Calais

Jeremy Corbyn Excerpts

Tuesday 14th July 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mrs May]

I assure my hon. Friend that we are constantly looking to see whether there are ways in which we can improve the action we are taking, but we need to approach it across a wide variety of areas of action, not just what happens at the ports. We will of course continue to look at what action needs to be taken in the ports.

[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Lab)]

In the later part of the Home Secretary’s statement, for which I thank her, she drew attention to the wider question of desperate migrant people around the world—my Friend the Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper) did the same. Are we not facing a global refugee crisis of similar proportions to that which took place after the second world war? We see the tragic, awful symptoms in the camp in Calais, in the Mediterranean and in many other places. Does it not require a much stronger, bigger and more humanitarian global response, possibly through the United Nations as well as through the European Union? Many people are destitute, desperate and fleeing from the war in Syria and many other conflicts. The problem will not be solved by turning people back. It will be solved by looking at the cause of the crisis and providing a high level of humanitarian support. I realise that we have given a great deal of support to Syrian refugees, but clearly more has to be done globally.

[Mrs May]

The hon. Gentleman is right that we are seeing significant movements of people in various parts of the world. We focus on those moving across the Mediterranean, but there are significant movements in the far east—we have seen lives lost when people move on boats there. It is important for us to look at what is causing the movements of those people. As I have said, that is why we will be looking at how we use our aid budget, and at how the European Union uses its budget, in those source countries. As regards the people we are relocating from Syria, we are working with the United Nations—we are working with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees—to ensure that we provide support to the most vulnerable.