Immigration Bill

Jacob Rees-Mogg Excerpts

Thursday 30th January 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hanson]

It was just a point of information that deserves wider knowledge.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg (North East Somerset) (Con)]

On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. I note the custom in the House to give notice before making personal remarks involving another Member. Does that include this case?

[Madam Deputy Speaker]

With respect, the hon. Member for Gillingham and Rainham (Rehman Chishti) has, having heard the remark, replied to it. I think we have a score draw there, so shall we continue? And that’s not a point of order, either.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sarah Teather]

I think I probably do not share her utilitarian view of what the greater good is. I probably have a slightly different view about the common good and do not think that that includes causing serious or manifest or overwhelming harm to children. That is why the UK is a signatory to the UNCRC, and why we believe that the best interests of children should always take prime consideration and that the law should be blind in that regard, irrespective of someone’s immigration status. It would be a sad day if the House legislated to say that it is okay to cause serious harm to children and indeed that it is okay to do that in order to pacify a Conservative party rebellion. That is not a good reason for legislating.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

I wonder whether the hon. Lady is placing the blame on the wrong person. If someone is deported for committing a serious crime, it is the fault of that person, not of the state for following the consequence of what that person has chosen to do.

--- Later in debate ---

[Pete Wishart]

Yes, and I will tell the hon. Gentleman something else: an independent Scotland will sign up fully to the European convention on human rights and take our responsibility in that regard very seriously. We will not be cavalier, as this Government seem to be in their approach to some of these very important human rights. I look forward to the day when Scotland, as an independent nation, will take very seriously its responsibilities to protect our citizens and ensure that they are properly protected by international laws and regulations.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

I do not understand why the hon. Gentleman does not have the courage to claim that Scotland would be the successor state and would therefore inherit membership of all those bodies, leaving England, Wales and Northern Ireland free from the European Union?

[Pete Wishart]

I invite the hon. Gentleman, who I know takes a great interest in these matters—

--- Later in debate ---

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

I must confess that the image of my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary being a puppet on a string for Nigel Farage is one that is new to most Members of the House, and one that seems rather far from the truth. I wish to speak to two new clauses: new clause 15, tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Esher and Walton (Mr Raab), and which I have signed; and new clause 18.

May I first say how fortunate it is that the Government and the authorities-that-be have ensured that new clause 15 has come up for debate this afternoon? It is crucial that the House of Commons should get to debate that which the House of Commons wishes to debate, and 105 signatures to a new clause is a clear statement of that desire. The business managers therefore deserve to be commended for their wisdom in allowing that to happen, and those in even higher positions of authority—I am thinking of Mr Speaker, in particular—follow in a fine tradition of Speakers who have ensured that the will of the House has been allowed to be expressed and a view come to. That is good fortune for us all.

I must confess that I disagree fundamentally with the case made by the hon. Member for Brent Central (Sarah Teather). It seems to me that part of our system of liberty is the fact that liberty comes with responsibilities. One of those responsibilities is that if a person’s actions are illegal, a punishment will follow, and that punishment is their responsibility and their fault. They cannot get out of it because other people might be indirectly affected by it. That is not what their actions have caused; their actions have caused them to go to prison, for a minimum of a year according to the new clause, and then to be deported because they were foreign criminals and therefore had no automatic right to be here in the first place. That is an important and fair principle.

If the alternative view is taken, which is that there will be knock-on effects on other people and therefore it is unfair and unreasonable to allow a punishment to take place, then no punishment can ever take place and we can have no proper rule of law in this country. Whenever somebody commits a crime and is likely to be sent to prison, they will say that their family cannot cope with that and that it will be unfair, and therefore their sentence must be brought down and they must be free to carry on their life of crime. I fundamentally disagree with the hon. Member for Brent Central and think that the provision in the new clause is both proportionate and sensible.

[Mike Thornton]

I very much appreciate the hon. Gentleman giving way. I believe that he has misheard my hon. Friend the Member for Brent Central (Sarah Teather), because I know that he would not deliberately misinterpret her comments. She was by no means saying that someone should not be punished because they have children; she was saying that, when considering them for deportation, we should properly weigh in the balance the genuine difficulties and harm that could be done to children. By no means was she suggesting—I hope that I am right—that we should stop punishment. That was no part of her argument whatsoever.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for his helpful clarification. The problem is that deportation is part of the punishment. The logic of the argument of the Member for Brent Central is that if someone’s punishment had an effect on their children that led not to “manifest and overwhelming harm” but to either manifest harm or overwhelming harm, it would be fundamentally and in principle unfair on the children, so that part of the punishment should not be carried out. Surely, however, it might equally be said that someone’s imprisonment would have an effect of manifest but not “manifest and overwhelming” harm on the children. If such an argument was accepted, the whole criminal justice concept of punishing people who have committed offences would become extremely difficult. Deportation is therefore simply a reasonable part of the overall punishment for someone who commits a serious offence.

I listened with great interest to the debate about the status of new clause 15 in European and UK law. A principle that we should always state and restate in this House is that, by its very nature, Parliament cannot pass a law that is illegal. We can pass laws that contravene international obligations or that we may decide our diplomatic relations require us to remove or repeal, but Parliament cannot pass an illegal law.

That point is important to remember, because there is a tyranny of lawyers. They give people advice stating that they think x or y, but until it has been judged by a court, that is no more than advice, which may be right or wrong. If my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary has been advised by the Home Office lawyer that the new clause does not meet the requirements of the European convention on human rights, that does not question the right of this House to pass it into law: it is our right to do so, and then to consider the judgment that may or may not be made by the European Court of Human Rights. That of course leaves open the question of whether the Home Secretary can sign the declaration that the Bill is compatible with the European convention on human rights. I am delighted that she is returning to her place as I say that.

My right hon. Friend has the right to go to another lawyer. When given legal advice that they do not like, many people see whether they can find one who gives different advice. Amazingly enough, when they pay a better lawyer, they sometimes get better advice. I hope that even in an era of austerity Her Majesty’s Government may seek out some better lawyers who can give improved advice that is more in line with what my hon. Friend the Member for Esher and Walton said.

The question is therefore only one of incompatibility, not of legality. I hope that the Opposition Front Bench team will also think about that. Whether the new clause is accepted and passed into law is not fundamentally a legal decision, because the legal position is as yet unproved—it has not been tested in the courts—so it is a political decision or a political statement about what hon. Members on both sides of the House think is the right way to treat people from foreign countries who have committed serious crimes. I would take the political decision that it is right to expel them from this country, and that it would be wrong to do so only if extraordinary factors meant that they ought to have the right to stay.

[Yasmin Qureshi]

It is on exactly that point that some Opposition Members have concerns about new clause 15. As the hon. Gentleman says, there may be exceptional circumstances that mean a decision should be made not to deport somebody, but the new clause tabled by the hon. Member for Esher and Walton (Mr Raab) would take away exactly such discretion, because it says, “If you get one year’s imprisonment, you’re out.”

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

As always, the hon. Lady makes an excellent point, but it is a question about which bit of discretion would be taken away. The courts would retain discretion if there was a threat of harm or a threat to life and limb, as my hon. Friend the Member for Esher and Walton pointed out. Discretion would be circumscribed only in very specific cases relating to article 8, and that would be done because the courts appear to have made some quite eccentric decisions. What has really brought this to the attention of the British public is the huge backlog of deportations—4,000 people are apparently waiting to be deported—and the fact that a very high number of challenges are brought purely on the basis of article 8 rights, which cannot therefore involve people in fear of torture or of harm to life and limb. I do not think that anybody in the House wants to deport people at risk to life and limb. As a nation, we believe in offering refugee status to people genuinely at threat, but we are not in favour of the exaggeration of spurious rights.

As I have said, the decision is a political decision, not a legal one. It is for this House to make a political choice about how our criminal justice system works, what rights belong to people who have committed very serious crimes and how far such rights should go. If it became a legal decision—if it were taken to the courts—we would find out at a later stage whether the European Court of Human Rights thought it was compatible with the convention. The House would then make a second choice, which would be whether to maintain today’s political decision or reverse it to be compatible with the convention. That is not the choice before us today. This is a routine exercise of parliamentary sovereignty in adding to a Bill a provision that may become law and be justiciable at a later stage.

I know that a lot of other Members want to speak, so I will be brief on new clause 18. I have some concerns about it. I am perhaps rather romantic in my view of what it means to be a British subject. I always thought that Palmerston got it right on the Don Pacifico affair—the “Civis Romanus sum” principle. Once any one of us has a passport that says we are British, we are as British as anybody else, whether they were born here or got their passport five minutes ago. It is incredibly important that there is equality before the law for all Her Majesty’s subjects who are living in this country and have right of residence here.

I worry that if we give the Government the ability to take passports away from a certain category of British subject but not from others, it will create a potential unfairness and a second category of citizen. There are Members of the House who were born abroad and have been naturalised and, on occasion, they may vote against the Government, which I hope the Whips will not consider serious enough reason to remove their passport. The fundamental underlying principle of equality of all Her Majesty’s subjects is important. I am always nervous about giving the Executive relatively arbitrary powers, because they are the ones that can be most misused. Once a passport is in somebody’s hands, they ought to be no different from anybody else in any legal respect.

Crucially, there may well already be laws that could deal with the problem in another way. If people have committed an offence so serious, important and threatening to the life of the nation that their passport should be confiscated, surely they have committed some other crime for which they could be charged, dragged through the courts, perhaps found guilty by a jury and then sentenced accordingly, with the penalty handed down in the right and proper way and their rights and liberties as subjects being maintained. They may have committed treason if they have done something so serious that they are to have their passport removed from them.

I will not oppose the new clause, but I wished to raise those concerns. I understand that the approach has been agreed because it will not affect many people. That is fine—I am glad it will not have widespread application—but what message does it send to the nation at large?

[Jeremy Corbyn]

The hon. Gentleman makes a fair point in saying that not many people will be affected immediately, but once one gives a Minister an executive power to deny someone citizenship, who knows how many citizenships will be taken away in future?

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

The House may be surprised to know that I am in almost complete agreement with the hon. Gentleman, which is rare—I think unique. One should always be suspicious of the arbitrary power of the state. As we saw with today’s proceedings about whether there would even be a vote on new clause 15, the arbitrary power of the state can sometimes be misused. The Executive sometimes have to come under pressure before they give way and allow the proper proceedings to take place. I much prefer a legal process, and I do not want to make the statement that people who have got their citizenship more recently than I did are in any sense lesser citizens. I fundamentally do not believe that. Anybody who is fortunate enough to be a subject of Her Majesty is an equal subject of Her Majesty with all others.

[Mr Brooks Newmark (Braintree) (Con)]

On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. It has just come to my notice that my name is on the list of those supporting the new clause and amendment tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Esher and Walton (Mr Raab). I would like to make it clear that I have not spoken to my hon. Friend, nor given him my written consent to be named on his amendments. Can you advise me, Madam Deputy Speaker, on how I can get my name excised from the record, and will you look into tightening up the rules, such as by requiring a Member’s written consent before names are added to amendments in future?