Britain’s Place in the World

Hilary Benn Excerpts

Tuesday 15th October 2019 Commons Chamber

[Alok Sharma]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Unfortunately, what has happened over the last few months—after we did not leave at the end of March—has indeed been a sapping of trust in democratic processes across our country, and that is why we must leave on 31 October.

[Hilary Benn (Leeds Central) (Lab)]

The Minister has talked about a no-deal Brexit. In evidence to the Brexit Committee the representative of the Ulster Farmers Union, when asked what a no-deal Brexit would mean for his industry, replied that it would be “catastrophic”. Would the Minister like to explain to farmers in Northern Ireland, and everyone else who would be affected, why it is the Government’s policy if there is not a deal that that catastrophe should be inflicted upon the farmers of a part of the United Kingdom?

[Alok Sharma]

I have a lot of respect for the right hon. Gentleman so I am sorry to have to say this to him, but the Bill that he brought forward, which we refer to as the surrender Act now—I know other colleagues would refer to it differently—reduced the negotiating position of the Government. Our policy still is a preference for a deal, but he must take his share of responsibility if we end up with no deal on 31 October.

Counter-Daesh Update

Hilary Benn Excerpts

Thursday 29th March 2018 Commons Chamber

[Penny Mordaunt]

Yes, sorry. My right hon. Friend the Minister for the Middle East has been in discussions with both Turkey and, yesterday, with two members of the Kurdish opposition. We are very much pressing for a de-escalation of what is happening in Afrin, in part because it is distracting from the effort in fighting Daesh.

[Hilary Benn (Leeds Central) (Lab)]

I join the Secretary of State in paying tribute to the bravery and dedication of all those who have helped to defeat Daesh on the ground and to liberate those whom it enslaved. Evidence of that is to be found in an exhibition in the Upper Waiting Hall this week, where the stories of Yazidi women who survived Daesh’s attempts at genocide, and who suffered sexual enslavement and rape, are told in the form of their words and art, as they seek to come to terms with the harrowing experience they went through. Will the Secretary of State tell the House what further efforts are being made to collect evidence of the genocide and crimes against humanity that Daesh committed, so that those responsible can finally all be brought to justice?

[Penny Mordaunt]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for publicising that amazing exhibition. I know that many colleagues from both sides of the House have visited it, and it was incredibly moving. It is absolutely right that we capture and record the immense suffering and cruelty that has taken place across both countries throughout the duration of this conflict. Clear processes are in place for that to be done. It is also vital that we are monitoring the existing humanitarian atrocities that are being perpetrated, not only by Daesh but by other groups, which I have alluded to in my statement. In future updates to this House, we may be able to share more information about the evidence that has managed to be collected, both photographic and forensic.

Counter-Daesh Update

Hilary Benn Excerpts

Wednesday 15th March 2017 Commons Chamber

[Priti Patel]

My right hon. Friend, as a former DFID Minister, knows better than most the vital role that UK aid plays in the world, particularly in Iraq. In answer to his question, we have been pressing Iraqi leaders and stressing to them at every opportunity the importance of an inclusive political plan for stabilising and rebuilding the country. All groups have to be involved in that rebuilding and stabilisation. Of course, the UK Government and UK aid are providing all the support to reopen schools in east Mosul, and humanitarian assistance to displaced people across Iraq.

[Hilary Benn (Leeds Central) (Lab)]

The whole House will welcome the progress on defeating Daesh in Mosul and elsewhere, and I join the Secretary of State in paying tribute to the bravery of all the forces, including our RAF pilots, who are engaged in that task.

The Secretary of State referred to the discovery of mass graves, and she will have seen the reports of the now infamous Khasfa sinkhole, which is said to contain thousands of bodies. What action is being taken to collect forensic evidence? Are we giving assistance? Such evidence will be important in calling to account those who have committed crimes against humanity, war crimes and genocide, and one way to defeat Daesh ideologically is to tell the truth about what it has done.

[Priti Patel]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for his remarks about the starkness of what has taken place. We have to speak the truth and bring the facts about exactly what has been going on to light. He specifically asks what the Government are doing in this area. We are working with the UN and others on the investigations. All colleagues in the House will know that this is difficult and will take time. We have seen in the past the amount of time it takes to get the evidence to secure convictions for war crimes, but that does not mean we should shy away from doing this. The mass graves exist, and we already know the extent of the horrors and atrocities that have taken place. It is in all our interests to stand by those who have suffered or been silenced, to act on their behalf to bring about justice for the victims of these atrocities, and to show the world the appalling nature and conduct of Daesh and those who have been associated with them.

Humanitarian Crisis in the Mediterranean and Europe

Hilary Benn Excerpts

Wednesday 9th September 2015 Commons Chamber

[Hilary Benn (Leeds Central) (Lab)]

I rise to support the motion. I very much welcome the spirit in which the SNP has sought all-party support for it. The hon. Member for Moray (Angus Robertson) made a very powerful speech. Like him, I hope that the motion will win the support of the Government.

It is right that the House is debating how Britain should respond to this crisis, which, as we have heard, has been described as the largest movement of refugees since the second world war. But what is the reality? The reality is mothers and fathers and children, brothers and sisters, forced by bloody conflict, their homes and their schools destroyed, their relatives killed, to flee from the land in which they were born, to seek help from the kindness of strangers. From Syria, hundreds of thousands of people are trying to make their way to safety in Europe, taking to dangerous and overcrowded boats, climbing over fences that have been erected to keep them out, queuing outside stations and then, despite desperate exhaustion, walking mile after mile along roads and railway lines to try to reach a new life in a new country.

They do this for one simple reason: they are desperate. Everything they had and knew has been destroyed. They see no hope, no future, no life. Deep down, every single one of us in this Chamber today understands, because it is exactly what we would do if those we loved were confronted by the same horror. Human beings will brave many dangers because the human urge to survive is strong and when we see people in these circumstances, our human urge to help is just as strong. It is, after all, our moral obligation, especially when we know what others are doing; Germany and Sweden, in particular, have already been mentioned. The fact that we are not in Schengen does not mean that we should opt out of our responsibility to stand shoulder to shoulder with our European friends and allies in playing our part. I say this to the Secretary of State: why is a child who has made the same perilous journey that claimed little Alan Kurdi’s life and is now in Greece any less deserving of our help than a child in a Syrian refugee camp? We should help both, and it is a false choice to argue otherwise.

As always happens in war, it is the neighbouring countries that bear the greatest burden. There are nearly 2 million refugees in Turkey. Jordan has seen its population increase by 650,000. Lebanon’s population has increased by 1.2 million, or 25%. That is equivalent to the United Kingdom taking in 16 million people. Let us compare that with the number of refugees we have actually taken from Syria under the UN vulnerable persons relocation scheme thus far: 216.

Britain has given very considerable help in humanitarian aid to these countries; we are the second most generous donor in the world. I pay tribute to the Secretary of State and to the Government for everything that they have done. It has been as exemplary as the Government’s initial refusal to take in a share of refugees, saying that we had done enough, was profoundly mistaken. Like my right hon. Friend the Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper), the shadow Home Secretary, I genuinely welcome, as did the hon. Member for Moray, the Government’s change of heart.

But we have to turn that commitment into practical steps that will help change people’s lives, and do so now, because the crisis is now. The families here in Europe need somewhere to live, somewhere for their children to go to school, and the chance to make something of their lives now, not in four years’ time. That is why the question of how quickly we can fulfil the commitment that the Government have made is so important. Four thousand people a year, dividing 20,000 by five, is not enough. As my right hon. Friend said yesterday, there needs to be a plan for how we are going to take in those refugees, and it should include people who are already in Europe.

[Simon Hoare]

I confess that I fail to understand the logic of the right hon. Gentleman’s argument. There are schools, hospitals, doctors and all the social infrastructure in the rest of the European Union; that is not a unique preserve of the United Kingdom. On what logic does he base his argument that when these people have found places across the continent of Europe, they should merely use that as a stepping-stone to come to the United Kingdom? Those European countries can provide succour just as well as we can.

[Hilary Benn]

I say in all honesty to the hon. Gentleman that it is about playing our part, including by taking those who have sought shelter in Europe and those who are still in the camps in the region. It is about doing our bit. It is not a competition between providing the generous help that the Government have given in humanitarian aid and providing help and succour to those, in particular, who have made such a perilous journey.

[Mr Adam Holloway (Gravesham) (Con)]

I greatly admire the Prime Minister’s attempt to help the maximum number of people in this desperate position in the fallout from the Syrian war. The amount of money that he is spending to help as many people as possible is a huge credit to our country. But I also admire the fact that he clearly understands that there are hundreds of millions of people in impoverished states in the middle east and north Africa—some, yes, in the grip of war—and realises that if we say to hundreds of millions of people, “Europe is open,” at some point Europe will have to close, and before that point we will lose thousands more people in the Mediterranean and lose the emphasis that he has put on looking after people properly in the areas where they are, which is what we have to do. It is a scandal that the international community is not doing enough to look after these people.

[Hilary Benn]

I shall address directly the hon. Gentleman’s point about the wider challenge of the movement of human beings around the globe, because he is right to raise it and it is important that we consider it. However, the specific question I am addressing in this part of my speech is what we do now to help those who are fleeing Syria, including those who have made the perilous journey to our shores.

[Ms Diane Abbott (Hackney North and Stoke Newington) (Lab)]

Does my right hon. Friend agree that citing the possibility that hundreds of millions of people may be on the move as an argument against taking our fair share from the current migrant crisis is dishonest and an argument for doing very little, possibly nothing at all?

[Hilary Benn]

I agree with my hon. Friend, who makes the point that this debate is about taking our fair share. The Government have moved to acknowledge that, which I welcome.

Tomorrow my right hon. Friend the Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford will meet representatives of local authorities, and we now hear that the Government will meet representatives of the Local Government Association on Friday. If we are going to take on this responsibility, which we should, it is important that all of us, including Parliament and all local authorities—not just some—and charities, voluntary organisations and communities do our bit and play our part in making this happen.

Picking up on the point made by the International Development Secretary, we also need to persuade other countries to play their part in giving their share of humanitarian aid. The United Nations has warned about lack of funding for essential supplies. In July the World Food Programme—I echo every single word the International Development Secretary said about that extraordinary organisation, with which I too had the privilege of working when I held her position—announced that it had halved the value of the food vouchers being given to Syrian refugees in Lebanon because it does not have enough money to continue giving as much as before. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees reports that ration cuts, lack of electricity and people who are sick and cannot get treatment for themselves or their children are reasons given by refugees for making the journey to Europe.

Although we are understandably focusing on Syria today, as we speak another hidden humanitarian catastrophe is unfolding in Yemen, where according to the International Committee of the Red Cross just under 13 million people are food-insecure and 500,000 children are severely malnourished.

[Keith Vaz]

As my right hon. Friend knows, I am one of three Members who were born in Yemen, and as chair of the all-party group on Yemen for a number of years I have been very concerned about the situation. Does he agree that it is extremely important that none of the aid that will be spent here as a result of the Syrian refugee crisis should be diverted away from Yemen at this critical time in its history?

[Hilary Benn]

I agree with my right hon. Friend, who is very knowledgeable about that country. I am sure that is the Government’s position. The practical problem in relation to aid to Yemen is access. Concerns have been expressed that some of the aid is being used for purposes connected with the nature of the conflict. Humanitarian aid should be given to people on the basis of need, not on the basis of which side of the conflict they happen to be on or find themselves on because of where they happen to live at any particular moment.

I say to the Government that Britain’s proud record on humanitarian aid gives us particular authority, which I know the International Development Secretary uses, to speak out and urge other countries to do their bit. We cannot run the international humanitarian system on the basis of insecure and intermittent funding. That will not work.

[Mrs Anne Main (St Albans) (Con)]

My concern is that if we are to speak with authority and ensure that the support these families need is delivered, the process needs to be ongoing. We need sustainable, ongoing community support for people who are traumatised, who need language skills and who need school places. That is vital and all Members on both sides of the House need to support local authorities.

[Hilary Benn]

The hon. Lady is absolutely right. The Government will use the international development budget, as the official development assistance rules allow, in the first year to support local authorities, but she raises the question of what will happen the following year. I have no doubt that one of the first questions local authorities will ask Ministers when they meet will be, “If you’re going to help us in the first year, how are we going to sustain that support?” Every one of us knows the extraordinary pressure that local authority budgets are under.

Turning to the cause of the crisis, the Prime Minister was right to say that it will be solved only when peace and stability return to Syria. Despite considerable efforts, no progress has been made and yesterday the UN envoy, Staffan de Mistura, said there was no more time for a long political process, and he is right. He urged Saudi Arabia and Iran finally to start talking to each other, as Russia, the United States and other countries are doing. We need an urgent diplomatic effort, under the auspices of the United Nations, to work out a future for Syria. It is time that Syria’s neighbours started trying to solve the conflict instead of continuing to fuel it. They should also discuss—I understand that this is extremely difficult in Syria—whether it is possible to establish safe havens to help those who are fleeing violence, and they should talk about the humanitarian funding crisis that we have just discussed.

We also have a responsibility, as part of the international coalition, to defeat ISIL/Daesh, politically and militarily, and to confront its brutal ideology. We should be unashamed in proclaiming our values of openness and respect for others in direct opposition to its brutality and ignorance, which have forced so many people to flee for their lives. One of the best ways in which we can give expression to the best of British values is to welcome and take in those who have fled, because we have a long and honourable tradition as a nation of giving shelter to those fleeing further persecution.

[Bob Stewart (Beckenham) (Con)]

I thank my right hon. Friend for allowing me to intervene. What really concerns me is that within Syria there are huge numbers of would-be refugees. In my experience people who have no resources whatsoever, who are traumatised and terrified and who are being beaten up and killed are stuck. It is our duty, as the shadow Secretary of State has said, to sort out what is happening on the ground in Syria as part of an international effort.

[Hilary Benn]

I agree with the hon. Gentleman, who has great experience in these matters and is a true humanitarian. We need to put as much effort as possible into putting pressure on those who hold in their hands the future of this conflict and its resolution.

I want to reflect on what else this crisis and the wider points it raises tell us. It shows us that the Dublin agreement, which says that people entering Europe should seek asylum in the first country in which they arrive, and the Schengen agreement, which allows free movement but does not apply to the United Kingdom, are both creaking at the seams. It is unsustainable—this was the argument I made to the hon. Member for North Dorset (Simon Hoare) when he intervened earlier—for some countries, just because of their geographical position, to bear the full weight of responsibility for refugees when they clearly cannot cope.

It shows us that the idea that leaving the European Union would somehow make the problem go away is absolute nonsense. A refugee fleeing with her family and her children is not suddenly going to stop at Calais and say, “Ah! Britain’s not in the European Union any more. I’m not going to take another step forward.”

It reminds us that we live in an increasingly interdependent world: what happens in one country will affect all of us who live in another country, even if we happen to be far away. In the 21st century we cannot, as human beings, shut the doors and close the curtains and wish that the rest of the world would go away.

[Nicola Blackwood (Oxford West and Abingdon) (Con)]

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

[Hilary Benn]

I will give way and then I will bring my remarks to a conclusion.

[Nicola Blackwood]

A fleeing refugee will stop in the first place they feel safe, and the problem is that many refugees do not feel safe in the camps we are providing. We need to address the insecurity for women and girls in many of the camps. This is a short, medium and long-term problem that we are not yet solving.

[Hilary Benn]

The hon. Lady is absolutely right. Reflecting on my experience of visiting refugee camps in Darfur, that was absolutely the issue. Women were going out to collect firewood and were being attacked or raped. We must provide security. I know that the Government have done a lot of work on that issue in recent times and, again, I applaud them for that. It is more complicated than people thinking, “We are in a place where those who were killing us and who led us to flee are no longer to be found.” Insecurity is about how people feel in their minds about whether they, their family and their children are safe.

We are in this together and the way forward has to be through co-operation with our neighbours, including the rest of the European Union. We are confronted with the painful truth that the world has to be much more effective in dealing with conflicts like this before they turn into brutal and bloody civil wars. The responsibility to protect was meant to be about that, but let us be honest: in Syria, no responsibility has been taken and nobody has been protected.

We have to recognise that as well as refugees—I come to the point made by the hon. Member for Gravesham (Mr Holloway)—many, many other people are seeking to move across the globe to find a better life, in part because of conflict. They are coming not just from Syria, but from Eritrea, Afghanistan, Iraq, Nigeria, Somalia, Sudan and other countries where there is poverty and a lack of economic opportunity. We talk about economic migration, but that is the story of human history.

[Mr Holloway]

As a television reporter, I lived in the Sangatte camp in Calais and joined people who were being ethnically cleansed in the Balkans. There is an enormous difference between an economic migrant and a refugee. Surely the Prime Minister is absolutely right to focus our cash on places where we know people are refugees and on looking after them, rather than exposing our borders to hundreds of millions of people who are making the perfectly rational decision to seek a better life in Europe.

[Hilary Benn]

I am well aware that there is a difference; that is precisely the point I am making. However, I am trying to make a broader point about the challenge that this small and fragile planet of ours is facing and will face increasingly over the years ahead.

I am making the point that our human story is a story of economic migration. Whether anyone would describe William the Conqueror as an economic migrant, I do not know, but America, the land of my mother’s birth, certainly was built on economic migration. The story of movement within the European Union is also one of economic migration.

We must look ahead. The world’s population is 7.2 billion people. It is forecast that by the end of this century, it will be 11 billion people. Look at how the population of Nigeria is going to grow. We can already see the tensions and conflicts in countries across north Africa that are created by a lack of jobs, lack of hope and lack of opportunity. We see a generation in those countries who are looking at other parts of the world and seeing opportunity, jobs and hope for the future because of technology. This is the century in which every single one of us is having to lift our eyes to look beyond our own borders and see the lives of others.

Then there is the threat of global climate change. If people can no longer live where they were born because their houses are under water or because there is no water any more, they will do what human beings have done throughout human history: they will move to try to find a life somewhere else. The wave of economic migration we have seen in Europe these past few summers will be as nothing compared with the wave that is to come if we do not act on these issues—to tackle climate change, to fight conflict, to promote economic development and to fight poverty—so that people can build a life for themselves and their families in the land in which they were born.

All of these things are the expression of the fundamental interdependence of humankind. We will not be able to deal with them if we pull up the drawbridge, if we say that we have done enough, if we think that they are somebody else’s responsibility or if we deny entry to some people because they are supposedly of the wrong religion.

I spoke at the beginning about the reality of the mass movement of refugees, but the rest of us have to face our own painful reality. There has been unanimity of purpose and the expression of generosity so far in this debate, but let us be honest that there are other voices in Europe that are not so generous and who say, “It is too hard for us to help those in trouble.” We have a responsibility to say to them, “It is infinitely harder for those whose lives have been changed by circumstance— war, famine, disease—in the most profound way.” Our job—the Government’s job—is to tell the truth and to lead, because by doing so we have the best chance of giving full expression to that fundamental wish to help that represents the best of our character as human beings.