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.