Refugees (Family Reunion) (No.2) Bill

Hannah Bardell Excerpts

2nd reading: House of Commons
Friday 16th March 2018 Commons Chamber

[Angus Brendan MacNeil]

The hon. Gentleman asks a good question. From the information I have directly, I can tell him that a number of years ago we would have been talking about 400, but with the increase in refugees the number who would be helped is probably between 800 and 1,000 at the moment. It is not a huge number. I commend him for what he has done to help refugees in the past. He sees the benefits of that today in his personal life, and there are a number of similar examples of that from across the world.

This Bill merely takes the UK into line with the rest of Europe. If I have any criticism of what I am trying to achieve, it is that my Bill is so small and unspectacular—so much so that we should have no problem in passing it. Someone would have to have a very hard heart or an empathy bypass not to want to ensure that the limited measures I ask for today become law. May I say how grateful I am for the support of people who have done well in life yet have made it their concern and business to use their position to help the least well-off in the world? Some are celebrities—actors and actresses, and pop stars—who have used their position to highlight this Bill and given their time very freely.

[Hannah Bardell (Livingston) (SNP)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on the support he has gathered for his Bill and on the powerful speech he is making. He talks about those supporting others who are vulnerable in our community. A refugee family in my constituency have come to Livingston, made it their home and set up a business, which reclaims leather sofas and turns them into shoes and bags, and is now supporting and employing disabled people in the West Lothian and Livingston area. These are exactly the kind of people we want to welcome to our communities—those who come and make the fabric of our society richer.

[Angus Brendan MacNeil]

Absolutely. This is also a loss for the host countries from which these people have had to flee, often in the most desperate of circumstances.

As well as pop stars and celebrities, it is mostly decent members of the public who have been writing to us, as the hon. Member for Liverpool, Riverside (Mrs Ellman) pointed out. They can conceive of the enormity of what refugees, or people fleeing to safety, have had to go through, and in their droves they have been very supportive.

Often as Members of Parliament, we have to consider issues that require us to put ourselves in the shoes of those whose experiences are dissimilar to our own, which puts our ability to empathise to great test. At first glance, the subject of the Bill may seem as though it is going to ask us to go to similar lengths. How can we, sitting here in this old royal palace in the heart of London, begin to know what it is like to be a refugee who has fled the guns of Assad, crossed dangerous seas with their life in the hands of unscrupulous smugglers and then faced a gruelling, adversarial asylum system? How can we know what it is like to be a 17-year-old from Eritrea who has escaped his homeland because he did not want to end up like his older brother—murdered because he did not want to be forcibly conscripted, indefinitely, into the army? I do not know, but I know that I do not want to know and I certainly do not want many other people to know in future.