Immigration Bill

Earl of Sandwich Excerpts

Tuesday 9th February 2016 Grand Committee

[Lord Roberts of Llandudno (LD)]

It gives me the greatest pleasure to support the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Dubs. Sometimes a situation will sweep through a country and bring compassion and tears to so many people. This is the case especially after the last weekend, when we saw the continuing destruction of Aleppo, with scores of thousands of people crowding on the border between Syria and Turkey. They will somehow move from there. They will join that trek, like hundreds of thousands before them, to some sort of hope. Many of them will be children.

I know that in Wales we sometimes have very sad cases where a child has been abducted or put in some danger and people say, “We’ve got to do something to save this child”. Whole communities will rally round to save that child, and so we should. Except it is not one child, but scores of thousands of children. But if we will do it for one child, so we should be prepared to embrace the children that are there—we cannot see the one child because of the hordes of other children. It is a matter of individuals, of little toddlers. I have seven grandchildren myself. They are usually fairly well behaved—not always—but you would defend them and speak for them. You would do anything. You would rather be hurt yourself than they be hurt.

We now have a situation with many unaccompanied children. I think of the parable of the good Samaritan. I should not bring my Sunday sermon here, but in that parable we remember that a traveller on the road—I am not preaching—from Jerusalem to Jericho fell among thieves. There he was, left at the side of the road. He had been robbed of everything. Two temple officers came by and said, “We’d better not touch him. We could be contaminated if he is dead”. They kept on talking. I imagine that they would have met in Jericho and one would have turned to the other and said, “You know, it’s a dangerous situation on that road from Jerusalem to Jericho. Let’s set up a committee to safeguard these people who travel along that road”. Now, we want committees; of course we do. What would we do without them? The House of Lords would be abolished tomorrow if we abolished committees. But that person was still at the side of that road until a Samaritan came who cared for him, took him to the inn and made sure that he was on the way to being well again.

We have a tragic situation from Syria to Calais and Dunkirk, but we need people who will not first go to a committee, but say, “Something needs to be done. We have to act now”. I mentioned yesterday in Questions our debt to the thousands of young people in particular who are in the camps and on some of the Greek islands and sacrificing so much to be there. We owe them a tremendous debt. It is the Red Cross, Calais Action, the Refugee Council and Save the Children—they are there. These are the people with their hands to the wheel in those places.

What are we going to do? If we say that the UK will do no more, where will those children go? Possibly they are asking on the Turkish/Syrian border now, “Where do we go?”. They get to Calais or Dunkirk and they say, “Where do we go?”. Are we going to pull up the drawbridge and say, “You can’t come here?”. If we do, we condemn these children not only in the present time. If they live through the present time to a childhood scarred with memories it will not be to the well-being of the rest of us. Action needs to be taken for the tens of thousands of children as if it was for just one child, for just one of my seven grandchildren.

It is a big undertaking, of course it is, but Canada has taken 25,000 refugees in two months. It was great, seeing that happen and hearing that an appeal went out on the radio in Canada when that first plane arrived at Lester Pearson Airport in Toronto: “Please, will no more people come to the airport? We’re under siege with people wanting to welcome these people from Syria”. The heart of the people is with those people who are tramping across borders or suffering in the camps.

In 1939, we said that we would accept our responsibility for people threatened by the blitz on our large cities—Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham and London, of course—and in two months there were arrangements for evacuating 3 million people. We could do it. If we could do it for 3 million people in 1939, we can do it for 3,000 children now. I do not think there is any reason for us not to do it. I cannot think of a valid reason to come to this Committee and say, “Oh, yes, it’s this; it’s this; it’s this”. They are tiny children, like our children. I urge the Government to think again. I assure noble Lords that Heathrow, Gatwick or Stansted would be under siege by the warm-hearted people of the UK wanting to embrace and welcome them. I urge the Government from the bottom of my heart to think again on this.

[The Earl of Sandwich (CB)]

My Lords, I can see the point of the Government’s plan to collect child refugees from the Middle East, but the thousands of children who were seen on our television screens in October and November last year were already in Europe. The impression at the moment is that the Government are refusing to respond to what has become a public demand. I strongly support the noble Lord, Lord Dubs. This is not just an emotional issue; it is a case of practicality. The Government are talking about an admirable resettlement scheme, but, except in the case of family reunion, they are ignoring unaccompanied minors and ignoring this plea.

[Baroness Neuberger (LD)]

My Lords, I support this excellent amendment. This is the least that we can do. As the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, and my noble friend Lord Roberts said, there is a huge groundswell of support to bring some of these children—as many as we can—into this country. It is enormously important to get those children out of there, particularly out of Calais and Dunkirk.

I have to declare a couple of interests. I am rabbi of West London Synagogue, which runs a drop-in for asylum seekers and asylum-seeking families, and we have a lot of volunteers who have been going to Calais and Dunkirk. What they say about the situation of those children and the degree of risk to them and the appalling circumstances in which they live is truly ghastly.

I am also a trustee of the Walter and Liesel Schwab Charitable Trust, which was set up in memory of my parents. My mother came as a refugee. She was a domestic servant when her younger brother was still at school. His teacher rang her from Germany and said, “You have to get your brother out of here”. So my uncle came as a semi-unaccompanied refugee and was looked after by the most wonderful foster parents, who responded to general appeals for foster parents. They came forward, took him in and looked after him for months until my mother could cope.

It is ironic that we have been holding these Committee stage debates on the Immigration Bill around the time of Holocaust Memorial Day, when we have been saying “never again” and have been remembering the Kindertransport and the refugees who came. When one looks back on those speeches, as the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, did, on the whole you think a lot of the parliamentarians in 1938 and 1939 were truly wonderful people. However, I want to mention Eleanor Rathbone who is something of a heroine of mine. She also helped my grandparents, who also got out just before the beginning of the war. She said that our being so slow in taking action—in a slightly different area—was the equivalent of saying:

“’We are very sorry for all the people who are in danger of being drowned by this flood, and we will do our best to rescue them, but, mind, we must use nothing but teacups to bale out the flood’”.—[Official Report, Commons, 31/1/1939; col. 151.]

The trouble is that we have been so slow and are taking such very small actions. Three thousand is the very least we can do. We should go to Italy or to Greece and see the huge numbers who are there and then ask ourselves whether 3,000 unaccompanied children on top of the 20,000 who the Government have already said they will take is really too many. I hope the Government will accept this amendment.