Illegal Migration Bill

Debate between Jonathan Gullis and Yvette Cooper

2nd reading
Monday 13th March 2023 Commons Chamber

[Yvette Cooper]

Indeed, I am very happy to. I hope the hon. Member will support our proposal for a cross-border police unit to go after the criminal gangs and bring up those convictions, which have totally collapsed on the Conservatives’ watch. I hope too that he will support our proposals for a fast track for Albania and other safe countries, which Ministers are not doing. [Interruption.] This is interesting, because the Immigration Minister says, “Oh, we are already doing it,” except that they are not. Only 1% of the cases from Albania have been decided. The Home Office is not taking fast-track decisions on safe countries such as Albania, for all the promises the Government made. Even where they have the powers to take action, they are not doing it. I hope the hon. Member will also support our proposals to work on not just return agreements with France and other countries, but family reunion arrangements and reforms to resettlement schemes to make those work.

Instead, we have a Bill that is a con and that will make things worse. We have been clear that the Home Secretary has nowhere that she can say she is going to return people to. Last year, the Government made exactly the same promises when they said that 18,000 people would be inadmissible because they had travelled through safe countries, yet just 21 people were returned. Of those the Home Secretary said were inadmissible, just 21 were returned. Now she wants to say that everyone is inadmissible, but if she still manages to return just 0.1% of them, the reality is that she will have tens of thousands of people left. She is simply creating misinformation and conning those on her Back Benches, who have been cheering for the things she says but will see them unravel in practice.

The Home Secretary says this legislation means that she can return people to designated safe countries such as Albania, but she can do that already. She does not need this law to do that. She already has the power to fast-track Albanian and other cases. We have been calling for it for months, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees proposed it two years ago and the Prime Minister even promised it before Christmas, but it is not happening and 99% of those cases are still in limbo.

Just 15 people who had arrived in small boats were returned last month. That is the equivalent of 180 a year, when over 10,000 people came from the designated safe country of Albania. The real problem is that Conservative Home Office Ministers just do not have any grip on the system that they are supposed to be in charge of.

[Jonathan Gullis (Stoke-on-Trent North) (Con)]

My focus goes back to clause 49, which looks specifically at interim measures of the Strasbourg court. We know that those measures have no actual effect in UK law, but UK courts may take them into account when passing their own judgments. Do the shadow Home Secretary and the Labour party support me in wanting to see that clause beefed up to make sure that the Home Secretary is under a statutory duty to remove unlawful migrants?

[Yvette Cooper]

Perhaps the hon. Gentleman should have put that question to the Home Secretary, because he appears to disagree with his own Conservative Government’s policy and to be off on another bit of freelancing for himself, further undermining any possibility of getting international agreements, whether on returns or on anything else. He is planning to make it even harder to get the kinds of returns agreements we need and to get the kind of international co-operation we need as well.

Ministers say that they plan to lock everyone up before they are returned, and the Bill says that everyone is included. Children, unaccompanied teenagers, pregnant women, torture victims, trafficking victims, and people such as the Afghan interpreters and young Hongkongers we promised to help—all locked up because they arrive without the right papers. The Home Secretary has not said where, or how long for. It might possibly be at RAF Scampton, but the Tory right hon. Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh) does not want that. It might possibly be at MDP Wethersfield, but the Tory right hon. Member for Braintree (James Cleverly)—the Home Secretary’s Cabinet colleague, the Foreign Secretary —does not want that either. In other circumstances, there might be pressure on the Home Secretary to put the site in her own constituency, except for the fact that she does not actually have one right now.

Public Order Bill

Debate between Jonathan Gullis and Yvette Cooper

2nd reading
Monday 23rd May 2022 Commons Chamber

[Yvette Cooper]

I will in due course.

The Home Secretary said to us this afternoon:

“From day one, this Government have put the safety and the interests of the law-abiding majority first.”

She claimed that she was prosecuting more criminals, but the opposite is the case. Since she came to office in 2019, crime has gone up by 18% and prosecutions have gone down by 18%, so I have to ask her what planet she is living on. Just because she says things stridently, that does not make them true. When she wonders about being on the side of criminals, maybe she should remember that it is a Conservative Government, and a Conservative Home Secretary, who are literally letting more criminals off—literally. There are hundreds of thousands’ fewer prosecutions every single year than there were under the Labour Government. Prosecutions, cautions and community penalties are going down, even now when crime is going up, and that genuinely means that rapists, abusers, serious offenders, thieves and thugs are all less likely to be prosecuted than they were seven years ago. There is just a one in 20 chance of someone being prosecuted on this Home Secretary’s watch.

The Home Secretary said too that she would not “stand by” while antisocial behaviour caused misery for others, but she is. There are 7,000 fewer neighbourhood police than there were six years ago, and the police are failing to send officers to more than half of all reported antisocial behaviour offences. People and communities across the country are expressing serious concerns about antisocial behaviour being ignored time and again by this Home Secretary.

[Jonathan Gullis]

rose—

[Yvette Cooper]

I will give way first to the right hon. Member for New Forest East (Dr Lewis), and then to the hon. Gentleman in due course.

[Yvette Cooper]

I do not think this is about bellowing; I think this is about serious offences and the committing of crimes.

[Jonathan Gullis]

I have been listening to the right hon. Lady, but I would appreciate some clarity. Does she condemn the behaviour and actions of Insulate Britain, Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil?

[Yvette Cooper]

I was going to come on to exactly that, because Insulate Britain’s motorway protests were hugely irresponsible and, frankly, dangerous. They put lives at risk, which is why the Department for Transport was absolutely right to put an injunction in place and why the police were right to take prosecution action. Nobody has a right to put other people’s lives at risk with dangerous protests.

What is the Home Secretary offering today? She offers a Bill that targets peaceful protesters and passers-by but fails to safeguard key infrastructure and does nothing to tackle violence against women, nothing to support victims of crime and nothing to increase prosecution rates or to cut crime. This Bill fails on all counts. It will not make our national infrastructure more resilient, and it will not make it easier to prevent serious disruption by a minority of protesters. Instead, it will target peaceful protesters and passers-by who are not disrupting anything or anyone at all.

There should be shared principles throughout the House on this issue. All of us, whatever our party and whatever our political views, should believe that, in a democracy, people need the freedom to speak out against authority and to make their views heard. Yes, that includes bellowing if they feel so strongly about an issue.

We have historic freedoms and rights to speak out, to gather and to protest against the things that Governments or organisations, public or private, do that we disagree with. That goes for protesters with whom we strongly disagree as well as for protesters whose views and values we support, because that is what democracy is all about. But we should also share the view that no one has the right, no matter what they may think they are protesting about, to threaten, to harass or to intimidate others. No one has the right to protest in ways that are dangerous or risk the safety or the lives of others. Nor should they be able to cause serious disruption to essential services and vital infrastructure on which all of us in society depend.

That is why Labour has long defended the rights to speak out, to protest, to be heard and to argue for change, and it is why we called for greater protection for women and staff from intimidatory protests outside abortion clinics. It is why we called for greater protection from harassment and threats outside schools and vaccine clinics after the threatening antivax protests. It is why we made common-sense proposals to give local authorities the powers to act which the Government initially voted against. It is why we condemned the highly irresponsible protests on motorways because, whatever we think about the cause pursued by Insulate Britain or any other organisation, no one should put lives at risk like that, which is why we supported stronger sentences for those wilfully obstructing major roads. It is also why we criticised those involved in Just Stop Oil for causing serious damage and trying to disrupt supplies to petrol stations, which could have stopped people getting to work or pushed up prices in the middle of a cost of living crisis. Those protests were not just against the law, but counterproductive; at a time when they should have been trying to persuade people, they alienated people instead. That is why we called for national action to ensure that speedy injunctions were in place to prevent serious disruption.