Immigration and Social Security Co-ordination (EU Withdrawal) Act 2020 (Consequential, Saving, Transitional and Transitory Provisions) (EU Exit) Regulations 2020

Lord Horam Excerpts

Thursday 10th December 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Horam (Con)]

My Lords, the title of this statutory instrument is quite a mouthful, even when delivered in the dulcet tones of my noble friend. It has been brought about by the UK’s exiting the European Union and therefore also leaving the free movement of people system, which prevails within the EU. This is a historic step for this country, and it is perhaps worth pausing for a moment to reflect on that. Free movement of people is one of the four fundamental freedoms of the European Union, and it is easy to see why, when devising the single market structure, it was included along with the other three. But it has always been controversial.

Interestingly enough, the person who most accurately put his finger on the problem with free movement of people is Bernie Sanders, the former self-declared socialist candidate for the US presidency. Questioned about free movement in an interview in 2005, he said that that meant

“doing away with the concept of the nation state”.

He is right, of course. The simple fact is that the world has organised itself into nation states. With nation states come borders, and with borders come border controls.

Moreover, if you are not well-off and have few skills, you welcome that. Your country is there to protect you. It is okay if you are Sir Philip Green, who appears to live mostly on a yacht off Monaco; borders do not matter to people like that. But if you are an NHS porter in Darlington, they do.

That is why it surprised many people that the Blair Labour Government bought so heavily into free movement. Noble Lords may recall that they even eschewed the seven-year transition period allowed under the rules, which other European Union countries adopted. That Labour Government also, of course, increased immigration from other non-European sources, for example by dropping the primary purpose rule and by expanding the work visa system. Net immigration, which had been steady at tens of thousands a year and not caused a problem for decades, surged to hundreds of thousands a year.

The results were devastating for some working-class communities. For instance, as Paul Embery, the Labour and trade union activist, writes in his book, Despised, the non-UK-born population of Barking and Dagenham, where he lives, increased by 205% between 2001 and 2011. Local services were overwhelmed; the demographic shifts were rapid and huge. Local papers were filled with complaints but no one listened. When a Labour supporter in Rochdale raised the question of immigration in the 2010 election, Labour’s Prime Minister simply called her a bigot—when, of course, he thought she was out of earshot. The Conservatives promised to do something, and had some initial successes in closing down bogus colleges, for example, but they appeared to run out of steam under pressure from business interests—and, of course, they could do little about European Union immigration, as much as David Cameron clearly tried.

There were two political results from this. The first has been Brexit, which has not been entirely about immigration, but I think that leave leaders would admit that the campaign could not have been won without it. One of the supreme ironies of the Brexit saga has been to listen to Labour and Liberal remainers in your Lordships’ House complaining bitterly about Brexit without understanding how much it was their doing. Secondly, there has been the collapse of support for Labour among the working class—as instanced in the last election, when they realised that, on this issue, Labour was not on their side. The party that was built to represent the working class got only 33% of its vote in 2019, while the Conservatives got 48%. What a shocking indictment of the Labour leadership that is.

It would have been better if Labour, Conservative or Liberal politicians had got a grip on the problem at an earlier stage, and better if the politicians of the European Union had been less dogmatic in their defence of free movement. Now we are closing in on a defining moment in the UK as free movement ends and we move to a new system, as my noble friend has explained, with immigration controls. One can only hope that present politicians of all strands understand the lessons of the past 20 years and listen more to the views of the British people. It is not rocket science.