UK Opt-in to the Proposed Council Decision on the Relocation of Migrants within the EU (EUC Report)

Lord Jay of Ewelme Excerpts

Wednesday 22nd July 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Jay of Ewelme (CB)]

My Lords, I, too, am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Prashar, for having secured this debate and for introducing it. I agree entirely with her speech.

The discussions about opt-ins, opt-outs and Title V of Part 3 of TFEU risk obscuring an extraordinarily serious and difficult issue: the consequences of the situation in Iraq and Syria and, further south, in Sudan and Eritrea. The war in Syria alone has led to the worst humanitarian disaster on the borders of Europe since the end of the Second World War, and that is only part of a huge global problem, as the noble Baroness, Lady Ludford, has said: 60 million refugees worldwide, with more than 20 million displaced people on the borders of Europe.

Not only is this extraordinarily serious, it is also extraordinarily complex. There are people fleeing conflict in Iraq and Syria. There are economic migrants from west Africa who had gone to work in Libya but are now fleeing conflict there—economic migrants have become asylum seekers. The apparent constancies here easily break down. Whatever the causes, though, the consequence of all this is that desperate people are prepared to take desperate remedies to escape a pretty desperate predicament. In some cases, as we know, women and children are encouraged into leaking boats by unscrupulous people smugglers and many of them, alas, have died.

There is an inevitable and understandable tendency to wish for an easy solution to problems as complex as this, but there are, alas, no easy solutions. I have to say that I entirely understand, and in many ways applaud, the European Commission’s attempt to find a solution by proposing a relocation scheme. I think that it was wrong to stick to a mandatory scheme when the European Council clearly did not want that. However, proposing to allocate to other EU member states some of the asylum seekers in Greece and Italy is a perfectly sensible, logical and humanitarian attempt to share the burden among EU states.

Of course, that can be only part of the solution. For the longer term, we need to work collectively with countries in the region to remove the causes of migration—not easy at the moment in Iraq, impossible in Syria and virtually impossible in Libya. But we need to work with Jordan and Lebanon and, where we can, with those in north Africa to encourage co-operation and promote development. I think that there is a big role here for DfID, and I would be grateful if the Minister could confirm that it will indeed be working hard to co-operate with the states from which the migrants are coming.

We also need to work to try to neutralise people smugglers and drug traffickers. This will inevitably be for the medium to long term, and meanwhile we need to ensure that those who are on the leaky boats are rescued, not left to drown. I was encouraged that HMS “Bulwark” was sent to help to achieve that, and I would be grateful for an assurance from the Minister that HMS “Enterprise” will be equally assiduous in trying to save people on leaky boats trying to get from the north African coast to Malta or the European continent.

I am glad that at the Council meeting this week the UK agreed to take 2,000 people from east Africa. However, if we believe that the United Kingdom has an international role, or indeed an international responsibility, surely we must take part fully in the search for a solution to an immensely difficult problem, and that means taking part fully also in the European Union’s proposals for relocation. The response is evolving day by day, and we must be part of that. Opting out of a key part of the European Union’s attempt to find solutions to a problem as serious as this is, frankly, as the noble Lord, Lord Tugendhat, has said so eloquently, not worthy of our history or our traditions, nor indeed of our interests as a nation that still has global influence around the world. I therefore hope very much that the Government will consider these broader humanitarian issues as well as the narrower question of how many people to take in under these different schemes.