Jo Stevens
Main Page: Jo Stevens (Labour - Cardiff East)Department Debates - View all Jo Stevens's debates with the Home Office
(5 years, 11 months ago)
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Sajid Javid
I say to the hospitality industry and others who have concerns about the end of freedom of movement that it is perfectly possible to have our own independent immigration policy without freedom of movement, as many other countries with successful hospitality sectors do, while catering for the needs of all sectors. That is what this balanced immigration package achieves. We have been speaking to many different industrial sectors, including that sector, and we will continue to listen, but I believe that what we have set out will absolutely meet their needs.
Jo Stevens (Cardiff Central) (Lab)
The Secretary of State has just said that there will be no cap on international students, yet the Government include international students in their migration targets. How will he square that circle?
Sajid Javid
First, the decision about what is included in immigration statistics and what is not is an independent decision for the Office for National Statistics. I have discussed the issue with it and last year we asked the Migration Advisory Committee to look into it. Its recommendation was to keep the number in the statistics, reflecting the fact that, although most students leave the country, there is an impact on infrastructure and public services. I am very sympathetic to the issue the hon. Lady raises, but I remind her that it is an independent decision for the Office for National Statistics.
Jo Stevens (Cardiff Central) (Lab)
I will be voting against this deal. Based on the substantial number of my constituents who have contacted me about this vote, it seems I will be doing so with their overwhelming support—nearly 95% of them have urged me to vote against. We are now a month on from when this vote should have taken place—a month that has achieved nothing, much like the last 932 days since the narrow outcome of the referendum. It was an advisory referendum, not a binding one. It was a referendum that disenfranchised more than 4 million people, one in which no 16 or 17-year-old was allowed to vote and no EU citizens living here and working here—they are part of the fabric of this country and society—were allowed to vote. The ballot asked just one question—whether to remain or leave. It did not ask how we should leave, nor what should happen afterwards.
And 932 days on, we now know, because we have facts, that the referendum was drenched in illegality by both the Vote Leave and the Leave.EU campaigns. We know that electoral law was broken, that campaign spending limits were breached and that impermissible foreign donations came through online platforms. We have those facts from the Electoral Commission and the Information Commissioner, and, following the work of those regulators, investigative journalists and our Select Committee on Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, which has spent a year painstakingly investigating widespread evidence, the National Crime Agency is investigating Arron Banks, the largest political donor in UK history, and senior figures of the Leave.EU campaign, because there are reasonable grounds to suspect that Banks was not the true source of £8 million in funding to the Leave.EU campaign. That is important—it should not be dismissed as sour grapes—because it raises really serious concerns, which this Government have deliberately chosen to ignore, about the legality and the validity of the referendum outcome.
I voted against triggering article 50. In my speech in that debate, I said that the former Prime Minister, David Cameron, had behaved recklessly in his approach to the reform negotiations at the EU, and that he was
“a man who put himself and his party before the national interest, and who gambled our country’s safety, future prosperity and long-standing European and wider international relationships to save his party and his premiership from imploding”.—[Official Report, 31 January 2017; Vol. 620, c. 895.]
He failed miserably.
Two years on, I regret to say that those words, and those actions, can equally be applied to the current Prime Minister. This whole period has been an exercise in how not to negotiate. Of all the ironies, yesterday’s desperate phone calls by the Prime Minister to some trade union leaders—who are professional, expert negotiators from whom she could have learned so much—were the first contact she has made with them.
Jo Stevens
I absolutely agree with my right hon. Friend: it is astonishing. The refusal to work not just with the TUC and the unions but with Opposition Members to develop a negotiating strategy that would secure a deal in the interests of the whole of the UK and each of our four constituent nations has been grossly negligent. The strategy has not been one of strong leadership. Stubbornness and failure to listen and to engage are the hallmarks of weak leadership, and they have led this country into this complete mess.
The best course of action for the country’s future stability, economy and security would, of course, be to revoke article 50. I suspect that there are very many colleagues across the House who would privately accept that but who do not feel that they could openly commit to supporting revocation at the moment. However, there is no majority in this House or the country for no deal. In the absence of that, or a general election and change of Government, the right course of action must be to ask the electorate what they now think. I know that is what the majority of my constituents want, in the absence of revoking article 50. Nearly 90% of those who have contacted me have told me that. I know this because I have been asking them for their views since 2016, and they have been giving them to me. Every published poll in the past six months also confirms that.
People are allowed to change their minds. The referendum result in 2016 was not a result in perpetuity. In the words of one of the Government’s former Brexit Ministers: “It’s not a democracy if you can’t change your mind.” In Wales, we would never have had devolution and the creation of the National Assembly had we not had a second referendum, in which people did change their minds.
I will finish on this point. All the irresponsible, dangerous and inflammatory talk that we have heard in recent months about civil unrest, riots and treachery if we vote down this deal next week and have a people’s vote has to stop. Every time I come into this Chamber, I look at Jo’s shield and think of her bravery and determination during her time here, and what she must have faced in those final moments confronted by extreme right-wing violence. We cannot allow a small minority of fascist thugs to undermine our democracy. They are using Brexit for the advancement of their far-right ideology, and we all have to oppose it.
In the vote next week, each of us will make our own judgment as to what is right in the interests of our constituents and our country. I am very clear about what I feel is right, and I will vote against this deal.
The Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Mr Jeremy Hunt)
What excellent timing, Mr Speaker, because the right hon. Lady has just said—I think—that Labour does want to end free movement, without then explaining how it will deliver frictionless trade with no more barriers than we currently have, which is Labour’s policy, even though she knows the European Union will never accept that. I do not think we will take any lessons on consistency from the Opposition.
We have had an excellent debate today and I commend all hon. Members who have spoken. It is a shame that the shadow Home Secretary is not in her place for the end of the debate. I thank the right hon. Member for Islington South and Finsbury (Emily Thornberry) for her reference to one of my favourite childhood films, “Lassie Come Home”. Of course in that story, Lassie was given to a member of the aristocracy, the Duke of Rudling, but Lassie was not happy and she broke free, without any kind of referendum, and came home. There is a lesson for all of us.
Today’s debate has focused on immigration and the central point, made so eloquently by my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary, is that leaving the EU allows the Government, for the first time in almost 40 years, to respond to public concern by restoring sovereign control over immigration policy. Part of that, of course, will be to be generous to EU citizens who live among us and contribute so magnificently to our national life.
If the shadow Home Secretary had been here, I would have reassured her, as I do the hon. Members for Ealing Central and Acton (Dr Huq) and for Oxford West and Abingdon (Layla Moran) and others who raised the rights of EU citizens in this country. Part two of the withdrawal agreement describes how EU citizens currently living in the UK will enjoy broadly the same rights after we leave. Indeed, if we leave without a deal, the Government have made it clear that our position will be the same. While the shadow Home Secretary was correct to remind us that we are talking about the lives of real people—our friends, colleagues and neighbours—I respectfully suggest that it does not help to say that there is any doubt whatsoever about the status of EU citizens, when in fact there is no doubt. The hon. Member for South Shields (Mrs Lewell-Buck) spoke passionately about the effect of uncontrolled migration on her constituency and how it risked dividing communities. She, along with many Government Members, will therefore understand the significance of restoring parliamentary sovereignty.
We have not talked just about migration today. I commend my right hon. Friend the Member for Mid Sussex (Sir Nicholas Soames), my hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex (Sir Bernard Jenkin), my right hon. Friend the Member for Rayleigh and Wickford (Mr Francois) and my hon. Friends the Members for Romford (Andrew Rosindell), for Rochford and Southend East (James Duddridge), for Southend West (Sir David Amess), for Bosworth (David Tredinnick) and for Mole Valley (Sir Paul Beresford) for emphasising the obligation that falls on all of us to honour the referendum decision. Although I did not hear all those speeches, one of the most powerful contributions came from my hon. Friend the Member for Hornchurch and Upminster (Julia Lopez), who said that if we do not deliver Brexit, it will confirm people’s deepest fears about the conceit of the political class.
To her credit, when the shadow Home Secretary was here, she was clear that we have to honour the referendum vote. What the Government say to Opposition Members is, “If you really do want to honour the vote, stop playing parliamentary games and remember that leave-voting Labour voters will never forgive the Labour party if it uses parliamentary procedures in a way that ends up stopping Brexit.”
I say to the hon. Members for Ealing Central and Acton and for Liverpool, Wavertree (Luciana Berger) and others who called for a second referendum that they risk doing profound damage to the integrity of our political system. It cannot be right to ask the British people to vote again in the hope of producing a different result. They should listen to the wise words of my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Dorset and North Poole (Michael Tomlinson), who talked about the breach of trust there would be between politicians and the people who gave them their jobs if we failed to honour the referendum result.
Jo Stevens
The Foreign Secretary has spoken about trust and validity. Does he accept that, as I said in my speech, the illegality during the referendum has already caused mistrust? People doubt the validity of the outcome of the referendum because of the things that went on, which have been found by our regulators, the Information Commissioner and the Electoral Commission.
Mr Hunt
This is a matter for the Electoral Commission, but exaggerated claims were made on both sides of that debate, as indeed—I think this is fair to say—they are generally made on both sides in general election campaigns. However, people listened to those claims on both sides, and they came to a democratic decision, and that is the foundation of trust in our country between politicians and the people who give them their jobs.