Crispin Blunt
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LGBTQ+ Afghan Refugees
Crispin Blunt Excerpts(3 years, 3 months ago)
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Crispin Blunt (Reigate) (Con)
I join the congratulations to the hon. Member for Jarrow (Kate Osborne) on securing the debate. I follow an extremely moving account from the hon. Member for Ochil and South Perthshire (John Nicolson) about the personal circumstances of the people we are trying to assist. I have a couple of points to make, briefly and hopefully well within the time allocated.
The hon. Member for Jarrow made clear a number of issues about finding and establishing people’s credentials and the difficulty associated with that for LGBT people in societies such as Afghanistan. I welcome the statement on Afghanistan last week by my hon. Friend the Member for Louth and Horncastle (Victoria Atkins), then a Minister at the Home Office, when she undertook to give us a point of entry, in order to get advice from officials in the Home Office who have to make these difficult decisions. It is incredibly important that there is a dialogue between people who are supporting LGBT people trying to make these asylum claims, so that they can be assisted to assist the Border Force to make the judgments necessary, in order to ensure that our country is kept safe while these individuals are enabled to be safe.
I welcome that undertaking; it is incredibly important. We failed to achieve it during the conduct of Operation Pitting. I am interested to know how many Afghan citizens got out, courtesy of the United Kingdom evacuation operation. I can understand to a degree why it may be the case that there were no LGBT people who were evacuated under that third group of people at risk, not least because we had not identified them as a cohort. They have now been so identified by the Prime Minister in his statement, which was a point reiterated by my hon. Friend, whom I congratulate on her appointment as Minister for Prisons and Probation. There are some old boys kicking around who have had that title before and would be happy to give advice, if sought.
I am also very pleased that she appears, from the list of Government responsibilities, to have kept responsibility for Afghan resettlement. It is a credit to her that, having held that responsibility for only a month, she is in a new role and different Department, but is being invited to continue because she has got across her brief so well. There are enormous hopes invested in my hon. Friend that this issue will be dealt with sensitively and effectively.