Refugee Crisis in Europe

Peter Kyle Excerpts

Tuesday 8th September 2015 Commons Chamber

[Yvette Cooper]

My hon. Friend is right, because people want to help. They want to be able to do their bit and they want us to show that we are also prepared to do our bit from this Parliament. One million people have signed petitions in the past week alone and £500,000 has been raised in 24 hours for Save the Children. Almost 4,000 people have offered to open their homes for refugees. Earlier this week, a convoy of 15 cars travelled from Birmingham to Calais filled with donations for refugees in camps there. Faith groups, community groups, workplaces, businesses and councils are also involved. A business contacted me this morning to ask how it could offer jobs to refugees and give them a new start. That is the kind of country we are—this is the best of Britain. We have to now make this the best of the House of Commons as well by responding to that demand for help and action from our country.

I urge the Home Secretary to ask communities and councils how much they are able to do to help, and to call an urgent meeting with councils, community organisations, charities and faith groups to ask how we can work together to address this crisis. I will hold such a meeting on Thursday, but they could come to her instead and be part of a Home Office and Government-led programme across the country, showing the leadership we need.

We need a clear plan. We need the Home Secretary to spend the next month working across the country to draw up a serious plan for how we in Britain can help and to address the target of how many people we can take before Christmas and over the next 12 months. Britain is showing how much it wants to do; now we need a Government who want to do their bit, too, and who are ready to live up to the country they represent.

There is a second area of disagreement. The Government have said that they want to take only refugees from the camps near Syria, not those who are already in Europe. They have said—this point has already been raised—that they do not want to give people an incentive to travel through Europe in order to get asylum in Britain. The trouble is that people are travelling already. They did not wait for any asylum statement by the British Government before deciding to pack their bags and flee. Rations have halved in some of the Syrian border camps. Parents are despairing that their children will never go to school. They cannot work or go home and they are fleeing to Europe whatever we in Britain do or say.

Let us remember that Britain has already used the incentive argument in relation to search and rescue. The boats were withdrawn to deter people from travelling. Instead, many more came, and many more drowned because the boats were not there to help. Refugees are travelling and there is a crisis now.

[Peter Kyle (Hove) (Lab)]

I was an aid worker in the Balkans for almost 10 years during the crisis in the 1990s, and I saw at first hand what it took to make somebody leave their home, their loved ones and the community they love. People do not flee such things lightly; they do so because of desperate conditions and war. Does my right hon. Friend agree that those conditions and the push away from areas of war far outweigh the pull of coming to a country such as Britain?

[Yvette Cooper]

I agree with my hon. Friend. Any of us who are parents know just how stressful it always is to travel with children; and to entertain the idea that any parent would take the decision lightly to travel with children across a continent—not knowing where they will sleep the next night, not knowing how long the journey will be, not knowing where the food will come from for their next meal—is to misunderstand the huge pressure and anxiety that so many of those desperate refugees are facing.

And they are travelling now. The UN has reported that 7,000 Syrians arrived in Macedonia on Monday alone. Some 50,000 people have arrived in Greece in just one month. In the Greek islands alone, 30,000 people are currently asking for sanctuary and help, including 20,000 on Lesbos.

To be honest, it is the refugees arriving in Greece that I am the most troubled about right now. Germany, Austria and Hungary are understandably focusing on helping the hundreds of thousands of people crossing their borders, while Italy, with help from the EU, is working to help more than 100,000 who have come mainly from Libya. But Greece needs much more help to deal with and respond to those who have arrived on its shores, and to provide them with humanitarian support.

The authorities are doing their best, but the camps are makeshift, without toilets or running water. Many people are sleeping outside, with nothing but cardboard to sleep on—and they include babies and children. There have been cases, too, of police using riot batons against refugees as tensions have risen. How on earth is Greece supposed to assess people’s asylum claims and provide them with humanitarian aid when 130,000 people have arrived on its shores this year alone?

The Prime Minister’s response yesterday seemed to be that the issues for Greece, Italy and Hungary were just a problem for the Schengen zone to deal with. Why is that? The Schengen zone did not cause millions to flee their homes, whether in Syria, Libya or beyond. The Schengen zone did not draw up the geography of Europe and its islands, by which our British islands are 2,000 miles from Syria, whereas the Greek islands are just three miles from the Turkish shore. I agree with Angela Merkel that the Schengen countries need to rethink their border controls now, but none of that is an excuse for us not to help.

Today, as we debate, the European Commission is drawing up plans to move 130,000 people into other countries. I agree that we should not be part of a quota system drawn up by the Commission, but I do not agree that we should turn our backs, and I do not agree that we should say that the crisis in Europe is nothing to do with us and that the only people that we will help will be from the Syrian camps.

Devolution and Growth across Britain

Peter Kyle Excerpts

Wednesday 3rd June 2015 Commons Chamber

[Peter Kyle (Hove) (Lab)]

It is an honour to deliver my maiden speech in the debate on our nation’s economic growth. The drivers of growth are the smaller enterprises that inject our economy with creativity and energy. Behind each of those businesses are people with the skills to solve problems, to take decisions and to have the courage to lead. Entrepreneurs and the enterprises that they create, both private sector and charitable, play a uniquely large role in Hove’s economy, too. They also played a big role and a crucial part in my family’s history.

In the last week, I have enjoyed listening to and learning from the maiden speeches of other new Members. Each has laid claim to representing the best and most beautiful part of our country, so, at the risk of offending Members on both sides of the House, it is with conviction and evidence that I explain why I represent the most attractive place to live and work. Hove and its older sibling Portslade enjoy a coastal location that is fully exploited by several miles of unbroken promenade, but my constituency has a double helping of natural beauty. To the north it extends into the south downs, a testament to the beauty of the south of England and a credit to the last Labour Government, who wisely protected that landscape by granting it national park status. Brighton and Hove has two world-class universities and a fantastic social life. It is fuelled by the largest number of restaurants and bars per head of population outside London.

All that explains why our city has been voted the best place to live, the happiest place to live and the coolest place in Brighton—in Britain. [Laughter.] However, we do have a problem with immigration—that is, people flocking from London, buying our property and clogging up our commuter trains. Such is the burden of living in the coolest place in Britain.

My predecessor, Mike Weatherley, championed the importance of performance rights and licensing and introduced to Parliament the much loved music competition Rock the House. I know that Members on both sides of the House will wish him the best.

In 1973, another of my predecessors, Sir Tim Sainsbury, rose to make his maiden speech having won the seat in a by-election. He joined the Tory Government Benches and used his speech to make the following plea to his party:

“We must continue to search for ways by which our economic life can be regulated so that those who are not strong enough to join in the fight are not the first to suffer”. —[Official Report, 18 December 1973; Vol. 866, c. 1225.]

Those words still ring true today. Then it was pensioner poverty. Now it is the disabled and the asset poor who suffer most and who I set out to champion.

I had just turned three years of age when Sir Tim made his maiden speech. When at the age of 26 I came to live in Brighton and Hove, he was still serving as the Member of Parliament. The year before, my friend and mentor, Dame Anita Roddick, became the first person to suggest that I go to university, but my application to Sussex University was rejected—understandable, considering I left school with no useable qualifications.

Therefore, at the age of 25, I returned to Felpham comprehensive school and started all over again. From there, I became the first in my family to get an A-level, a degree and then a PhD. I co-founded a Brighton-based film company with my great friend Rob Claisse and went on to become the deputy chief executive of one charity and ultimately the chief executive of another.

All of this was possible because I was given a second chance. Public services were there at the time and place I needed them most. But I stand here today fully aware that youngsters do not get the second chance that I did. How many businesses, charities and PhDs do not exist because young people leave school unskilled or under-qualified? I do not just believe this—I know that every young person has the potential to succeed, but some like me need the occasional support of others to get there. That is why I have undoubted ambition for our public services, especially education, and that is why I will vent anger and frustration if failure in our public services is ever excused due to the challenging nature of the people who need them the most.

There is an aspect of my family life that is also central to my political outlook, and that is the path taken by my father, Les Kyle. He grew up in post-war Liverpool, in conditions of poverty thankfully not seen any more in this country. He left school at 16 and served in the Royal Navy. After he left the service, he took several jobs, including door-to-door salesman. He wanted to better himself and his future family and that meant working during the day and learning at night. When opportunities arose, he took them, like taking a job for a market-leading fibreglass company in Portsmouth. By the time he retired, he was the owner of that company.

“Aspiration” is a word that has been exalted and derided in equal measure and it has rightly become part of the debate about why the Labour party lost the election, but for me it is not an abstract. It delivered my family from poverty and ultimately me to this great place.