European Agenda on Migration

Peter Grant Excerpts

Monday 14th December 2015 Commons Chamber

[Peter Grant (Glenrothes) (SNP)]

As has been mentioned, there is a fair amount of overlap between this motion and the previous item, so I will not repeat some of the comments I made in the prior debate. Unlike the previous motion, we will not be forcing this one to a vote, although one or two parts of it give us significant concern. I shall discuss those in a few moments’ time.

Yet again, I am disappointed, because we are talking about a refugee crisis, yet everything in the papers talks about migrants and migration. This is not a crisis of migrants or migration; it is a crisis of refugees fleeing for their lives. If we could get that into the mindset of not only our Government, but Governments across Europe, we might start to address this emergency in the correct terms. The terminology is important. We fully support the fact that we need to have co-ordinated and firm action against the criminals who are exploiting the vulnerable and desperate through people smuggling and people trafficking, but, as the Immigration Law Practitioners Association is keen to point out, people smuggling and people trafficking are not the same thing. They are very different in the eyes of the law, although it is sometimes difficult to tell them apart in practice in individual circumstances. This means that they need to be addressed in different ways.

We should also remember that the House of Lords EU Home Affairs Sub-Committee has recommended to the European Commission that when setting the legislation and directives that deal with people smuggling and people trafficking, we should make a distinction when it is clear that the smuggling has been carried out for humanitarian motives. Some may question whether that could ever be the case, but if it is clear that the act was done not for criminal purposes or for financial gain, but possibly through a misguided belief that it was a humanitarian act, would it be appropriate to classify such smugglers as international criminals? I certainly would not think so and the House of Lords Sub-Committee did not think so either. I would therefore be interested to know what the Government’s attitude to that is.

The motion also refers to action to tackle the “root causes” of migration, and I would be interested to hear what the Minister thinks are the root causes of 800,000 refugees arriving in Greece over the past year or so. What are the root causes of 4 million people being in the refugee camps in and around the Mediterranean coast? Unless the Government can prove to us that there were 4 million people last year and the year before, and every year for the past 10 years, the unescapable conclusion will be that the root cause of this crisis is war, violence and persecution in Syria and in other countries in that region.

[Gavin Newlands (Paisley and Renfrewshire North) (SNP)]

In the previous debate, the hon. Member for North East Somerset (Mr Rees-Mogg) said that the risks families take when trying to leave a situation such as my hon. Friend has just described were “foolish”. Does my hon. Friend agree that the hon. Gentleman does not understand the situation and his comment speaks to the mindset that my hon. Friend was discussing?

[Peter Grant]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for those comments and I fully agree with them. I had wanted to say more in response to what the hon. Member for North East Somerset said, but as he is not here I will not respond to him just now. There may be people taking risks that could be described as foolish, but they are not foolish risks—they are desperate risks. These people are not stupid. Some of them are very highly educated, highly skilled workers in their homeland, and the reason they are risking their lives and, even more remarkably, those of their nearest and dearest, including their own children, is because they have taken a calculated risk that leaving them behind in Syria puts their lives at even greater risk.

[Alison Thewliss (Glasgow Central) (SNP)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that part of the problem is that there is no means of safe passage across land once borders have been closed, which means that there is no option for many people but to go by sea?

[Peter Grant]

Absolutely. One thing that drives people into the unseaworthy boats of the criminals is that they have no other way of getting out. If the only way they can get out is by risking their lives with the smugglers, that is what they will do. Sadly, all too often the evidence is washed up on the beaches of Europe and north Africa.

Does the Minister accept that the root cause of this emergency is not the benefit system or the wonderful economic growth that is happening in Britain, but the desperate, desperate tragedy that is unfolding in Syria and some of its neighbouring countries? That is the situation that must be addressed once and for all if we want this emergency to be resolved, even in the longer term.

The hon. Member for Stone (Sir William Cash) mentioned the £3 billion of aid that is going to Turkey. We want to know what transparency and accountability is attached to that money. How do we know that it will be used for the correct purposes? I am not as enthusiastic a friend of the Turkish Government as some of those on the Government Benches. I cannot forget what the Turkish military are doing to the Kurdish people right now, and until they stop, there must be a limit to how willing we are to accept them as fully fledged respecters of human rights and of the rule of international law.

In the letter received by the Chair of the European Scrutiny Committee on 11 December, the Minister addressed this question of how the UK will respond to specific calls for assistance under the EU civil protection mechanism. In his final comment he said that he believed that there was more that other member states could do to support all this work and the various funding strands among the UK’s contribution. It made me remember a story that used to be popular a few years ago in certain management circles about the four workers called Anybody, Somebody, Nobody and Everybody. There were various versions of the story, but the nub of it was that there was always a vital job that had to be done. Everybody agreed that Somebody had to do it, and Anybody could have done it, but Nobody actually did. I just wondered whether what the Minister was saying was that they all agree that everybody else should do a lot more, but they cannot agree on who that is. Perhaps the Minister, either here in the Chamber or in the Scrutiny Committee, will clarify and amplify his comments. Which specific member states should be doing more? What more is it realistic for them to do? What are they doing already? We cannot judge whether other member states should do more unless we have an indication of what they are already doing.

One part of the Government’s motion gives me a great deal of concern. It talks about the need

“to break the link between rescue at sea and permanent settlement in the EU.”

I did not realise that there was an automatic permanent link of that kind. If somebody is rescued from the sea, they are almost by definition a refugee. They are claiming asylum. We have to assess whether they are entitled to asylum. If they are here solely as an asylum seeker, they do not have an automatic right to live here forever. In theory, they can be asked to go home when it is safe to do so. I just wonder whether we are seeing yet another acceptance by the Government that the emergency situation in Syria will continue for years and years. People have come here because they want a safe haven for a few years before they go home. Are we accepting that it will be years, possibly decades, before Syria is fit to take them back? I will look for clarification from the Minister on that—not necessarily this evening, but hopefully in the near future. I hope that we do not have to wait as long as the Chairman of the European Scrutiny Committee has had to wait for some of his answers.

At one point, we considered pushing this matter to a vote simply because of that comment about the link between rescue at sea and permanent settlement. We decided against it, but I do wish to put on the record our deep, deep disquiet about the wording of that part of the motion, because it is inaccurate and it continues to create an impression that a significant number of these 4 million desperate citizens are trying to come here because they are attracted to living in the United Kingdom. They are not; they are trying to get out of Syria because they do not want to die. I just wish that the terminology that has been used and the language of this debate would recognise that this is a crisis that has fundamentally been caused by war, violence and civil unrest. It has not been caused by an economic miracle happening in the United Kingdom or in Germany.