Humanitarian Crisis in the Mediterranean and Europe

Adam Holloway Excerpts

Wednesday 9th September 2015 Commons Chamber

[Hilary Benn]

I say in all honesty to the hon. Gentleman that it is about playing our part, including by taking those who have sought shelter in Europe and those who are still in the camps in the region. It is about doing our bit. It is not a competition between providing the generous help that the Government have given in humanitarian aid and providing help and succour to those, in particular, who have made such a perilous journey.

[Mr Adam Holloway (Gravesham) (Con)]

I greatly admire the Prime Minister’s attempt to help the maximum number of people in this desperate position in the fallout from the Syrian war. The amount of money that he is spending to help as many people as possible is a huge credit to our country. But I also admire the fact that he clearly understands that there are hundreds of millions of people in impoverished states in the middle east and north Africa—some, yes, in the grip of war—and realises that if we say to hundreds of millions of people, “Europe is open,” at some point Europe will have to close, and before that point we will lose thousands more people in the Mediterranean and lose the emphasis that he has put on looking after people properly in the areas where they are, which is what we have to do. It is a scandal that the international community is not doing enough to look after these people.

[Hilary Benn]

I shall address directly the hon. Gentleman’s point about the wider challenge of the movement of human beings around the globe, because he is right to raise it and it is important that we consider it. However, the specific question I am addressing in this part of my speech is what we do now to help those who are fleeing Syria, including those who have made the perilous journey to our shores.

--- Later in debate ---

[Hilary Benn]

The hon. Lady is absolutely right. Reflecting on my experience of visiting refugee camps in Darfur, that was absolutely the issue. Women were going out to collect firewood and were being attacked or raped. We must provide security. I know that the Government have done a lot of work on that issue in recent times and, again, I applaud them for that. It is more complicated than people thinking, “We are in a place where those who were killing us and who led us to flee are no longer to be found.” Insecurity is about how people feel in their minds about whether they, their family and their children are safe.

We are in this together and the way forward has to be through co-operation with our neighbours, including the rest of the European Union. We are confronted with the painful truth that the world has to be much more effective in dealing with conflicts like this before they turn into brutal and bloody civil wars. The responsibility to protect was meant to be about that, but let us be honest: in Syria, no responsibility has been taken and nobody has been protected.

We have to recognise that as well as refugees—I come to the point made by the hon. Member for Gravesham (Mr Holloway)—many, many other people are seeking to move across the globe to find a better life, in part because of conflict. They are coming not just from Syria, but from Eritrea, Afghanistan, Iraq, Nigeria, Somalia, Sudan and other countries where there is poverty and a lack of economic opportunity. We talk about economic migration, but that is the story of human history.

[Mr Holloway]

As a television reporter, I lived in the Sangatte camp in Calais and joined people who were being ethnically cleansed in the Balkans. There is an enormous difference between an economic migrant and a refugee. Surely the Prime Minister is absolutely right to focus our cash on places where we know people are refugees and on looking after them, rather than exposing our borders to hundreds of millions of people who are making the perfectly rational decision to seek a better life in Europe.

[Hilary Benn]

I am well aware that there is a difference; that is precisely the point I am making. However, I am trying to make a broader point about the challenge that this small and fragile planet of ours is facing and will face increasingly over the years ahead.

I am making the point that our human story is a story of economic migration. Whether anyone would describe William the Conqueror as an economic migrant, I do not know, but America, the land of my mother’s birth, certainly was built on economic migration. The story of movement within the European Union is also one of economic migration.

We must look ahead. The world’s population is 7.2 billion people. It is forecast that by the end of this century, it will be 11 billion people. Look at how the population of Nigeria is going to grow. We can already see the tensions and conflicts in countries across north Africa that are created by a lack of jobs, lack of hope and lack of opportunity. We see a generation in those countries who are looking at other parts of the world and seeing opportunity, jobs and hope for the future because of technology. This is the century in which every single one of us is having to lift our eyes to look beyond our own borders and see the lives of others.

Then there is the threat of global climate change. If people can no longer live where they were born because their houses are under water or because there is no water any more, they will do what human beings have done throughout human history: they will move to try to find a life somewhere else. The wave of economic migration we have seen in Europe these past few summers will be as nothing compared with the wave that is to come if we do not act on these issues—to tackle climate change, to fight conflict, to promote economic development and to fight poverty—so that people can build a life for themselves and their families in the land in which they were born.

All of these things are the expression of the fundamental interdependence of humankind. We will not be able to deal with them if we pull up the drawbridge, if we say that we have done enough, if we think that they are somebody else’s responsibility or if we deny entry to some people because they are supposedly of the wrong religion.

I spoke at the beginning about the reality of the mass movement of refugees, but the rest of us have to face our own painful reality. There has been unanimity of purpose and the expression of generosity so far in this debate, but let us be honest that there are other voices in Europe that are not so generous and who say, “It is too hard for us to help those in trouble.” We have a responsibility to say to them, “It is infinitely harder for those whose lives have been changed by circumstance— war, famine, disease—in the most profound way.” Our job—the Government’s job—is to tell the truth and to lead, because by doing so we have the best chance of giving full expression to that fundamental wish to help that represents the best of our character as human beings.