Refugees (Family Reunion) Bill [HL]

Baroness Chakrabarti Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 10th September 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)]

My Lords, I add my congratulations to the noble Baroness, Lady Ludford, for drafting such a timely Bill. In my experience, the cause of human rights has many occasional, selective and even fickle friends. She is not of their number, and it is completely characteristic that she should use this precious opportunity for a Private Member’s Bill in defence of some of the most vulnerable and dehumanised people in our communities and our world. Obviously, it is a shame that her wholly sensible, practical and humane measure is even necessary, but I am afraid it is becoming more essential by the day.

Like the current Home Secretary, I am the daughter of migrants to this country. However, it seems that this shared experience appears to have instilled rather contrasting approaches to refugees on our respective parts. In the summer of 1940 little boats in the English Channel came to symbolise the Dunkirk rescue and Britain’s defiance of Hitler. Now it seems that little boats of desperate people are to be repelled or even sunk, in clear contravention of the refugee convention and even clearer contravention of common decency.

Ministerial answers to this charge plead that they are merely seeking to deter the evil trade in people smuggling or words to that effect: that the answer to the greatest refugee crisis since World War II is not such dangerous and mercenary human traffic, but safe routes to our shores. Does not the noble Baroness’s Bill call that bluff? Her short and simple measure not only provides safe routes but plugs an obscene and discriminatory gap in protection that denies refugee children the right to bring parents and siblings to join them in safety, and she offers those seeking family reunion legal aid. I really look forward to hearing a single valid argument against that legal aid provision.

I am sorry not to find the Minister, the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, in her place today. That is not to begrudge her a break or to question the ability of the noble Lord, Lord Parkinson, to turn his hand to her brief. It is just that earlier in the week, in response to a question, she seemed to suggest that the UK had always given compassionate haven to the desperate. I am afraid that I beg to differ. I do not think that our patriotism should lead us to airbrush important history and fail to learn its lessons. In the autumn of 1938 and even after Kristallnacht, the Home Office—my former employer—was regularly denying refuge to German Jewish people seeking to flee Hitler. No less than Albert Einstein had already been denied asylum here, having to go on to find it in the United States. Sylvia Pankhurst pleaded with the Home Office via the Manchester Guardian:

“May we not plead for somewhat more humanity in dealing with these cases?”


I suspect that the Minister might not find the red suffragettes so compelling, so I will try these words instead:

“I am a refugee in a crowded boat foundering off the coast of Vietnam, I am a Laotian, a Cambodian, a Cuban and a Miskito Indian in Nicaragua.”


Today we could add a desperate person in a dinghy in the English Channel. That, of course, was Ronald Reagan. I hope the Home Secretary might find some similar compassion.

[The Deputy Speaker (Lord Brougham and Vaux) (Con)]

The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Southwark will not be able to speak because he missed the opening speeches, so I call the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, who is taking part remotely.