Immigration

Debate between Anne Main and Steve McCabe

Monday 19th October 2015 Westminster Hall

[Steve McCabe (Birmingham, Selly Oak) (Lab)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Sutton and Cheam (Paul Scully) on a rather broader contribution than the wording of the petition suggests. I wanted to take part in the debate for two reasons. First, I believe that immigration should be debated and that people’s anxieties and concerns should be heard. If we are not willing to do that, we will create further problems and pressures in society. I received a fair amount of vitriolic abuse for remarks I made in the local press about this petition. I understand that it was picked up by a national newspaper. In those comments to the local press, I expressed some concern about the wording of the petition and about any automatic tendency to debate petitions simply because of numbers. I went so far as to say that I think there is a risk that we could end up legitimising bigotry. Members will not be surprised to hear that that did not go down terribly well, but I draw their attention to the wording of the petition, which begins:

“The UK government need to prevent immigrants from entering the UK immediately! We MUST close all borders, and prevent more immigrants from entering Britain. Foreign citizens are taking all our benefits, costing the government millions! Many of them are trying to change UK into a Muslim country!”

The petition goes on to make the references to graves that the hon. Gentleman mentioned.

[Mrs Main]

The hon. Gentleman highlights the capitals, but I draw attention to the shouty exclamation marks that punctuate those sentences.

[Steve McCabe]

The hon. Lady is right. I make it clear that I do not consider people who are concerned about immigration, or who object to it, to be bigots, but I have a problem with the petition. Some of the people who contacted me had a legitimate right—they were not constituents, by and large—to say that they did not like what they had read in the press, whether or not it was what I had actually said. I understand that. The vile nature of some of the other people’s comments probably justifies what I said about them—in fact, what I said about them was probably mild compared with what I read from them.

I will pick up on what a couple of people said. A Mr David Harrington, who I understand owns or works for PressLine, a marketing consultancy, extended my criticism to say that I had accused all signatories of being of a racist tendency, which is quite worrying if he runs a marketing consultancy. That may have been what Mr Harrington heard, but never did I say it. The danger of petitions that deliberately set out to pander to people’s fears is that people end up reading things that are not there and hearing things that have never been said.

Mr Harrington, a bit like the hon. Member for Sutton and Cheam, advised me that it was Labour that had opened the floodgates to mass migration. Members may not be surprised to hear that I do not entirely share that view, but people have legitimate concerns. We all know that there is pressure on some of our services at the moment and that people fear such pressure. There is pressure on health services and on access to school places. Certainly as far as European migration is concerned, I have more faith in the Prime Minister than it appears the hon. Gentleman has, because I do not want to plan to leave the European Union; I want the Prime Minister to succeed in his negotiations. I hope that one of the things the Prime Minister will seriously consider trying to negotiate is a migration fund so that, where we have a significant influx of people into a particular part of the country from Europe, we can draw on it if the influx is putting pressure on our services. That would be a welcome and useful proposal, as has been made clear in my extensive consultations with my constituents on immigration.

There is clearly an issue in relation to the benefits system. The vast majority of immigrants come to work, so we should not be entirely concerned when the petition says that foreigners are “taking all our benefits”, but it is reasonable to ask questions about benefits. For example, most people would recognise that it is absurd that people who do not have children resident in this country are able to claim child benefit. That is a reasonable point. I am not sure that I support the idea of transferable benefits. It is probably also legitimate to say that there should be a reasonable qualifying period for accessing benefits.

The hon. Gentleman drew on the example of curry shops. The balti business is very big in the Birmingham area. The issue is not about whether one should have to bring over a chef from the Indian subcontinent in this day and age. It would be better to put a bit more support and funding into our sixth form colleges and further education colleges so that they are not at risk of collapsing. If we cannot train people as balti chefs and curry chefs in this day and age, there is something badly wrong with our skills training in this country.

I recommend to the hon. Gentleman that, as was Labour policy at the last election—the Chancellor is now keen on some bits of Labour policy—where an employer asks for a visa to bring someone into this country because they argue that they genuinely cannot fill the skills gap, and where it is practical to create an apprenticeship, we should say, “You can have the visa, provided that there is an apprenticeship to train someone from here for the future.” That would be a useful and practical way of addressing that particular problem.

The Government’s targets need a bit of realism. I liked a lot of what the hon. Gentleman was trying to say—he was trying to be fairly balanced—but then I heard him say, “Oh, the last Labour Government let 2.5 million people into the country.” Where has that figure come from? How many of those people are permanent residents of the UK? How many of them does he know anything about? The reality is that that figure has been conjured up for propaganda purposes, just as the Government’s target to reduce immigration is now becoming a straitjacket for the Home Secretary. It would probably be better if the Government were to set out clear principles for the areas of concern on immigration so that people across the country can work together. That would be more fruitful than setting unachievable targets that lead to further disillusionment, which would be a mistake.

Of course, including refugees in the target, thereby confusing refugees with conventional economic migrants, is a dreadful mistake. I hope the Minister, who is responsible for refugees, will take advantage of this debate to tell us a bit more about what is happening with the Syrian refugees. How many orphaned and abandoned children can we reasonably expect to have been resettled in this country come Christmas? An answer to that question would be helpful, and it would also be helpful if he made it clear that he sees a clear distinction between refugees and economic migrants and that he is willing to consider not mixing the two in the numbers.

It is preposterous that this country wants to make it hard for high-value students to come to our universities. I do not know why we should discourage people who pay good money to come to our universities, and who help to subsidise our own students. Such students will not stop going to university; they will just go to Australia, Canada or the United States. The losers will be our universities and research programmes. It is a dreadful mistake to include students in our immigration targets, and the Minister will have no difficulty getting support from the Labour party, and maybe from other Opposition parties, if he were to come clean and make that distinction. Students are not coming here to settle permanently. They are people who come here for a time-limited period and who we actually want to come here.

This petition is misleading in a number of ways. It ignores the fact that the number of permanent visas being awarded is currently down by about 15%; it ignores the fact that many of our most welcome immigrants come on fixed five-year work permits; and it does not take account of what they come to do or where they come from. We are talking about doctors, nurses, scientists, social care workers, digital engineers—the very people the hon. Member for Sutton and Cheam wants to come here to help, support and invigorate businesses, and to start businesses—and they are coming from places such as India, Australia, the USA, the Philippines, Canada and New Zealand. They are the main countries that we are taking immigrants from at present, which is hardly the picture conjured up by this particular petition.

Of course, the petition also ignores what the impact would be on our agriculture and hospitality sectors, for example, if we were to end immigration immediately. The effect would be to close down those sectors. I do not know whether the person responsible for originating this petition thought about the implications of that, or whether the 190,000 or so people who were so keen to sign it have considered that, but I understand that closing our borders would mean that it would be quite difficult to leave the country as well as to enter it. As I have said, I have no problem with discussing and debating immigration. There are immigration issues that we should tackle. There are some where we could find quite a bit of cross-party consensus. However, I for one have no desire to have to go around telling my constituents, “I’m sorry. You’re not going on holiday after all this year, because we have decided to support a petition that says we are going to close our borders.” I do not think that things have got quite that bad in the UK.

I welcome the opportunity to debate this issue. There is a persuasive argument, I say to the hon. Member for Sutton and Cheam, to consider whether we should issue further guidelines on the wording of petitions. That might be helpful. That is no criticism of the hon. Gentleman or his Committee but there may be times when the current e-petition situation has unintended consequences.

Is it not reasonable to ask that we be given a bit more information about the person originating the petition? It is probably fair to know who they are, where they live, whether they are a registered British voter, for example, whether they have any party political association or any history in relation to a particular subject. It would not be unreasonable to know that. The idea of the e-petition system, of course, was to give a voice to the public and to ensure that we in this place did not ignore issues that matter.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mrs Anne Main (St Albans) (Con)]

I say to the hon. Member for Birmingham, Selly Oak (Steve McCabe), who it is a delight to follow, that I agree with a lot of what he said; I would wear the vitriol that he has experienced with pride. I hope I will not upset him too much with some of the comments I might make about the previous Labour Government.

I declare an interest as chair of the all-party group on Bangladesh and as president of the Conservative Friends of Bangladesh—obviously, I have quite an interest in Bangladesh.

I am glad that the hon. Gentleman read out the wording of the petition. For anyone who has not read it, I should say that it contains a lot of exclamation marks; in my view, that creates a rather shouty tone. Like many hon. Members here today, during the election period I listened to people expressing concern that we have lost control of our borders. I heard from residents who said they were exasperated that we, as British citizens, could not fully control who came into our country, partly because of the right of EU nationals to travel freely to this country; and from residents who were also angry about illegal immigration—for example, those who break into our country on the back of lorries and who slip into a murky world of criminality and the black economy.

In this uncertain world, we as a country should be able to know who is coming across our borders and for what purpose. Illegal immigration and people traffickers do a disservice to all legal migrants and help fuel sentiments such as those expressed in this petition.

I want to regain strong control over immigration and I share the sentiment of my hon. Friend the Member for Sutton and Cheam (Paul Scully), who opened this debate: I am hugely in favour of the promised referendum on our membership of the EU. It is time we had the discussion and the debate. I will be campaigning to leave the EU. We will consider that issue in the next few months.

How can we hope to control our UK immigration numbers when 42% of our immigrants can walk straight in from the EU, regardless of family ties or skill set? We will listen to the debate on that issue as the months go by. Freedom of movement and of residence for people in the EU was established by the Maastricht treaty in 1992. Now, free movement has a much broader meaning than in the original wording of the treaty of Rome, which talked more about “workers” than about “persons”. The four pillars of the EU—free movement of goods, capital, services and people—seem to be non-negotiable. I welcome the fact that the Prime Minister is trying to negotiate them, but the president of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, said in January this year that regarding

“the end of the free circulation of workers, there can be no debate, dialogue or compromise. We can fight against abuses, but the EU won’t change the treaties to satisfy the whim of certain politicians.”

There is the rub: as long as Britain is a member of the EU, the EU will not countenance meaningful change that would mean Britain has the policy freedom to control its borders as it sees fit.

This petition asserts that immigrants are taking “all our benefits”, which is a highly alarmist statement. I share the view of the hon. Member for Birmingham, Selly Oak, who spoke before me, that there are areas that we need to look at. Under EU laws, there are areas we need to tighten up on, particularly the highly contentious area of child benefit. We have all talked about that issue; there are cross-party concerns about it. It is worth noting that the figures for 2013 showed that £31 million of British taxpayers’ money was sent abroad as child benefit to other European countries, and that two thirds of that money was sent to Poland.

The EU will fight to defend people’s ability to nominate the country in which they wish to claim their child benefit. However, the Prime Minister believes that it cannot be right to send benefits abroad to children who have never lived in this country and who may, for all we know, not even exist. It is no surprise that a Polish worker would prefer to nominate to receive UK child benefit when it is four times the amount that could be awarded in Poland. Yes, we are welcome to go to Poland and to make a similar claim over there, but it is highly unlikely that we would.

However, despite wanting to tackle the syphoning-off of British taxpayers’ money to Europe, I profoundly disagree with the wording of this petition. It conflates immigration pressures and personal faith. I want a sensible immigration policy that is creed and colour-blind; that welcomes workers to fill vacancies in this country that need filling; that welcomes students to enrich and support our top universities—on that I agree with the hon. Member for Birmingham, Selly Oak; that respects familial ties and, importantly, our Commonwealth connections; and that does not discriminate against an individual because of his or her personal faith, because to do otherwise would be to go down a hugely dangerous road. Surely the holocaust, which happened in the not-too-distant past, should have taught us a lesson about discrimination on the grounds of faith, which this petition seems to advocate.

In August, the latest net immigration figures were 312,000. As my hon. Friend the Member for Sutton and Cheam remarked in his well-balanced comments, 50% of respondents in an Ipsos MORI poll for The Economist said that immigration was the biggest challenge this country faced. Not only was that the highest such percentage ever recorded, but it surpassed the figures for the economy and the NHS. There is no dispute, therefore, that we need to talk about immigration, but how we talk about it is important. As elected representatives we must discuss the matter, but this petition is not the answer.

The petition currently has 199,000 signatories, and I am pleased to say that only 189 of them are from St Albans—0.25% of its electorate. In contrast, more than 500 of my constituents wrote to me about banning foxhunting, so supporting the petition is not high on the St Albans agenda. My constituency has an approximately 10% ethnic minority make-up; the largest black and minority ethnic community is the Bangladeshi one, which at 2,500 represents 2.5% of the population. Christian denominations make up 57%, at 55,951 individuals, and the Muslim denomination is 4,653, which is 4.8%. When I am at our war memorial on 8 November, I will expect to see, as usual, religious leaders from my churches, synagogues and mosques all reading passages and prayers from their sacred texts.

In St Albans we welcome prayers for peace, and we recognise that Muslim soldiers too have fought alongside their brothers from all faiths in the defence of our country. When someone criticised the fact that excerpts were read by the leading imam from one of our mosques, I wrote back and said exactly that—that they should bear in mind that these people support our country regardless of, or because of, their faith, and we should not discriminate. More than 400,000 Muslims alone fought in the first world war on behalf of this country.

I do not believe that faith can be forced. I profess a Christian faith, and I have friends who share other faiths and friends who have no faith, including my husband—he has no faith at all. I do not believe, as the petition asserts, that our faith, however personal, is threatened by Muslims, nor do I accept that Muslims are trying to change the faith of this country. The fact that Muslim families have been shown to have a higher number of children and may bring them up in the faith might mean an increase in the number of people who profess that faith, but it might not. I do not think, however, that someone can rob you of your faith. If a person’s faith comes from within it will not be threatened by another person’s faith, only by another person’s intolerance or oppression of that faith.

In many countries, religious minorities face oppression and we must speak out against that. We should not be fearful or foster or import intolerance into our country. One of this country’s pillars of strength is that each man and woman has the ability freely to express their own faith, and I want nothing to do with any petition that suggests otherwise.

I do not dispute that we need a full and frank discussion about how we manage our immigration levels, but I do dispute why reasonable people would want to associate themselves with an ill-informed petition. What provokes nearly 200,000 people to agree with the aggressive, shouty and unpleasant sentiments expressed in the petition? I am sorry—this is the point where I might upset the hon. Member for Birmingham, Selly Oak—but a large part of the fault can be traced back to the previous Labour Government’s failure to see the true impact of EU migration.

In 1997, net immigration to the UK was 48,000 and a 2003 Government report projected that additional future net migration would average between 5,000 and 13,000 a year. In one year alone—between 2003 and 2004, when the accession countries joined the EU—net migration to the UK jumped from 185,000 to 268,000. Net migration has been well over 200,000 per year since, with one exception: when it dropped to 177,000 in 2012.

[Steve McCabe]

On a minor point, does the hon. Lady accept that it was the recognition of that error with the original accession countries that led to the transitional controls that the same Government imposed for the next round of countries? That error was not ignored.

[Mrs Main]

I accept that it was not ignored. The hon. Gentleman anticipates my next comments. The modelling was based on the equal access of member states to the labour market, but other states had imposed transitional controls at that time and the UK and Ireland had, unfortunately, not. We learnt that hard lesson.

A former speechwriter for Labour, Mr Nether, wrote in 2009 that

“mass immigration was the way that the Government was going to make the UK truly multicultural.”

He went on to say that he remembered

“coming away from some discussions with the clear sense that the policy was intended—even if this wasn’t its main purpose—to rub the Right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date.”

That is an incredibly unhelpful statement, but if Mr Nether was correct it is no wonder petitions such as this have found favour in communities that might feel duped and that we are not facing the ongoing effects of mass uncontrolled migration.

In response to local authority and community concerns, mentioned by the hon. Member for Birmingham, Selly Oak, the Communities and Local Government Committee looked into the matter. I served on the Committee in 2008, and we produced a report. At the time, the Committee was Labour dominated—obviously—and it also had a Labour Chair, Phyllis Starkey. It is worth noting the report’s findings. We learned lessons, and we have to learn lessons now. The report’s summary states:

“There is significant public anxiety about migration, some of which arises from practical concerns about its effect on local communities.”

The hon. Member for Birmingham, Selly Oak referred to that. It continues:

“On our visits we heard from settled residents”—

some of those settled residents were second and third generation from other countries—

“about many such concerns, including the limited English of new arrivals; the problems associated with Houses in Multiple Occupation (HMOs)…a perceived increase in anti-social behaviour; and pressures on public services. The practical concerns of settled residents about migration need to be addressed by central and local government for cohesion to be improved, and cannot simply be dismissed as expressions of racist or xenophobic sentiments.

Recent migration has placed pressures on local public services in areas that have experienced rapid inward migration, including pressures on schools, translation services, social care, English language teaching, policing and the NHS. These pressures are currently left unfunded by Government, because resource allocations are being made on the basis of flawed population data. Leaving local services with inadequate funding to cope with added pressures from migration is not only detrimental to the service provided to local communities; increased competition between groups for access to limited public resources can also negatively affect community cohesion.”

That happened, and I believe that the petition has come out of it. I think that the petition is wrong in its sentiments and language, but we cannot dispute those findings. We need to face into the situation—all of us. It will take a long time to turn it around.

In an effort to row back from that situation, the points-based immigration system was introduced. Our Government, elected on a mandate of trying to control immigration, say the same. We have, however, to be honest, in this Chamber and in this Parliament: we can control only outside-EU immigration. We are unable to control EU migration, so other areas must be particularly hit, including former Commonwealth countries. The bar is set extremely high, and it has an unfair and disproportionate effect on certain communities and industries.

My hon. Friend the Member for Sutton and Cheam mentioned the curry industry. What he said was absolutely right, but the Chinese food industry is affected as well. The curry industry is worth £4 billion and employs 100,000 people across many of our constituencies. The hon. Member for Birmingham, Selly Oak mentioned training up people. Yes, we can do that, but it seems rather perverse that a poor Polish immigrant can walk into this country and take up any vacancy they find in any industry, including the hospitality industry or a curry restaurant, even though they might not have the relevant skills, while a poor skilled Bangladeshi chef is not able to that because the bar is set so high.

My hon. Friends the Members for Sutton and Cheam, for Northampton South (David Mackintosh) and for Harrow East (Bob Blackman) and I returned two weeks ago from visiting a social action project in Bangladesh. Bangladesh is a very poor country and it will be enormously difficult for its people to jump the bar to get in and take up vacancies. Someone from the EU can walk in and, hopefully, get a job in any restaurant by virtue of their EU membership.

In response to public concern, we have made it our mandate to cut immigration to tens of thousands, but my own concern is that certain countries are discriminated against. People from those countries have families here and other ties to the UK. We should not just tinker with the margins of the figures by hitting only non-EU countries. We need to look at immigration as a whole and ask ourselves what we can, and cannot, realistically control.

I want to regain control of our borders so that the UK once again says welcome and gives refuge and asylum to those it wishes to come and shows the door to illegal immigrants. Yes, we need controlled immigration. Yes, we need a reasonable debate. However, we do not need nasty, small-minded xenophobia, which wording such as that in the petition encourages and feeds. The petition and its wording have got it wrong on so many levels. After we have considered it today, I suggest that we consign it to the dustbin, where it belongs.

I want a debate on immigration. I do not want a shouty, nasty, ill-informed petition that means we are then discussing whether people are trying to turn us into Muslims or grab our jobs or whether to stop this, that and the other. We need to say why we believe in controlled immigration and explain how we can control it, recognising that we have control over only small amount. That leads to the big debate, which I look forward to having over the next few months, on whether we should throw the whole thing up in the air and say, “Do we want to be able to control our borders?” If being a member of the EU means that we cannot, that is part of the robust debate we should be having. I am pleased to have had the chance to put those comments on the record. I look forward to the vitriol, which I will wear with pride.