Nationality and Borders Bill

Richard Burgon Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 20th July 2021 Commons Chamber

[Richard Burgon (Leeds East) (Lab)]

It is a great pleasure to welcome as Deputy Speaker one of my former neighbours from Cross Gates in my constituency of Leeds East. It is good to see you in the Speaker’s Chair. What it is not good to see, however, is this vile Bill.

I have been a Member of Parliament for six years, and in that time I have seen some vile legislation—legislation that punches down and attacks the poorest and most vulnerable, from the bedroom tax to the slashing and denying of benefits for disabled people, and welfare caps that force children into destitution—but this dreadful Bill is up there with the worst of it.

I find the Bill stomach churning. I cannot help but feel sick reading it, reading the Government’s plans and reading what they want to do to vulnerable people, including children fleeing war, rape and torture. The Bill will criminalise people seeking asylum simply because of how they get here. That is not only immoral; it is in breach of international law, although that is not all. The legislation—this rotten, sick legislation—opens the door to offshore detention centres. What kind of dystopian society do the Government want to create? They want offshore detention centres where, hidden from public view, people seeking asylum can be subjected to the mistreatment the Government are already known for, without any accountability.

[Mr Goodwill]

Does the hon. Gentleman agree that some of the most vulnerable and needy people are from Syria? Would he be surprised to hear that when the camp at Sangatte was cleared, of the 750 migrants who came here, only eight were from Syria? No one in Syria can afford the cost of the people smugglers.

[Richard Burgon]

It appears that there is a twitching of a conscience one Bench back from the Tory Front Bench. If the hon. Gentleman has a conscience on these matters, if he cares about the people he purports to care about from Syria or from anywhere else, I would urge him to vote against the Bill, because this reactionary Bill should be killed off today.

[Stuart C. McDonald]

To bring things a little more up to date, if we are looking at the statistics about who is in these boats crossing the channel, the nationalities are Iranian, Iraqi, Syrian, Eritrean and Sudanese. People from almost all those countries have success rates when they claim asylum of about 60% or 80%. The vast majority of people crossing the channel are refugees. Instead of locking them up, let us look at their applications.

[Richard Burgon]

The hon. Gentleman makes an important point and brings some reality to this debate. This reactionary Bill should be killed off today.

[Jonathan Gullis (Stoke-on-Trent North) (Con)]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Richard Burgon]

No, I will not give way. I will only give way if the hon. Gentleman wants to stand up and say he will vote against this dreadful Bill.

The Bill is not a one-off. It is the latest in a long list of racist interventions from the Government—a Government who have already deliberately stoked division and hate over the past decade. From the “go home” vans touring working-class communities to the Windrush scandal that saw black citizens deported, to the hostile environment policy and the attacks on Black Lives Matter, hatred, division and racism are used as weapons of mass distraction to try to shift the blame for Tory policies that hurt the majority of society. Rather than to blame the Government for the lack of school places and council houses, or the underfunding of our health service, the Government want to encourage people to blame their neighbours and other people in their community. The good news is, however, that the working class in all its diversity in this country is better than that and better than this Government.

Listening to speeches from the Government Benches, they remind me very much of speeches by Donald Trump. I think that, like Donald Trump, the Government’s approach will be thrown into the dustbin of history before too much longer. The policies that this divisive approach seeks to distract from and shift the blame from mean that people’s wages have not improved in over a decade. These are policies that have slashed key local services and ripped the heart out of many communities.

This Bill comes at a time when millions and millions of people have been having a long-overdue debate on racism in our society. Last week, England footballer Tyrone Mings rightly called out the Government for stoking the fire, because racism starts from the top. We have seen, of course, Tory MPs make themselves look like complete mugs, attacking footballers for being opposed to racism and showing their opposition to racism. The Bill that we are looking at today is exactly the type of legislation that we end up with when we have a Prime Minister who has labelled black people piccaninnies with watermelon smiles and Muslim women letter boxes. [Interruption.] Conservative MPs can groan and shake their heads all they want, but they should save their outrage for the people who will be criminalised, demonised and abused by this legislation, should it pass.

The Tories have a low view, as I have said, of working-class people and hope that they can whip up anti-immigrant sentiment to distract from their own failures. I do not share that view, and the response we have seen over the last week in this huge national conversation about racism shows that, while racism starts from the top, anti-racism and solidarity start from below. This legislation is about fear. It is about division. It is about hate. In the diverse, multicultural communities across the country that have come together over the last week we have seen a far better country than the one that this Government imagine—a country full of the spirit of community, the spirit of unity, the spirit of hope, and I encourage anyone, regardless of their political party, with an ounce of humanity in them to reject this Bill today.

I make this speech thinking of the asylum seekers I have met in my immigration surgeries at the Bangladesh centre in my constituency, and thinking of the sons and daughters of asylum seekers who go to school at Bankside Primary in Harehills in my constituency—a school where over 50 languages are spoken. I make this speech thinking of them, and this is just a small part of my effort to speak up for them, because those in power, those in government, are not speaking up for them; they are sticking the boot into them. They are chasing favourable headlines from the disgraceful individuals that run newspapers like The Sun that seek to divide the working class, but those views, I am glad to say, are going out of date. Our country is a far better, far more decent place than this Government imagine. That is why this rotten, racist, divisive approach is, in the long term, bound to fail. So I urge everyone who is appalled by the idea of offshore asylum seeker processing centres and everyone who is opposed to this to do what is right and vote against the Bill.

[Jonathan Gullis]

On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. I seek your advice. The hon. Gentleman has thrown the slur of racism at the Conservative Benches throughout his speech, yet he was a key leading member of the Labour party that was found to be institutionally racist at its core due to the antisemitism that took place. I ask for your ruling on whether that—