Illegal Migration Bill

Debate between Nigel Evans and Tim Loughton

Tuesday 11th July 2023 Commons Chamber

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

Order. I will call Tim Loughton first, and then it will be Dame Diana take two.

[Tim Loughton]

I will aim to complete my speech in less time than it took the hon. Member for Cumbernauld, Kilsyth and Kirkintilloch East (Stuart C. McDonald) to start talking about the Lords amendments, which is what we are here to do—but we will see how we go. I declare an interest as the chair of a safeguarding board of a children’s company.

I thank the Minister for the extensive discussions that we have had about the Lords amendments. I fear that we have not quite got there, so we may be back here again in a while. There has been an inordinate amount of debate on the Bill, and a lot of work has been done in the Lords, which is why we have so many amendments.

I support the Bill and I want it to pass, but it needs properly to balance safe and legal routes, and assurances about looking after the most vulnerable—particularly children—with coming down hard on people who are gaming the system and do not have a legitimate case for claiming asylum in the UK.

I do not have time to talk about every Lords amendment, so I will focus on two main areas: child detention, and safe and legal routes. I am pleased and grateful to the Government for the progress that we have made on the detention of pregnant women; that was a no-brainer, frankly. I also have some concerns around the treatment of people being transported back to other countries on the grounds of sexuality, and I want further assurances on that from the Minister. I also have concerns about accompanied children. There is a real problem with so-called families, who have been put together by people smugglers, as the Home Affairs Committee saw when we went to Dover. We came across somebody claiming to be the uncle of a young girl and they did not even speak the same language. There are problems here, but I absolutely want to concentrate on unaccompanied asylum-seeking children.

I am also pleased that Lord Carlile’s amendments around retrospectivity have been accepted. The Archbishop of Canterbury’s 10-year strategy has some merit in it, but I do not think that it is for this Bill; it is a strategy for a Government rather than being for a piece of legislation such as this.

On the subject of child detention, despite the substantial discussions I mentioned, it would appear that the Government are setting out only a very narrow concession, just to give the possibility of bail after eight days to one small subgroup of unaccompanied asylum-seeking children detained on the grounds of removal only. The Government themselves said in March in guidance:

“A period of detention can have a significant and negative impact on a child’s mental or physical health and development”.

I think that we would all agree with that, so such detention needs to be used sensitively and sparingly.

This is a really sensitive issue. I think it was a proud achievement of the coalition Government when, after a Citizens’ Assembly back in 2010, David Cameron said that child detention was not acceptable and pledged to end it. It was part of the coalition programme in May 2010. Detention policy changed in 2011 and was codified in the Immigration Act 2014. Large numbers of children were being detained before 2010. There were 1,065 children being detained in 2009 alone. There was a case of a three-year-old girl who had spent 166 days of her life—her short life—in Yarl’s Wood detention centre. That was completely unacceptable, so it was right that the law was changed.

At the time, guarantees were also made in a debate on the Nationality and Borders Bill. The Government made explicitly clear their commitment to the rationale that unaccompanied children should not be blocked from claiming asylum and would be exempt from the inadmissibility process. As the Minister set out on Report of that Bill:

“I wish to emphasise that we will always act in accordance with our international obligations, and to be very clear that unaccompanied asylum-seeking children will not be subject to inadmissibility or transferred for offshore processing.”—[Official Report, 7 December 2021; Vol. 705, c. 311.]

There was merit in that then and there is still merit in it now.

This matter was raised as a priority issue in the Committee and Report stages of this Bill. The Minister promised us changes in the Lords. That is why we did not push to a vote the amendments tabled in my name and the names of other right hon. and hon. Members at that stage. However, I am afraid that the promise did not materialise in the House of Lords, and only now, with amendments in lieu, are we seeing some concessions at this late stage, which, frankly, is not good enough. That is why, I am afraid, there is some scarcity of trust in the assurances given from the Dispatch Box, rather than stuff written, prima facie, in the Bill, or in specific guidance linked to undertakings in the Bill. We need to see more details in the Bill, not just assurances from the Dispatch Box, which have not always been forthcoming.

In changing the law, we need to comply with a clear set of principles when we are dealing with vulnerable children. Children should be treated differently from adults. Any child in the United Kingdom is entitled to the same protections whether they arrive on a boat or they were born here. Whether we like it or not, a child is a child and, as such, should be subject to the safety of the Children Act 1989, which is as relevant today as it was when it was first legislated for.

Recognition of Armenian Genocide

Debate between Nigel Evans and Tim Loughton

1st reading
Tuesday 9th November 2021 Commons Chamber

[Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That leave be given to bring in a Bill to require Her Majesty’s Government formally to recognise the Armenian genocide of 1915-23; and for connected purposes.

I declare an interest as chair of the all-party parliamentary group for Armenia. Many people might not be able to identify Armenia on a map or have any knowledge of atrocities that happened over a century ago, but that is no reason for us not to consider, to remember and to seek to remediate a particularly dark chapter in human history, which has been acknowledged by His Holiness Pope Francis as the first genocide of the 20th century.

The Armenian genocide was the systematic and systemic mass murder of between 1 million and 1.5 million ethnic Armenians in the Ottoman empire, primarily in the years of the first world war between 1915 and 1916 and extending as far as 1923, though large-scale massacres at the hands of the Ottomans go back to the 1890s and 1909. Following the Ottoman invasion of Russian and Persian territory during world war one, and to deter Armenian independence, Ottoman paramilitaries massacred local Armenians and plans were formulated for mass deportation.

In 1915, the Ottoman authorities arrested and deported hundreds of Armenian intellectuals and leaders from Constantinople. Subsequently, on the orders of Talaat Pasha, an estimated 800,000 to 1.2 million Armenian women, children and elderly or infirm people were sent on death marches leading to the Syrian desert in 1915 and 1916. Driven forward by paramilitary escorts, the deportees were deprived of food and water and subjected to robbery, rape and massacres. In the Syrian desert, the survivors were dispersed into concentration camps.

In 1916, another wave of massacres was ordered, leaving about 200,000 deportees alive by the end of 1916. Around 100,000 to 200,000 Armenian women and children were forcibly converted to Islam and integrated into Muslim households. Massacres and ethnic cleansing of Armenian survivors were carried out by the Turkish nationalist movement during the Turkish war of independence after the first world war. The Armenian genocide resulted in the destruction of more than two millennia of Armenian civilization in eastern Anatolia.

We knew about these atrocities at the time. The British Government commissioned a parliamentary blue book in 1916 to document the Armenian genocide. It was compiled by Viscount Bryce and the historian, Arnold Toynbee. I read the Hansard of the debates in the Lords at the time, and in particular the speeches of the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Randall Davidson, a great champion of the Armenian people. He spoke of

“appalling stories of wholesale massacre, of expulsion of great populations from their homes under conditions which could only be described as in most cases slowly dragged-out massacre…on a scale so vast as is scarcely credible in our own time or, indeed, in any time.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 17 December 1919; Vol. 38, c. 280.]

He recounted details of women and girls thrown off barges on the River Tigris to drown, children burned alive in concentration camps and hundreds of thousands of men uprooted and forced on long marches to be murdered if they did not expire on route. He concluded:

“After all the distractions which the war has brought into the mind of men all over the world in contemplating contemporary history, is it conceivable that we are going to allow these facts to be forgotten; or, if we do not allow them to be forgotten, that we are going to allow conditions to arise again during which their repetition can be possible? That seems to me to be a question which ought to be, and must be, asked at once.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 17 December 1919; Vol. 38, c. 285.]

Hear, hear to that, Mr Deputy Speaker. It is why the issue is still so important today.

Part of the problem is that the term “genocide” was not in use then and therefore not applied to massacres such as this back in 1916, and it did not have the international resonance that it does today. The word “genocide” was first coined by the Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin in 1944. It was first recognised as a crime under international law in 1946 by the UN General Assembly and codified as an independent crime in the 1948 convention on the prevention and punishment of the crime of genocide, which came into effect in 1951. From that flow all the subsequent international cases on genocide tried in the international court, which includes retrospectively—that is an important point—the Jewish holocaust.

The convention and subsequent UN resolutions recognise that genocide has taken place at all times in human history and that there were prosecutions for the crime even before the term was invented. To date, the convention has been ratified by 149 states, including the UK in 1970, strengthening our country’s global prestige for standing up for human rights and justice.

We know about the Jewish holocaust as a genocide and, since 2001, we have commemorated Holocaust Memorial Day, applied to all holocausts. We acknowledge and mourn the Rwandan genocide of 1994, in which 800,000 Tutsis and Hutus died. The Srebrenica massacre of 1995 has been recognised as genocide by the International Criminal Tribunal, and there are others. However, the UK has yet to recognise the Armenian genocide, despite strong condemnation of it at the time from the British Government as “a crime against humanity”. Churchill referred to the infamous massacre and deportation of Armenians thus:

“The clearance of the race from Asia Minor was about as complete as such an act, on a scale so great, could well be.”

Despite no fewer than 31 countries officially recognising the Armenian genocide, including European partners such as Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden, and France, which notably recently passed into law the offence of denying that the Armenian killings were genocide, for some reason the UK has failed to follow suit. Earlier this year, the Biden Administration in the US recognised the Ottoman-era Armenian genocide as well. It is therefore surely time for the UK to do the right thing and follow suit.

Let me uniquely quote Hitler, who, ahead of his invasion of Poland in 1939, famously said

“who after all speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?”

That is the point: we cannot legitimately call out and stand up to genocides that are still going on in the 21st century by side-lining and neglecting the genocides of the 20th century. The refusal to recognise the Armenian genocide risks conveying a dangerous message of impunity that a crime unpunished is a crime encouraged or downplayed. A memorandum from the Foreign Office back in 1999 let the cat out of the bag. It said:

“Given the importance of our relationship (political, strategic, commercial) with Turkey…recognising the genocide would provide no practical benefit to the UK”.

That is not good enough. Glossing over the uncomfortable inconveniences of history is not the basis for strong and constructive relationships with supposed allies in the present day.

Earlier this year, the House rightly voted unanimously to recognise the Chinese genocide of the Uyghur people going in Xinjiang. Every aspect of what happened to the Armenian people deserves the same title and regard. Just as the Uyghur atrocities continue, the recent invasion of Nagorno-Karabakh by Azerbaijan, which has forced 90,000 Armenians to flee their homes due to the threat of ethnic cleansing, serves as a warning that Armenians remain vulnerable today. Disgracefully, the Azerbaijanis issued a set of official postage stamps depicting exterminators in hazmat suits cleansing Nagorno-Karabakh of Armenians. What more chilling evidence do we need that some countries need to be reminded about the horrors of genocide?

My Bill would require the UK Government formally to recognise the genocide of the Armenians in the period from 1915 to 1923; establish an annual commemoration to victims of the Armenian genocide, which may be part of a wider commemoration of genocides; and ensure that the facts of the Armenian genocide and its relevance are acknowledged in the curriculum, just as we do with other historical genocides. Such an undertaking would help to right an historical injustice; help to advance genocide studies globally; raise public awareness on crimes against humanity; and send out a strong message and assurance to the Armenian community in the United Kingdom that we share and recognise their pain and will stand with them against the revisiting of such crimes in future.

The Bill is strongly supported by hon. Members from at least five parties across the House—I am glad to see some of them in their places—including the Conservative party, the Labour party, the Liberal Democrats, the Democratic Unionist party and the Scottish National party. It has the backing of the Armenian National Committee. I am particularly grateful to Annette Moskofian, its chair, for all her help and support both for the all-party parliamentary group for Armenia and in preparing the Bill. I also thank the ambassador. I am glad to see and be able to acknowledge the presence of both of them in the Public Gallery.

The Bill is important. The Armenian genocide is not an historical anachronism but an important contemporary issue where, inexplicably, we have failed to read the room internationally. We urgently need to put that right now. Many of us were disappointed with the relatively tame condemnation last year of Azerbaijan’s invasion of Nagorno-Karabakh and the ongoing atrocities committed against Armenian prisoners and Armenians still trying to live in homelands that their ancestors have inhabited for centuries. With the Bill, we have the opportunity to do our bit to help right an appalling historical injustice and, as a leading advocate of human rights on the international stage, send out a clear message that we recognise genocide—wherever and whenever it has been committed—as the worst crime against humanity and that we will call it out, defend the victims and bring the perpetrators to justice.

Question put and agreed to.

Ordered,

That Tim Loughton, Sir Iain Duncan Smith, John Spellar, Chris Law, Christine Jardine, James Gray, Jim Shannon, Andrew Rosindell, Dr Rupa Huq, Wera Hobhouse, Alan Brown and Chris Stephens present the Bill.

Tim Loughton accordingly presented the Bill.

Bill read the First time; to be read a Second time on Friday 18 March 2022, and to be printed (Bill 190).

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

Order. Before we move on, following the earlier points of order about the Committee on Standards, information has now come to me that a motion has been tabled for Monday that will do exactly what Mr Bryant, the Chair of the Committee, said: endorse the Committee’s proposals and rescind the proposals for reform. I do believe it is important that the House gets to know these things as quickly as possible so that it can make all sorts of preparations. It is a shame that that was not made clear earlier.

His Royal Highness The Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh

Debate between Nigel Evans and Tim Loughton

Monday 12th April 2021 Commons Chamber

[Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con)]

Well said, Mr Deputy Speaker. Indeed, what is left to say after so many distinguished contributions? Let me start by sending my thoughts and prayers to Her Majesty the Queen, as so many others have, on behalf of the people of East Worthing and Shoreham. I add my three-penn’orth to this Humble Address without any particular first-hand knowledge of His Royal Highness, other than having met him at Buckingham Palace receptions, where I am sure we can all attest to his wit and occasionally eyebrow-raising humour. Alas, I never hosted His Royal Highness in my constituency in the last 24 years, but like so many people, I have admired his constancy, his dedication and his public service from afar and have felt truly personally saddened that he is no longer there; I have been surprised at the extent of that.

So often at funerals we find out so much about a person after they have left us from the tributes of friends and family. Extraordinarily for someone who was so much in the public eye, I have learnt so much from the saturation coverage that I have welcomed over the last few days, and it is virtually all good. It has been a welcome change from the negative, sensationalising and often conflict-seeking docu-soaps that hit the headlines on certain TV networks, to which, unfairly, members of the royal family can never really reply. The Duke of Edinburgh, above all, would have hated the tsunami of attention and all the fuss and the tributes that he is receiving now, like it or not—all the “yak, yak, yak; come on, get a move on,” as he once chided the Queen aboard the Britannia.

The outstanding theme of the accounts of the last few days has of course been the Duke’s unstinting and constant support for the Queen—“my rock”, as she called him. Indeed, it has been an outstanding partnership, and even the most hardened republican cannot but be moved by the obvious intensity of their devotion to each other in their engagement photos, which is echoed so uncannily and undiminished in the diamond wedding anniversary photos 70 years later, as if there were just a few days between them.

However, there was so much more to the Duke than as consort to Her Majesty, and I do not just mean the extraordinary success of the Duke of Edinburgh Award scheme, which virtually everybody in this House seems to have been on or to have had children who have done it. I will not repeat all the figures, but one thing that is less known is that it was designed to be disability-inclusive, at his insistence, years before disability discrimination legislation was ever a thing.

The Duke was associated with 837 organisations, with a particular focus on young people and getting them active outdoors. Those organisations included the National Playing Fields Association, now Fields in Trust, of which he was president from 1948 until 2013—65 years. It was a long-term and active hands-on commitment because early in his royal life, the Duke was said to be appalled to see children playing in the street instead of in green spaces and it became his desire to improve the situation for young people in urban areas. He raised a huge amount of money for that charity, and he recognised the power of the media to help in that fundraising. He struck up a connection with Frank Sinatra, no less, and provided the introduction to the recording of “If Only She Looked My Way”, recognised as the first charity single, which helped clear the debts of the charity by 1952.

We know about the Duke’s extraordinary, courageous military achievements and about his sporting achievements, and he was ahead of his time in so many other ways. He was a recognised environmentalist before even David Attenborough recognised that he was an environmentalist. He was an accomplished broadcaster, particularly on issues concerning technology, science and space, and of course he took a particular interest in the NASA projects.

The Duke ran the estates at Windsor, Sandringham and Balmoral, and left them in a much enriched state. He was the force behind the conversion of the private chapel at Buckingham Palace into the Royal Collection to allow the public in to share the many masterpieces in that collection. He was, by all accounts, an accomplished artist himself, and commissioned over 2,000 works of art. He was a deeply serious and intellectual man, for which he is not appreciated. He loved debate, and to question and to challenge, as a result of which he set up the St George’s House conference resource at Windsor castle in 1966, hosting many distinguished speakers and debates. I was privileged to have been part of that at one time. And, of course, he was worshipped as a god on the island of Tanna in Vanuatu in the south Pacific. The Queen is merely an earthly sovereign; the Duke of Edinburgh was a god.

On one thing, however, the Duke was wrong, and I will finish on this. Because of his slightly nomadic upbringing, leading him often to give “no fixed abode” when signing visitors books, he claimed:

“My trouble is that I’ve never properly belonged anywhere.”

I think the outstanding outpouring of respect, affection, admiration and genuine sorrow at his passing from every corner of the globe since his death has shown that he actually truly belonged everywhere. In the often unfashionable places he visited, the many under-appreciated causes he supported, the impressions he left on the many millions of people whose lives he touched and in the hearts of the family, the nation and the Commonwealth he served so unflinchingly over the last almost century, our biggest tribute to him must be to just get on with it. We give thanks for an extraordinary life lived to the full, and may he rest in peace.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

Before I call John Howell on the video link, I will just say that we have 53 Members who now want to contribute and they are all on the Government side, so can I encourage people to take less than the three minutes so that we get everybody in? If they take two and a bit minutes, we should do it.

Public Health

Debate between Nigel Evans and Tim Loughton

Wednesday 6th January 2021 Commons Chamber

[Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con) [V]]

Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker, for saving me up till last. It is difficult to say something new at No. 67 on the list.

Let me say at the outset that I recognise the seriousness of the situation, particularly given the new strain of the virus. I recognise the huge pressures on hospitals and I pay tribute to them. However, I am not convinced that another hurriedly announced national lockdown is the right solution. That is why I am loth to vote for the regulations, especially when we have had just three hours to debate the biggest infringement of our constituents’ civil liberties that I have ever had to vote on as an MP, and given that Parliament could have sat all this week, and we would then have considered the regulations before they came into force.

The sunset expiry date of the regulations has been surreptitiously moved to the end of March rather than the end of January as we were earlier led to believe. The regulations have no impact assessment, and there are measures in them that were brought into law in the first lockdown, but later removed or relaxed.

I have said all along that the Government have a difficult job to balance advice about risk from the medical experts with the economic impact and the public’s confidence in abiding by the regulations. After 10 months, that confidence has been sorely tested and there is a high level of lockdown fatigue. It is therefore even more important that what we ask our constituents is logical, consistent and fair. Banning golf, tennis, angling and other outside pursuits was not considered logical previously and was relaxed in earlier regulations. Banning people from buying beer from outside closed pubs rather than crowding into supermarkets and off-licences was also inconsistent and relaxed in earlier regulations. It is therefore frustrating and regressive to see those and many other unnecessary and illogical restrictions creeping back in again. I ask the Secretary of State to be sensible and sensitive to the lobbying to remove them before they undermine confidence further.

My main point concerns the vaccine. It must be the Government’s single biggest imperative. We need a national effort—a “little ships” effort—to deliver, buoyed up by the sea of vaccine the Government wisely bought up early. So when Ministers and clinicians proudly claim that we will be vaccinating 12 hours a day, seven days a week, my reaction is to ask: what about the other 12 hours—the other 50% of the day? We should be vaccinating 24 hours a day, seven days a week, until everyone who qualifies is jabbed. Many volunteers have come forward to work shifts in the middle of the night—many little old ladies in Worthing who would readily bring tea and biscuits round at 4 o’clock in the morning, with others to run the technology. If they are offered a jab at 4 am rather than four weeks hence, people will turn up.

We should be getting more juice, as the Secretary of State put it earlier, including by approving the Moderna vaccine already given the go-ahead in the US, for example. Create drive-through jab centres, develop online booking of slots, allow walk-in services for spare appointments, allow diabetics to self-jab when they get their insulin. Only when we are vaccinating full-time can the Government claim to be doing absolutely everything they can, at pace, to get us out of this revolving pandemic lockdown door.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

Order. Sorry Tim.

Immigration and Social Security Co-ordination (EU Withdrawal) Bill

Debate between Nigel Evans and Tim Loughton

Consideration of Lords amendments
Wednesday 4th November 2020 Commons Chamber

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

I am going to call the Minister at 6.27 pm, and the questions will be put no later than 6.32 pm. There are a number of MPs on the call list, so please show some self-discipline in order that we can get in as many as we can.

[Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con)]

I rise to speak in support of Lords amendment 4B. I was disappointed to hear the Minister dismiss it as just well intentioned. I think it is absolutely essential. With just eight weeks to go before the Dublin arrangements for family reunion fall, we have had the tragic drownings in the channel recently; mercifully, but surprisingly, such cases are rare.

Here we go again. This is the last remaining amendment that has come back from the Lords, and it has done so with a vengeance. It was a big defeat for the Government in the other place, by 320 votes to 242. Lord Dubs has led the charge on this ably and eloquently over many months, and he spoke with huge passion. The debate in the other place was just about financial privilege; as he put it, that

“falls short of being humanitarian and falls short of respecting the opinions of this House.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 21 October 2020; Vol. 806, c. 1595.]

Many in this House think we must do better, and I find it extraordinary that the Government are still digging their heels in for the sake of about 500 highly vulnerable children.

The Government have produced their own amendment. I have no objection to it; it is perfectly innocuous. It commits to a review of safe and legal routes, and that is welcome. It is the least that can be expected, however, because it is what the Government have promised all along in the light of the welcome overhaul of the immigration system and the continued suspension or non-renewal of previous safe and legal routes. Simply adding the Government’s amendment to the Bill will not guarantee the replacement for the Dublin family reunion scheme that we have been promised for so long—despite the fact that, as the hon. Member for Halifax (Holly Lynch) has said, there is no negotiating mandate from EU member states.

The amendment gives no timescale for when measures may be introduced, if they are to be. Neither does it give details about how extensive a replacement scheme may be, given that the Government’s separate refugee family reunion scheme is much more restrictive about family members who can reunite. Part 11 of the rules applies only to pre-flight children seeking to reunite primarily with parents, and provisions on reuniting with uncles or aunts, for example, are subject to very strict criteria and high evidential thresholds.

Let us look at those thresholds by considering the ability of a young teenage boy on the Greek islands to reunite with an aunt or uncle in the UK—a case that we raised with the Minister in the Home Affairs Committee this morning. The Minister made it sound as though that would be no problem, but it will not work in practice for most cases. That child would have to apply under rule 319X, which technically allows children to join uncles, aunts, cousins, siblings or any other family member who is not a parent and who has the refugee status of humanitarian protection. However, the requirements that have to be met are very onerous, and there are strict evidential requirements.

The child would be able to apply under 319X, but only if the uncle or aunt is a refugee, not if they are British or have other status, unlike in the Dublin regulations. The child can apply only if the uncle or aunt can maintain and accommodate them. That is a very high threshold, and it is much higher than the one in Dublin. The child can apply only if they can show that

“there are serious and compelling family or other considerations which make exclusion of the child undesirable”—

that is a very high test that is hard to meet, and there is no such test under the Dublin regulations—

“and suitable arrangements have been made for the child’s care”.

The child can apply only if the uncle or aunt can afford the £388 fee to make the application. The uncle or aunt cannot be a refugee with indefinite leave to remain; they must only have limited leave to remain as a refugee. That is an absurdly high bar to meet, and I suspect the Minister knows it. Frankly, it is no substitute for the safe and legal routes that are available now, which have worked well and have been responsible for saving hundreds of highly vulnerable children.

That was the only alternative scheme that the Minister could offer the Home Affairs Committee this morning. He claimed that some 7,400 refugees—it fell to one of the officials to look this up on the computer in front of them—had been issued family reunion visas in the year to March 2020. But they are from outside the EU. The scheme is welcome, as is the fact that we have brought those people in. The Government are to be applauded for targeting some of the most vulnerable families and children, who are genuine refugees from some really dangerous parts of the world, and that has worked exceedingly well. They are all from outside the EU, however, so the scheme does absolutely nothing for the children we are talking about. As things stand, on 1 January 2021, an unaccompanied child in a squalid French refugee camp or on the streets of Italy,  or any of the 1,600 unaccompanied children on the Greek island of Lesbos—where a refugee camp recently burned down, as the hon. Member for Halifax mentioned —or a child orphaned because their parents were killed by a bomb in Syria, by terrorists in Afghanistan, or by disease or famine in sub-Saharan Africa, will have no obvious mainstream means of applying to join a last remaining sibling, aunt, or other relative in the UK. Safe Passage, to which I pay great tribute for its work on this issue, says that some 40% of the cases that it supports in France are of siblings trying to reunite. That is the reality.

Given that, I am afraid that all the assurances given by the Minister at the Dispatch Box and at this morning’s session of the Home Affairs Committee pale into absolute insignificance and irrelevance. I have set out what the position will be on 1 January 2021, in eight weeks’ time, unless a deal is negotiated and agreed before then—and a deal on a Dublin replacement is not even being discussed at the moment.

I have asked previously for a serious replacement for Dublin III, and a Dubs 2 scheme; the previous Dubs scheme did an extraordinary job of rescuing 480 very vulnerable unaccompanied children from dangerous parts of the world. I ask the Government, as a last-ditch effort to show their good will and commitment to a practical scheme that we know works, to roll over the terms of Dublin, at least until a new scheme is in place. I also ask them to give the go-ahead to the more than 30 councils across the country that have offered places to over 1,400 refugees like these refugee children, and to provide the financing for that.

We are not talking about a huge number of children. We are, however, talking about some of the most vulnerable children, who find themselves in hopeless and dangerous circumstances through no fault of their own—the sort of children we have a proud record of helping, and the sort of children whom we helped through the Dublin scheme, and can continue to help if the Government will make this concession. The Lords amendments would achieve that. Let us not let those children down.

European Union (Withdrawal) Act

Debate between Nigel Evans and Tim Loughton

Wednesday 5th December 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mr Nigel Evans (Ribble Valley) (Con)]

It is great to follow my right hon. Friend the Member for East Antrim (Sammy Wilson) and his siren warnings about what could happen over the coming weeks and months if we do not listen. I understand that people are talking to the DUP; it is about time that people started listening to the DUP. There is a huge difference.

I am not one of the MPs who has stood up and waxed lyrical on this issue over the past two years, as some Members in this Chamber have done. Barely a debate has gone by without certain Members sharing what they believe is right. I have heard a lot of talk today about honesty, transparency and treating people like adults. That is a good idea, because in 2016 we had a people’s vote. For anybody even to suggest that another referendum would be the people’s vote because the last one was not is totally and wholly fraudulent. It is ridiculous.

A people’s vote was held in 2016. We MPs in this Parliament allowed it to be held, and it was held. Surprise, surprise: it was not what people in the main thought was going to happen. I remember watching the result. There was no exit poll. The pound was up, shares were up, and Nigel Farage conceded defeat. Then, of course, the results started to come in. People who lived in the bubble of London could be forgiven for thinking that remain was going to win, but what happened was that there were swathes of people in the north-east, the north-west, and the south-west who felt as if nobody was listening to them—that they were the invisible people. Thanks to David Cameron, though, they were given a voice, they used that voice, and the voice said leave. Now, all of a sudden, those people are facing this Parliament, which is saying, “Not only don’t we see you; we have now decided not to listen to you.” That is wholly dangerous indeed.

When we agree to a referendum, we really do need to respect the result. In 1997, when I was a shadow Minister, Wales had a referendum on devolution. The result was 50.3% in favour and 49.7% against, on a 50.1% turnout. What did we do? We conceded. The difference between yes and no was under 7,000, but we conceded that that was what should happen, and devolution was given to the people of Wales. It would have been wholly wrong had we not done that.

[Tim Loughton]

Does my hon. Friend not agree that one of the reasons why people voted to leave is that, when a country has a referendum and comes up with a result that the EU does not like, it is the practice of the EU to pat it on the head patronisingly and to tell it to go away and come up with a different result—one that the EU agrees with. Is that not what certain people are now telling us that we should be doing, which is why we wanted to get out of the EU in the first place?

[Mr Evans]

It is worse than that. Again, it is this idea of let us go for honesty and treat people like adults. I am talking about the people’s vote—because we did not have one last time when 35 million people voted. What should be the options? “Oh”, says my right hon. Friend the Member for Putney (Justine Greening), “there should be three options.” The first is vote for the Government’s deal, which hardly anyone I speak to thinks is any good; then there is the cliff edge, which most people believe can be avoided and is an option that people really do not want; or there is stay in the European Union, which people rejected in 2016. That is not fair. Let us be honest: we are told that, in this Parliament, we cannot reach a decision with which everyone will agree. We must accept that, during the referendum, the vast majority of Members of Parliament voted and campaigned for remain. We are in a remain Parliament, which happens to reside in a leave country. It is wholly dangerous for us to turn to the people now and say, “You let us down. You got it wrong.” What else is said about people who voted leave? It is that they are a bit thick and that they did not know what they were voting for. We have also had intimations that perhaps they were racist. Well, no, they were not. They were not racist. Immigration was only part of it. It was all about the sovereignty of making decisions in this Parliament, with immigration being part of that.