Migration

Patrick Grady Excerpts

Thursday 15th June 2023 Commons Chamber

[Patrick Grady (Glasgow North) (SNP)]

I congratulate the hon. Members for Liverpool, Walton (Dan Carden), for Worthing West (Sir Peter Bottomley) and for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton) on securing this debate. I was pleased to support their bid to the Backbench Business Committee. I hear the call for reasonableness and rationality in this debate, but I hope they will understand if I also express a little frustration.

My office has dealt with more than 1,400 immigration cases in one form or another since 2015. I have sat in my constituency surgery while people have pulled out their biometric ID card that says “No right to work” and “No recourse to public funds.” That is humiliating, disheartening and inhumane, and it speaks to everything that is wrong with the Government’s policies in this area.

The Foreign Office spends millions of pounds a year on an advertising campaign proclaiming “Britain is Great” in glossy aeroplane magazines, expo pavilions, embassies and visa processing centres. Although the advertising says “Britain is Great,” the message from the Home Office is that Britain is closed: closed to the ministers of religion who want to come here to provide cover in parishes and faith communities while local ministers have a holiday; closed to the women’s rights activists from Malawi who are invited to speak at all-party parliamentary group meetings in this House on violence reduction and economic empowerment; closed now to the families of international research students at some of our finest universities; closed to German rock bands that just want to play a few gigs and meet their fans before going home.

Britain is closed to interpreters who supported UK forces and companies in Afghanistan. Sometimes it is even closed to people who hold UK passports and who worked in our NHS but, because they also happen to hold a Sudanese passport, have been told they are not allowed to come here. It is closed to students who have won Chevening scholarships; closed, unless people are willing to pay hundreds, and sometimes thousands of pounds in processing fees and ongoing costs for visa renewals and access to the NHS, whether or not their visa allows them to have a job and pay into the tax system.

Britain is closed to Sana, the clinical psychologist I met at the Red Cross VOICES event yesterday. She is stuck in substandard accommodation and has been refused the right to work, while the NHS cries out for trained staff like her. It is closed, completely closed, to anyone—men, women and children—who might be fleeing war, famine or oppression, simply because they arrived here on a small boat when no safe or legal route is open to them.

The hostile environment is not just directed at refugees and asylum seekers; it pervades every aspect of the Home Office and the UK Border Force’s operation, whether it is the interminable waits for passport checks in airports, the chronic under-resourcing of application processing or even the delays our own staff members face in trying to get answers for constituents. It is all deliberately designed to drag things out, with the aim of making people just give up and go back to where they came from.

The Government’s mindset always seems to be that arriving on these islands is some kind of privilege to be striven for and that people who want to settle, or even just visit for anything other than a holiday, should largely be treated with suspicion and a working assumption that they are planning to abscond or overstay their visa.

[Several hon. Members rose—]

[Patrick Grady]

I will not give way, given the time available

Anyone who doubts that that is the Government’s position should just look at their obsession with setting arbitrary net migration targets and then the repeated failure to meet those. Where did they even come from in the first place? Who decided that we needed a net migration target of 100,000, rather than 110,000 or 95,000? Perhaps it was just picked out of thin air because it sounded good. Rather than make the positive case for growing our population and workforce, the Tories sought to play to the lowest common denominator, trying to out-UKIP UKIP or various other outfits on the hard and far right.

Meanwhile organisations in commerce and industry across the country are desperate for staff. Some days it seems that just about every bar, restaurant and retail outlet in Glasgow has signs up saying, “Staff wanted”. Crops are being ploughed back under the earth because farms cannot get enough help, and NHS backlogs are literally costing lives as staff leave to work in other countries. I hear from the academic and cultural sectors that people are put off even applying to come here because the attitude is so restrictive. All of this simply diminishes the UK in the eyes of those institutions and the wider global community. The Government proclaim, “Britain is Great” but then allow their outriders and Back Benchers to raise the prospect of the UK joining Belarus and Russia as countries that have withdrawn from the European convention on human rights.

It is also worth reflecting briefly that the net migration figure is just that: a net figure, which, at least in theory, counts the number of people who emigrate from the UK. For centuries, people have left these islands to make their homes overseas. Sometimes they did so violently, forcing indigenous communities off their ancestral lands and destroying ancient ways of life. Sometimes they did so as the result of violence: people were cleared from the highlands to make way for sheep, or they were in search of pastures where crops would not be devastated by disease and blight. Even today, people seek sunnier climes or different opportunities and experiences, and are often welcomed in a way that is not necessarily reciprocated on these shores. Brexit, of course, has made this so much more difficult now. The very process of getting through the airport in many European countries takes longer and can be more complicated, let alone the effort of studying or getting a job, or putting down roots, as generations over the past 40 years had been able to do so easily.

I said during the debate on the Illegal Migration Bill that it might come as a bit of a surprise to some of the more excitable elements among the Government Back Benchers, who are obviously not represented here today, but the world is round—the Earth is a globe. There is no edge people can be pushed off in the hope that they will just go away. As the fantastic Glasgow charity Refuweegee puts it, “we’re a’ fae somewhere”. Immigration, emigration and migration, in all its forms, always has been and always will be part of the human experience. We cannot simply pull up a drawbridge. We have to be willing to welcome people who are seeking refuge or who want to contribute, not least because one day we, individually or collectively, might look for similar treatment from others.

That is certainly the vision the SNP has of an independent Scotland, where migration policy helps to grow our population and works for our economy and society. If the Government were willing to devolve powers, we could begin to do that immediately. But the Minister wrongly claims that Scotland is not taking its fair share of asylum seekers, or seems to expect local authorities to implement Home Office policies without Home Office funding, and then says that Scotland does not need to have a different immigration policy from the rest of the UK.

Ultimately, it will not be up to this Government to decide. People in Glasgow North and across Scotland want an asylum and immigration system that treats people with fairness and dignity. That is not what is being delivered by the current Tory Government, and there is little evidence that the pro-Brexit Labour party would do much to change things either. The actions of the two pro-Brexit, anti-independence parties make the case for Scotland to become independent, because by refusing to adapt the current regime or devolve powers to Holyrood, they show that only way for Scotland to have an immigration system fit for purpose in the modern world is with those full powers of independence.

[Several hon. Members rose—]