EU Action Plan Against Migrant Smuggling (EUC Report)

Lord Selsdon Excerpts

Wednesday 15th June 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Selsdon (Con)]

My Lords, I have no locus standi in this at all and therefore may be an ungifted amateur intervening on other people’s activities, but at the time of national service, I wanted to go into the Navy, which was quite a difficult thing to do. Somehow, I managed to get down to Portsmouth and asked if they would take me, and they said I had to go through the normal procedures but there was a little bit of a crisis coming up. Before I knew it, I was taken on and told that if I wanted to get ahead, I had better take a few exams and they were looking for new officers, but I was totally unqualified.

They put me on a crash course and somehow I managed to pass. Before I knew it, I was going out effectually to the Mediterranean, to Cyprus and Suez, to find myself as a junior officer on board a coastal minesweeper called HMS “Floriston”, which was to be a patrol vessel for illegal activities in the whole of the Mediterranean.

It was a great experience for me, because the whole Suez situation was just coming on and there were a lot of illegal activities of smuggling and aggression. We would do night patrols, which meant that I as the most junior officer was the one who was up all night and then had to get up early in the morning. We used to board vessels with an outboard and a rubber dinghy, because the main barge did not work. We found that a surprising amount of illegal trade was going on—but it was not illegal in any way other than people trying to avoid taxation. In our stop and search for things, we found an amazing pattern of movement of people and of smuggling of people, even in those days, which it is hard to understand now.

Later, I found myself involved in the banking world. I was dealing with trade and became chairman of the Committee for Middle East Trade, which had responsibility for trade development for the whole of north Africa and anywhere to do with the Middle East. I learned a lot from our Arab friends, all of whom are traders by nature and many of whom were great seamen, but it was the business of stop and search for illegal activities in the Navy that taught me. We have found that there is an awful lot of this going on right across the Mediterranean today.

I found that I had got hooked, and something I had longed to do was the travels of St Paul. So I went out and bought myself a sailing boat—not a particularly great one—and spoke to a bishop or two, got the route and sailed around the Mediterranean following St Paul. I then found to my surprise that the boat was quite acceptable for other people to charter, so I did that activity for 10 years. But in the back of my mind was the movement—the migration—of people. I used to study the maps and look at where they were and where they came from.

Even today, I find it a difficult world to work and live in. I am not sure what we can do about it, but I believe that greater co-operation with the Middle East might be helpful, because it is difficult to stop and search in many places. I would be quite like to be back in the Navy—but anything that I can do to help the committee I would willingly do.