Rights of EU Nationals

David T C Davies Excerpts

Wednesday 19th October 2016 Commons Chamber

[Neil Gray (Airdrie and Shotts) (SNP)]

My hon. and learned Friend will undoubtedly have read the disgraceful comments in some quarters of the press this morning by a Tory MP who suggested that some child refugees should have to undergo dental checks to confirm their age before gaining passage to the UK from Calais—as if those children had not been through enough. Leaving aside the fact that those children have a legal right to family reunification here—

[David T. C. Davies (Monmouth) (Con)]

On a point of order, Mr Speaker. [Interruption.]

[Mr Speaker]

Order. The hon. Member for Airdrie and Shotts (Neil Gray) will resume his seat. We will be with him in a moment. There is a point of order from Mr David T.C. Davies.

[David T. C. Davies]

I am the Conservative MP who has just been referred to. This is not a matter that is before us today. I wanted to speak about EU migrants, being married to one myself. If the hon. Member for Airdrie and Shotts (Neil Gray) wants to raise a completely unrelated matter, will I be able to answer that in the speech that I hope you will call me to make later on, Mr Speaker, even though it has nothing to do with this debate?

[Mr Speaker]

I did not judge the remark to be disorderly, although it needs to be made briefly. I did not and do not think it was disorderly, but I give the hon. Member for Monmouth (David T. C. Davies) the assurance, which he is entitled to seek, that he will have an opportunity in his remarks to respond as he thinks fit. No one should deny him that opportunity. Briefly, Mr Gray; let us hear it.

--- Later in debate ---

[Dr Whitford]

Frankly, this is an immigration arrangement from Europe. If the hon. Gentleman thinks that having stirred up the anti-immigrant view that led to leave we are going to say that we will not take EU nationals but that we will take many more people from all over the world, he is deluding himself.

Another point came up when members of our group said that Europe had to change free movement, so that we could stay in the single market. Where were we sitting at that moment? We were sitting in what had previously been East Berlin. We need to understand that for all Germans and east Europeans free movement of people comes from the heart; it is not a technical problem. They do not realise that we do not understand that. Twenty-seven years ago, there was a wall through Berlin. The last person trying to get over it was shot just a few months before it came down. Angela Merkel could not travel west until she was 36 years old.

[David T. C. Davies]

rose—

[Dr Whitford]

I am sorry, but I am running out of time.

In our debate in July, I mentioned that my husband Hans is a GP who has worked in our NHS for 30 years. At first, he did not really think that this concerned him, because he thought that it would all disappear, but four months on it has not. The problem is that these people are finding it terrible. The Minister said in that debate that anyone who had been here about five years could apply for right to remain, and when I mentioned my husband he said, “Oh, he can definitely stay.” My husband has printed out Hansard and is keeping it in his passport to prove absolutely that he has his personal reassurance. The Minister also said in that debate that we would have to consider what rights and benefits they have and which of our public services they can access. My husband, nearing retirement after 30-odd years in the NHS, is really concerned that he might get to stay but might suddenly have to pay for the healthcare he has been delivering for 30 years. And we are told that we are the scaremongers.

The story of my husband’s family is this. His father was German; his mother was Polish. They met during the war and were not allowed to marry. They had a child who was taken away from them. They were lifted and interrogated by the Gestapo. His father was imprisoned and his mother was turned into a forced labourer. Long before this debate arose, my husband used to say, “I can’t believe that in one generation I have been allowed to marry who I like, settle where I like and carry out the profession I chose.” I cannot believe that in one more generation we could lose those rights and take them away from our young people.

--- Later in debate ---

[David T. C. Davies (Monmouth) (Con)]

I echo the comments about how disappointing it is that the SNP chose to play a game of political football rather than to discuss the issues seriously. There is little in the motion that I would disagree with except for the word “should”, to which I will return in a moment. The motion asks us to recognise the huge contribution that people from other EU countries have made to this country. Of course we all recognise their contribution. That point has been made over and over again on these Government Benches, and inside and outside the House by people in both the remain and leave camps. Let me say it again: people from other European Union nations have made an enormous contribution to this country. They are very welcome in this country. They were welcome before the referendum took place, they are welcome now and they will be welcome after we exit the EU.

[Keith Vaz]

May I add the hon. Gentleman’s wife, who is of Hungarian origin, to that list of people?

[David T. C. Davies]

I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman. I was going to mention that. I declare an interest in that my wife is Hungarian. My children are completely bilingual and have dual nationality. It is a cliché, but when I say that some of my closest friends are from eastern Europe, I mean that I go on holiday and share houses with them, which makes us pretty close friends. It is ludicrous even to suggest that people who are involved in the leave campaign—dare I say that I was the leader of the campaign in Wales?—have some kind of xenophobic or anti-EU agenda.

At the same time, we should also be making it clear that we welcome the contribution of professionals from countries outside the EU. I have dealt with many EU nationals who work in the NHS and the public sector in Wales, but I have also dealt with doctors from Egypt, businessmen from India and nurses from the Philippines, and they are also making a huge contribution to our economy. These people from outside the EU nations are also very welcome and will continue to be so. It is ridiculous to suggest that people from EU states should somehow be scared or worried about what is going to happen when we leave the EU, given that we already welcome and appreciate the contribution of so many people from outside it.

This Government have put compassion at the heart of their policy. We are spending more money on foreign aid than any other Government in this country has ever done and more than any other country in Europe is doing; we have ring-fenced NHS spending in England—Labour certainly has not done that in Wales; and we are dedicated to ironing out the inequality within the education sector. It is ludicrous in the extreme to suggest that anyone on any part of the Government Benches would ever want to round up people from other EU nations and throw them out—that is a fantasy and it will never, ever happen. Nobody wants it to happen and nobody has ever called for it to happen. I am just grateful for the opportunity to say that clearly once again.

Apparently, there have been issues with hate crime. May I say once again, as someone who was heavily involved in the leave campaign, that I, along with everyone I campaigned with, unreservedly condemn any form of hate crime towards anyone, be they from EU nations or outside, and whether it is because of their sexual orientation, the colour of their skin, their religion or their nationality? I, along with every person I have ever worked with on the leave campaign and with every person I have been involved with in politics, totally condemn that sort of behaviour. We should not run away with the idea that people from eastern Europe or from other European nations are constantly being hassled as they walk around; in my experience, which is considerable, that is simply not happening. I have been married for 13 years to somebody who moved here from eastern Europe and who has never been a victim of that sort of behaviour. I am not suggesting it does not happen, but I sometimes think there is a tendency to over-exaggerate.

[Joanna Cherry]

Does the hon. Gentleman accept the statistics produced by the Home Office showing that hate crime has increased by 41% in England and Wales since the EU referendum? Does he accept those stats produced by his Government’s Home Office?

[David T. C. Davies]

Of course, but the statistics have increased because the Government have rightly said that they are determined to stamp out hate crime and are looking to police forces—

[Several hon. Members rose—]

[David T. C. Davies]

Let me answer the question and then perhaps I will give way again. The Home Office has rightly said that it is determined to stamp out hate crime and it is expecting police forces to produce figures and to seek out examples. Of course we also face the additional problem that social media sites such as Twitter make it easier for keyboard warriors to commit hate crimes—one has only to look at my feed today to see that that is the case.

[Joanna Cherry]

I am very interested by what the hon. Gentleman has just said, as I think he is suggesting that the Home Office has changed the basis on which it calculates hate crime in the UK since the EU referendum. Would he like to tell us his source for that? Or perhaps the Minister will be able to help us with that later.

[David T. C. Davies]

I have not suggested that; I have said that the Home Office is rightly determined to stamp out hate crime and it has asked police forces to be much more rigorous in getting the figures. The Home Office will be looking to use those figures to investigate this, and quite right too; there is nothing wrong with that. But what I find concerning is that the hon. and learned Lady and others seem to have tried to make a correlation between hate crime and Brexit, and the clear and worrying implication of what they are doing is to suggest that the 17.2 million people who legitimately voted for Brexit are in some way responsible for hate crimes. That is an absolutely outrageous suggestion and I hope that—

[Joanna Cherry]

rose—

[David T. C. Davies]

I hope that if I give way to her for the third time, the hon. and learned Lady will take this opportunity to make it very clear that those people who voted to leave the EU were exercising their democratic right to do so and do not, in any way, support hate crimes.

[Joanna Cherry]

I was going to ask the hon. Gentleman this: how does he explain the 40% increase in hate crime in England and Wales since the referendum if it is not down to the vote? To what does he attribute this? How does he explain why there has been no such increase in Scotland? We would love to hear his wisdom on that.

[David T. C. Davies]

I am not an expert on Scotland, but I can tell the hon. and learned Lady that the Government are absolutely determined to stamp out hate crime and are rightly demanding that police forces come forward with those figures, and I am very glad that they have done so. The problem she has is the same as a conundrum I faced about 17 or 18 years ago when I was on the losing side of the referendum on whether or not we should have a Welsh Assembly. That all went through on a very small vote and issues were raised about how the press had handled it. Those in the anti-Assembly campaign all sat down afterwards and thought, “What are we going to do? We should challenge this and get the Lords to chuck it out. It is outrageous. How dare they do this on the basis of a vote of about one in four of the population?” At that time, I was probably a little less older and wiser than I am now, and I was probably all for fighting the campaign and re-running the whole referendum. I am glad that wiser heads within the Conservative party prevailed and those in the anti-Assembly campaign said, “Hang on a minute, people have voted for this. It may only be one in four of the population in Wales and we lost out by only a few thousand votes, but the reality is that people have voted for it and we now need to let them get on with it.” What we did was to appoint to the National Assembly advisory group somebody who is now a Conservative Minister, Nick Bourne, who became a very good friend. He decided that he was going to get the Conservative party involved in this, to iron out the details of what was actually going on.

The motion’s use of the word “should” is what would lead me to vote against it; the rest of the motion is absolutely fine. We do recognise the contribution that is being made by EU migrants within the UK, and the Government are doing everything they can to ensure that their rights are respected post-Brexit. The whole point of what the Government are doing at the moment is to say to other EU nations and to the EU itself, “Look, we’ve got 3 million people here. We want to protect their rights. We want to ensure that their freedom to move around continues in every single way, but you are going to need to reciprocate in some way.” As someone who is married to an EU immigrant, may I say that I utterly support what the Government are doing and trust them to do exactly the right thing?

[Dr Philippa Whitford]

I gently point out that this is a debate on the EU and not on Wales. It is absolutely the case that people who voted leave are not racist or xenophobic, but unfortunately what that vote has done is give authorisation to people who feel emboldened, now they are in the majority, and we have seen these incidents across the country.

[David T. C. Davies]

Everyone absolutely condemns any form of hate crime. The hon. Lady made a point earlier about Berlin and the Berlin wall, so let me say how strongly I feel about that. I have visited Sopron, where the Berlin wall really fell; the videos of people cutting through the barbed wire can be seen on YouTube. These were people from Berlin who had gone on holiday in that summer of 1989 to Sopron in Hungary. They snipped through the wire and walked into Austria because they had been told that they were not going to get shot at for doing so. It was there that the Berlin wall really began to fall and the socialist Government in East Germany finally realised that their blinkered view of how people should live their lives was not going to prevail because people do demand freedom.

We are not in the business of erecting a wall as a result of Brexit; we are in the business of taking down a wall—a much less violent wall but one that exists around the European Union—going out into the world and giving people the freedom to trade and to do business all over the world. That is what this is all about.

Let me finish by saying how delighted I am that the hon. Lady recognises the important significance of the Berlin wall coming down and the defeat for socialism, for that is what it was. I hope that she will join me in paying tribute to Lech Walesa, Ronald Reagan, Pope John Paul and Mrs Thatcher, who did so much to bring about the end of socialism in eastern Europe.

[Several hon. Members rose—]