Business of the House
Debate between Joanna Cherry and Angus Brendan MacNeil(5 years, 1 month ago)
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Joanna Cherry
I would, and that is a point that I am coming on to address. I must point out to the hon. Gentleman, however, that the Scotland Act was indeed an unbelievable travesty because, when it passed through this House, 56 of the 59 MPs who represented Scotland here were Scottish National party MPs, yet not a single one of our amendments was accepted. So in fact, the present system can be a travesty, without having this process tacked on to it.
Angus Brendan MacNeil (Na h-Eileanan an Iar) (SNP)
I do not want to wander too far from the current matter, but just a week before the independence referendum, David Cameron said that if Scotland voted to remain in the United Kingdom, all forms of devolution would be there and all would be possible. When it came to our amendments, however, none was able to be there and none was accepted.
Joanna Cherry
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Many promises were made by David Cameron, Ruth Davidson and others during the Scottish independence referendum that have not been kept.
EU: Withdrawal and Future Relationship (Motions)
Debate between Joanna Cherry and Angus Brendan MacNeil(5 years, 1 month ago)
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Joanna Cherry (Edinburgh South West) (SNP)
I rise with the endorsement of the Father of the House, the right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe (Mr Clarke), for my motion (L)—for which I am grateful to him—and that of my hon. Friend the Member for Na h-Eileanan an Iar (Angus Brendan MacNeil), who has prosecuted the issue of revocation with such vigour in the House over the past few months. I am glad to say that my motion is supported by all parties in the House. It has the official backing of the Scottish National party, the Liberal Democrats, Plaid Cymru and the Independent Group. Many Labour Members have told me that they intend to support the motion, and I hope very much that the Labour party will reconsider its decision not to whip on it.
Angus Brendan MacNeil
Surely anyone who has said in the House “No to no deal” must support motion (L), because it gives a mechanism to that—namely, revocation.
Joanna Cherry
Absolutely. If there is one thing that we can achieve this afternoon by supporting this motion, it is categorically ruling out no deal. The motion is a revocation backstop. It stipulates that if within two days of exit day we have no agreed deal and Parliament does not positively approve no deal, the Government must revoke the article 50 notice, and we will stay in the EU. But it is important to understand that revocation does not mean that we could never notify the EU of our intention to leave again. That is incorrect, as Members will see if they read the decision of the Grand Chamber in the Court of Justice of the European Union on the case that I and others brought.
European Union (Withdrawal) Act
Debate between Joanna Cherry and Angus Brendan MacNeil(5 years, 3 months ago)
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Angus Brendan MacNeil (Na h-Eileanan an Iar) (SNP)
The Attorney General admitted that there are two problems with the deal. It is a bit like a yachtsman who, when seeing his yacht on the rocks, says, “That anchor chain was great. Only two links were bad.” That is what he is giving the House. It is a disaster, and well he knows it. My second point is that he misunderstood the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Kilmarnock and Loudoun (Alan Brown). He was not talking about fish being caught, but fish as a commodity once caught. If it is landed in Northern Ireland, it is in a more advantaged position for export to Europe than fish caught and then landed in Scotland for export to Europe. He should recognise that and be straight with my hon. Friend, which I am sure he was trying to be, but he misunderstood the point.
Refugee Family Reunion
Debate between Joanna Cherry and Angus Brendan MacNeil(5 years, 10 months ago)
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Joanna Cherry
Yes—credit where credit is due. That said, there is a lot more that we could do to help refugees in this country. We have heard some very thoughtful contributions about the pros and cons of doing that. I am very firmly on the side of my hon. Friend, whose Bill is a small step in the right direction, but there is still a lot more to be done.
Earlier, the hon. Member for Bristol West (Thangam Debbonaire) mentioned the size of the displacement problem that the world faces at the moment. The UNHCR reports that the world is witnessing the highest levels of displacement on record, with an unprecedented 68.5 million people forced from their homes around the world. Among those, there are nearly 22.5 million refugees, over half of whom are under the age of 18. European Union statistics show a significant increase in the number of asylum applications over the past few years, and we need only to switch on our televisions every night to see the impact of the refugee crisis on Europe and the European Union.
As my hon. Friend the Member for Cumbernauld, Kilsyth and Kirkintilloch East (Stuart C. McDonald) said, current rules for family reunion in the United Kingdom are too narrowly drawn, and the private Member’s Bill before this House, and that in the other place promoted by Baroness Hamwee, who I am pleased to call a friend, try to widen eligibility. At the moment, immigration rules state that
“adult refugees in the UK can only be joined by their spouse/partner and their dependent children who are under the age of 18.”
No provision is made for dependants who are over 18 and that can—and has—resulted in, for example, a sole 18-year-old girl who has fled her country being left in a very vulnerable situation in a refugee camp. I urge hon. Members and the Government to support my hon. Friend’s Bill. It is modest but, as the hon. Member for Enfield, Southgate (Bambos Charalambous) said, it will make a significant difference to a number of people.
The Bill would expand the criteria for who qualifies as a family member for the purpose of refugee reunion, so that young people over the age of 18, and elderly parents, can live in safety with their families in the UK. It would also give unaccompanied refugee children in the UK the right to sponsor their close family to come and join them. Importantly, it would reintroduce legal aid so that refugees who have lost everything have the support they need to afford and navigate the complicated process of being reunited with their families. I ask the UK Government to support the Bill and to take a leaf out of Scotland’s book in two respects—first, because we still have legal aid in Scotland for such situations and, secondly, because of our refugee resettlement and integration programme.
I would like briefly to address the “pull or push” argument that has been mentioned this afternoon, because I am aware of two reports that emanate from this House that show no evidence for such a pull factor. The first report was written with the assistance of the Human Trafficking Foundation and published in the House of Lords last summer. It was an independent inquiry into the situation of separated and unaccompanied minors in parts of Europe. If hon. Members look at it, they will see that it found no evidence for the pull factor. Indeed, it referred back to an earlier report that was published by the Lords EU Committee in 2016, which found absolutely no evidence to support the argument for a pull factor. It said that, if there were a pull factor of the kind sometimes posited, one would expect to see evidence of that in other EU member states that participate in the family reunification directive and have more generous family reunion rules than we do. The Lords Committee, and the Human Trafficking Foundation—two separate reports, a year apart—found no evidence to that end. We should therefore proceed on the basis of evidence from reputable reports, rather than the impressions of hon. Members, important as those may be.
It is important that hon. Members visit refugee camps abroad—I visited the camps in Calais and Dunkirk when they still existed, as well as one in Palestine, and I hope to go to Jordan later this year with Lord Dubs. It is important that MPs visit those camps and bring their experiences home, but our experiences and impressions cannot substitute for evidence from careful reports.
Windrush
Debate between Joanna Cherry and Angus Brendan MacNeil(6 years ago)
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Joanna Cherry (Edinburgh South West) (SNP)
Earlier this week, I welcomed the Home Secretary to his place and congratulated him on his appointment. I mentioned that it is a good thing he is the first BAME person to hold this great office of state, and I want to make it quite clear that the Scottish National party absolutely condemns any racist abuse he may have received from whatever quarter. As somebody who is on the receiving end of a daily diet of anti-Catholic and anti-gay abuse from the hard right in Scotland and across the UK, I know what it feels like to receive such abuse from whatever quarter, so he has my absolute support in resisting it. I thank the Home Secretary for his courtesy in explaining to me that he would not be able to stay for my speech because he has a very important Cabinet Committee meeting to attend. How much many of us would love to be a fly on the wall in that meeting.
The right hon. Member for Hastings and Rye (Amber Rudd), for whom I have a lot of respect, resigned as Secretary of State for the Home Department on account of having misled Parliament about her knowledge of the removal targets, but nobody has as yet been held to account for the policies that led to the imposition of those removal targets and caused the Windrush scandal.
Others who have Windrush constituents will speak eloquently today about the details of their position. I want to speak about the real, underlying reasons why this scandal has occurred and to say to the new Home Secretary, as represented here by his Immigration Minister, that he will be judged by this Parliament, and by the public watching outwith this Parliament, on the degree to which he has the gumption to address the underlying causes of the Windrush scandal rather than just fiddle around with the outcome.
What has happened to the Windrush generation is not an accident, it is not a mistake, it is not an aberration and it is not the work of over-zealous Home Office officials. It is, in fact, the direct result of the Prime Minister’s imposition of a wholly unrealistic net migration target and of the contortions that have to be gone through to achieve that target, which, incidentally, has as yet not been achieved.
Angus Brendan MacNeil (Na h-Eileanan an Iar) (SNP)
There is another dimension to the hostile policy, which I have seen in fishing on the west coast. It is not directly impacting on Windrush, but it is a similar aspect of the mentality at the Home Office. For eight years, we have been waiting to get non-European economic area labour in. Everybody wants the Home Office to give us a piece of paper that will keep the Home Office happy, but we just cannot get it. That is symptomatic of the Home Office that has led to Windrush.
Joanna Cherry
I wholly agree with my hon. Friend. There are many people in the United Kingdom at the moment who make a great contribution to our society, but who are being made to feel very unwelcome at best and are being deported at worst, simply because they cannot evidence their right to be here.
These people have come to light as a result of another policy of the Prime Minister’s—the hostile environment policy, which is a racist policy. I say that quite clearly: it is racist. When people of a certain ethnic background, or with a name that does not look British, apply for a tenancy or a job, that is when they come to light, and that is when suspicion falls upon them. It is absolutely disgraceful. That is why, at Prime Minister’s questions this morning, despite the howls of derision from Conservative Members, I asked the Prime Minister to apologise for the policies that have caused this. I am still waiting for that apology, and I will be asking for it constantly. Policy has caused this problem, not mistakes—not mistakes by officials and not even mistakes by politicians. It is the direct imposition of policy that has caused this problem.