Nationality and Borders Bill

Lord Teverson Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 5th January 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Teverson (LD)]

My Lords, I should come clean in that my family, the Teversons, are migrants themselves. The Teverson family reputedly migrated from Denmark in roughly the 10th century. I do not think we were particularly invited by the resident population at the time. There is no picture of us with horns coming out of our helmets, but we were definitely migrants into Suffolk. Since then, I have dwelt with the Celtic tribe of the Cornish in Cornwall, who I am proud to say are a race yet to be subdued by us Danes.

Let me explain briefly why I am speaking this evening. I normally get involved in issues relating to energy, climate change, fisheries—a niche subject—and biodiversity, those sorts of areas. I am speaking tonight, because when I listened to the Queen’s Speech and the Government’s programme, what I saw very strongly was a dark side, a malevolent streak, that I had not seen before in a government programme. The relevant Bills, which I will go through very briefly, were: the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill; this Bill; and the heavily modified, I am pleased to say, Judicial Review and Courts Bill. There is also the Elections Bill, which is primarily about voter suppression. Let us be clear: that is what it is about. I therefore decided that I would involve myself in this Bill.

Let me move on for a minute. It interesting that the Minister in his opening remarks mentioned “reality”. I should like to concentrate on that a little because there are some unrealities that we talk about on asylum-seeking. It is different from migration and we should keep those two subjects separate, as other noble Lords have said. One issue is people smugglers. I condemn their gross activities but let us not pretend, as some Ministers do or imply, that migrants and asylum seekers across the channel somehow have traffickers with Kalashnikovs behind them who force them to come across the channel. It does not work in that way. I did A-level economics—wow—and one of the things that I learnt about was called supply and demand. It happens in most things with any economic background. Where there is demand, there will be supply. In this area, forget trying to stop the so-called pull factors. The push factors will always outweigh those by miles. What is the evidence of that? It is the evidence of those 27 people who died in that small vessel in the channel several weeks ago because they were willing to risk not just their own lives but the lives of their families to reach these shores. Forget the idea that pull factors will end that. I do not know whether anyone in the Government has been in business, but the thing about destroying business models is that they are replaced by more effective business models. It does not solve the problem but tends to make those challenges even greater.

One of the other so-called realities that I need to challenge is the contention that we are a friendly nation for migrants. There are 84 million refugees in the world. More than two-thirds of those are from five countries, which maybe gives a clue as to the way in which we should approach this issue rather than concentrating just on the symptoms. Four out of 10 refugees are in five countries. The fifth country is Germany, in which there are 1.2 million refugees. We have only a 10th of that number. Let us keep those numbers somewhere in our minds.

I was going to talk about some of the other matters that I find difficult in the Bill but I will not go through them because I will run out of time. However, I will refer to one of my fellow Scandinavians who maybe came over in the same ship as my forebears—King Canute. He is famous for one thing. He went down probably to the channel coast, looked across to the continent and tried to push back the ocean. What is he known for? It is his failure. The fact is that the Bill cannot and will not work. It will not be a solution to a problem but, in the process, we will continue to trash the reputation of this country internationally. To me, that is a matter of despair.