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

Paul Sweeney Excerpts

2nd reading: House of Commons & Money resolution: House of Commons & Programme motion: House of Commons & Ways and Means resolution: House of Commons
Monday 28th January 2019 Commons Chamber

[Mr Paul Sweeney (Glasgow North East) (Lab/Co-op)]

When I consider the whole issue of immigration in this country, the first thing that comes to mind is thwarted opportunity—squandered opportunity. I am reminded of Billy Connolly’s eulogy at Jimmy Reid’s funeral. He was talking about the conversations he used to have with Jimmy Reid, with one wonderful anecdote being about driving past a high-rise tower block. Jimmy was saying, “Think about this, Billy. When you look at all those windows, imagine that behind each of them is a world champion horse rider or a Nobel prize winning chemist. They are all there. They are all there with that potential, but they will never realise it because they have never been given the opportunity to achieve it—because society has determined from their youngest years that they will never realise their inherent potential to be as good as they can be and to realise their talents.”

That is a question of not only poverty, but our immigration system. The same dynamic plays out. Tragically, it is often a function of people in poverty finding the wrong scapegoat—the wrong enemy—for their situation. The perennial problem of labour versus capital is the root cause of many of the tensions in our society today and many that caused this country to vote to leave the EU. Unless we understand those reasons and those underlying dynamics, we will fail to address those tensions.

Before I was elected as a Member of Parliament, I had a tangential involvement with immigration in this country—many people do, as they do not have many day-to-day dealings with it—but I remember one case that came close to home. I was working in the shipyards on the Clyde, having joined after graduating from Glasgow University. My starting salary was just £24,000, which is far below the £30,000 threshold. Many people of all sorts of nationalities—Australians, Canadians and Malaysians—were graduates working in the shipyards on the Clyde. One colleague had been awarded a PhD in unmanned underwater vehicles by Queen’s University Belfast, and she was a fantastic researcher. She also happened to fall in love at the same time with a Brazilian man who lived in Dublin and was studying there. She was in the invidious position of having to choose between her career in Glasgow and getting married to her fiancé.

[Ms Harman]

She should have chosen the career. [Laughter.]

[Mr Sweeney]

Yes, perhaps she ought to have done.

The Home Office told my colleague that because her fiancé was resident in Dublin, he could not come to live with her in Glasgow. They had to move away to Brazil in order for him to apply to come to live in the UK, even though they had both been living in Ireland. What a bizarre anomaly that is! It is just one example of the absurd situation—the Kafkaesque nightmare—that many people encounter. As a result of that situation, my colleague had to go to work in Dublin. She left her job on the shipyards on the Clyde: another example of potential lost to the industry on the Clyde and to Scotland.

[Angus Brendan MacNeil]

Of course if the Brazilian gentleman had become a full Irish citizen, he would have been able to move through the common travel area without hindrance. There is a question here, and it is one the Scots Tories do not like. They do not want Scotland to be able to contribute to common travel area migration in the way that Dublin and the London Government can. Does the hon. Gentleman support the Scottish Government’s having the same rights to enable people to become citizens as the Irish Government have, and having them freely move within the common travel area, which is not a problem?

[Mr Sweeney]

One interesting and more laudable aspect of the Bill is that it does seek to maintain a common travel area. I recognise that there are many issues with the Bill, which is why I will not be supporting it. I will certainly be going through the Lobby to vote against it.

One of the fundamental issues with the Bill is the lack of flexibility and the rigidity of the system, of which the £30,000 is merely one example. I have talked about my personal example, but I also think of many of the people I know from university, including junior doctors who start on a salary well below the £30,000 threshold, or other people I know from other countries around the world who will not meet that threshold. It is an entirely arbitrary and utterly absurd threshold that will destroy potential in our country. That is one reason why, if the Bill does go into Committee, I will be looking to support amendments that remove the threshold, so that we can have a skills-based system rather than an arbitrary salary threshold.

There are also severe problems with the 12-month visa scheme, and there are all sorts of issues relating to the protection of workers’ rights, which are another fundamental root cause. It is not a question of immigration undermining wages and working conditions in this country; it is the fact that organised labour has been under systematic assault by this Government for many years. That is what has driven down wages and why wages have stagnated. The power of organised labour to bargain collectively in this country has been systematically undermined by this Government. That is the root cause and the heart of the problem. It is not about immigration.

The swathe of Henry VIII powers that the Government seek to usurp from Parliament in favour of the Executive is extremely sinister and unacceptable. If the Bill receives its Second Reading tonight—I hope it does not, but it may well—that must be challenged in Committee.

The whole notion of an arbitrary cap on migrants panders to the worst sort of stereotypes and ought to be stopped. We cannot have a system that imposes such arbitrary limits. It is simply nonsensical from any sort of economic development perspective. Indeed, an arbitrary cap militates against any effort to try to improve the country’s prosperity.

I wholeheartedly support the proposal by the Mother of the House, my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman), to introduce a 20-day limit to immigration detention. I deal closely with this issue in many constituency cases. The idea that this is the only country in Europe with a system of unlimited detention is absolutely shameful. The Government should accept my right hon. and learned Friend’s amendment without any Division and incorporate it into the Bill.

It would be a great gesture of good will and a great example of this country’s humanitarian tradition if we sought not to have arbitrary detention. In the past year, more than 10,000 have been detained in this country without limit. They can only count the days up; they cannot count the days down. Some 70% of those people are detained not because there is any sense that they have committed an offence; they are being detained entirely arbitrarily and it is an extremely distressing situation for many of them to be in. The system needs to be changed.

It is about not just the economic aspects but the opportunities denied because of our asylum system. Think of the huge talents thwarted. I have met doctors, surgeons, lawyers and chemists in my constituency who are all denied the opportunity to work in or contribute in any meaningful way to our society, because under our current asylum policy they are not able to work so are kept in limbo for years at a time. It affects not only the adults but those who came here, often as infants and small children, who have grown up as second-class citizens. There are very frustrated young adults in our society who have been denied the chance to go on holiday with their friends or to get student tuition. They have been denied any kind of meaningful recognition in our country.

I have confronted the appalling reality in my past 18 months or so as an MP. I have had to deal with more than 100 asylum cases in the past five months alone because of the Home Office’s failures to expedite those cases efficiently. I find it tragic when 18-year-olds are unable to take up a place to study law at university in Glasgow because they cannot get student finance because their immigration or asylum status has not been determined, or when champion boxers who want to represent Scotland internationally are unable to go abroad to fight in competitions because their asylum status has not been settled. That is shameful and a squandering of human talent and ability. That they are denied that chance is a collective loss to everyone in our country. It needs to be addressed urgently because it is a shameful situation.

The “move on” policy came into sharp focus in Glasgow last year. With the existing asylum contracts coming to a close in 2019, we learned that Serco, which had the asylum accommodation contract in Glasgow, was seeking to move on asylum seekers at a much faster rate than usual. We saw the prospect of mass destitution in Glasgow, because more than 300 potential evictions were going to happen. It is clear that the “move on” policy needs to be addressed. I would support measures to extend the period to give asylum seekers the right to assess where they are at the end of a process and to consider their right to appeal, without the threat of being turfed out on to the streets. That is especially true for those in particularly vulnerable situations when they have no recourse to public funds. If they are survivors of domestic abuse, care leavers or have dependants, it is shameful. We cannot be in a situation where they are reliant on charities to support them in the face of destitution. I just find that, in our country, that just cannot be acceptable. I hope that most people in this House recognise that appeal for basic dignity.

We face an economic challenge in Scotland, which we tried to address in previous years under a Labour Government through the fresh talent initiative. The initiative was successful in reversing Scotland’s historic population decline. From 1801 to 1901, the Scottish population grew by 180%, but from 1901 to 2001 it grew by just 10%, which was a huge demographic challenge for Scotland. The current immigration policy of this Government threatens to undo all that hard work to reverse Scotland’s population decline.

Having worked in Scottish enterprise, promoting initiatives such as the ScotGrad scheme, which has brought in international graduates and foreign language students to help promote Scottish exports abroad, I can say that the policy is a real threat to the future economic prosperity of this country. We must oppose this Bill for a number of reasons—reasons to do with thwarted opportunity, basic human dignity and economic opportunity. The Bill’s approach is totally wrongheaded. We need a new system rooted in economic opportunity, in human dignity and in the ability to grow our collective potential as a country.