Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill

Alison Thewliss Excerpts

Consideration of Lords message
Monday 22nd April 2024 Commons Chamber

It seems to me that we must look at Lords amendment 3G in the light of this late stage in proceedings. We cannot keep batting the Bill backwards and forwards across the building. As I said, I do not think that the amendment is the best way to solve the problem that Parliament has no mechanism available to it to change its mind if the facts change, but with all due respect to the Minister, whom I hold in high regard, the Government have not come up with a better alternative. He leaves me little place to go other than to support the amendment, if he cannot propose a better way of resolving this deficiency.

[Alison Thewliss (Glasgow Central) (SNP)]

The Minister opened by saying that he had looked forward last week to not debating the Bill. I, too, wish that we did not have to debate it; indeed, I wish that it had never been brought to this House in the first place. I wish that it had never seen the light of day. If he never wanted to debate it again, he could of course have accepted the Lords amendments last week, instead of stringing this out for even longer. The Lords have tabled perfectly legitimate amendments, but Government Members are seeking to get around the tedium of voting on amendments to render vulnerable people overseas. A text message is circulating on X in the name of the Government Chief Whip, saying:

“Dear Colleagues,

With a potentially long and historic night ahead, on behalf of the Prime Minister I would like to invite you to drinks this evening from 21.30. These will take place in the Prime Minister’s office in the House of Commons.

I look forward to seeing you there.”

How absolutely heartless and despicable that Government Members will be quaffing drinks while thinking about sending people to Rwanda. How utterly without any kind of moral background. Should the Lords send back further amendments tonight and carry out the unusual procedure of double insistence, I will support them very much in that endeavour. We should use any mechanism that we can in this place to stop the Bill.

[Patrick Grady (Glasgow North) (SNP)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on using every procedure available to her to state the SNP’s opposition to the Bill, not least by moving amendments in the Reasons Committee last week. We in the SNP will take every single opportunity to express our opposition to this outrageous plan.

[Alison Thewliss]

I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention, and note on the record that Labour did not vote on any of the reasons that I sought to amend in the Reasons Committee. I have yet to hear any explanation for why Labour Members would not use any mechanism available to them to oppose the Bill.

We had yet another press conference this afternoon. The Prime Minister did not come to this House to talk about his gurning and his greeting that those mean old Lords would not let him have his way. I point out that the Conservatives have over 100 more Lords than Labour. Perhaps the lack of enthusiasm from their own Lords is reflective of the fact that many of them did not even show up to vote last week. The policy was not in the Conservative party manifesto. The Government have no mandate for the Rwanda plan whatsoever. Indeed, what manifesto would they put in front of people that would say, “We’re going to set out to breach our international commitments and engage in state-sponsored people trafficking?” What manifesto would that be?

Let me mention briefly some of the things that the Prime Minister mentioned in his statement. He suddenly conjured up a whole load of judges to determine these cases, when they could perhaps better serve by looking at the appeals backlog that his incompetent bulk processing of asylum claims has created. He mentioned charter flights being booked, but many commercial companies, including the Rwandan state carrier, have refused to be involved in the charter flights at all, so which companies have been engaged to do that and at what cost? We still do not know.

The Prime Minister said:

“The first flight will leave in 10 to 12 weeks.”

Will that be before or after we reach summer recess—we already know how far the timescale on this has slipped for the Government—and what scrutiny will occur should they take off during recess? If the Government do manage to send anybody to Rwanda, where will they put them? We know that the Rwandans have sold off the housing that they set up to place people in. Will they be piling them up in tents? I would not put it past this Government, but that would be useful to know.

We fully support the Lords amendments, which do their very best to mitigate an absolutely dreadful piece of legislation. I cannot see what the Government’s objection is to Lords amendment 3G. They are all about taking back control, but they want absolutely no parliamentary scrutiny of whether Rwanda remains a safe country. The right hon. and learned Member for Kenilworth and Southam (Sir Jeremy Wright) rightly pointed out that we in this place have no means of declaring Rwanda unsafe, so it is safe in perpetuity—forever and ever. We cannot declare it unsafe should something happen, and that is just not logical. I note also that the Irish High Court ruled last month that, in the light of these plans, the UK is not a safe country to send asylum seekers to.

I fully support Lords amendment 10F relating to Afghans. I have mentioned many times before my support for the Afghans who served and supported UK objectives in Afghanistan and how woeful the Government’s response to their needs has been.

[Peter Grant (Glenrothes) (SNP)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that the £11,000 it costs per person to deport to Rwanda could be used right now to rescue my constituent and his wife, who got out of Afghanistan and into Pakistan and are now stuck there waiting for the UK Government to rescue them?

[Alison Thewliss]

I wholeheartedly agree. I know of many cases of people who have been sorely let down by the Government.

We note that the figures that the Government brought out this morning show that there has been an increase in small boat arrivals in the past three months compared with last year. The plan is hardly any kind of deterrent if people are still coming over in small boats in their droves. Among them were 1,216 Afghans—an increase on the 1,098 who came in the same period last year. If the Minister thinks that the Afghan schemes are such a roaring success, why are so many Afghans being forced on to small boats just to get to safety? Many of them will have family in this country, many will have been unable to avail themselves of the Afghan schemes that he so talks up, and many will not have been able to use family reunion, which is an existing safe and legal route.

Given the time, Madam Deputy Speaker, I will not go into detail on the Afghan cases that I wished to mention. However, I will say this to the Government: this legislation is utterly despicable. It is state-sponsored people trafficking, it is against our obligations in international law, and Scotland wants no part of it. We will oppose it every step of the way.

[Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con)]

May I start by agreeing with what the Opposition spokesman, the hon. Member for Aberavon (Stephen Kinnock), said about there being nothing new to say? The trouble is that he then spent 14 minutes saying nothing new. He said that the amendments do nothing to stop flights getting off the ground, but the fact that we are still having to debate amendments is preventing the legislation from going through, which would allow the scheme—literally—to get off the ground. Now it is time to get the Rwanda legislation done.

On the remaining amendments, many people have had days, weeks and months to make their points. The Government have given undertakings, and we have heard further undertakings about the treatment of Afghan refugees today. The Bill does not oblige the Government to return anybody from Afghanistan; there are explicit schemes to protect them.

When it comes to declaring Rwanda a safe country, the only reason why the legislation states as such is that a court declared it not to be, based on limited and snapshot evidence. The Government have a white list of countries that are deemed not to be safe—the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office issues guidance about where it is safe to travel—but what constitutes “safe” in the eyes of those courts? Is Spain safe to a Catalonian dissident who is in exile because they have taken issue with the Spanish Government? Is it safe to go back to France? Some of the refugees I have met in the Napier barracks claim that they are beaten by French police, and that it is not safe for them to go back to that country. Indeed, in the eyes of some court judgments, is London safe for a person who is “openly Jewish”?

Plenty of safeguards are given in this Bill: it will bring people back to the UK if Rwanda is deemed not to be safe or appropriate. Plenty of international legal scrutiny has now been added into the Bill. The issue of refoulement, which was the Supreme Court’s major complaint, has been dealt with, and legal assessment is available for those sent to Rwanda. I will say it again: when the Home Affairs Select Committee went to Calais last year, we were told by all those who were in charge of the policing system on the beaches that when the Government announced the Rwanda scheme the previous May, there was a surge in migrants around Calais approaching the French authorities to try to regularise their position in France, because they did not want to risk being sent to Rwanda.

It is disgraceful that, time and again, those behind these amendments—the Labour party, continuing this ping-pong—have not come up with a single solution to the really important question of what we do with asylum seekers who have come to this country illegally, who have no credible case to be in the UK, but who it is practically impossible to return to their own country. It is also absolutely disgraceful that just this morning the shadow Home Secretary, the right hon. Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper), made it quite clear that a Labour Government would abolish the Rwanda scheme, whether it is working or not. They are saying to people on the other side of the channel, “Just wait a few months, and then you can come in your droves.” That is the truth of the matter, and these amendments need to be beaten again.