Queen’s Speech

Lord Roberts of Llandudno Excerpts

Tuesday 24th May 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Roberts of Llandudno (LD)]

My Lords, 24 May is a special day for Methodists—I am sure that I am not the only Methodist in this House—as it is the day of Wesley’s conversion. He wrote in his journal:

“In the evening I went very unwillingly to a society in Aldersgate Street … About a quarter before nine”—

I am sorry, I am 15 minutes late—

“I felt my heart strangely warmed.”

This is an anniversary of a heart being strangely warmed. We want hearts warmed, but in a different way. We want hearts warmed in their concern for those who are most vulnerable, for the refugee and the asylum seeker.

The Government are often dragged reluctantly to that responsibility. We see so many people who are in desperate need, and yet time and again, as when trying to get those 3,000 children accepted into the United Kingdom, we struggle. We think of the people who are being bombed in Aleppo and Damascus. We think of those whose lives are absolutely different from ours in Asia and Africa. We think of the 3,000 victims who have already been drowned as they tried to cross the Mediterranean Sea to a better life. We think of all these people. It takes a great deal of courage to hold on to the undercarriage of a wagon or a train. It is desperate. It is not about coming here for a better life in order to make a lot of money; it is, for so many people, about life itself.

I urge the Government to look at their whole attitude. They say, and we have heard it many times, that we have given £2 billion to help the emergency relief in Syria. I am so grateful for that: it has saved so many lives and done so much good. We thank the Government for that, but we need not only money but a personal link with people in desperate need: children who have never had a hug, people who do not know what a home of their own is. I thank the charities, the big ones such as the Red Cross and Save the Children and the smaller ones, such as Calais Action, and the many individuals who give their time to cross over to try to extend a helping hand to those in camps in Calais and Dunkirk and on some of the Mediterranean islands. Those people deserve our thanks.

Thousands of refugees, hundreds of children, have already suffered more than one winter in northern France. We are now promised that the children who are to be accepted will be here before Christmas. There is seven months to go. The promise is that they may be here in seven months. Surely we can do better than that.

I was reading about the evacuees who came from the cities in 1939; many of them came to the Welsh countryside. In four days, 3 million people were evacuated. Surely, if we could do it in 1939, we can do it today. It is not lack of facilities, it is lack of political will. That is what we need to put in the heart of this Government: political will to devise an all-European strategy to meet the needs not only of the immigrants and refugees who so need our help today, but those who will come in future.

Global migration is a problem that we need to tackle now. Climate change, conflict, greed and corruption are all very evident and will become more so. In the years ahead, our children will have to tackle them, and we need to give them the guidance now on how to do that more effectively than we have in the past.

I always dreamt of a country that could be the lead, the heart of a concerned world. Is Britain that country? Can we do it? Do we have the courage, vision and compassion to lead in the move to tackle global migration that will be far worse than anything we know at present? Can the Minister say a word of encouragement that Britain itself is ready to go out of its way to bring hope to so many of those people?