Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill

Debate between Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb and Lord Inglewood

Report stage
Wednesday 6th March 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Inglewood (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I would like to ask the Minister one question in the context of the provisions in Clause 4. Is it or is it not the Government’s policy that they will look at each individual case, regardless of any other evidence, even if it is only to decide that there are no merits in that particular person’s case?

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, I will speak only once today, as I did on Monday. The Greens will vote for all the amendments that are called. Some Members of your Lordships’ House quoted the book Nineteen Eighty-Four on Monday, and I have a favourite quote as well:

“Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four”.


It is the freedom to speak truth, even when the ruling party is declaring otherwise.

That is what we are debating today. We are debating whether this authoritarian Government can declare that the objective truth of facts decided by the courts can be overruled. If we allow it, it is another big step towards a dictatorship—intentional or not. I know that the majority of people in your Lordships’ House know that the Government are wrong. I also know that many still cling to the belief that the House of Lords should not vote to stop the Government passing the most draconian of laws.

What are we going to do once we have voted on our amendments, and tried to do our job of improving the Bill, when the Government then ignore us? Will we do nothing again? We did nothing last year when a Minister overruled a vote in this House and gave the police draconian powers via a ministerial decree. It was the first time a Minister had ever used a statutory instrument to overturn a vote in this House, but the Labour Party failed to back my fatal amendment. I look forward to being told that that piece of legislation is going to be repealed as well.

We are paid more than £300 per day to come here and talk and vote, but what is the point of all our hard work if the Government ignore us? Either your Lordships’ House starts to act in defence of our liberal democracy and against the extremists at the heart of government, or we abolish this place and create an elected second Chamber with some backbone. I look forward to more defeats for the Government in these votes.

Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill

Debate between Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb and Lord Inglewood

Committee stage
Monday 12th February 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, each and every amendment proposed to this Bill shows the sheer nonsense of it. We are being forced by this Government to deny reality. We are being forced to create an enduring piece of legislation that states the proposition that Rwanda is “conclusively” safe, which cannot be rebutted even by conclusive proof to the contrary. This is Alice in Wonderland; it is complete and utter nonsense.

I have signed Amendments 6, 20 and 26 in the name of the learned Lord—I am sorry, it is very late—the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope of Craighead. I have tucked myself under his coat-tails because they are incredibly sensible amendments. They at least require the Rwanda treaty to be given effect and to remain fully implemented for the Act to have effect.

However, even with that, I am not sure that we can legislate that Rwanda is conclusively safe, so my Amendment 93 would go further. It would require the whole Act to be scrapped on the day that the Secretary of State is presented with evidence that Rwanda is not conclusively a safe country. Noble Lords might call this a wrecking amendment; I would call it a huge dollop of sanity in the mad world of this Bill. Surely the Minister and all other noble Lords should support this. Why would anyone want a piece of legislation to exist on the statute book with a key provision that

“Every decision-maker must conclusively treat the Republic of Rwanda as a safe country”,


if Rwanda is not conclusively safe? Rwanda is either conclusively safe or it is not. If it is conclusively safe, why do we need legislation to force decision-makers to treat it as such? If it is not conclusively safe, why would we force decision-makers to treat it as though it is? This clause is either pointless or plainly false. I struggle to see how this Bill was ever written. Did lawyers really write this Bill? I cannot believe that anyone is going to defend it when it is so patently stupid.

[Lord Inglewood (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I rise just to say that I entirely agree with those who have said that we should look carefully at the direction of travel suggested by the amendments from the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope, and the noble Lord, Lord Anderson, and encourage the Government to do the same.

It seems to me that the Government have got themselves into a pretty strange position. In proceeding with what they want to do, they have given themselves a binary choice: either legislate a fundamental untruth or find a way of establishing a system that will bring about and give confidence on the safety of Rwanda. If they do not want to do the former—and they should not—they must investigate ways of doing the latter.

United Kingdom Internal Market Bill

Debate between Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb and Lord Inglewood

Committee stage & Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard) & Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 26th October 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP) [V]]

My Lords, when the Conservative Party came up with its absolutely brilliant slogan about taking back control, many of us, for whom it resonated, felt that it meant that our Parliament would be taking back control. However, over the past year it has become obvious that that is not how the Government see it. In fact, they are using Brexit as an excuse to take more control of the country, which of course is extremely undemocratic. In this Bill, they are trying to seize control from the devolved Governments and Parliaments, and that, as the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, has just said, is extremely unhealthy for the UK. The Bill pretends to replicate what exists in EU law, but it has created a sort of Frankenstein’s monster, which is not at all what any of us were expecting. It is like a legal framework creating a bureaucratic bulldozer that the Government will use to grab more power.

It is obvious that this Government cannot win any seats in Scotland, Northern Ireland or Wales, so they are using this Bill—this bureaucratic bulldozer—to force the elected Governments of the devolved nations to fall in line with Conservative Party policy. These amendments are important because they would stop that undemocratic move. Without them, devolution will be replaced with a sort of lowest-common-denominator system in which the devolved Governments will have to wait for the UK Parliament to take action on any policy or law that relates to the production, distribution and sale of goods and services in the UK before they can take action. That is clearly not what any of us expected. The devolved Parliaments must continue to have the right to make decisions on improving environmental standards and implementing other legitimate policies that will benefit their nations. Your Lordships’ House must amend this Bill and prevent yet another government power grab, and of course protect the rights of the devolved nations.

[Lord Inglewood (Non-Afl) [V]]

My Lords, now that we are leaving the scope of the single market, the characteristics of the UK internal market become very important; that is why I put my name down to speak to this group and, in particular, to Amendments 2 and 59.

Superficially, it is easy to assume that the UK internal market should, and will, share the principal attributes of the EU single market but, of course, that is far from certain, not least because of the circumstances surrounding it all. After all, the creation of the EU single market was first agreed by member states in an IGC, which is very different from what we are looking at now in this country. The new arrangements have come into being in somewhat different circumstances and across a single territory in which there has been devolution—and within that, the different components clearly have different perspectives.

There is now much less consensus and no prior agreement. In these circumstances, within a devolved as opposed to a federal system, there are potential procedural problems where the UK Government and the English Government—if I might be allowed to call them that—are coterminous. It is not desirable for the repatriation of European competencies to drive a coach and six through the devolution settlement in these islands. For this reason, I believe strongly that Amendment 2 is important to provide a legal framework around the political procedures repatriating these powers. In my view, it is particularly important—I speak as both a unionist and a supporter of the devolution settlements—that England does not emerge as a bully boy imposing its will on the other countries. To do that would be to take the high road to the break-up of the UK.

I also want to touch on Amendment 59, in the context of my chairmanship of the Cumbria local enterprise partnership. As a border region and part of borderlands, any form of potential discrimination—be it direct or indirect, intended or unintended—poses a very real threat to our economy, much of which is focused on both sides of the Solway Firth. Competition law, environmental law and a number of other more general categories of social law are essential components of market economies in our kinds of societies in the 21st century. As a number of speakers have said, there is a real conundrum at the heart of this between local autonomy, which matters, and British cohesion and homogeneity, which also matter. I very much hope that the Minister will spell out exactly how the Government see these things interacting, because, as always, the devil lies in the detail.