Nationality and Borders Bill

Debate between Bambos Charalambous and John Hayes

2nd reading
Tuesday 20th July 2021 Commons Chamber

[Bambos Charalambous]

Criminalising people who have come to this country irrespective of what they have left behind makes them criminals. What law have they broken when they are seeking refuge here?

What we have seen playing out in the channel crossings over the past few days occurred because the Government have closed down all safe routes for refugees to travel to the UK for protection. People are being driven to make dangerous journeys because they are out of options. To this callous Government, it is all a game—pure theatre. The Tories use all migrants, an ever-easy target, as a distraction from their own institutional failings and the gross inequality that falls upon their citizens.

The Bill does nothing to propose refugee resettlement or family reunion routes and will only put more pressure on Britain’s broken asylum system. About 10% of arrivals are expected to be unaccompanied children. The Government should be properly addressing the issue of safe routes for claiming asylum and helping unaccompanied children. Penalising refugees is a clear breach of article 31 of the refugee convention, but even more disconcerting is that clauses 27 to 36 seek to interpret the refugee convention to suit the Government’s whim. Unilaterally deciding how international law should be interpreted never ends well for the Government. The reason they feel the need to do so here is that they know they will be humiliated when those clauses are challenged. Once again, it is not so much a case of marking their own homework; more a case of being judge, jury and executioner.

One thing the Bill will almost certainly do is ensure that people seeking asylum here are kept longer. Whether through imprisoning asylum seekers for four years in our prisons or detaining them in barracks, that is an awful lot of money to spend on something that is not going to work. I dread to think what impact that will have on our creaking criminal justice system. Again, we have not seen the sums. Why not? Surely the Home Secretary will have cleared this with the Chancellor and costed it?

[Sir John Hayes]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Bambos Charalambous]

I am conscious of time. I have to sit down in three minutes.

The Law Society of England and Wales warned yesterday that the Bill risks putting England’s global reputation for justice at risk—shameful. This is the Government who are reducing the country’s global standing so significantly. As if the inhumanity in the way the Government propose to treat asylum seekers is not bad enough, they go further by deciding to punish victims of modern slavery. The Bill peddles the Government’s signature toxic politics of fear and hostility by changing the standard of proof for determining if someone has a well-founded fear of persecution and making it more difficult for people to be recognised as victims of human trafficking. Despite choosing to start by disbelieving trafficked victims, there is nothing in the Bill about setting up a national operating standard procedure to train those whose first point of contact is clearly to identify victims of modern slavery. Why is that not in the Bill? Once again, it is just like the Queen of Hearts: sentence first, verdict afterwards.

We should most definitely be going after the traffickers and people-smuggling criminal gangs, but without international co-operation we will struggle to do that. The Bill is high on rhetoric, but low on action. Without introducing any safe routes, the Bill will be a boon for the international criminal gangs and a boost for their profits. Rather than breaking the business model, the Government have breathed new life into it by pushing people further into the arms of smugglers. Having reduced our ties with Interpol and tarnished our reputation with the international community, we have lost the soft power that things such as our commitment to international aid bought us.

We have been asking for safe routes to replace Dublin III since last year, but we have had nothing from the Government. Meanwhile, the Bill gives the Secretary of State new powers to act like the playground bully in delaying or suspending visa processing for citizens of countries that she believes are unco-operative with removals. In all honesty, if the Government seriously think that that will work in getting international co-operation, they are deluded. It is the same desperate politics that created the hostile environment and the Windrush scandal. Labour strongly opposes this misleading and deeply flawed legislation, and urges the Government to engage responsibly in a debate that recognises the humanity of those who have to flee their homelands and seek protection, no matter how they arrive in the UK.

This Bill is nothing more than a house of cards. It does nothing to address the crisis in our asylum system. It is deeply flawed and will end up collapsing if there are no bilateral agreements with our EU neighbours. We on the Labour Benches will be opposing the Second Reading of the Bill.