Refugees (Family Reunion) Bill [HL]

Lord Cormack Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Friday 15th December 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

My Lords, I thought it rather sad that nobody from this side of the House was taking part. I will briefly give my support to the general principles of the Bill. I am so glad that the noble Lord, Lord Kerr of Kinlochard, mentioned Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal. If your Lordships have not read it and do not read anything else during the Christmas Recess, look it up. It will not take you long. It is the most wonderful, erudite, witty, scintillating indictment of nonsense that you will ever read.

I want to contribute to this debate for three reasons. I remember that in 1945, we had in our own small home a couple of Polish children roughly of my age—six or thereabouts—who came from a camp in Lincolnshire not very far from where they lived in Grimsby to spend the day on two or three separate occasions. My father was on the point of making an application to see whether we could adopt at least one of them when they were mercifully reunited with their family. I can still remember the joy.

When I came into the other place in 1970, I had not been there long when I was very proud to support Edward Heath’s welcoming of the Ugandan Asians. Like the Jews before the last war and those such as the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, who came with the Kindertransport, that influx enriched our society. We even have at least one of them—my noble friend Lord Popat—among our number in your Lordships’ House. I remember, as chairman of the campaign for the release of Soviet Jewry, helping to welcome in Vienna those who got their visas to get out of the Soviet Union and the repressive conditions there, and to come to the West.

We are moving towards Brexit. I acknowledge it as much as I regret it, but the one thing we must not be moved towards is an isolationist position in the continent of Europe. We must remain a leading nation. We are a leading nation with a proud history of welcoming those fleeing persecution. Of course we must be careful in how we vet people in this age of terrorism and so on. But earlier this year when I was on the Home Affairs Sub-Committee of the European Union Committee—before I was sacked for voting as I did on the Article 50 Bill—a group of children came before us and gave testimony in a private session. It was deeply moving.

This country, with its proud record going back centuries—welcoming the Huguenots in the 17th century and so on—has a role that it must not abandon. The family unit is the building block of any society. If we can help by having some family units from those countries riven by famine, civil war and strife, we will be living up to our proud history. If this Bill helps us to do so, it deserves our full and unreserved support.