Immigration and Social Security Co-ordination (EU Withdrawal) Bill

Alison Thewliss Excerpts

2nd reading: House of Commons & Money resolution: House of Commons & Programme motion: House of Commons & Ways and Means resolution: House of Commons
Monday 28th January 2019 Commons Chamber

[Stuart C. McDonald]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right; the Bill will catch hundreds of thousands of people into one of the most horrible bureaucracies that the Government have managed to create, and we should have absolutely nothing to do with it at all.

All the people—inevitably, hundreds of thousands of them—who fail to apply in time for the EU settled status scheme will be cast into the hostile environment, and that will make this a Windrush crisis writ large. The Bill creates that danger, but provides no clarity on, or protection from, the danger it creates.

[Alison Thewliss (Glasgow Central) (SNP)]

My hon. Friend is making some excellent points. Does he appreciate that many of my constituents will be EU nationals whose partners are non-EU nationals, and that that causes double the uncertainty for those families, who now do not know what the position will be?

[Stuart C. McDonald]

That is a fair point. That is the Surinder Singh route, and we still need clarity from the Government about what happens to people in that position.

One part of UK immigration policy continues to work pretty well: free movement. I would hope that continuing free movement would answer many of the questions I have just posed, but the Bill seeks to ditch it. An end to free movement will make the UK poorer economically, socially and in terms of opportunity. Ending free movement means ripping up mutual rights to live, study, work and enjoy family life across Europe, depriving future generations of the extraordinary opportunities that ours have enjoyed.

--- Later in debate ---

[Angus Brendan MacNeil]

Absolutely. When people mix together, rub shoulders and talk to each other, they learn quite a lot from each other. They stop fearing each other and stop believing the demagogues who are telling them all sorts of nonsense about the other.

We will not just see more work in our own MPs’ offices, but add anxiety and angst to people’s lives because of the nonsense that will come before us. What is all this based on? It is based on a voodoo referendum. The question was about leave or remain, but it quickly became akin to slaughtering a chicken, looking at its entrails and claiming that the people meant us to leave Euratom, that the people meant something on standards and tariffs, that the people meant something on the customs union, or that the people meant something on the single market. It is claimed that the people meant something else again on migration and freedom of movement, and on the European Court of Justice. It is nonsense, but people draw all sorts of conclusions. This is voodoo politics based on a voodoo guff referendum that we had a couple of years ago.

[Alison Thewliss]

I am almost loth to interrupt my hon. Friend because he is making some excellent points. He mentioned the increased casework for MPs’ offices. My surgery on Friday overran by an hour and 10 minutes, all because of Home Office problems. Does he agree that the Home Office cannot cope with the additional 3 million people, and woe betide anyone else in the system at the moment?

[Angus Brendan MacNeil]

My hon. Friend’s point stands for itself and is well made. As we are dealing with further voodoo from the Home Office, let me say that the problems that we have at present are based on voodoo thinking. Part of it was “Take back control”, but when we are dealing with the Home Office, no one is in control, least of all the Home Office itself.

The Bill is based on Soviet-style central planning and a desire for tractor statistics, but it does not take account of what we really need. I have raised one of the most important points with the Home Office time and again. It is said that we are in control and we do not have free movement, but if we need people to come and work on fishing boats—people from outside the European Union want to come here, their Governments want them to come, our local authority wants them to come, fishing organisations want them to come and our communities want them to come; indeed everybody wants them to come except somebody in an office in London—we are told it cannot happen. The Home Office in London says no, and boats are tied up.