Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill

Debate between Mark Pritchard and Jerome Mayhew

Committee of the whole House
Wednesday 17th January 2024 Commons Chamber

[Jerome Mayhew]

The phrase “safe and legal routes” feels right, doesn’t it? It feels like we should be in favour of safe and legal routes and, speaking personally, I think they are part of a wider solution to immigration. My hon. Friend says there may be up to 100 million people currently seeking asylum. From memory, I think the figure from the United Nations report is actually 108 million.

[Mark Pritchard (The Wrekin) (Con)]

My hon. Friend is making an excellent speech. This Bill is dealing with a lot of the pull factors; at least, it mentions or implies approaching those in a more constructive and positive way. I know that he serves on the Council of Europe delegation. On the push factors, does he agree that this domestic policy should not be disaggregated from foreign policy and our overseas aid policies? Let us look at the examples of sub-Saharan Africa or the Sahel, where the French have recently exited, or are about to do so, and where the UK has an important counter-terrorism presence. In those places, fragile states that are becoming failed states are causing more push factors. In addition, some adversaries of this country, such as Russia, through its proxies in Africa, are trying to disrupt democratically elected Governments in order to create a migration crisis; they are happy to see people coming up through north Africa and into Europe. Given his international experience, does he agree that we have to have a more holistic view of this policy in the context of global foreign policy?

[Jerome Mayhew]

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for those excellent points. They highlight one reason why the merging of the Department for International Development with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office to form the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office has the potential to link those two areas of policy. The challenge with push factors is substantial and it is that they have only just started. He is right to refer to malign actors such as Russia in the short and medium terms, but there is a much bigger factor that this House needs to consider over the next 20 to 50 years: climate change. The likelihood is that there will be very significant mass migration from sub-Saharan Africa when large areas of countries, perhaps entire countries, may become functionally uninhabitable through water scarcity and heat. What we have seen currently in push factors will be nothing compared with what we see in the future, so it behoves us, as a responsible Government, to design and implement an immigration policy that is fit for purpose, not just for now, but for the future.

China’s Policy on its Uighur Population

Debate between Mark Pritchard and Jerome Mayhew

Wednesday 11th March 2020 Westminster Hall

[Mark Pritchard]

I am grateful for my hon. Friend’s intervention. He is absolutely right. There have clearly been, as I referenced earlier, acts of terrorism within China, but those have been committed by a small minority of people. Claims were made by organisations regarding the Beijing attacks, but China said that in fact they were not responsible. A variety of domestic and international groups want to cause harm to Chinese nationals. We would stand with the Government of China and with the people of China against such groups, but my hon. Friend is right to point out that the Muslim population in China want to live in peace and get on with their lives in freedom, like most people around the world. We are talking about a very small minority compared with the 10 million population that I referenced earlier.

[Jerome Mayhew (Broadland) (Con)]

I have my own experience of staying with the Uighurs, having spent some weeks in that part of the world. It is clear to anyone who has lived there what a noble civilisation they represent. To cast an entire population as terrorist sympathisers is an absolute travesty and does not in any way justify the Chinese Government’s undertaking population-level oppression and their wholly disproportionate response to a small terrorist incursion.

[Mark Pritchard]

I am grateful for my hon. Friend’s intervention. I was not aware of his personal experience, but he adds real value to the debate by sharing that. He is absolutely right. A one-size-fits-all policy is not right, and I will elaborate on why I think that.

Notwithstanding this debate and what might be perceived as criticism by some in the embassy here, or those in China, it is not criticism. It is what I call critical appreciation, or being a candid friend. China is a strategic partner and a key ally on so many levels internationally. To make this speech and have this debate is not to deny that there is a domestic terrorist threat in China; it is not a denial that, for example, the Turkistan Islamic party is a real threat to the Chinese nation. However, it does appear that the detention and forced labour camps policy is at best a clumsy attempt to reduce the threat of home-grown terrorism and at worst an illegal attempt to eradicate Uighur culture, language and religious practice. I think that either attempt will ultimately fail.

The short-term outcome might be a decline in the number of protests, and reduced Uighur gatherings, but the acts of state-led oppression are, I fear, laying the foundations of the very radicalisation and future home-grown terrorism that the Chinese Government are seeking to avert. It is a tragic irony that, in carrying out these policies, the Chinese state itself is in danger of becoming a recruiting sergeant for its own domestic terrorist threat in the coming years.

Last November, the United Nations issued a report agreeing with that analysis. It stated that

“disproportionate emphasis placed by the authorities on the repression of rights of minorities risks worsening any security risk”

and that such practices

“deeply erode the foundations for the viable social, economic and political development of society as a whole.”

Today, I am calling on the Chinese Government to end the extrajudicial detention of Uighurs and other minority groups in the Xinjiang region; to allow religious minorities to practise their religion peacefully and without state interference; and to heed the UK Government’s call to allow the United Nations to send in observers with unrestricted access to the detention or re-education centres. I urge Ministers to keep diplomatic pressure on their Chinese counterparts, both in bilateral discussions and through the United Nations.

Finally, I say to the Chinese authorities, as a friend—a candid friend—recognising the great and long history of China, China’s huge economic success and its astonishing and positive sociological transformation, that in sowing the seeds of oppression and repression in its own Uighur population, China’s leadership runs the very high risk of reaping a harvest of significant home-grown terrorism in the years that lie ahead.