Humanitarian Crisis in the Mediterranean and Europe

Mark Durkan Excerpts

Wednesday 9th September 2015 Commons Chamber

[Gareth Johnson]

I would argue that if we send out a green light to people by saying that if they come over to mainland Europe, they will find sanctuary, there is a huge danger that we will inadvertently encourage people to make the perilous journey that has cost so many lives. It is clear that if we suggest to people that all will be well if they come over the Mediterranean to mainland Europe, it will encourage more people to take the journey and hundreds more people will die in the boats, as has happened before.

[Mark Durkan (Foyle) (SDLP)]

Does the hon. Gentleman not accept that that was exactly the catastrophic rationale that lay at the heart of the decision in autumn 2014 to suspend Mare Nostrum? That decision was taken on the basis that rescuing people was encouraging more people on to the seas. The decision to suspend Mare Nostrum exacerbated the problem and cost many, many lives, and the folly that he is stating will do the same.

[Gareth Johnson]

I have to disagree with the hon. Gentleman. There will not be a long-term solution to this problem until we sort out the problems that Syria faces within Syria. If we ensure that there is a safe place to live there, the necessity to make the dangerous journey will go away. That is the positive way forward.

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[Alison McGovern (Wirral South) (Lab)]

It is good to speak in this important debate. I listened carefully to the contribution from the hon. Member for Gloucester (Richard Graham) and the remarks that he made about whether numbers matter. Of course, it is not numbers that matter, but need. If some of us are exasperated about numbers, it is because the Government are not doing enough and we are trying to encourage them in that direction.

I want to send out a message from this House that I hope everyone will agree with. It was a fine innovation when we decided that it would not just be for the Government to dictate our agenda, but for the public. Hundreds of thousands of people have signed e-petitions and the House has listened and put the issues that matter onto our agenda. One of those issues is one that the British people care about not for their own sakes, but for the sake of others. It is testimony to everybody who bothered to sign the petition that they are changing politics today.

One of the great moral puzzles is working out what we owe to others who are far away—who are not of our own family but of someone else’s family far away—and the Secretary of State answered that question in her contribution. She has met refugees and she told us about them. She has met people who have fled Syria, and she told us what she had heard from them. I ask whether anyone can hear those stories, or the contributions from the hon. Members for Glasgow North East (Anne McLaughlin) and for Oxford West and Abingdon (Nicola Blackwood), and not wonder if we can do a little more.

When we meet people, we realise they are just like us. I want to read out the words of Hassan, who is 14 and from Syria. He said:

“The children in Syria need help. They need help because they are being tortured, shelled, shot at. They take children and put them in front of them. They create a human shield of children. They know that the people in the town will not shoot their own children. I saw this with my own eyes.

I want children in Syria to escape. They should run away so they don’t die in the shelling.

What do I remember of Syria? I remember that whenever shelling took place we ran to a shelter. Inside, children shouted and wept a lot, they were so afraid. I remember that so many children were being tortured.

Because of what is happening in Syria we don’t play any more. I miss my house. I miss my neighbourhood. I miss playing football.”

Football, the universal language. The more we find out about the refugees, the more we realise that we are just like them, and that is why we need to help them.

The problem is that progress feels painfully slow. Back in 2014, we had a debate about whether the Government should join the UN resettlement scheme. The Government said that they would not join it, and in the end they came up with their own scheme. As Member after Member has said, that scheme has taken insufficient numbers. My right hon. Friend the Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz) mentioned the debate I held about refugees. In June, I asked the Prime Minister whether he felt that we were doing enough to help vulnerable children from Syria. In his words, he said that he was “convinced that we are”. It took the events in August to make him realise how wrong he was. Forgive me, Madam Deputy Speaker, if I am a little bit infuriated at times at such very slow progress.

I want to make two brief points and then say a final word. First, I know that the Government are capable of listening. The Secretary of State for International Development has listened and, as evidence has come before her, she has changed her position. She is a reasonable person who has done the right thing. I know that Ministers are prepared to do the right thing, so I say this to them. Let us be a part of Europe. Let us see what is happening on the southern coast of our continent, in Greece and in Italy, and say to the people there, “We stand with you. We know that you cannot deal with this alone.” Let us in this House listen to Matteo Renzi’s call to be a part of Europe and to demonstrate our European values by saying that we believe in freedom, tolerance and respect, as well as a place to live and a decent life for each and every person. Let us show some leadership. My right hon. Friend the Member for Leicester East, the Chair of the Home Affairs Committee, said that leadership has been lacking. Let us change that, because the rest of Europe is crying out for the UK to play a role, in part by offering sanctuary to some of the people who, perhaps in exceptional circumstances, are already in Europe.

[Mark Durkan]

My hon. Friend may recall that she questioned the Prime Minister in October 2013, following the EU Council, on precisely these issues in the Mediterranean. At that time, the Prime Minister told her that

“we should try to avoid the sense that there are…front-line states…that are under particular pressure.”—[Official Report, 28 October 2013; Vol. 569, c. 664.]

He went on to use Hungary as a comparator to show that the UK was taking its fair share of the burden.

[Alison McGovern]

In this debate, several hon. Members have reminded me of my previous contributions, and I thank them for doing so. I will not shut up about this because these people matter. In response to what we said in 2013, 2014 and this year, the Government have demonstrated that they have the capacity to change their mind. All I ask is that they show what sensible, reasonable people they are and change their mind again.

We need to play such a role in Europe. We need to demonstrate—whether in exceptional circumstances, or under whatever definition we set—that we are prepared to help our friends in Europe. The UK needs to be

“a piece of the Continent, a part of the main”,

as John Donne, one of our country’s finest poets, said.

Secondly, we need truly to respond in policy terms to the outpouring of good will towards refugees and victims of the conflict in Syria. Never mind the numbers; let us show that we have heard what the people of Britain think and take refugees out of the migration target. I think that the Government have failed on their migration target, which was ill-conceived for loads of reasons to do with the place of universities in our economy and the needs of great businesses, such as Unilever in my patch. It was a bad idea, but they are the Government and they have a right to do it. What they do not have the right to do is to say that we should decide whether we are living up to our duty towards the people coming to our country needing our help and needing sanctuary on the basis of some arbitrary statistical target that they have set for themselves in the heat of an election.

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[Mark Durkan (Foyle) (SDLP)]

I sat through the debates yesterday and today and want to address a number of the points that have come up rather than just rely on some of the helpful and poignant briefings we have received from so many people.

One of the first things I want to do is acknowledge the tenor and content of the speech made by the hon. Member for Moray (Angus Robertson) as well as the scope of the motion. Contrary to the attempts by the hon. Member for Gloucester (Richard Graham) and others to misrepresent it, people need to recognise that the motion clearly listened to the points that many Government Members made in yesterday’s debate, when they said that in all the focus on the refugee crisis as it is manifesting itself in Europe we should not forget the refugee crisis in the camps in some of the countries surrounding Syria or the significant commitment that the Government are making to the efforts to support people affected by conflict in Syria and elsewhere. The motion clearly does that. It attempts to achieve consensus on some of those concerns and on the valid points made by Government Members yesterday.

The most questionable point made by the hon. Member for Gloucester was when he complained that the motion

“calls for a Government report to be laid before the House by 12 October 2015 detailing how that number can be increased”

and stopped there. He forgot to say that the motion continues:

“encompassing refugees already in Europe and including a plan for the remainder of this year to reflect the overwhelming urgency of this humanitarian crisis”.

That is the point. If those of us who have signed the motion had been saying that we wanted to see refugees who are already in Europe admitted as part of the 20,000 the Government are looking to admit over the next few years, Government Members would say that we were trying to deny people in the camps the opportunity to be part of that number. Our concern is not that people who are in the camps should not be admitted—we welcome the Government’s interest, although again we would welcome an increase in the numbers—but that we cannot ignore those who are already in Europe. It was the overtone of disqualification in the Prime Minister’s statement the other day that particularly concerned me.

In the debate yesterday and today, many hon. Members touched on what prompted so many of our constituents to mobilise and get in touch with us. A little over a week after the media were full of the photographs of the Prime Minister on a beach in Cornwall, a different beach photograph emerged in the media. It brought out those words of Seamus Heaney about something having the ability to

“catch the heart off guard and blow it open.”

That is what that photograph of Alan Kurdi did.

We heard the response from so many of our constituents and we know what the response has been internationally, but let us be clear. That photograph stirred our constituents and in turn seemed to spur the Prime Minister into altering his tone, but let us think about another Alan who might arrive on a beach or somewhere else in Europe, having survived his perilous journey, but alone and unaccompanied. What is the message in the Government’s response to that Alan? “He is disqualified. He is outside our consideration.” We even heard from the Prime Minister today that, yes, we do have to take care as to what we do with unaccompanied children and how we treat them, but being careful is no reason not to show them care and consideration, which appears to be the Government’s position. That needs to be revised, improved and altered.

I welcome the fact that the Prime Minister has had his attitudes to this long-running problem reconditioned. Remember, he was one of the leaders at the EU Council who went along with the idea that Operation Mare Nostrum was somehow encouraging people on to the seas. The line back then in autumn 2013 was, “If we run rescue operations, we will only be encouraging more people on to the seas.” At least now, thankfully, we have the Royal Navy, the Irish navy and others helping to rescue, but it took the disasters of April this year to force that rethink. The same caution from the Government Benches that we have heard in the past two days—that we have to be careful not to encourage people to make those perilous journeys—was exactly what was behind the disastrous decision in relation to Operation Mare Nostrum, which did nothing to discourage the perilous journeys and meant that people were not saved and too many lives were lost.

[Mr MacNeil]

The perilous journeys would, of course, be ended if people could fly. Sadly, they cannot because an EU aviation directive prevents that, which means that at four times the cost they are taking those perilous journeys.

[Mark Durkan]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for making that point, which is correct. We know from Amnesty and others that a cogent case has been made in relation to a number of deficiencies in the Schengen agreement and the Dublin regulation, which clearly need to be overhauled in the light of recent events.

I agree with so many Government Members on a number of points that they have made, not least the hon. and learned Member for South East Cambridgeshire (Lucy Frazer) and the hon. Member for Oxford West and Abingdon (Nicola Blackwood). We need to recognise the scale of the whole humanitarian crisis and not concentrate just on those who are arriving in Europe. We have to meet our responsibilities in relation to those who have made it to Europe and in relation to the wider crisis.

The Secretary of State for International Development spoke of her concern not only that other countries were not matching the 0.7% aid target, but that there was a significant shortfall in so many relevant UN appeals. Some of us would say that one of the ways to deal with that is through a global financial transaction tax. Part of the aim of those of us who have supported that idea is precisely to support funding for the sort of international mechanisms and measures that are needed, rather than different UN funds having to busk around different countries trying to gather money for programmes. Although we have heard in these debates about the very good work in the refugee camps and elsewhere that is being funded through DFID and so many NGOs, let us also be clear that UN funding in a number of those camps is being reduced. The level of food aid in some of the camps is being reduced, and education support is not what it should be.

In the previous Parliament the all-party group on protecting children in armed conflict, led by Fiona O’Donnell, produced a report that drew heavily on the lessons being learned from what is happening in Syria, particularly in relation to the millions of children who have had to flee. It noted that when DFID and other organisations respond to such emergencies, in the first order of things little thought is given to education. That might be understandable, but when we consider just how long term many refugee camps have become for other conflicts—look at the Palestinian experience—we see that clearly more needs to be done. The world must respond not only to the immediacy of the refugee crisis, but to the wider lessons about the inadequacy. Obviously the convention on refugees will have to be overhauled, and so many other rules, such as Schengen and Dublin, will have to be revised.

Of course, these islands are outside Schengen. One of the things that I would like to see the UK Government do, along with the Irish Government, is convene a meeting of the British-Irish Council to co-ordinate across the devolved Administrations and with the Irish Government what the response will be across these islands in order to meet our responsibilities for accommodating refugees. That would ensure optimum co-ordination across jurisdictions and between services so that there is no fall-down, breakdown or confusion facing international agencies or domestic charities when it comes to responding. The Government might find, as a result of the information and ideas that would emerge from such collaboration, that they are in a position to reconsider the number of refugees they are taking and the time scale, not least by accommodating some of those who are already in Europe.

Let us be clear that the Government, having previously been averse to engaging with the UNHCR resettlement scheme, and then having been very dilatory in relation to the vulnerable persons scheme, have now moved to strike a tone of some urgency in this regard, but of course limits have been put on it—the Prime Minister appears to have put the guard up on his heart again. The Government must be prepared to do more, but those of us who are criticising them for the number of refugees they will admit or on the time scale must face the wider question about the scale of the problem in the camps, about other conflicts, not least in Sudan and South Sudan, that are driving people into refugee status, and about the need for a much bigger and longer-term response, including proper support for the UN, and a global financial transactions tax would be a good start.

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[Simon Hoare]

I hear what the hon. Gentleman says, but the sovereign Government of Greece signed up to an arrangement of open borders, which they now have to justify to their people. Her Majesty’s Government, on previous occasions, took a different point of view.

[Mark Durkan]

The hon. Gentleman has clearly overcome whatever emotions afflicted him when he scrolled through his family photographs by conjuring up the most bizarre rationale. Does he not understand that many of us fully accept why Government Members want at every opportunity to stand outside a common currency in Europe, but not to stand outside common decency?

[Simon Hoare]

With the greatest respect to the hon. Gentleman—I do have a huge amount of respect for his views on many issues—I think that point seeks to deliberately debase the debate. This is nothing at all to do with either decency or indecency. The difference between opposition and government is that Opposition parties can let only their hearts dictate the narrative; the governing party has to use heart and head. I shall come on briefly to some of the issues—whether we are talking about 20,000 and whether they will come from within the camps or elsewhere—that are pertinent for Ministers to consider.