelling. Instead, many more came, and many more drowned because the boats were not there to help. Refugees are travelling and there is a crisis now.

[Peter Kyle (Hove) (Lab)]

I was an aid worker in the Balkans for almost 10 years during the crisis in the 1990s, and I saw at first hand what it took to make somebody leave their home, their loved ones and the community they love. People do not flee such things lightly; they do so because of desperate conditions and war. Does my right hon. Friend agree that those conditions and the push away from areas of war far outweigh the pull of coming to a country such as Britain?

[Yvette Cooper]

I agree with my hon. Friend. Any of us who are parents know just how stressful it always is to travel with children; and to entertain the idea that any parent would take the decision lightly to travel with children across a continent—not knowing where they will sleep the next night, not knowing how long the journey will be, not knowing where the food will come from for their next meal—is to misunderstand the huge pressure and anxiety that so many of those desperate refugees are facing.

And they are travelling now. The UN has reported that 7,000 Syrians arrived in Macedonia on Monday alone. Some 50,000 people have arrived in Greece in just one month. In the Greek islands alone, 30,000 people are currently asking for sanctuary and help, including 20,000 on Lesbos.

To be honest, it is the refugees arriving in Greece that I am the most troubled about right now. Germany, Austria and Hungary are understandably focusing on helping the hundreds of thousands of people crossing their borders, while Italy, with help from the EU, is working to help more than 100,000 who have come mainly from Libya. But Greece needs much more help to deal with and respond to those who have arrived on its shores, and to provide them with humanitarian support.

The authorities are doing their best, but the camps are makeshift, without toilets or running water. Many people are sleeping outside, with nothing but cardboard to sleep on—and they include babies and children. There have been cases, too, of police using riot batons against refugees as tensions have risen. How on earth is Greece supposed to assess people’s asylum claims and provide them with humanitarian aid when 130,000 people have arrived on its shores this year alone?

The Prime Minister’s response yesterday seemed to be that the issues for Greece, Italy and Hungary were just a problem for the Schengen zone to deal with. Why is that? The Schengen zone did not cause millions to flee their homes, whether in Syria, Libya or beyond. The Schengen zone did not draw up the geography of Europe and its islands, by which our British islands are 2,000 miles from Syria, whereas the Greek islands are just three miles from the Turkish shore. I agree with Angela Merkel that the Schengen countries need to rethink their border controls now, but none of that is an excuse for us not to help.

Today, as we debate, the European Commission is drawing up plans to move 130,000 people into other countries. I agree that we should not be part of a quota system drawn up by the Commission, but I do not agree that we should turn our backs, and I do not agree that we should say that the crisis in Europe is nothing to do with us and that the only people that we will help will be from the Syrian camps.