Immigration and Home Affairs

Desmond Swayne Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd July 2024 Commons Chamber

[Sir Desmond Swayne (New Forest West) (Con)]

It is a great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Dulwich and West Norwood (Helen Hayes). I spent 13 years on these Benches in opposition, and I know how frustrating it can be.

The reality is that when the sheer size of our defeat became apparent, I had some difficulty in coming to terms with it. In order to characterise it, I do not think one can do better than our late colleague Peter Brooke, who, when describing a similar calamity, said, “the battle of Isandlwana is lost, so now begins the defence of the mission station at Rorke’s Drift.”

I had no doubt that the Government were always going to abandon the Rwanda scheme—they made that absolutely clear, and they have every right to do it—but I do think that the House will ultimately come to regret not having such a deterrent to hand. Had it been allowed to develop, it could have been such a deterrent. It was never a silver bullet but always part of a complex jigsaw of measures, of which, of course, the holy grail would be returns agreements.

The previous Government should be utterly congratulated on the returns agreement they made with Albania, which has been a tremendous success. Such agreements are hard to come by. I remember being sent to negotiate with President Ghani in Afghanistan to try to get him to take a more helpful approach, given the blood and treasure that we were expending on behalf of his regime and the people of Afghanistan. He turned to me and said, “My priority is the young men and women who are taking the battle to the Taliban, and you want me to give time and resource to those people who’ve chosen to run away?” Well, it was a fair point—of course, ultimately he ran away himself. But I had little more success in negotiations on returns agreements with other Commonwealth members. These agreements are extraordinarily hard to achieve. I think that we would have wanted a third country where we could have settled people, because ultimately our ability to do so will be finite and limited.

I want to draw attention to what the Prime Minister said yesterday in his statement, when he pointed out that he had just authorised a very significant increase in money to regimes in Africa. Ultimately, that has to be the long-term answer—the very long-term answer. We made an agreement back in 1970 with the wealthy countries of the world to spend 0.7% of our national income on international development in the economies of those countries from which so many people are now coming and will continue to come as long as the incentive of life being so much better here exists. It took us until the coalition Government in 2011 to actually honour that commitment to spending 0.7% of our national income, and we subsequently abandoned it—or certainly reduced it. If all the nations that had entered that agreement had honoured it and delivered it when they made it, perhaps the flow of population from the developing world would have abated substantially and we would be dealing with a different situation.

Ultimately, it is all about jobs. Take Zaatari, the huge refugee camp on the borders of Jordan and Syria: a great city now, made from scratch. Those who are accommodated in Zaatari will find that the housing provided by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees is of a substantially better quality than that available in many cities and shanty towns across the world. They will find that the World Food Programme will feed them, and their children will be educated by the UN children’s agencies. Perhaps most importantly, security will be supplied by the Jordanian forces and be of a much greater standard than they might enjoy in many other parts of the world. Despite all those advantages, people from Zaatari will spend every penny they have, and borrow, in order to escape and get the one thing that Zaatari cannot supply them: a livelihood and a future for their family. That is the driver of so much migration.

Ultimately, we must return to that original policy, restore the 0.7%, and start building for the long term a world that is much more secure as a consequence of the economic developments available in those other places.

[Sammy Wilson (East Antrim) (DUP)]

The right hon. Gentleman makes a powerful point, but does he accept that much of that aid went to propping up corrupt regimes, which denied people the rights that we have in this country and was one of the things that drove immigration in this country? If aid is misspent or used to prop up regimes, it is detrimental, not helpful.

[Sir Desmond Swayne]

That is absolutely right, but we did not do that. We did not spend our money in that way. We supported people under desperate regimes, not by giving money to those regimes but by providing sustenance through third parties and NGOs, which delivered that. Some of the greatest damage done by much of our own press was how our international development aid effort was painted as destructive in the way that was just described. It never was.

I return to my original point: we cannot take everybody, and we certainly needed somewhere else where they could have gone. Rwanda struck me as somewhere that that possibility could blossom.