Immigration: Hostile Environment

Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall Excerpts

Thursday 14th June 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Bassam for introducing this debate. It is already clear that it is raising a number of extremely difficult and very emotional points which it will be necessary for the Government to hear and to take seriously.

I want to come at this from a slightly different angle. There is an old aphorism which says, “Sticks and stones may break my bones but words can never hurt me”. However, there can be few less accurate or less helpful aphorisms available to us. Language is powerful. Everyone knows this, from those like the actors and writers among whom I have spent my life, for whom it is their professional stock in trade—which of course incudes politicians—through to children taunting each other in the playground. It can galvanise and persuade, in good ways and in bad; it can terrify or pacify, enable or silence; and it can bring together or it can divide. It works on the imagination—the source of all our creativity but also of our most acute vulnerabilities. We are more aware now than perhaps we have ever been of the impact of language on mental health—how, for example, the extended reach which the internet provides has amplified the potential for people to be attacked, threatened and demoralised just with words.

All Governments know that they must choose their words carefully, so we must assume that there has been nothing accidental about the rhetoric adopted in public discussion of immigration in the past few years or in the legislation it has given rise to. I accept, as most people do, that there must be rules about who is and is not allowed to come into this country and remain here, but the problem with the use of phrases such as “hostile environment” is that they frighten and demoralise not only those who may be in breach of those rules but, as we have already heard from my noble friend Lord Morris and the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill, for example, those who have done nothing wrong.

More insidiously, they give licence to the expression of generalised prejudice and antagonism—sadly, never too far below the surface in any society—towards whole categories of people by emphasising their “otherness”. Recalling those grotesque “Go Home” vans a few years back, I really wonder what the Home Office, and more particularly the then Home Secretary, was thinking. Who ever thought that that was any way for a Government to address their own citizens? We should have learned from the hideous lessons of history how dangerous it is to use divisive language to stigmatise. Surely “us” is far more important than “them”.

Many years ago, one of my sisters met and married a Jamaican man who had come to the UK in the 1950s, not actually on the “Empire Windrush” but in that era. He was a delightful person—an entertainer, magician and escapologist—who in 1968 became the first Afro-Caribbean performer in the UK to receive the Inner Magic Circle Gold Star. Noble Lords might imagine what a welcome visitor he was to my house when my children were small. Shortly after they married, he and my sister returned to Jamaica, where their two children were born. They came back to the UK in 1991 in order for those children to complete their schooling.

I tell this bit of family history for two reasons. The first is to make the obvious point that my brother-in-law and his children fall exactly into the category of people about whom quite unjustified suspicion has been stirred up by recent Home Office activity. As it happens, I do not believe that either of the children, now grown up, have fallen foul of the rules, and my brother-in-law sadly died in 2006, before the current legislation. But I wonder whether he would have had the kinds of problems that have been described to us, had he lived. So I have thought a lot in recent weeks about how it must feel to wonder if, despite everything being in order, your right to be here might suddenly be called into question; if perhaps, after all, you do not really belong. Because the second, equally obvious, reason for mentioning them is that the people I am talking about are not “them” and not “other”—they are my family; they are our family; they are us.

Some noble Lords will have heard the debate on Tuesday evening about the immigration and nationality regulations concerning fees for registering citizenship. There were many powerful speeches, but I was impressed in particular by the words of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Derby, who was in his place but no longer is. He said:

“Citizenship is the privilege that glues a country together and enables a Government to have a culture of law and order that people respect and work in and where they support each other”.


He later said that,

“the civic energy that we need to offer welfare, support, friendship and kindness to make human life more bearable is under stress more and more”.—[Official Report, 12/6/18; cols. 1663-64.]

A strong civil society encourages us to use empathy and respect in our dealings with one another. Governments should do the same. The language of hostility and suspicion should have no place in official discourse. Even difficult, unwelcome messages can be delivered humanely. To misquote an old song, “It ain’t what you say, it’s the way that you say it—that’s what gets results”.