Europe: Youth Mobility

Lord Moraes Excerpts

Thursday 30th January 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Moraes (Lab) (Maiden Speech)]

My Lords, I am honoured to make my maiden speech today in this debate. It is somewhat daunting. The doorkeeper steadied me just now and said, “Every one of the noble Lords in the Chamber today has been in the same place”. I am not sure if that helped. I did notice also that there are noble Lords and noble Baronesses who have had connections with the European Union and who have been MEPs.

I want to start my remarks in this maiden speech with some comments on the approach of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans to these mobility schemes. Many noble Lords and Baronesses in this Chamber will have had experience of those reciprocal mobility schemes in their work. In my experience over 20 years, I helped many young constituents with these reciprocal schemes and how to navigate them. Over the years I saw UK students, some from disadvantaged backgrounds who would not otherwise have afforded to access those schemes to study, benefit from Erasmus and other mobility opportunities. Those schemes were not perfect. For example, there should have been more UK take-up between 1987 and when we left in 2020—that is clear. But, very objectively, I saw a lasting benefit for those students in the UK, and I also saw measurable economic benefit and benefit to our academic institutions in the UK.

On this vexed point that the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans raised about free movement, I would love to hear other opinions on it in this debate, but my understanding was always that the legal base of these reciprocal mobility schemes was never anything to do with free movement because they did not involve settlement and that was the key legal element that would make such schemes “free movement”. These schemes are not free movement; they are reciprocal schemes that generate advantages in all aspects of our lives. I will limit my comments on the debate to that and will now proceed with my maiden speech.

I thank your Lordships for the kindness and support I have received since entering the House. I thank my noble friends Lord Kennedy of Southwark and Lady Smith of Basildon for introducing me. I was only introduced on 16 January, but already I have received so much help and kindness from the remarkable staff in every part of this House.

I feel the honour of being in this House very keenly, not least because of my own background. I was a first-generation immigrant to this country. I was born in Aden, but my family had to leave during the Aden Emergency. My family were then split—my mother took us back to her country of origin, India, while my father gained entry to the UK as an overseas student, where he trained as a teacher and became a key worker in Scotland. We were eventually reunited. My parents were part of that generation which, some noble Lords and Baronesses will understand, was a generation of Commonwealth immigrants of the 1960s and 1970s who came to this country to give their children opportunity—and that certainly happened to me.

I then grew up in Scotland, first in Dundee and then Stirling, and this of course explains my accent, which has been somewhat commented on. As a new member—I am sure other new noble Lords and Baronesses will have had this experience—I am open to all sorts of advice. The first piece of advice I got on the first day that I came was from a noble Lord, who will remain unnamed, who said, “That’s a very nice soft Scottish accent”. Then he paused and added, “But nobody’s going to hear it if you don’t speak up”. So I immediately raised my volume and I have kept to that volume, hopefully, for noble Lords and Baronesses.

I came to London to further my law studies but could only do so because I had the opportunity to work for John Reid, then an MP, and later Paul Boateng, then an MP—now my noble friends Lord Reid of Cardowan and Lord Boateng. I thank them both for the start they gave me. I then stayed in the capital, working at the Trades Union Congress—the noble Lord, Lord Monks, allowed me to work at Congress House and I thank him for that—and, later, as director of JCWI, an independent legal protection NGO in the area of immigration, nationality and asylum law. In some ways, I was returning to the issues that had affected my family, but your Lordships may well recall that, during the period of the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s, the UK experienced the most significant refugee arrivals since the war—from the former Yugoslavia, the Kurds, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan and Sri Lanka. Working on these refugee issues individually, and on the policy, was a very formative experience. I did, of course, encounter many colleagues during that JCWI period and I am very honoured that they have come to listen to my maiden speech.

In 1999, I had the honour of being elected to the European Parliament for London. I shared this honour for a period with the noble Lord, Lord Balfe, who was also on my London list. I am really gratified that a number of colleagues who also served in the European Parliament are present in the Chamber. I chaired the Parliament’s justice and home affairs committee, and that legislative committee became enormous. It covered security, migration and the rule of law, but, because the Lisbon treaty gave it the competences and powers, it ended up reaching into data and privacy. As a result, I was able to chair the Facebook inquiry and work on data adequacy agreements, and I started work on the EU AI White Paper before we left the EU in 2020.

That brings me to a second reason why I am so happy and honoured to join your Lordships’ House. Over that whole period, I regularly gave evidence to committees of your Lordships’ House. This peaked in 2018—some noble Lords and Baronesses will recognise this—at a time when we were having heated discussions on how we were going to resolve issues post Brexit. How were we going to continue to share security databases such as SIS II or remain involved in Europol? Were we going to achieve data adequacy with the EU and were we going to adopt the European arrest warrant? Some of these issues are still not resolved and are still being considered by the House.

My point is that I gave evidence to Lords committees, whether it was the EU Home Affairs Sub-Committee or the European Union Scrutiny Committee, as it was, in front of noble Lords who actually understood the issues—I am not making any comparisons with the evidence I gave to the Home Affairs Select Committee in the other House, which is a fine committee—and in some cases had actually put the issues together. I will give one example: the noble Lord, Lord Kirkhope, negotiated the passenger name record security agreements in the EU, and then he was the noble Lord asking me questions about it—which was kind of defeating, but there we go. It does give a sense of how this House can often be incisive and in the moment but can also, in my view, take a longer view of some of the most sensitive issues Parliament has to deal with, in an age when everyone wants instant solutions but when it is sometimes important to think through the most sensitive issues if we possibly can.

In conclusion, it has been an honour to make my first speech in your Lordships’ House in this debate and on this subject, and I very much look forward to making contributions in the future.