Illegal Migration Bill

Danny Kruger Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 27th March 2023 Commons Chamber

[Dame Diana Johnson]

Unfortunately, there seems to be a great deal of confusion in the House about the small boats issue. It is worth reflecting on the fact that currently the largest number of people coming across in small boats come from Afghanistan and that the backlog in the Home Office system—now over 166,000—has been growing for some time, creating a knock-on effect on how quickly the system can deal with people arriving in this country, process them and remove those who should not be here.

It is also worth reflecting on the Home Affairs Committee report on the small boats crisis, published last summer, which said that the Government needed to address four things: clearing the backlog and speeding up the processing of people arriving in small boats; the issue of safe and legal routes, which I will say a little more about in a moment; the need for international co-operation; and the need to deal with the criminal gangs and to have return agreements with other countries in place. I remain worried about the argument that the Bill will deter people from getting into small boats, which goes back to my concern about the lack of evidence.

The hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton) referred to the Home Affairs Committee trip to northern France in January. One key thing I remember from that trip is that if someone is standing on the beach in Calais or northern France, with the British coastline visible just 30 miles away, it is too late; they are going to take their chance and get into a boat.

I worry about the Home Office’s capacity to deal with the momentous change that the Bill will bring. It has not been very good at dealing with the asylum applications that have been building for many years, and I worry about its capacity to deal with the large-scale detention of people, families and children that the Bill will introduce.

My amendment 137 is on the issue of establishing a cap on the number of migrants using safe and legal routes. It will be difficult for the House to identify and make provision for crises that will unfold in the year ahead. In 2010, we could not have known the true extent of refugees from the first Libyan civil war or from South Sudan, or the number coming from Syria in 2011 or from Ukraine just one year ago. We cannot know what global challenges we will face in the next year, so an arbitrary target could be seen as a restraint on Governments being able to respond dynamically and appropriately.

Who will be included in the cap, and will it include children? Every child has the right to protection from persecution, discrimination and violence. That is a cornerstone of international and domestic law. Turning away a child fleeing a war zone or a genocide because of a cap decided months earlier in this House, could undermine the key principles of the international child protection frameworks that we have signed up to, including our own Children’s Act 1989, which gives clear focus to our international obligations in domestic legislation. The Government say that clause 51 will allow them to exceed the number set out in the cap each year if needs be. In that case, it is not really a cap, is it? It might be a target, but one that would have difficulty dealing with what is happening internationally.

We should reflect on and acknowledge the willingness of the British people to step up to the plate when crises appear, as thousands did last year when they took in displaced Ukrainians, and the wholesale support for unaccompanied children being given shelter when we debated the Dubs amendment a few years ago. If the Government are determined to introduce the cap, children should not be included and “people”, as set out in the clause, should be defined as those over 18 years of age. Setting a cap on the number of children who can claim asylum could result in one child being turned away while another is chosen—it is a “Sophie’s Choice” regulation. I ask the Minister to think again, and recognise the special position of children and our obligation to them.

The most obvious and appropriate way to support refugee children is to ensure they have access to safe and legal routes, which are clearly set out and defined. That is why I have added my name to new clause 13 and amendments 72 to 75, tabled by the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham. I also support new clause 17 in the name of my hon. Friend the Member for Walthamstow (Stella Creasy).

Our Home Affairs Committee report made it explicitly clear that ensuring that there are accessible, safe and legal routes to the UK is a key plank of an asylum system that is both fair and effective, and also provides a clear disincentive and deterrent for illegal routes. I agree with the comments made by the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham about the need for additionality. We cannot just say that the current schemes are sufficient, welcome as they are. There must be a package of measures to deal with the current situation, along with clearing the backlog. It cannot be right that that is left until some future date when we will know what the safe and legal routes are. That needs to be up front as part of the Bill, so that we have both the deterrent and the options around safe and legal routes.

New clauses 8 and 10 are about safe passage visa schemes. The Home Affairs Committee report mentioned using reception centres in France to allow people to make asylum claims from France—the Government rejected that idea, but some imaginative thinking about how we can assist people to make claims would be helpful. That is why it is worth the Government considering what new clauses 8 and 10 would mean. We have juxtaposed checks on passports and customs with the French, but there may be more room for negotiations with the French about making claims in France directly. New clause 8 is a little more prescriptive than new clause 10; that might be helpful as well.

I have added my name to amendment 122, which was tabled by the hon. and learned Member for Edinburgh South West (Joanna Cherry). The amendment would clarify our legal responsibilities and fulfil the recommendations of the Joint Committee on Human Rights. Last year’s Home Affairs Committee report underlined the importance of strong international co-operation and relationships in dealing with migration issues. I believe that those would be weakened by walking away from our international legal obligations.

In conclusion, the Government must ensure that the Bill does not undermine our legal or moral obligations. They should clearly establish safe and legal routes in the Bill. If they are determined to tighten our refugee provisions, we must not turn our back on child refugees by arbitrarily placing a cap on, or excluding, those vulnerable children who turn to us for support.

[Danny Kruger (Devizes) (Con)]

I rise to speak to amendment 131, which stands in my name and in the name of colleagues. I am grateful to the Minister and his colleagues for their very constructive engagement in recent days; on the basis of the commitment that I hope we will hear from him this afternoon, I do not propose to press my amendment to a vote this evening. I also thank my hon. Friend the Member for Stone (Sir William Cash); I am very glad that he has just returned from his cup of tea, because I am about to make a great speech in defence of parliamentary sovereignty in his honour.

The fact is that we need a new asylum system in our country. Indeed, the world needs a new framework for protecting the rights of refugees in an age of mass migration, with the huge people movements that we are seeing. Part of that is safe and legal routes, which are the natural corollary of the Bill; I support the principle described by my hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton) and set out in his amendments to that end. I particularly endorse the work that has gone on in the Home Office—I want to see more of it—around community sponsorship. It is one of the existing global routes that we have, and we want to see it widened significantly. Even more fundamentally, the new framework that we need must honour the founding principle of both the European convention on human rights and the refugees convention: that the primary responsibility for managing asylum rests with the nation state. That is the purpose of the Bill and of my amendment.

It is worth stating why, as part of the new framework that we need, we need a law requiring the removal of people who arrive here illegally. The fact is that even if we had the best safe and legal route in the world, we would still have thousands of people—tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands a year—seeking to come here by unsafe, illegal routes. We simply cannot accommodate all those people. That is why it is absolutely right that this Bill creates a limit, with a cap on the total number of refugees we will receive. What that cap should be is up for debate, but the need for one is clear.

Unless we want open borders—Opposition Members deny that they want them—we have to do something about the many, many people who will still try to come once the cap has been reached. The only logical answer is to deny leave to stay to people who enter illegally, to detain them and to remove them somewhere safe and free: either back to their own country or to a third country that is willing to have them. That process must be swift and unquestioned. Nothing but the certainty of detention and speedy removal will deter illegal migrants and break the business model of the smugglers.

That power of removal was established in the Nationality and Borders Act, but as we know, a judge in Strasbourg was then woken in the middle of the night by a lawyer acting for an assortment of campaign groups. The judge—sitting in his pyjamas, for all we know—issued an interim order that caused the Home Office to stop the policy before the first plane took off.

[Joanna Cherry]

What the hon. Gentleman has just described is the process of getting an interim injunction in England or an interim interdict in Scotland. Is he not aware that that happens just about every day of the week in our domestic legal systems?

[Danny Kruger]

The difference is that our domestic legal systems should not be subject to the findings of a foreign court. Moreover, the process should be transparent, it should be possible to appeal and the Government should have been able to be involved in the process. For action to take place in that way is profoundly undemocratic.

[Joanna Cherry]

rose—

[Danny Kruger]

Let me explain myself more clearly. There are two things profoundly wrong with what happened last June. The first is the explicit tolerance of illegality—the claim by activists, backed by Opposition politicians and by judges, that people who break into our country should be allowed to stay and settle here. The second is the idea that the laws of the British Parliament can effectively be struck down by courts claiming a greater sovereignty, in deference to a higher power than parliamentary statute: the power of international law.

[Yasmin Qureshi (Bolton South East) (Lab)]

The United Kingdom has signed up to many international treaties. Why do we sign up to treaties if we are not going to allow them to be implemented or follow them?

[Danny Kruger]

The hon. Lady is absolutely right that this is a treaty to which we have signed up. Under a treaty we have certain obligations, but those obligations do not include obeying such interim orders. There is no legal basis for us to obey them; that is a recent convention, and it is not in statute that we should obey such an order. Moreover, even if it were a substantive judgment, it does not give direct effect to what the British Government do. We need to change these things. That is why this Bill is necessary: it will mandate, not merely permit, the Government to remove illegal migrants, so that there can be no doubt in the mind of Ministers, officials or contractors what the law requires them to do.

--- Later in debate ---

[Danny Kruger]

The hon. Lady mentions Winston Churchill, who of course had no intention for the UK to sign up to the European convention. It is true that he sent some lawyers over there, but actually the original intention was for the UK not to sign up. There was no need for the UK to sign up to it. We did so, but at that time there were no rule 39 orders. There was no opportunity for judges, in the middle of the night, to issue these interim orders and stop UK policy. That was not the case then, and it should not be the case now.

Even substantive judgments, with which I accept we need to comply—Opposition Members are quite right about that—should not have the direct effect of halting removals. A substantive judgment against the UK would simply start a process of negotiation like the one we had after the Court ruled against us on prisoner voting. My amendment would put Strasbourg and the ECHR in their proper place: as a treaty partner, not a higher power or a superior lawmaker to the Parliament of the United Kingdom. Opposition Members seem to think that the ECHR has a power superior to the sovereignty of this House. I invite them to stand on that platform at the next election: by all means go ahead and suggest that this House is not sovereign.

I come not to bury the ECHR but to praise it. The convention is a noble document—as we know, it was written with the help of British Conservative lawyers—but really it just codifies the liberties enjoyed under English common law and statute. We should not have done so, but sadly we have put ourselves under

“the supervisory jurisdiction of the European Court”.

We should not be dictated to when it comes to the control of our borders. I challenge any hon. Member who thinks that the judges in Strasbourg have superior jurisdiction to that of this Parliament. My amendment would restore the proper balance of power.

The heart of the matter, and the reason passions run so high around the Bill, is what kind of country the UK is, or what we think it is. Opposition Members think that this country is a cruel, petty, small-minded small island that ignores its responsibility to the most vulnerable people in the world. That is what they think this country is, but our side of the House does not think so. We know that we have obligations to the world’s refugees and we are determined to fulfil them, but we think the first and foundational principle that defines the UK—the source and basis of all our generosity and our engagement with the problems of the world—is that we are a law-governed nation and that the laws that govern us are made here, in this building, by the representatives of the people. That is the principle that holds everything together. That is why Britain is respected abroad. That is the basis of our peace and prosperity, and our extraordinary history. It is why, directly or indirectly, so many people from other countries want to come and live here, whether they come legally or illegally—because we are a safe, prosperous, law-governed and sovereign nation. No human rights framework, no international convention, can dictate to us that we should tolerate illegality, let alone illegal entry to our country and all the privileges of residence here.

We need, with this Bill, to remember the people who sent us to this place and what they expect of us. They expect us to defend the interests and the values of the law-abiding citizens of this country, and to put the laws that we make here ahead of the interpretation of a foreign court. Statute is sovereign. Parliament is sovereign. The public expect us to have the courage to discharge our duty and take back control of our borders, as we promised we would when we left the EU. I believe the Bill will do that, with some strengthening. I know that the Government share my view, and I look forward to working with them ahead of Report to make the Bill watertight.

[Tim Farron (Westmorland and Lonsdale) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Devizes (Danny Kruger), with whom I agree about the source of human rights. Sometimes we need to have an arbiter, a human one, who will prevent us from being our worst selves, and I fear that the Government are being their worst self in this instance. I fear that the Bill, with its flagship title—no pun intended—will not stop the boats. I want to stop the boats, because every person who gets into a rickety boat on the French side of the channel and takes the risk of crossing it is a potential tragedy. We should all want those boat crossings to stop. However, I am convinced that the Bill will do nothing of the sort.

This Bill is dozy and it is dangerous. It is dozy because it will not work and will be counterproductive; it is dangerous for genuine refugees—we will not know who they are unless we seek to assess them in the first place—and it is dangerous for Britain’s reputation and therefore to our power overseas, soft or otherwise, thus undermining our sovereignty. It fails the moral test, not just because of the impact on those who seek sanctuary on our shores, but because it is based on a hysterical and bogus pretext. The context is important here, and so is the language. The fact that the Home Secretary and other refer to the UK’s being “swamped” by refugees is an outrage as much as it is totally and utterly inaccurate. In a league table of European countries, the United Kingdom ranks 20th among those taking refugees, per capita. It takes a third of the number taken by France, and a quarter of the number taken by Germany.

The bogus premise on which the Bill is based is set out clearly and obviously. Intelligent Conservative Members—and I am sure they are all intelligent—understand that, yet they continue to promulgate this nonsense. Nevertheless, language has consequences. Do Conservative Members not realise that when far-right protesters stood on the pavement screaming abuse at some terrified person fleeing persecution and simply awaiting an assessment, that was caused in no small part by the incendiary language used by politicians and people in the media? It is outrageous.

Illegal Migration Bill

Danny Kruger Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 28th March 2023 Commons Chamber

[David Simmonds]

I entirely understand what my hon. Friend is seeking to achieve through the introduction of those “notwithstanding” clauses. We heard a great deal about this in the evidence to the Joint Committee on Human Rights on the Nationality and Borders Bill, on the issue of the margin of appreciation. This is the idea that the courts have perhaps gone further in interpreting the meaning of some conventions than was the case originally. That is often under pressure from parliamentarians, including British parliamentarians, who have argued in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, which supervises the operations of the European Court, that some of these laws needed to go further to take account of modern circumstances. The way to address that is not to say that we somehow seek to set aside the obligations that we freely signed up to, but rather to go and have that wider debate with our international partners and, if necessary, say that we wish to see an end to this process to make sure that what we feel we originally intended to achieve is what is achieved by the Bill.

[Danny Kruger (Devizes) (Con)]

Let me clarify the purpose of the “notwithstanding” provision. It is not to say that we will not comply with international obligations; it is to say that while those negotiations are going on—as my hon. Friend says, that is what happens when a judgement is made by the European Court of Human Rights against a Government—the policy shall proceed. It is to stop the idea that the Court’s judgment would have direct effect and effectively ground the flights, as happened after the interim order was made. Whether it is an interim order or a substantive judgment, it should not immediately have direct effect to stop the policy. Does my hon. Friend accept that that is an appropriate way to proceed?

[David Simmonds]

That is an extremely good point. For many of us who had some involvement with the ECHR in the past, one of the frustrations at that point was that we recognised that interim orders are not legally binding when they are issued. However, as I understand it, the basis of that interim order was that our own UK courts had not completed their consideration of whether the policy was lawful or not. Therefore, the European Court of Human Rights was saying, “While you have not yet decided whether this is lawful, it is not appropriate to proceed against somebody in a way that would leave them without a remedy.” There is a way of resolving this, but the route to that is through colleagues in the Parliamentary Assembly who have the ability to bring about a significant change.

I will conclude with something that I have called for before, and I will again suggest that the Government look at. It is that we extend the process we currently use in our resettlement schemes, where we have the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees administering a process. We tell them how many people that we think we can accommodate as a country, and who we feel best able to support, in consultation with local authorities. Those people then travel to the UK knowing full well how they will be accommodated and supported from the point they leave to when they arrive. The process involves a number of people determined by this Parliament, with their circumstances vetted in advance before they arrive, and permission issued by the Government of the United Kingdom, in control of our borders. If we want to stop the boats and have a new asylum system that gives us control of our borders, we need an asylum visa system that operates in such a way, and that is robust, effective, and ensures that this Parliament, and our Government, are genuinely in control of our borders.

Illegal Migration Bill

Danny Kruger Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 26th April 2023 Commons Chamber

[Robert Jenrick]

So far, we have been calling individuals and families forward in order of priority; those in Sudan should check the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office’s published advice to see that. There is discretion for Border Force officers where British passport holders, or those who have leave to enter the UK, present with minors and there is credible evidence that those children are their own, and this is so as to ensure that the family unit stays together wherever possible. That is the right approach. We have worked closely with Border Force to ensure that the group of officers we have in Sudan have the correct guidelines to operate that policy. To the best of my knowledge, we have not encountered any issues, but of course we are getting regular updates to ensure that that is functioning properly.

[Danny Kruger (Devizes) (Con)]

I wish to draw the House’s attention to another safe and legal route that exists at the moment, the community sponsorship arrangement, which was introduced by my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May) when she was Home Secretary. It enables communities to welcome refugees from around the world. Does he agree that it is a good model and that we should expand it in future?

[Robert Jenrick]

I do, and I commend that arrangement wholeheartedly. I took part in what is, in one sense, a successor to that scheme, the Homes for Ukraine scheme, and it was an incredibly rewarding experience for me and my family. The principle at the heart of that is that it is not purely a matter for the state to provide support; individuals, groups, churches, synagogues and mosques might want to come forward to gather support and funding to meet the state halfway and assist those people to come to the UK. That scheme is available. We would like more people to take part in it. It is exactly the sort of scheme that could be considered alongside the future expansion of safe and legal routes.

--- Later in debate ---

[Patrick Grady]

I am not sure I fully completed my hon. Member for Stone bingo card there, but we certainly got most of the greatest hits.

I am not sure whether the hon. Member for Dover (Mrs Elphicke) is aware—I apologise to her if she was not—that a cross-party delegation of MPs visited the port of Dover last week with the Industry and Parliament Trust. We learned that in 55 BC illegal migrants from Rome, possibly led by Julius Caesar, were pelted from the White Cliffs with sticks and rocks. It is just as well that none of the Ministers from the Home Office was on that delegation, because it might have given them ideas for further amendments to the Bill, permitting the throwing of stones at craft attempting to land—or perhaps they would be instructing Border Force to seize the bronze age boat from Dover Museum in an attempt to track down any descendants of illegal migrants from 3,000 years ago.

We also learned about the Border Force processing facility in Dover. Despite the myths of an invasion of small boats washing up on beaches across the south of England, in reality most small boats are diverted directly from channel shipping lanes, where of course they are a major risk to larger vessels, and from there people are processed and sent directly to Marston or elsewhere. There is no invasion; there are no thousands of people prowling the streets. There are just human beings so desperate that they are willing to risk their lives to get here.

Although the provisions of the Bill are designed to be retroactive from 7 March this year, according to the Home Office website, there does not appear to be any significant change in the patterns of detections since the Bill was introduced, so if the Bill was supposed to have a deterrent effect, it appears to be failing from the start. However, that has not prevented the Government from doubling down on their hostile environment with the swathe of amendments they have tabled today.

In Committee, the Minister took issue with the number of amendments tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow Central (Alison Thewliss), saying:

“At this rate, there will be more SNP amendments to the Bill than there are refugees whom they accommodate in Scotland. Instead of pruning the already excessive forest of legal challenges that we find, the hon. Member for Glasgow Central (Alison Thewliss) proposes a Kafkaesque array of new ones.”—[Official Report, 27 March 2023; Vol. 730, c. 777.]

Yet now it is the Government who have tabled a forest of amendments, with an amendment paper running to 73 pages. Of course, if the Government had tabled just one amendment, that would be more than the number of asylum seekers they actually seem to want to accommodate in this country.

If people are looking for Kafkaesque amendments, they should turn to Government new clause 26 and its consequential amendments. Picking and choosing which parts of the ECHR they want to apply at any given time betrays the true agenda of the Home Secretary and her cheerleaders on the Tory Back Benches—to take us out of European, and eventually global, human rights frameworks altogether.

The same applies to the Government amendments, which will undermine their own previous legislation on human trafficking and modern slavery. Those measures will be counterproductive; as the Trades Union Congress has said, the proposals will mean that,

“modern slavery victims who are trafficked…for exploitation will first be denied refuge, then returned to their country of origin and almost certainly back to the criminal gangs who trafficked them in the first place.”

Where the Government have been forced into making concessions, they are nowhere near adequate. I have heard from many constituents in Glasgow North who want refugees to be welcomed here, to have the right to work so they can contribute to our economy and society, as Plaid Cymru proposes in new clause 1, and to be able to come here by defined, safe and legal routes that are established and workable—not a vague pledge to publish a plan for a review of a consultation in a few months’ time, as suggested in new clause 8.

In fact, what constituents in Glasgow North want to see is the Bill defeated at Third Reading and scrapped altogether. Failing that, the Government should adopt the wide range of amendments tabled by the SNP, which aim to bring at least a vestige of humanity into the system, as our amendment 45 would do by requiring courts to make sure the Act is interpreted in line with our international treaty obligations, and to ensure it still resembles an actual asylum process rather than deportation charter, which is why we have tabled amendment 46 to delete clause 2 in its entirety.

I have asked this in this House before, but how often have Home Office Ministers, or their Faragiste fanboys on their Back Benches, sat down with asylum seekers and people who have come here on small boats to listen to their stories? There is an open invitation to any of them—Front Benchers and Back Benchers alike—to come to Glasgow North and meet the inspiring members of the Maryhill Integration Network, who have come here fleeing war and persecution and who, despite being met by the most hostile of environments created by the Home Office, are determined to make a new home in Scotland and make our society a better place for everyone to live in.

That is what an effective asylum system should be designed to produce: people in genuine need being supported and welcomed to rebuild shattered lives and strengthen our society as a whole. The Government’s amendments today to an already inhumane Bill move us even further away from that ideal. However, it is an ideal that constituents in Glasgow North and across Scotland will continue to aspire to, and it will be the foundation of our own independent asylum and immigration system when Scotland too breaks free of the UK’s hostile environment.

[Danny Kruger]

I am very pleased to have listened to this interesting and useful debate. I rise to speak to new clauses 22 and 17, which clarify the means by which a suspensive claim may be made to stop a removal from this country.

In that context, I will reply briefly to my hon. Friend the Member for Newbury (Laura Farris), who made a good speech in Committee opposing the amendment that I had tabled to disapply the operation of the European convention on human rights as a means to prevent removals. Her point was that English law already includes protections that could be used in the same way as the ECHR. Of course, she is quite right: the jurisprudence of the UK has a set of remedies against unfair treatment, and they still apply. Indeed, they are clarified in the Bill.

In contradiction to what the hon. Member for Sheffield, Hallam (Olivia Blake) was saying, the remedies for a suspensive claim against a removal are clarified in the Bill, particularly the principle of non-refoulement, which is in our common law—we would have it even without European rights law. So this policy does not contradict that principle. Indeed, it strengthens it with a clear protection for people who would suffer harm by being returned to their own country or any country. Now that that relief is clarified in the Bill, we need to block the spurious use of other domestic remedies that are no longer necessary.

I thank the Minister and the team for their constructive engagement. I am very happy about where we have got to in the Bill. I will quickly explore the issue at the heart of the debate, which is not migration but the sovereignty of Parliament in making law, including laws about this essential issue. It has been established in recent times—particularly by the judgment in the case of Thoburn in 2002—that some laws in this country have more weight than others and, indeed, are not subject to implied repeal. They essentially have the status of constitutional documents. Of course, the European Communities Act 1972 had that status until Brexit. The other Act that has that constitutional status is the Human Rights Act 1998, which requires and enables the British courts to apply the ECHR. The doctrine of implied repeal does not apply to the 1998 Act either, and that Act requires the courts to follow the judgments made in Strasbourg.

I can live with anomalies. We do not want a hasty, destructive, ideological or populist rejection of the status quo in the legal arrangements of this country—that is not the British way; it is not the Conservative way. We can live with an eccentric inheritance from the post-war era. The problem is not when it is eccentric, but when it is deeply problematic, as it was in June last year, when the European Court put a stop on our removals policy. To respond to my hon. Friend the Member for Newbury, that was an occasion on which the European Court exercised an interference in our immigration policy.

I accept that that was just a rule of the court, which, in my view, we could have ignored, but the Government seemed to accept the legal advice that they were obliged to give immediate effect to that ruling. I am very pleased that new clause 26 will give the Home Secretary the power to disregard rule 39 interim orders from Strasbourg, but we remain subject to article 46 of the convention, which obliges us to comply with final judgments.

For me, there are two profound problems in our membership of the ECHR. First, we have an in-built ratchet with Strasbourg rulings and the treatment of the ECHR as a living instrument to be interpreted in the light of whichever cultural ideas are prevalent or appealing to the judges. Thanks to the Human Rights Act, those rulings form part of English law. At the same time, there is a willingness among lawyers in the UK to employ the ECHR to frustrate the will of Parliament and to refer the laws that we make to some higher authority—to an abstract morality rooted not in custom or the habitual allegiances that we have to each other as citizens of the same country, but in their own liberal fantasies.

I also believe in a higher authority that respects the dignity and value of every human being. Let us call it the natural law. I believe that that higher authority is the source of all our liberties and rights, and indeed of the ECHR and every other noble-sounding document in the west. It is the source of our morality, but the way in which that morality works in practice is not through abstract theorising from on high but through the accumulation of case law and the statutes passed in this place.

I do not propose that we come out of the ECHR now. I am suggesting that, if there is a further challenge to British sovereignty and the supremacy of Parliament—be it in Strasbourg or through the British courts applying the convention—we have no superior obligation to remain in the ECHR. The superior obligation is to our own sovereignty and the supremacy of this place. This debate has exposed a difference between those of us who believe in nation states and the customary laws of nations, and those who believe in abstractions to be interpreted by unaccountable judges—whether or not they are in their pyjamas. I am content with where we have got to with the Bill, which I support unreservedly.