Nationality and Borders Bill

Lord Reid of Cardowan Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 5th January 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Reid of Cardowan (Lab)]

My Lords, may I courteously suggest to Ministers that, if I have judged the flavour of the opinions in the House correctly, they could quite easily convey to the Home Secretary the feelings of the House when they tell her that there was absolute concord of views between not only my noble friend Lord Rosser and the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, but my noble friends Lady Chakrabarti and Lord Blunkett and myself? I have never known any other subject on which that could have been said.

When the Home Secretary said that the asylum system was broken, I confess that I felt a frisson of déjà vu. Like my noble friend Lord Blunkett, when I began to hear the suggested proposals to remedy the situation, I had a faint echo in my mind of suggestions many years ago from civil servants which seemed to bear a faint resemblance to some of the ideas that are now being put forward. My Minister at the time, my noble friend Lord Coaker, is nodding in agreement. We rejected them because they were wrong, either morally, politically or internationally, in terms of creating an international alliance, or simply because they would not work. So in all sincerity I ask the Minister to please convey this back, because I will give the reason for it at the end.

Like other noble Lords, of course I am concerned. As we have heard, the Bill was published before any formal response to the consultation. The UNHCR disagrees with the Home Secretary’s statement that it complies with our obligations under the 1951 Act. It would allow the Government to create offshore camps. It will not work. It has not worked anywhere. Every time I see one of these headlines coming out of the Home Office, I wonder how extraordinary the next one will be. I was waiting for somebody to suggest St Helena or Elba, which have been used in the past against intransigent foreigners such as Napoleon. Every proposal like this that is put forward must be sustainable and realisable, otherwise people will recognise that it is a political debate of headlines that is going on and nothing is changing in terms of making the system better.

These and other points concern me, but my greatest worry about this piece of legislation, as well as the other things that have been brought forward on this subject by the Government, is that they always address themselves to the symptoms of the problem and never the underlying causes. The reality is that for 40 years, ever since the Iron Curtain was raised, or at least fell apart, there have been accelerating drivers of emigration. When I was Home Secretary, 200 million people got up every year and moved somewhere else, not just to visit but to stay. War, persecution, famine and climate change, which was mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Desai, and others, have driven unprecedented numbers of refugees around the world, probably about 80 million. At present, the globalisation of media and communications has made it plain that there is a better world somewhere else that I can go to if I am suffering in that fashion. We have internationalised travel: the EU’s external borders are porous and the EU’s determination to provide limitless internal travel throughout Europe through the Schengen process offers ample opportunities for anyone coming in from their external borders.

I will make this point. The Government will not solve this problem by trying to put a stopper in the distance between Dover and Calais. This is a much deeper strategic problem that will be solved only by international co-operation, international concord and international plans. That is why it is a tragedy that we have had cuts in the aid budget—which are hardly calculated to address the underlying problems—and the abolition of the Department for International Development. Likewise, leaving the EU reduces our ability. A mad spat between the Prime Minister and the President of France and name calling are hardly calculated to do it—but it is only at that level that we would do it, and it would be better and wiser under those circumstances to underpromise and overdeliver, rather than overpromise and fail to deliver, and I am afraid that once again that is what this Bill will do.