Immigration

Debate between Paul Scully and Peter Grant

Monday 19th October 2015 Westminster Hall

[Paul Scully]

I thank my hon. Friend for that example. As she rightly says, situations around the country are sometimes exacerbated by a breakdown of community cohesion but are in no way reflective of the population, whether the Muslim or the indigenous British population —the Church of England population. Actually, I will correct myself. It is really important that, in describing the Muslim population, we do not bring together religion and ethnicity or race, because Muslims are not limited to Pakistanis, Bangladeshis or Arabs. There are a number of British-born Muslims. There are a number of people who have converted. There are a number of American Muslims and African Muslims. Muslims are represented in countries right across the world. It is important that we make that distinction even though, as I have demonstrated, it is easy to bring the two together by accident.

To return to my example, the final piece of the jigsaw in Worcester Park was a third group of Ismaili Muslims who bought a pub, not far from the controversial planning application site, called the Worcester Park Tavern, where they wanted to build a community centre. There were some issues surrounding the proposal—purely from a planning perspective, to do with things such as parking and traffic. However, because of the other two mosques, a lot of people in Worcester Park were whipped up—I felt that there was a bit of an undercurrent—into opposing the application because they were anti any Muslim group taking over the pub. In reality, however, Ismaili Muslims do not pray in the same way, and a number of them drink alcohol; they are a very different group.

[Peter Grant (Glenrothes) (SNP)]

Does the hon. Gentleman intend during his allotted time to refer to the majority of immigrants to the United Kingdom who are not Muslims? Does he intend to use the opportunity to talk about the positive benefits that migration gives and will continue to give to the United Kingdom, rather than playing into the hands of the xenophobes by constantly talking about the problems caused in some communities?

[Paul Scully]

Absolutely I do. I am trying to set the scene by reflecting some of the concerns, which are the reason why 198,000 people have felt the need to sign a petition. We must bear in mind that the reference to Muslims is only one part of the petition; there are references to a number of concerns about immigration, such as benefits. I will come to those, but first I will finish describing the example that I was giving.

The Ismailis in the area decided not to take that planning application any further because they felt that if they were not wanted in that area, they would go somewhere else. That is to the detriment of Worcester Park, because the members of the Ismaili community around the area, whom I know personally, play a positive role in society. They are successful businessmen, and successful in their various other fields. They play an active role in their communities through charity and philanthropic work, and they have fantastic support networks.

To pick up on what the hon. Member for Glenrothes (Peter Grant) said, that is the case for so many people who follow the Muslim faith in this country. Their religion dictates that they should be charitable and philanthropic, and that they should look out for people more vulnerable than themselves. Looking wider than that, many immigrants, especially from the Arab world and Asia, share the values to do with the importance and benefit of a fantastic education, the need for hard work, the need to succeed and look after their families, and the need to build up support networks. I absolutely echo what the hon. Gentleman has said. Immigrants from a number of different backgrounds play a hugely positive role—not only economically, but culturally—here in the UK.

I want to cover the statement in the petition:

“Foreign citizens are taking all our benefits, costing the government millions!”

There is no doubt that a number of people who have come into the country claim benefits—either out-of-work benefits or, more likely, in-work benefits. People tend to come to this country to get on; they do not come for the fun of it. They do not move halfway across the world simply to do nothing in the UK. Often, they want to take a job, look after their families and make the most of the opportunities that the UK has to offer.

In the UK, immigrants from within the EU often get the same level of benefits as they would in their home countries, although that is something that we, as a Government, are trying to change. To most people from outside the EU, we do not make available recourse to public funds, and rightly so. Since April this year, we have introduced an NHS surcharge of £200 for each year of an immigrant’s visa, because NHS tourism becomes less likely if people understand that there is a cost attached to coming over here for healthcare.

Those facts do not stop people holding the view, which I have heard from some of those I have spoken to on the doorstep, that many immigrants come into the country just to claim benefits. They do not want to work; they just want to claim benefits. Sometimes, the same people also told me, “They are taking all our jobs.” It is a kind of Schrödinger’s immigrant, and we cannot have it both ways; there cannot be lazy people taking all our jobs. I do not know whether hon. Members saw the viral spoof Donald Trump quote the other day:

“I’m sorry Clinton, but my ancestors didn’t make their way to this great country to have immigrants come in and take their jobs!!!”

Although that quote was a spoof, it reflects some of the arguments that we hear around the country, which is why it is incumbent on us as politicians to make the case that some immigration is very good for the country, both economically and culturally, but that we need to address mass, uncontrolled immigration full on.

I have met, as I am sure have many of my colleagues in the Chamber, people in the construction industry and the trades—carpenters, plumbers, electricians—who find the situation incredibly difficult because they feel that they are being undercut by European workers or workers from further afield. I absolutely understand their concerns, but we must also understand that we, as people who use those trades, take such workers on. I have employed a Polish plasterer, and I know colleagues who have used Romanian builders. Why do we do so? Because they are cheap. If their work is good and they can undercut the market, that represents open competition, which I absolutely subscribe to as a free-market Conservative.

One thing that drives people to the UK is the fact that we have the fastest growing economy in the developed world and in Europe. Yorkshire created more jobs than France last year, and the UK has created more jobs over the past few years than the whole of Europe. While our economy is doing okay—better than it has been over the past few years—and there is double-digit unemployment in several southern European countries, it is no surprise that people are attracted by the UK and that they come here to better their lives and those of their families.

There are two ways to tackle that. Either we can tank our economy—I do not believe that anyone here would subscribe to that solution—or we can make our immigration policy less attractive to unskilled economic migrants or people with skills that we do not particularly want to attract. That will allow us to concentrate on attracting the very best skilled workers and migrant entrepreneurs to the country.

The final point that I will cover from the petition is the mention of footage showing foreigners desecrating British soldiers’ graves. I am not sure why that was put in the petition. There is some footage showing people kicking over the graves of a number of soldiers, not all of them British, in Benghazi, Libya, two or three years ago. It is a shame that, because we sometimes shy away from talking fully and frankly about immigration, such issues can be conflated into what amounts, often, to a non-sequitur. It is important that we concentrate on the policies that the Government are introducing and those that we need to go further and introduce.

My own background is one of the big drivers for me when I think about immigration. As many Members know, my father was born in Rangoon in Burma. My grandfather worked as a port commissioner and was in charge of scuttling the docks in Rangoon before the Japanese came in. During that time, my grandmother and my two aunts were refugees at a camp in India and, by chance, they managed to find my grandfather in a fort in India.

My father came over here when he was 18. He finished his apprenticeship on the Glasgow docks. The docks, either in Rangoon or in Glasgow, gave him the welcoming present of asbestos inhalation, which unfortunately killed him 25 years ago. None the less, when my father came here, he made a real success of himself. He came with no money but with a great education from a Jesuit school in Amritsar. He worked incredibly hard, instilling in me the importance of a good education, and the need for hard work and family, which set me in good stead. When I look at my Burmese family, I see the support network that they have built around them. They do not look to the state to look after their own. My grandmother was a real matriarch and looked after a number of our extended family well into their old age. We can spread those values across the nation and we must herald some of the values that they hold dear.

I mentioned the fact that immigration is good because many of those people do jobs that others simply do not want to do. Of the NHS, 11% is staffed by people from abroad and 26% of NHS doctors are from abroad. The curry industry is an amazing industry that most people like, whether they are British or first-generation immigrants to the country. A lot of people enjoy their curry. I had tandoori chicken, which was served up by the café in Parliament, a little earlier on. It is our national dish. I know that my hon. Friend the Member for St Albans (Mrs Main) has some strong views on that, as do I as Chair of the all-party parliamentary group on the British curry catering industry. I have that role because the curry catering industry is a massive industry for the country, although it is struggling at the moment, partly because of some unintended consequences of our immigration policy, which we will perhaps hear more about later. I mentioned that there are jobs that people do not want to do. We have an ageing population so we need to bring people in. We need skilled people to come in to do those jobs so that we can create the wealth that helps to pay for pensions, freedom passes, our health service and all the services that older, retired people rely on, as we all do.

I will give one example of a migrant entrepreneur. A friend of mine and the Minister—a chap called Atul Pathak—came over here when he was young with very little money. He worked hard day in, day out in Southall on some pretty arduous jobs. Over the past few years he has gone from the ground floor of the hospitality industry to becoming McDonald’s largest franchisee, running 26 restaurants around London and turning over £50 million. He employs 2,000 people and has given 450 of those the opportunity to gain GCSEs in English and maths. He has provided a number of apprenticeships and some of his staff now have degrees in hospitality. He has helped to bring on thousands of people to follow something that was a job through to being a really satisfying career. He is a fantastic example and does a huge amount of charitable work. A lot of entrepreneurs who have come here from other countries come with a slightly different philanthropic view from ours as businesspeople in the United Kingdom. They are far more active in the charity environment. It is really important that we learn those lessons and share them.

I have talked about the fact that immigration is good for culture, which is important, but let me turn for a second to the fact that mass, uncontrolled immigration is bad. There are tensions when too many people come into the country, like the 2.5 million people—twice the population of Birmingham—who came in under the last Labour Government. That provided a big shock to our infrastructure, including to hospital beds, school places and housing, which are all issues that we are now having to tackle. There are various community tensions in certain areas—I mentioned Tower Hamlets and other towns—so we need to control numbers.

I am pleased that the policy of the previous Government, which we are carrying on now, has started to address the issue. It is like turning an ocean liner around: it cannot all be done particularly quickly. None the less, we have been slashing student fraud. We have struck off nearly 900 bogus colleges and made access to welfare and housing tougher, but there is plenty more to do. I am glad that the Immigration Bill will make it far harder for illegal immigrants to work and access public services, and far easier for us to remove people who should not be here.

The one area in which we need to go further is the European Union. The Prime Minister is trying his hardest to renegotiate a number of terms with the EU, especially regarding freedom of movement. My opinion is that we need to leave the EU. That would ultimately give us far more flexibility to control our own borders, which are strong. Bear in mind the fact that we have the channel; there is sea between us and the rest of Europe. There are tensions in the some of the central and eastern European countries, where we hear about border issues every day. We have a sea and a strong border, which we could do something about if we had the policies in place to do so. Leaving the EU would give us more flexibility to control our borders and tackle some of the unintended consequences of immigration from outside the EU. Things such as the curry industry—bringing curry chefs over—might benefit.

In conclusion, I want quickly to talk about refugees because we are in the middle of a full-blown crisis. We do not want to go back to the position of the early 2000s, when all the talk about immigration was of bogus asylum seekers. We need a situation where we can have strong borders, bring in the people we want and also fulfil our moral obligation—we have a rich history in this—of bringing in the refugees who are most in fear of their lives, so that they feel welcome.

We must have a welcoming environment for legal migrants and refugees, and a hostile environment for illegal immigrants. That needs to be distinct so we do not conflate two issues, but it is a difficult situation to turn around. I fully support the Government’s plans for immigration and the Immigration Bill. Now that we have a majority Conservative Government, we can do things that we could not necessarily do under a coalition Government. I look forward to the Minister’s response on how immigration policy will develop over the next couple of years.

--- Later in debate ---

[Peter Grant]

I am sorry if I am not making the point clearly enough, but by conducting the debate on the terms of UKIP and those even more extreme than UKIP, it allows people like the gentleman who started the petition to believe that they are in the ascendancy and on the front foot. I do not know anybody—it is certainly not the policy of the SNP—who thinks there should be utterly open, uncontrolled immigration into Scotland, and I would not imagine that any UK parties would want the same for England. One of the big problems is how the controls are defined. For example, the salary control prevents qualified nurses from getting into the country. How ridiculous is that? It has been pointed out that the controls that were set up supposedly to stop bogus students coming in to go to bogus universities seriously affected the financial viability of some of our great and most ancient seats of learning.

To finish the comments I was making on my links to immigration, my Auntie Mary was born in Scotland. She was an immigrant. My wee brother and wee sister were born in Scotland, and they are immigrants, because one lives in Ireland and one lives in Germany. Why is it that, as part of the demonisation process that is so built in that we do not even recognise it, when other people come here they are immigrants, but when we go there we insist on becoming expats? Some of the biggest and most concentrated immigrant communities that can be found anywhere are of British immigrants in parts of southern Spain, Portugal and France. If we allow the debate to be carried out in the terms expressed in the petition, we are inviting the far right and other countries to demonise and discriminate against British citizens in exactly the same way as some people would want us to discriminate against the citizens of other countries.

Among the other great disservices of the past few weeks is what I can only assume is a deliberate strategy of conflating the humanitarian refugee crisis with controls or lack of controls over immigration. Those are two completely different issues. We are not required to take Syrian refugees or refugees from anywhere else because of our membership of the EU. That is not affected by our signing up or not signing up to Schengen or anything else. A fundamental requirement of international law is that we give proper succour to refugees if they come in fear for their lives. We allowed the Home Secretary to make a statement about the Syrian refugee crisis headed, “Immigration”, which was an utterly shocking piece of bad naming, misrepresenting the true situation in the Mediterranean. Where people want to come here because they are in fear for their lives, that is not immigration. I fully agree with the hon. Member for Birmingham, Selly Oak that it is utterly and totally wrong to include hopefully short-term or temporary succour to refugees in an immigration figure.

[Paul Scully]

Would the hon. Gentleman not agree that the Government’s approach to the Syrian refugee crisis, which concentrates our help on the camps and taking people from there, directly helps refugees? Taking more people who are landing on these shores by crossing the Mediterranean risks giving support to human traffickers, who are bringing economic migrants as well as refugees.

[Peter Grant]

I had not intended to get into a debate about refugees, because the debate is not about refugees—that is what I am trying to say—but the direction I approach the matter from is that 4.5 million people have fled Syria because they would have died had they stayed. The United Kingdom takes 20,000 people. Who do we morally think we can tell to take the other 4,480,000? There are not places roundabout Syria that are stable enough to take those kind of numbers. That is why I welcome the Government’s moves so far. I am on the side of the bishops. The Government have not gone nearly far enough, but let me repeat: the petition should not be allowed to be about refugees. This is about immigration, and the two have got to be kept utterly and completely separate.

I was as shocked and offended as anyone when I saw footage a few years ago of people desecrating war graves. The desecration of any grave or any site of religious or spiritual significance is a terrible thing. What was done in the footage was done to create disharmony and conflict and to set communities against one another. That is why the militants did it. As has been pointed out, the petitioner was incorrect in stating that British war graves were desecrated. There were some British war graves and there were war graves of other nationalities who fought alongside Britain when Britain most needed them. They gave their lives in the service of the values that so many of their countries share with the nations represented in this hall today. A lot of them died in the uniforms of countries from which citizens would not be allowed to come if the petitioner got his way and if some of the reforms that the Government have talked about were implemented.

Let us not forget that, whether we talk about immigration or foreigners who have no intention of coming here even temporarily, we are talking about people whose countries suffered desperately in the fight against Nazism and about people who have come to settle in the UK whose fathers, grandfathers and great-grandfathers fought, risked their lives and sometimes lost their lives fighting for exactly the same values that our people did. It is wrong to start driving barriers between people based on the country they were born in, on the language that they speak, on the colour of their skin, on the god they choose to worship, on the way in which they choose to worship their god, or on their belief that there may not be a god at all. To discriminate against people on any of those grounds is rightly unlawful. More importantly, it is indefensibly immoral. There are no circumstances in which it is acceptable to discriminate on such grounds.

Like the hon. Member for Birmingham, Selly Oak, I have been on the receiving end of some very unpleasant emails from my constituents. I have had about 100 emails asking for an anti-immigration debate since I got elected this year and I think 99 of them have come from the same place. I got hate mail almost handed over to the police some years ago. I wrote a letter to one of our local papers in response to what I saw as xenophobic comments about immigration and refugees. I pointed out that in a few weeks’ time some of us would celebrate our patron saint. I was not referring to St Andrew, who comes a couple of weeks later. Being an adoptive Fifer, I am proud of the connection that we have with St Margaret.

I can understand and I share a lot of the feelings of those who earlier this year celebrated the achievements of the present monarch, and I can understand why English people celebrate the incredible achievements of the previous Elizabeth, who also reigned for a long time, but I believe the finest monarch that we had in our days of independent monarchy was Margaret, who is now a patron saint. She came to Scotland as a refugee. She did not choose to come to Scotland. She came as a refugee and became by far our best loved monarch of all times, certainly in the pre-Union days. When I have commented on that before, I have had hate mail accusing me of being a traitor to my country and of being a traitor to my cause. I made those comments because we just never know what outstanding acts of good can come from somebody who has come here in the most desperate of circumstances. We never know what exceptional contribution someone who comes here as an immigrant may or may not make, just as we can never know who the next great migrant emigrating from these shores might be and what good they might do in other countries.

In exactly the same way as closing down all international trade would harm us all, closing down all immigration would be a desperately sad step to take. In practice, that is what the petitioner is asking for. We cannot close Britain’s borders to anybody trying to come in without borders going up against anyone trying to go from Britain to other countries.

A couple of people have asked who the petitioner was. They have been identified. In fact, they were interviewed by a news website not far from the constituency of the hon. Member for Birmingham, Selly Oak. It was somebody in Walsall. They are not a registered voter because, ironically, at the time the petition was started the young gentleman was only 17. Although some of us would have been happy to allow them to express their views through the ballot box, a majority of people in here would not have allowed them to do so. Perhaps he had to set up the petition because other people would not allow him a vote. When he was asked where he got the information in his petition, he said he got it off the internet, so perhaps that is an issue we need to look at.

I would be against rejecting a petition that appeared to have been supported by a substantial number of people simply because we found it offensive or we thought it was wrong. If people bring forward ideas based on falsehoods and on facts that are simply not accurate, the way to deal with it is to get the inaccuracies out into the open and to expose them for what they are. So when we get the response from the Minister—spokespersons tend to read through what the Government’s record is and what their future plans are—I hope the Government will take the chance to say unequivocally that the request that has been made in the petition is unacceptable, because the comments, arguments and statements of fact on which the request is made are utterly and completely untrue and unjustifiable.