Kwasi Kwarteng
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(6 years ago)
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Kwasi Kwarteng (Spelthorne) (Con)
I am grateful to be called to speak in this hugely important debate. I am delighted to follow the hon. Member for Bristol West (Thangam Debbonaire) and wish to pick up on several of her remarks later. She said very movingly that how we treat this subject reflects who we are as a people and the kind of culture and civilisation that we represent.
As the hon. Member for Na h-Eileanan an Iar (Angus Brendan MacNeil) said in his opening remarks, the debate in Britain has been driven perhaps for too long by sensationalist tabloid headlines. There is of course a huge swell of emotion whenever the issues of immigration and refugees are raised, but we have to distinguish between different types of immigration. We have to distinguish between economic migrants and refugees, and we have to recognise that opportunistic traffickers exist—we cannot turn a blind eye to that. It is a complicated picture.
On refugees, the hon. Member for Na h-Eileanan an Iar’s private Member’s Bill is a remarkable thing for a private Member to bring forth. It commanded the support of many Members from across the House: the hon. Gentleman said that Members from five parties turned up to support his Bill on 16 March. Regrettably, I could not be one of those Members, but it is striking that his Bill has commanded such a wide range of support. The reason it commanded that support is that in Britain, as represented not only by Members in this House but by a wide population—by many, many of our constituents—there is a general feeling that if people are fleeing for their lives or fleeing persecution, Britain will be a welcome home and place of asylum for them.
Britain has a long history of welcoming, in a very generous spirit, people who have fled persecution. We can talk about the Huguenots in the 17th century or Russian Jews fleeing persecution in the 19th century. We can talk about the 20th century, when Jews once again faced a terrible tyranny and sought asylum here in Britain. Over the centuries, many of those people have contributed enormously to British culture, literature, economics and philosophy. All sorts of brilliant ideas have been fostered by extremely talented people who have fled for their lives. There have also been people who have helped in more ordinary situations, such as in the transport sector and the public services. A number of those people have come from families of refugees, or have been refugees themselves. No one denies that.
In the recent past—in the last few years—the British Government have had a good record and a good story to tell. One thing that no one has really talked about so far in this debate is that we are going through an unprecedented period of stress and political turmoil in the world. I have travelled a lot in the middle east and Egypt, and I have seen at first hand the devastation—the complete chaos—to which large areas of that part of the world have been subjected, through war and the lack of stable government. We hailed the Arab spring when it came upon us in 2011, but for many people that spring has turned into a nightmare. We need only look at the situation in Libya. I am one of very few Members of Parliament to have been there, and some of the conditions in which migrants there find themselves is appalling. As I said earlier, we cannot be blind to the fact that there are unscrupulous and wicked people who will exploit the situation.
Mr Carmichael
The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right and highlights the importance of having this debate and getting it right. The pressures we face are not going to get any easier. Whether or not the conflicts come and go—I suspect that they always will—we are going to see, not that far down the track, further pressures from the effects of climate change. That will cause massive movements of people. Whether they would currently be seen as economic migrants or refugees, there will be people unable to remain where they currently are.
Kwasi Kwarteng
The right hon. Gentleman makes a crucial point: this phenomenon of migration and the political uncertainty and instability are not just going to go away. In fact, if we look forward, we are probably going to have greater pressures and greater numbers of people coming from sub-Saharan Africa and the middle east.
Bob Stewart
I thank my very good friend for allowing me to intervene on him. He cites migrants in Libya. I have not been to Libya, so I bow to my hon. Friend’s greater authority on the matter, but are those migrants refugees from other parts of Africa or displaced persons from within Libya, or are they economic migrants? It seems to me that they might be a mix of everything.
Kwasi Kwarteng
My hon. Friend—my very good friend—is absolutely right, and that shows how complicated and variegated the problem is. In Libya, there are all three: economic migrants, people from sub-Saharan Africa fleeing real persecution outside Libya, and people who are being mercilessly trafficked for gain. It is a complicated picture and it is not easy to say which is which. In some instances, an individual or family might have two or three different reasons why they should leave their home or why they were forced out of their home. It is not particularly helpful to come to this question with a simple, preconceived notion of what a refugee is, what an economic migrant is or what someone who is being trafficked is, because the real world is a lot more complicated than that. We cannot simply put people, families and children in such neatly defined silos. We have to be much more flexible in our approach.
The hon. Member for Na h-Eileanan an Iar stressed how Britain is very welcoming, but he also mentioned the fact that the climate has been hostile in many instances, particularly in respect of tabloid newspapers. I am not someone openly to praise tabloid newspapers in this country—they have many strengths and many weaknesses—but it is easy in this House to pour scorn on what used to be called the popular press. The tabloids respond to the very real concerns of people throughout the country. If I speak to my constituents in Spelthorne, they express extremely generous sentiments towards genuine refugees, but there is also genuine concern that Britain’s hospitality and generosity can be abused, and it can be abused by some of the unscrupulous traffickers we talked about.
I wish to talk a little more about trafficking, because it is a problem that perhaps absorbs too little attention in this House. I was in Libya a year ago, when I was told that an individual needs to pay $1,000 to be transported from Libya to, in the first instance, Italy, which is the most common country of destination for these migrants. It does not take a mathematician to work out that if each person pays $1,000 to be trafficked, or transported, and there are—I was told—up to something like 1,000 migrants a day in the high season, when trafficking is at its peak the business of trafficking is potentially worth around $1 million a day. Such a huge amount of money that is potentially being distributed, or is part of the revenues of this business, attracts all kinds of people. When I was there, people talked about the Sicilian mafia, various eastern European mafiosi and the Russian mafia. Lots and lots of unscrupulous people are involved in this terrible trafficking.
We must look not only at the political instability and the relative disturbances in sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere, but at the sources of the trafficking. We must clamp down on the criminal activities of these gangs, because they are the people who are driving this trade. As the right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr Carmichael) suggested, this is a problem that will not go away. I assure the House that, if it does not go away, there will be unscrupulous gangs and criminal elements all over this trafficking and this way of making money. If that is the case, any European Government will have to focus much more closely on stopping the criminality.
When we talk about refugees, we understand the humanitarian concerns of our constituents, but there is another side to this issue. I see the hon. Member for Leeds North West (Alex Sobel) shaking his head, but we cannot simply stick our heads in the sand and ignore this terrible trade.
Angus Brendan MacNeil
The hon. Gentleman makes an interesting case. On a wider point of information, I think it was the Swedish academic, Hans Rosling—I might have the name wrong—who pointed out first that the reason why many people go overland is that air transportation is closed to them because of our rules that will send them back again. We have other difficulties and other issues in and among that, so, sometimes, our own policies are actually creating the free market business that he describes of people trafficking at £1,000 a head.
Kwasi Kwarteng
That is a legitimate point, but this trafficking has not come from British policy. I do not think that people who are trafficking Nigerians from the western coast of Libya into Italy, as the first port, are doing so because of the policies of the British Government. I do not really see a direct link. All I am trying to suggest is that there is a far a wider range of problems on which this issue touches.
Mr Carmichael
I am in broad agreement with much of what the hon. Gentleman says, but there is another aspect on which he has not touched. He said earlier, I think, that people traffickers lead this trade. I suggest to him gently that, in fact, they are the product of it. One reason why they are a product of it is that they are filling a vacuum because there are no proper safe and legal routes. If we put in safe and legal routes, along with proper action on an international basis, we will be part of the way to excising the cancer of the people traffickers.
Kwasi Kwarteng
The right hon. Gentleman is right that, clearly, criminals are not, in the first instance, driving this issue. There are many social, political and economic reasons for this phenomenon but, certainly in the parts of Libya that I saw and in the migrant camps in Sicily where I talked to a few people who were unlucky enough to be trafficked, a big criminal enterprise underpins it. It is very easy in the Chamber of the House of Commons to focus on the humanitarian aspects and to remind Members of our obligations not only as MPs but as citizens and human beings to very vulnerable people. I completely accept that. It is too easy for people in this Chamber to turn a blind eye to what is actually going on from the economic and criminal point of view, which is, frankly, a scandal. Too little of our political debate focuses on these wicked criminal elements. We must take a much bigger view.
Bob Stewart
I ask my very good friend to forgive me for intervening a second time. I have had to deal with the mafia in the Balkans. It may be foreign-owned or run, but it uses local people. I am quite sure that, in Libya, the mafia to whom he is referring will often be Libyans who are actually working for foreigners. That makes it even more complicated.
Kwasi Kwarteng
The situation in Libya is very particular, and I do not want it to monopolise the closing moments of my speech. All I want to say with regard to Libya is that it can be seen as a test case. Certainly, Libya is the biggest immediate source of migration coming into Europe. That is what we have seen in Italy with the Five Star Movement and the remnants of the Northern League, the neo-fascist party. Their success was largely in response to this ongoing migrant crisis. I know that we are straying a bit from the private Member’s Bill of the hon. Member for Na h-Eileanan an Iar, but it is very important in a debate of this nature, which enjoys cross-party engagement, to suggest that there are bigger problems that we need to face. They are less attractive issues, dare I say it, and they probably do not salve our consciences in the way that helping genuine refugees does, but there are important questions that any serious legislature, any serious Government and serious Members of Parliament need to look at with respect to criminality.
In conclusion, I congratulate once again the hon. Member for Na h-Eileanan an Iar on his private Member’s Bill. I have heard some excellent speeches today—from the hon. Member for Bristol West and also from my hon. Friend the Member for Harborough (Neil O'Brien). I close on a number of suggestions that they have made. It is important that English language teaching is a priority for this Government. It should be in place for people have come from abroad and who do not speak English. I say that not because, as the hon. Member for Na h-Eileanan an Iar has suggested, we feel that we speak English here and they must be like us. That was not a particularly helpful point. My hon. Friend the Member for Harborough suggested that it was a way of empowering refugees and people coming into this country. That is perfectly legitimate.
The Government should also look at ways in which asylum seekers could, in an ordered process, work in the community, pay their own way and earn wages. Certainly, in my constituency, which is very near Heathrow, I have had a number of asylum seekers whose papers have not been processed in the six-month period, and they have said to me, “We really want to work. We want to be able to contribute to the economy and to look after ourselves.” There must be a way for them to do that. It cannot be beyond the wit of even this Government, dare I say it, to construct an ordered way in which asylum seekers can work and contribute to their communities. There have been many extremely helpful and extremely well-thought out suggestions. From a personal point of view, I would hesitate to relax the rules about children being allowed to bring in their parents, because of the objections that have been made and also the suspicion that these children could be ruthlessly exploited. That is a legitimate concern. I very much hope that the Government allow a money resolution so that we can debate these issues more fully in Committee.
Stuart C. McDonald (Cumbernauld, Kilsyth and Kirkintilloch East) (SNP)
I am pleased to follow the hon. Member for Spelthorne (Kwasi Kwarteng) who made a very eloquent, thoughtful and measured speech. Indeed, I welcome all the speeches that have been made so far in this debate. I congratulate those who secured the debate, particularly my hon. Friend the Member for Na h-Eileanan an Iar (Angus Brendan MacNeil) who has been leading the charge on this issue.
As the UN Declaration of Human Rights states:
“The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State.”
As lawmakers, we should do all we can so that we never force anyone to have to choose between living in this place of safety, and living with their family. Most reasonable people looking at the immigration rules now would agree that our refugee family reunion rules are still too narrowly drawn. Most Members in the Chamber will have encountered their own heartbreaking cases—perhaps an 18 or 19-year-old child left stranded in Libya or Lebanon while younger siblings are reunited with parents in the UK. Most strikingly, our rules on recognised child refugees in the UK are both outliers and pretty outrageous. To borrow the word the Home Affairs Committee used, it is “perverse” that unaccompanied children cannot be sponsors for their parents or carers.
In the lead-up to the Second Reading of my hon. Friend’s private Member’s Bill, there were many excellent articles about divided families, and one I found particularly moving was written by Sarah Temple-Smith, a children’s psychotherapist at the Refugee Council. In that article, she described the utter agony endured by two young child refugees because of separation from their families. One teenager, whose father had been killed, tells her that being apart from his mother and siblings was harder to deal with than the torture and violence suffered in detention in Libya. He was just one of an inbox full of referrals she received every day relating to children suffering from separation. It is incredibly sad, therefore, that other than Denmark, this is the only EU country that refuses to allow children to apply to have close family members join them here, if they can be found.
There cannot be a clearer illustration of why refugee family reunion is a win, win for everybody involved. It is clearly of huge benefit for the refugees here, reunited with their support network and better able to rebuild their lives. It is good for us because it means that the refugees can integrate more easily. It can literally be lifesaving for those who are granted family reunion visas to join their families here, and by providing a safe legal route it stops them turning instead to traffickers and smugglers to find their way to the UK.
In response, the Government tend to turn to two or three arguments. The first is that immigration rules already make provisions for other family members to join refugees here, but in my view the alternative rules are barely worth the paper they are written on. The legal thresholds, costs and complexity make them a poor and pale substitute for proper refugee family reunion rights. It is not unknown even for families to have to sponsor a niece or a nephew but be unable to sponsor both—a horrendous decision for anyone to have to make! I do not regard those rules as fit for purpose. Exceptional grants outside the rules are far too rare.
Secondly, the Government sometimes argue that expanding refugee family reunion rights would somehow incentivise dangerous journeys to the UK—we have heard a bit about that today. The most significant point is that the rules keep too many family members out and so force them to turn to smugglers and traffickers and to make dangerous journeys.
Kwasi Kwarteng
I want to ask the hon. Gentleman about a point I made in my speech. We cannot pretend that there is not a criminal element to this. What would he say to people who suggest, perhaps misguidedly, that changing the rules would bolster this criminal activity?
Stuart C. McDonald
The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right to flag up the trafficking and criminality. The UK, and the EU generally, have a long way to go to improve their response to that issue, but at the end of the day who are the most desperate to get here? It is the people with close family ties here, who are perhaps the parents of a child who has made it here, or 18 or 19-year-old siblings of children here. They will come here come hell or high water. The issue, then, becomes: are we going to allow them a safe legal route, established under my hon. Friend’s private Member’s Bill or otherwise, or are we going to leave them having ultimately to use these smugglers, traffickers and criminals? By expanding the safe legal routes, we will undermine and tackle the smuggling.
Stuart C. McDonald
The hon. Gentleman makes a perfectly fair point, and we can have this debate when the Bill, I hope, returns, but there is limited evidence to support the proposition that that is what happens in all the other EU countries—as I say, it is only Denmark and this country that do not give children this right. As far as I can see, the Government have not produced any evidence that in other EU countries this has become a phenomenon out of kilter with what happens in Denmark or the UK, but if somebody wants to cite statistics showing that everyone is sending their kids unaccompanied to the other EU countries, I will look at that argument.
Kwasi Kwarteng
Having visited Libya and having been to Italy and seen migrant camps in Sicily and other parts of the south of Italy, I can provide the hon. Gentleman with some assurance on this point. I cannot cite chapter and verse with numbers, but there is a narrative that there are lots of unscrupulous people exploiting children. One need only look at the results of the Italian election. I am not saying it was the sole reason the populist right got into power, but it was a factor.
Stuart C. McDonald
I am not absolutely sure what the hon. Gentleman is getting at. My view is that there is no evidence to back up what the Government are saying about providing an incentive to go to other EU countries as opposed to Denmark and the UK. I struggle with the ethics of that argument as well. We have child refugees here, and we should have rules in place that are in their best interests and which allow them to be reunited with their families, as do these other countries.
I turn to a third argument the Government tend to use in these debates: that they are acting in different ways in response to the refugee and migration crisis. It is only fair to recognise that the Government are doing good things. The Syrian vulnerable persons scheme is making excellent progress, and it is true that the Government have a record they can be proud of in providing aid to the region around Syria in particular. That does not mean, however, that we should not look at how else we can improve our response. Broadening the category of family members, as proposed by my hon. Friend’s Bill, would have limited implications for the Home Office but transformative consequences for the people involved.
Finally, I want to touch on legal aid. I used to be an immigration solicitor, and I can say hand on heart that using legal aid for a family reunion application, which people can still do in Scotland, never remotely struck me as a wasteful use of resources, because of how serious the subject matter is—separation can be both stressful for all involved and dangerous for those who are left behind—and how complex the process is. It is not just a matter of form-filling and box-ticking; there are other questions—what documents does a person need to prove a family relationship, how much credibility will a birth or marriage certificate from a certain country have with the Home Office, should we get expert verification, should a DNA test be done? That is even before we get to barriers of language and culture. Without a doubt, legal aid can make a huge and important difference to ensuring that applications are completed properly and that the Home Office can make the right decision on what are hugely important issues for those involved. For all these reasons, the measures in my hon. Friend’s private Member’s Bill are well founded, and I hope the money resolution will be tabled very soon.
Joanna Cherry
That is as may be, but there is no proper, forensic evidence to support the argument that the Bill would have a pull factor.
Joanna Cherry
I am going to make some progress, because I am conscious of the time. We will return to these issues in more detail.
I said that I wanted the UK Government to take two leaves out of Scotland’s book. The first is on legal aid. Legal aid is available in Scotland. We have managed to make it available. We actually spend less per capita in Scotland on legal aid than is spent in England and Wales, but we still make it more widely available. Do not take my word for it. An independent review of the Scottish legal aid system published earlier this year reported that, for less spend per capita than England and Wales, legal aid is more widely available in Scotland and covers a wider range of categories. Where there is a will there is a way.
Like my hon. Friend the Member for Cumbernauld, Kilsyth and Kirkintilloch East, I used to work in the Scottish legal system and did a lot of legal aid work. I can tell Conservative Members, as I have said to their colleagues in the Ministry of Justice, that the English legal aid system would benefit greatly from looking north to what has been achieved on a smaller budget. As has been said by others, the law on this subject is complex. People who are already vulnerable and separated from those who normally give them guidance need the assistance of a solicitor to find their way through it.
I would like to say something about the integration strategy in Scotland. I will keep it brief. The hon. Members for Harborough (Neil O’Brien) and for Dudley South (Mike Wood) spoke about good works in their constituencies. I am very proud of the work done in my constituency by the Kurdish community centre and by the Welcoming to integrate refugees, and also of the work done in primary schools in my constituency, particularly Redhall and Oxgangs, which are rights-respecting schools that have worked on big projects about welcoming child refugees. I have written to the UK Government about that.
In Scotland, we launched the New Scots strategy. The UNHCR UK representative said that he believed the New Scots strategy could be used as an example and model not just for the United Kingdom but for many countries around the world which host refugees. At the launch of the strategy, he said that, having left family far away, it is for many refugees a daily pain to think about a loved one, and he stressed to the Scottish audience how critical it is that the UK Government adopt more flexible and humane policies when it comes to bringing families together. He recognised that the powers are reserved to this Parliament at Westminster, and called on his Scottish audience to continue to influence and affect change here at Westminster.
That is what we seek to do here today. My hon. Friend the Member for Na h-Eileanan an Iar has brought forward a private Member’s Bill. My hon. Friend the Member for Cumbernauld, Kilsyth and Kirkintilloch East and the whole of the SNP will continue to try to pressure the UK Government to do more to help refugees, particularly the most vulnerable child refugees.