Palestinians: Visa Scheme

Alison Thewliss Excerpts

Monday 13th May 2024 Westminster Hall

[Alison Thewliss (Glasgow Central) (SNP)]

Somebody asked me earlier what a Westminster Hall debate is. I told them that, quite often in Westminster Hall, it is when everybody comes together to agree and disagree with the Minister, and so it has proven today.

We have come together in this place, cross-party, to agree that there must be a Gaza families reunion scheme, allowing people to come out of the hellish, unimaginable war zone of Gaza to get to safety with those they love here in the UK. I think every street in my constituency has written to me on this. More than 3,000 people have written to me on the ongoing situation in Gaza to call for a ceasefire, the return of hostages, for aid to get in and for a lasting peace and a two-state solution. The Government have not done anything practical to respond to the concerns raised by our constituents.

A constituent, Sama, came to see me in November. She has been studying and working in Glasgow and is desperately afraid for her family, who were living in the north of Gaza. They have been moved and displaced multiple times—she does not know how many times because she cannot contact them. She cannot hear from them and does not know at any given time where they are or whether they are safe. The last time I heard from her they were in Rafah, which does not bode well for their ongoing safety, given what is going on. She wants her mother, father and teenaged brother to come to Scotland to be safe with her. That should not be too much to ask.

I wrote to the Foreign Secretary and got the boilerplate reply, as many others have done. It was not even from the Foreign Secretary, but from the Minister of State, Lord Ahmad, and it did nothing to help my constituent. As my hon. Friend the Member for Glenrothes (Peter Grant) said, it is difficult even to give these constituents replies from this Government, because they do nothing to offer them any comfort whatsoever. I appealed to the aid agencies on the ground in desperation to ask whether there was anything that they could have done to help, but they regretted that they could not; they did not have those powers.

Sama’s father has a severe heart condition. He has high blood pressure and diabetes and cannot get the medication he needs. As the right hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) said so eloquently, there are no hospitals there either to help him get the treatment that he needs. The home that this family had built for 30 years lies in rubble and ruin. Sama showed me with pride pictures of what that house looked like the last time that they were all together in it.

Why is it that I have no answer that I can give to Sama to bring her family to safety? She knows that there is no safe and legal route, and other Palestinian constituents who were in touch also have no certainty. One applied for asylum back in December 2022 and is still waiting for a response. They are not going to send him back there: grant him the security that he needs. Another gentleman has been in the UK for 18 years and as yet has no certainty about his status. As Sama put it to me after one of my surgeries, “There is no money, there is no food, there is no ceasefire. There is no hope for those living in Gaza.”

More than 35,000 are dead and 80,000 are injured. The Gaza Families Reunited campaign has brought a very reasonable request before the Minister, and I commend it for all the work that it has done on this. I will say something about the practicalities of what it proposes. Hon. Members across this Chamber have said that existing routes do not cut it and are not working. Family reunion visas, visitor visas and student visas are not working at all.

[Nadia Whittome (Nottingham East) (Lab)]

As the hon. Lady knows, the Home Office allows applications for family visas only for immediate relatives, defined as partners, children or parents of children under 18. That excludes other close relatives such as siblings or parents of adult children, for example. As a result, perhaps the only surviving relatives of people with families in the UK might be stuck in Gaza with no way of joining them. Does she agree that it is beyond time that the UK Government introduced a Palestinian family scheme, just as they did with the Ukrainian family scheme, and that in fact they have a historical colonial responsibility to do so?

[Alison Thewliss]

I entirely agree with what the hon. Member presented. The Gaza Families Reunited campaign has set out the eligibility, saying that it would include an immediate family member, an extended family member or the immediate family of an extended family member. That is so important, because we know that there are people who now have nobody left. There are children who have been orphaned and have not a soul in the world that they can rely on, but they may have somebody they know is here, and they should be allowed to come to safety. It is cruelty beyond measure not to permit that to happen.

A recognised Palestinian refugee won a recent court case on this issue, challenging the Home Office’s refusal to decide the family entrance clearance applications of his wife and children under refugee family reunion rules on account of their inability to enrol their biometrics in Gaza. That was described as being “irrational and unreasonable” by the courts, and it is entirely irrational and unreasonable. People are stuck, as the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) said, in a Catch-22 where they need their biometrics to be able to leave, but they cannot get their biometrics because they cannot leave. It is impossible and illogical that that is the position, and it is in the Government’s hands to waive that requirement. It is in nobody else’s hands; it is in the hands of this Government and this Minister to make the decision to waive the requirement for biometrics. He could do it at the stroke of a pen this afternoon if he so wished, and I would like him to explain why he will not. As yet, we have not had an explanation of why, if it was good enough for people in Ukraine to get that biometric requirement waived, it is not good enough for the people of Gaza, whose circumstances are absolutely grim.

The people in Gaza are having to bribe their way across the border and are being smuggled out. This Government are supposed to be against people smuggling, but people have no choice. It costs $5,000 per adult and $2,500 per child, if anybody can even scrape that money together. People are crowdfunding on the internet to pay themselves across the border. What kind of system is that? None whatsoever. And as my hon. Friend the Member for Glenrothes and my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Edinburgh South West (Joanna Cherry) mentioned, they then get stuck somewhere else. They get stuck in Cairo waiting for something else to happen because this Government will not move with the paperwork. It is absolutely ridiculous and cruel. People could be here, safe and looked after, but they are not.

Turning back to the court case, disclosures were made that every single entry clearance visa application from Gaza made from 7 October has been refused by the Home Office. If this is about safe and legal routes, why are they automatically being refused? We know from experience that even visitor visas—a third of those last year—were refused because the Government do not believe that people are going to go back to Gaza, and in the circumstances, why would they? But even if someone could get a visitor visa, the Government are quite likely to refuse it.

The right hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington mentioned people coming over in small boats, but given the difficulty of even getting out of Gaza, that is not a prospect for most. The House of Commons Library briefing for this debate spoke about the rarity of that. Palestinians accounted for 0.14% of the people on boats, or 53 out of 36,704. They may well be sent to Rwanda after fleeing a war zone, getting across continents, getting in a small boat and getting to safety here. Can the Minister say whether anybody who came in such a way will be removed to Rwanda? Will he at least rule that out for some kindness to the Gazans who have managed to make it to our shores to safety? Again, it is just cruelty.

Hon. Members also raised the issue of people accessing medical treatment here. The Children Not Numbers campaign has done a huge amount of work to evacuate people in the past, including children whose medical needs are absolutely dire. We have all seen on our television screens, at a remove, the horror of children having amputations without anaesthetic, and children whose lives have been devastated at such a young age. They cannot even get those children out for the medical treatment that they so desperately require for their futures.

I am sure that the Minister will come out, as he always does, with how Britain is a welcoming country, how we have done so much to resettle people and how we should look at all these other things we have done in the past. What we are asking is for something now. It has been six months. He has had quite long enough to come to a conclusion. He has had quite long enough to design a scheme.

The Gaza Families Reunited campaign has given the Minister the work on this. It will not be difficult for him to create such a scheme. It was done for the people of Ukraine much more swiftly than this. He is out of excuses. He needs to give the Gazan people some kind of certainty that they can come to safety. Otherwise, we will all know that this Government do not care and are prepared to ignore the people of Gaza. It is despicable.