Migration and Border Security
Nigel Farage Excerpts(2 weeks, 6 days ago)
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Yvette Cooper
My hon. Friend is right. It was a total, shocking waste of money to send just four volunteers—and the Government had 1,000 people working on the Rwanda scheme. That was 1,000 people who could have been working on enforcement, returns or clearing the backlog, or taking action to pursue the criminal gangs. Instead, they were working on a scheme that ran for two years and sent just four volunteers.
Nigel Farage (Clacton) (Reform)
I agree with the Home Secretary, who was right to highlight that 2023 was a year of shame for a Government who had repeatedly promised net migration of tens of thousands a year, not nearly a million; perhaps they will never be forgiven for it. But I also see that in 2023 asylum claims were made by 84,000 people. Everyone talks about the small boats and yet 69% of those 84,000 did not come across the English channel in boats. Will she tell me, please: where did they come from? Were they overstayers? Were they on student visas? Who were the 69%?
Yvette Cooper
We are clear that net migration needs to come down after the huge increase. We also need to restore order to the asylum system. Part of that is going after the criminal gangs who are undermining border security and putting lives at risk, and tackling the small boat crossings. There is also an issue about the increase of in-country asylum applications. We have instigated a review into that, to get to the bottom of what is happening and why. We found that the previous Government’s decision to remove visa requirements for visitors led to a significant increase in asylum applications from people coming as visitors. We have reversed those changes made by the previous Conservative Government and reintroduced visitor visa requirements for those countries.
Illegal Immigration
Nigel Farage Excerpts(3 months, 1 week ago)
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Nigel Farage (Clacton) (Reform)
I thank the hon. Member for Harborough, Oadby and Wigston (Neil O’Brien) for calling this debate. He must find it excruciatingly embarrassing how badly the previous Government dealt with this issue.
With my strong connection in Kent and Sussex with the commercial fishing industry, the angling trade and indeed the lifeboats, I started to feel in early 2020 that —after the odd boat had crossed in 2018 and 2019, as the hon. Member for Dover and Deal (Mike Tapp) mentioned—something big was about to happen. The gangs had realised that the chances of deportation from this country were very low. So I went out repeatedly from Dover into the English channel, filming boats and meeting face to face with boatfuls of the young men who have been described—in many cases, very aggressive young males.
I also got to the bottom of the use of the word “escorts”. I kept being told that escorts were crossing the channel. I was not quite sure what that meant, to begin with, but then I understood that it was the French navy—that the French navy literally escorted boats across the English channel and handed them over to Border Force or the Royal National Lifeboat Institution —so I made a bit of a fuss about the whole thing. I said that unless something was done, huge numbers would come. I said that there might even be an “invasion”, a word that got me in very big trouble. Given that we are pushing up towards 140,000 who have come, I do not think I misused the word.
The efforts of the last Government to deal with this were frankly pretty pitiful. Rwanda might have worked in theory, but of course in practice it was not going to work. All the while, we are subject to that Court in Strasbourg, as we saw that evening. More interestingly, the incorporation of the convention into British law means that actually British judges will always rule in favour of the ECHR, so we have to face up to that reality.
I also believe that what we are facing is a national security emergency. When ISIS boasted in 2015 that it would use the Mediterranean to get its operatives into Europe, perhaps the European Union should have taken it more at its word. It was interesting to note that Sir Keir Starmer himself used the phrase “national security emergency” during the general election, so he is going to have to act accordingly.
Appointing a new border chief commander? Yes, we may get some better intelligence—fine, but the French, whom we have given hundreds of millions of pounds, already stop a lot of dinghies from crossing. They put knives in the dinghies, but the problem is that the prospective illegal immigrants just hide in the dunes and come back the next day. So that is not going to work.
Smashing the gangs? Well, I don’t know. What I have been hearing for the past 30 years is that we are going to smash the drugs gangs in this country, and yet there are more class A drugs being taken today than there ever were before. A good operative gang, working out of those sand dunes in northern France in a reasonable week of weather, can expect to make at least €2 million. The financial rewards are very, very high.
Really, what this comes down to is two things. No. 1 is political will. Successive Australian Prime Ministers attempted to deal with the problem; they all failed. They tried offshore processing and so on, until in the end Tony Abbott just towed the boats back to Indonesia. There was international outrage from the UN, the EU and indeed the Foreign Office.
Nigel Farage
Just a few weeks ago, for the first time, Border Force did an emergency pick-up on the other side of the line. Rather than bringing the people back to this country, as previously Dover lifeboat and Dungeness lifeboat had done, it actually took them into Calais. That is the way we do it. Yes, these are far flimsier vessels, but the principle of taking people back whence they came is the point that I am trying to make.
We can do this. We can do it under the international law of the sea. I ask the Minister to say that, given the money that we have given to the French, we will no longer accept escorts from the French navy. The day after 12 people died in the channel, a French naval vessel escorted a dinghy from a couple of hundred yards off Wissant all the way to our 12-mile line. No more French naval escorts—I think that is vital.
We need political will. The Germans, of course, are now showing it. The Germans will ignore the ECHR; the Germans, by the way, sent a plane full of young men back to Afghanistan the other week. With political will and by leaving the ECHR, we can solve this.
I promise the Labour Government one thing. This issue caused great pain to the Conservative party, and it had an impact in the general election. This issue of illegal migration and the crime that it leads to, which is a conversation that has barely started in this country but that in France and Germany is now very big, will do massive damage to Labour’s electoral chances. You are going to have to get tough, and I am afraid your leader is going to have to rethink his position on the ECHR.
Several hon. Members rose—
Immigration and Home Affairs
Nigel Farage Excerpts(4 months, 4 weeks ago)
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Nigel Farage (Clacton) (Reform)
I believe it is customary in a maiden speech for the Member to pay tribute to their predecessor, which I am very happy to do. Giles Watling is a very decent, nice, honourable man. He is former actor who wears his Garrick club tie. There is nothing even vaguely Conservative about him, but he is a jolly nice chap, and it was a clean-fought campaign.
Earlier, the right hon. Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Sir John Hayes) made reference to Clacton as being the place for a traditional English seaside holiday, and indeed it is, with its pier, miles of sandy beaches and arcades. Perhaps it is not a holiday destination that is as popular as it used to be, now that people go to Spain and elsewhere, but it is still there.
Other parts of the constituency are genteel and quite wealthy, but if we go to Jaywick we find the most deprived community in the whole United Kingdom. Those communities have little faith, trust or belief that Government can make their lives better. Indeed, what I found, when knocking on doors, was that people were saying, “We want to work—we want to get on and make money—but as soon as we work 16 hours a week or more, our benefits get taken away, so we’re better off staying on benefits.” I feel immensely sorry for those people, because the benefit system, which is designed to help them, is actually keeping them trapped in levels of relative poverty. I will do my best as the MP for the area to bring business investment—private money—into the constituency, with jobs, training and skills. I cannot promise that I will do it, but I will do my absolute damnedest to make it happen.
It is funny, because I spent nearly 21 years as a Member of the European Parliament, in Brussels and with its monthly journey to Strasbourg. I have to say that this place is very different indeed. It is smaller. There is not a chauffeur-driven Mercedes available for each Member. There are no large lump sums of money that Members do not have to spend on anything or show receipts for. I wonder whether that is why so many in the British political system seem to adore the European Union so much, because it is a rather wonderful place to work.
What I did not expect was to come here and find that I, with my Reform team, am more outnumbered here than we were in the European Parliament, because there are more supporters of Brexit in the European Parliament than I sense there are in this Parliament of 2024. This is very much a remainers’ Parliament. I suspect, in many cases, that it is really a rejoiners’ Parliament.
If we look at the King’s Speech, it is interesting that the word “immigration” is mentioned only twice and “asylum” just once. Perhaps that is not a surprise, as when the now Prime Minister laid out the six big priorities for the Labour party before the general election, he did not mention legal or illegal immigration. That is the other area in which the five of us sitting on the Reform Bench will find ourselves massively outnumbered in the House, because we actually want to talk about these issues.
I believe that the population explosion is having a bigger impact on the quality of life of ordinary folk than any other issue. It all started, of course, when the current Home Secretary became a Member of Parliament back in May 1997. It is worth reminding ourselves that net migration was the same during the late 1940s, the whole of the 1950s, the whole of the 1960s, the whole of the 1970s, the whole of the 1980s and in the 1990s, up until Mr Blair. Net migration ran at 30,000 to 50,000 a year for over half a century. Then Mr Blair got in and decided that we were going to open the doors in a way that had never been done before, to the delight and joy of big companies, especially giant multinationals, who have always wanted as much cheap labour as they can get, and to hell with the consequences for working-class families and people.
Perhaps it was even more of a surprise to see that massive acceleration in our population through immigration then further accelerate, because despite promises in four consecutive manifestos, the Conservative party actually accelerated what had happened under the years of Mr Blair, so we have seen a population increase of 10 million people since the time that Labour won its last landslide. Even the net figure is a migrant a minute.
Even during the course of this debate, many hundreds more people will have come to our country. Nobody is making the argument that there are not some exceptionally wonderful people among them—there are, of course—but the sheer level of population means we have to build a new house every two minutes. Even if the Labour Government are able to fulfil the 1.5 million houses that they want to build during the lifetime of this Parliament, that will make no dent at all in the current shortage of housing. Rents have risen by 25% since 2021. Why? Population increase and pressure. The list goes on, from access to health services to congestion and pressure on infrastructure. The population crisis has the biggest impact on people’s lives, damaging their quality of life, and virtually nobody in this place even wants to talk about it.
It is on illegal immigration that I really want to make a point. Four years ago, I went out into the English channel repeatedly, filming dinghies coming across the channel, with an average of 16 people per boat. I was described as being a sad, lonely, desperate figure, always seeking attention, and I have no doubt there are some who think that is still the case today.