EU Action Plan Against Migrant Smuggling (EUC Report)

Lord Patten Excerpts

Wednesday 15th June 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Patten (Con)]

My Lords, the first time that I can recall ever hearing the term “economic migrant” was when it was used in the other place by the then Home Secretary Douglas Hurd. His phrase neatly encapsulated a growing issue then for the UK and our European neighbours, but it was rather more of a challenge than a crisis. It was something new and it seemed to be in manageable numbers at the time. Fast-forward from the later 1980s, when I heard my noble friend Lord Hurd of Westwell, as he now is, use that phrase, to 2016, and just as the new economic normal for western Europe has become ever-low everything—low inflation, low interest rates and therefore low economic growth—the migrant issue has mutated from a border issue to a supposed economic and social existential event, in parallel with that low economic growth and therefore relatively low European capacity to deal with some of these issues because the money is not being produced by a growing economy.

The events that are now being played out in the Mediterranean Sea, with its never-ending toll of death and tragedy, appal us all. Operation Sophia, under a mandate now to be renewed, has done its best with some planes, some helicopters and some other military borrowed assets and a few ships to do a lot to save often economic migrants from death in its search and rescue tasks, which my noble friend Lord Horam referred to in his speech, as the pressure grows. I certainly do not decry that search and rescue effort; it is a vital humanitarian issue. But its law and order, border patrol activities have caught few of the organised criminals behind the sickening people-smuggling scams that we see. Why is this? It is because the intelligence needed to manage the task of dealing with them is highly underdeveloped. The European writ large has neither the people on the ground nor the writ to control the supply of this great and growing surge of people from states in economic difficulty down through Africa.

They are coming up through the very often ineffective and imperfect, if not sometimes in danger of failing, state of Libya—or, to me, what now seems to be the two almost separate blocs that reflect the way Libya is divided today between east and west, as it was back in the time of the Roman Empire with Cyrenaica to the east, centred on what is modern Benghazi, and Tripolitania to the west, centred on Tripoli. I hope I have that right. I am no classical scholar, but I see the noble Earl, Lord Oxford and Asquith, in his place and he can doubtless correct me if I have my historical geography of the later Roman Empire a bit wrong. But whatever, there are flows from the east and to the west where those Roman provinces once reached deeply down into Africa. Today the flows of migrants from Sudan, Ethiopia and Eritrea are funnelled up towards Benghazi while those further to the west from Niger, Mali or indeed Nigeria flow towards Tripoli.

The intelligence-gathering efforts that should inform a renewed Operation Sophia mandate are in their infancy, and we must be straightforward about that. There are certainly a lot of action plans along with a blizzard of acronyms and a welter of “contact groups”, “policy cycles”, “hot spot approaches”, “thematic groups” and much more of what to me is the impenetrable language of the action plan, but not enough people there on the ground. With great respect, I sometimes see more acronyms than there are actual feet on the ground. What is needed is a much greater effort to target more aid and to anchor more people with the foundations of hope to stay at home, which most want to do, whether in Ethiopia, Sudan or Chad. I am very proud of what the UK has done in this context and I am a strong supporter of my right honourable friend the Prime Minister in the way in which he has increased our overseas aid effort and targeted it better, whether that be in Syria or in some areas down in Africa. I only wish, not to beat about the diplomatic bush too much because that is not my way, that other countries such as Germany and France, which could afford to spend more, would do so. They are not spending anything like as much as the United Kingdom and they should get on with it.

What is also needed—perhaps being even less diplomatic—is to deal with Libya itself. It is a fulcrum of instability as well as a funnel of migration of the most desperate sort, helping to damage global stability. There have been UN-type mandates within Europe in the Balkans in the past few decades and there are others presently in sub-Saharan Africa. There may soon need to be some sort of mandate offered to the Libyan coast in order to create a less penetrable land barrier with the Mediterranean to stem the flow in a way that we have not yet managed to do. There may need to be helpful European shoes in greater numbers on the ground in Libya than there are now helping to stop migrants from reaching the sea and to support the hard-working Italian and British ships in their Operation Sophia tasks, which otherwise will be with us for decades. Let us hope that the good Libyan people will soon ask for that help. My noble friend the Minister will probably not be able to answer me today—why should he when I have not given him any notice?—but have they ever asked for that kind of help? Perhaps he could write to let me know if they have and what our response has been.

As the Sophia or its successor mandate is renewed, and important though ships and other borrowed military assets are, the real challenge is for the countries of Europe, members of the EU or not, to develop not just the projection of soft power into Africa but its actual use quite deep in Africa as well as in the Middle East, to develop and sustain those intelligence-gathering activities on the sources of migration, and to develop the ability to help more people in those countries to stay put for a better life at home rather than ending up on, or more tragically in, the Mediterranean.