Immigration and Security

Lord Selsdon Excerpts

Thursday 4th July 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Selsdon]

My Lords, I am most grateful to my noble friend Lord Marlesford for giving us the opportunity to discuss this issue. He and I often sing from the same hymn sheet, but he is perhaps more of a highly trained and intelligent Rottweiler while I am just a friendly Labrador, concerned about not upsetting too much my noble friend on the Front Bench when we gang up together. When I first joined your Lordships’ House, goodness me, some 50 years ago, I asked the then Leader of the House what I should do about a maiden speech. “Talk about something you know about”, he said. I replied, “Sir, I do not really know about anything”. He said, “Well, talk about your childhood, then”. I have suddenly realised that there is an opportunity, in this debate on immigration, for me to do so.

When the war came in 1940, with my mother and my younger sister I was suddenly migrated to the United States for safety purposes, so we were told. A year later my mother had to return to the United Kingdom because her own mother had died, her brother had been shot down and killed, and there were other family matters. However, she could not get back to us. As migrants or immigrants, we were moved from the United States up to Canada, to a form of nursery school run by a wonderful woman called Sister Hilda. She had had a school in Rottingdean where she had looked after children of empire while their parents were away and could not be with them. So there I lived and I learnt to speak Canadian. I thoroughly enjoyed myself. Occasionally I had to write letters to my mother, and when the other I day I found them, I saw that they were all about the war.

In that environment I was to some extent an immigrant, but it was rather more complicated than that. My father, who I did not see for many years, and my mother were called Selsdon, but the name of my sister and I was Mitchell-Thomson. As bright young children, we naturally worked out that we were probably not the children of those parents, and that perhaps ours had been killed in the war or even, I managed to find out, that we were possibly illegitimate. However, it was too long a word for me and I did not understand what it actually meant. This went on for quite a period of time, but then with great aplomb, my mother, who was then serving as a driver in the RAF, through a friend managed to get us on board a Canadian troopship and thus come back to the United Kingdom.

When we arrived we were immigrants into the United Kingdom and we were treated as such, but our name was not the same as that of our parents. We had labels around our necks so that we could be identified when we were taken off the train in, I think, Olympia, having sat in the ship in Liverpool for some three or four weeks. I was quite happy about it because the Canadians were kind to children. They taught me all about things and they let me clean their guns. I loved the idea of the war and I really wanted to join up. The difficulty was that when we came back to our real life over here, I was an immigrant and I was to be sent off to school. However, we did not have any clothing coupons so I could not have a school uniform. A young boy quite likes to be in uniform, so it was rather difficult. I could have a school hat, but not the uniform. One remembers the difficulties of being, to some extent, a foreigner in your own country.

Over time I have interested myself an awful lot in the Commonwealth and in the question of identity. When the identity cards Bill was going through the Lords, I went off to do a trial run. We were told to have biometric pictures taken in some vans outside. When they did me the first time the electronic voice said, “Not recognised”. So, without telling anyone, I went off to another van and tried to do the same thing, but again the electronic voice said, “Not recognised”. I suddenly asked, “Why do we have to have identity cards?”.

Then I learnt in the course of our debates that in this great country you can call yourself what you like. There is no such thing as a legal name. The nearest you get to one these days is in the National Health Service. Some bright young NHS statistician in the NHS must have realised that you can give your date of birth, and that is all, because very few people with the same name are born on the same day. Once the NHS has you on the list with your date of birth, it keeps on writing to you suggesting that you should be examined, treated and everything possible should be done, and it then gives you a code name. However, you cannot remember your code name.

You find in our great society that the names of people have been lost and that we all have numbers to remember. Very few people can remember more than a certain number. The noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, will probably agree with me that you can always remember your service number. Mine was PJ963040—in fact, two alpha and six numeric are the best way of remembering anything. It is the best method of identification.

If it is not necessary to have an identity card, what is a passport? Is it an identity card? I had a problem with this when I worked internationally. Often my passport was in for a visa somewhere or other. I did not think that it would necessarily matter, so I would travel without a passport. Once when I was on the board of a company I went to Italy and arrived there without a passport. I thought that they would wave me through as usual, but it was the day after the Heysel stadium disaster where, as noble Lords may remember, British fans caused a lot of deaths in a stadium in Belgium. The passport people, who I knew quite well, said that they could not let me through without proof of identify. I said that I did not really have anything, but then I realised that I had one of my father’s suits. I showed them that from the label inside it was quite an old suit and therefore it was proof of identity. They took the jacket, then came back and said, “The jacket’s gone through. If you take your trousers off, they can go through as well. But under the current regulations we cannot let you through. You do not have actual proof of identity”. I had to wait to be identified.

We do not believe in carrying proof of identity here in the United Kingdom—nor do I believe that we ever should—but perhaps there is a case for some form of it. Some time ago I lobbied about whether it would be possible for Commonwealth countries to have a slightly different passport from non-British nations, which would seem to be appropriate. Alternatively, would it not be possible for all immigrants to be required at all times to carry a card that was proof of identity, which might perhaps help them in their activities?

I have tried to search and work out what the level of immigration is. The best way to do it is to ask the immigrants themselves. This morning I was woken up as usual by 11 Romanian builders. I complained to them that there was a chap at the end of the road who was one of those who sells you the gold ring that he drops on the ground. You pick it up and it has got “19” on it and he says, “Can you give me some money?” and you say, “Are you an illegal immigrant?”. They have got to know me now.

The Poles, of course, colonised a good chunk of Putney but they are among the best plumbers, without any doubt. All these immigrant groups, once they are established, become extraordinarily British and they want to educate their children; above all, they want to see things bettered. If you are looking at televisions, audiovisual, it is the Caribbean that has the skills. Do not ask me why. Throughout the whole system those people who have been integrated into our society have actually developed skills.

The questions we are facing are: how many more people want to come here? How many illegal immigrants are here and in what way can they be controlled or administered? Usually it is with the associations themselves. Having dealt with the Arab world for many years, I go to talk to people at the mosques and you can find out what is going on. Of course, the greatest value is the amount of information you can get from each other in exchange, particularly on situations such as Egypt at the present time.

I do not know what we can do about the passport situation or immigration controls. I do feel that it has gone wrong. For those of us who travel quite a lot, if you turn up at Calais to go through the Channel Tunnel, you will find two of the gates open for cars to go through and the others shut; you may have to queue for half an hour or longer and miss your connection. It is the same at all the airports. In most other countries, the waiting time is less. Is it because we have more people coming here or more people wanting to come here than other nations or is it that we cannot cope? Do we really need a new airport for ourselves?

Perhaps the Minister can give us some idea of what proportion of the inflowing traffic into the United Kingdom is non-British. It is a growing amount and the excuses and reasons are given that we are a tax-friendly nation. But perhaps more than anything else, the world feels that children who are brought up and educated in England may have a better chance in the future.

If we feel that the Commonwealth is important, as I have always done, we should recognise that there is more that could be done with it. When I used to sit with Enoch Powell a long time ago, he suggested that we had a Commonwealth passport. Now one says: what is the benefit of the Commonwealth and what are the opportunities? If we look at illegal trafficking of people, which tends to take place within the 200-mile limit of each country, we find that the EEZs—economic exclusion zones—of the Commonwealth are equivalent to 60% of the world. An awful lot of the trafficking now is maritime. That is perhaps a worry if it cannot be monitored.

I would quite like to see whether we could have a Commonwealth identity card or some sticker or visa in the Commonwealth. I would also like to find out why even in your Lordships’ House we should be required to wear identity cards. We should know each other but my latest research indicates that very few of your Lordships can put more than 100 names to faces. The doorkeepers cannot quite do 100. My difficulty on these Benches is that I see only the backs of the heads of my noble friends, whereas I can see the faces of noble Lords opposite, so in general I feel I have a greater recognition of them.

The question to the Minister is: could we please think of some method of enabling people, if they wanted to, to identify themselves with a piece of paper or a card so that they may not appear to be stateless?