Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill

Josh Simons Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 10th February 2025 Commons Chamber

[Josh Simons (Makerfield) (Lab)]

As others have spoken about the specific measures in this Bill, I will take a step back and talk about the ideas that underpin it. There have been grumblings tonight that we are aping Conservative Members and that we are being asked to pretend, to delude ourselves and to dupe the public somehow into thinking that we support strong and controlled borders as a precondition for managed migration. I support this Bill, but I am doing no such thing.

For one thing, we have no need to ape Conservative Members. Their continued smug self-satisfaction smacks of their refusal to reckon with the magnitude of their failure, including to secure our borders. We also have no need to emulate the tub-thumping, NHS-destroying five musketeers who seem to be enjoying flying around the world, raking in cash and occasionally representing their constituents. Only one of them has bothered to show up tonight.

We should worry less about those people and more about the force of our own arguments—the arguments of those who believe in progress and fairness, and who seek to represent the interests of working people in this country. So often I have been told by people who live in wealthier, educated, cosmopolitan cities that support for strong borders and for the right of a public to choose who joins its ranks is an unenviable moral compromise. They say that open borders are the natural state of things, and the use of force to control them is a regrettable, if sometimes necessary, feature of the modern world. Those who think that do not understand the history of our democracy.

I hope the House will forgive a short detour. In the first great democracy in history—ancient Athens—about half the residents were migrants, or metics. Metics were subject to different rules; who joined the city was controlled and the bar was set high for who could become a citizen and vote. If metics broke Athenian laws, they were expelled from the city, and sometimes thrust into the blazing Greek sun. It is a fundamental principle of democracy that people who govern themselves control who they are and who becomes a member of the demos, but in recent decades, some in this country seem to have forgotten that principle. For instance, I was enormously frustrated by the remain campaign’s failure to acknowledge that the EU alters that fundamental principle. We might argue that control is worth giving up for some other reason, such as economic growth or reducing red tape, but without acknowledging that it is given up, we lack the credibility to make the argument.

This is something that my constituents understood perfectly well: control over who joins our self-governing nation is not a moral compromise; it is the heart of what makes us a free people and a strong democracy. The upshot is simple: control over the borders of this country is a precondition for a serious moral debate about who we should allow to join, on what terms and for what reasons. Unless elected Governments can demonstrate to their people that they have control over admission, we cannot seriously debate the trade-offs in who we admit and why.

The public rightly judged my party to have lost credibility on this issue in recent decades. In 2004, we chose not to put the brakes on and opened our labour markets to new EU members. At times, we openly mocked those concerned about migration, but we are not that party any more. I was not elected to this Chamber to espouse those views; in fact, I promised hundreds of my constituents that I would not rest until we gripped our borders, restored control, and yes, as the Home Secretary said, brought down the number of legal migrants entering this country each year—and I meant it. For me, this is not a regrettable moral compromise—a pact with the devil in which we hold our noses and ape Conservative Members to win votes—it is about a deep belief in what it means for our country to be strong, and our democracy respected.

Elected politicians do not just follow the polls; they explain and defend their convictions, and ours are these: the Labour party exists to represent working people. We seek to win power and use it to represent people outside the establishment who do not usually sit in the rooms where decisions are made. At the heart of that is the simple idea that elected people like me should take responsibility for deciding who gets to join our country. Parliament controls our borders, not Brussels or, after this Bill, smuggler gangs. We in the Labour party believe in control and order. The Opposition do not.

I welcome the Bill unequivocally. Those who abuse vulnerable people to threaten the order of our borders should be treated like terrorists, and I am glad that under this Government they will be. In doing so, we are not aping anyone; we are doing what Labour exists to do: take back control to represent the working people of this great country.