Leaving the European Union

Debate between Royston Smith and Paul Scully

Monday 22nd January 2018 Westminster Hall

[Paul Scully]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for that question, but I challenge the language he used—“crash out”—as it goes back to what I was saying about a sense of optimism. We are right to plan for no deal, because it would be patently ridiculous if we did not have every avenue covered as we seek to build our relationships with the rest of the EU; but saying that we will “crash out” suggests that there will be no planning at all, and I just do not share the pessimism of that view. Regarding the car industry, the hon. Gentleman gives a strong argument for why we need to do a deal and why countries such as Germany, which sells 10% of its cars to us, would want to do a deal with us. We can set our tariffs as we see fit, whether that is 10% or not, if we leave without a deal, but then we would have to have an equal tariff with other countries, unless we have a free trade agreement with them.

[Royston Smith (Southampton, Itchen) (Con)]

This is not a competition, but not only did I vote for the Referendum party in 1997, I was a member of it before I joined the Conservatives, not necessarily because I wanted to get out of the EU but because I felt it was time people had their say.

On “crashing out”, does my hon. Friend agree that the people who say “Let’s go now,” are pushing us to crash out, rather than to wait and see whether we can get a good and favourable deal?

[Paul Scully]

My hon. Friend makes a powerful point. That is exactly right. We need to use the time imaginatively, sensibly and constructively to ensure that we do not crash out, and that if we have no deal it is because we choose to have no deal—because we feel that is the best way for us, rather than because we have been forced into it by a knee-jerk reaction.

We were shown the benefit of using the time by the first part of the negotiations, which concluded just before Christmas and looked at three things: the Northern Irish border, EU citizens living in the UK and British citizens living in the rest of the EU, and the amount of the financial settlement we might pay. While we were getting in a funk because of some of the newspaper headlines and the rhetoric that was being built up, the Prime Minister got her head down and carried on. Everyone was despairing on the Monday, but by Friday she had come up with a really good deal and was able to demonstrate that both sides had compromised. That is what a negotiation is. Sitting there thinking we will get everything we want is fanciful, and I say that as someone who would love to have everything he wanted. It is just not going to happen. That is the whole point of a negotiation. If we are to have a fruitful ongoing partnership with our European friends, it is really important that we take that time, and the Prime Minister ably demonstrated that before Christmas.

I have done a few public meetings in Sutton in which I have tried to give people my sense of a Brexit update as neutrally as I can. I always say, “Don’t read The Independent and The Guardian about Brexit because you will be going to hell in a handcart whatever you do, and don’t necessarily read things like the Daily Express, because everything is going to be absolutely sunny. We know it will be somewhere in between.” That is a fact of life.

Enslavement of Black Africans (Libya)

Debate between Royston Smith and Paul Scully

Monday 18th December 2017 Westminster Hall

[Paul Scully]

I understand my hon. Friend’s expertise and knowledge of the area and totally agree with him. There is a real risk. We can tackle the atrocities of the slave trade in Libya, and Libya’s power vacuum, but ultimately the biggest threat to that part of the world and many others is migration—and not necessarily just migration through conflict. Economic reasons, climate reasons and any number of other reasons are moving such a mass of people, which causes other situations.

[Royston Smith (Southampton, Itchen) (Con)]

On the power vacuum in Libya, the UK Government continue to support the Government of national accord, yet we hear that these things are becoming very much worse. Would it not be right for the UK to consider whether the Government of national accord are perhaps not the answer?

[Paul Scully]

I am grateful for the intervention. I will be interested to hear from the Minister on we can do to work towards democratic elections, and to create a mainstream Government in Libya, which clearly has not had one for many years. It is only by having a mainstream, democratically elected Government that we will be able to have a long-term view, whichever party makes up that Government. It will not necessarily be for us to pick a horse, run the country or tell it what to do, but we can help support it. We can work with the African Union and a local offering to help Libya create its own destiny and future, which hopefully will be much safer and a lot more secure.

Let me get back to SC. He was bought, and then brought to his first prison. The IOM said it was

“a private home where more than 100 migrants were held as hostages. He said the kidnappers made the migrants call their families back home, and often suffered beatings while on the phone so that their family members could hear them being tortured. In order to be released from this first house, SC was asked to pay…about $480…which he couldn’t raise. He was then ‘bought’ by another Libyan, who brought him to a bigger house—where a new price was set for his release…about $970…to be paid via Western Union or MoneyGram to someone called ‘Alhadji Balde’, said to be in Ghana.

SC managed to get some money from his family via mobile phone and then agreed to work as an interpreter for the kidnappers, to avoid further beatings. He described dreadful sanitary conditions, and food offered only once per day. Some migrants who couldn’t pay were reportedly killed, or left to starve to death.

SC told IOM that when somebody died or was released, kidnappers returned to the market to ‘buy’ more migrants to replace them. Women, too, were ‘bought’ by private individuals—Libyans, according to this witness—and brought to homes where they were forced to be sex slaves.”

It was Nima Elbagir and CNN’s groundbreaking report, and those pictures, that really brought the situation home to so many people in the west. CNN heard from its contact that two auctions were going on at the same time. Some people in the Libyan Government would say that those things happen only sporadically, but on this occasion there were two at the same time, and the one that was filmed was an overflow auction, because there were so many people to be sold. There was also a big buyer in town wanting to buy people—that is what I said: “buy people”—as commodities or merchandise, to work on farms. It is atrocious, and while I am speaking I am reflecting on the words I use. That episode brought the matter home. Officers from the International Organisation for Migration said:

“What we know is that migrants who fall into the hands of smugglers face systematic malnutrition, sexual abuse and even murder. Last year we learned 14 migrants died in a single month in one of those locations, just from disease and malnutrition. We are hearing about mass graves in the desert.”

The total population of migrants in Libya, based on estimates provided by embassies, is about 750,000, mainly coming from Egypt, Niger, Sudan, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Syria and Mali. Previously, under the Gaddafi regime, there were about 1.1 million; I think that that was the estimate. They were predominantly there as cheap labour. Of the 750,000 who are there now, about 450,000 at least do not see Libya as their final destination. They see it as being on a migration route to Europe and beyond. Those are the people in connection houses, who have been trafficked. They are the people who are beaten and whipped with wires—hundreds of thousands of people. They experience extreme insecurity in Libya, including arbitrary arrest by non-state actors, detention for indefinite periods of time, bonded labour, harassment and general exploitation.

There were other pictures on CNN of not the auction but the detention centres. That aspect of the matter is of huge concern, and I want to ask the Minister for his views. The people held there share small mattresses, and are effectively in a cage. That brings me back to what I said when I began my speech: they are treated worse than animals. How can we have reached a situation where that is anywhere close to the case?

The 450,000 people who come through Libya, seeing it as part of their migration route, go to the north coast, to a crossing point, pay another trafficker to get them into a boat, and go predominantly to Italy—to Lampedusa, a small island that simply cannot cope. I went, as a member of the Council of Europe, to Lesbos, to see some of the hotspots there where the Syrian refugees come from. There were a number of north Africans there and some were protesting and throwing things at the bus I was on, wondering why the Syrians were getting preferential treatment. Having seen what they go through to get there, it is possible to understand their concern.

We need to look at how the Italy-Libya deal is framed. I understand that it is a bilateral arrangement supported by the EU, but that it is being contested in the Libyan courts by human rights organisations based in Libya. I want to ask the Minister how robust the memorandum of understanding between the countries is, when there are reports of Libyan coastguards taking bribes to release migrants to traffickers. A second question leads on from that. The Department for International Development is doing fantastic work, as it tends to do. It is a world leader in the aid and support it gives. However, it is supporting more than 20,000 emergency interventions, involving healthcare, psycho-social support, hygiene kits and safe shelter. Can we be sure that we have robust accountability, to ensure that any support we give is not being fed into and supporting the cycle of trafficking, and that it is focused absolutely on the things I have specified?

It is good to hear that the IOM has managed to up its repatriation flights. The target originally was for 1,000 people a month to be taken back to their place of origin; that has gone up, and it is expected that 15,000 people will be repatriated to their original country this month alone. That is a good sign of the direction in which things are going.

I wonder whether DFID can get involved, either directly or through leverage of support from elsewhere, in trying to get accurate numbers. Together with the power vacuum, a problem that hampers what is being done is the fact that no one really knows the extent of the problem. There is work using various methodologies, but there is more to be done to get accuracy. Can we, for example, build up a phone network so that families from around the relevant part of sub-Saharan Africa can report in and talk about their loved ones—where they are, what has happened, the last time they saw them, and so on—so that we can begin to get more accurate figures?

Of course the UK Government will have a competing agenda. We want accountability, clearly, but as my hon. Friend the Member for Southampton, Itchen (Royston Smith) says, there is a need for stability and preparation for elections; we need to give support on the route towards elections, to get rid of the power vacuum. It is only a question of enforcement—everyone knows that slavery is illegal already, and there is nothing to be done to change the rule, but someone is needed on the ground to arrest the people in question and hold them to account, bringing them to court and applying the full force of the law to them. If, for any number of reasons, there is no one on the ground to do that at the moment, it will not happen.

[Royston Smith]

Slavery these days is completely different from the way people would have imagined it some years ago. Many of the people who are trafficked get themselves to the traffickers to get somewhere else. Should we be looking at the possibility of DFID or others educating people in their country, village or town of origin, so that they do not embark on the journey in the first place? Does my hon. Friend agree that that would be helpful?

[Paul Scully]

I absolutely agree, because it is a matter of pull factors, and stopping people having to make the choice to migrate over such a treacherous route. They have so far to go: there are human traffickers; people may just be ditched at the side of the road as I have described, or sold out of a bus in the back of a car park, and then sold on again and beaten with wires; they may then be on the Mediterranean on a boat—and the technique used with those small boats is that as soon as a navy cutter comes to the rescue, they are deliberately capsized to tip the people in the water. The rescuers have to pluck them out of the water; they cannot just pull the boat somewhere. To return to the Greek example, while I was there I met a Yazidi Christian—someone on a different migrant route—with a 10-day-old child. They had gone through that whole process. How the child, who by then was aged three months, was still alive, I shall never know. Those are the most treacherous circumstances, so anything that can be done to stop the migration in the first place must be the only course of action.

UK Exit from the European Union

Debate between Royston Smith and Paul Scully

Monday 17th October 2016 Westminster Hall

[Paul Scully]

We will all be involved in the negotiations, because we will all—parliamentarians, devolved bodies and business—be involved in the debates and discussions held here over the next couple of years. We need to involve the country in this important debate.

As was said during the debate on the referendum, and as I said when I was campaigning to leave, this is a 40 to 50-year decision. Frankly, that is why I, as someone who has wanted to leave the EU for 20 to 25 years, am quite happy to be patient for six months before we invoke article 50. We need to get our exit right, and then spend the two years ensuring that we get our future working and trading relationship with the EU right as well. This is an absolutely crucial period for the UK to get it right for the economy, for immigration and for control and sovereignty within this country—the three pillars that I was talking about.

We will have our chance to vote as parliamentarians on the great repeal Bill, which will come into effect the day we finally leave the EU. It will transpose EU law into domestic law. We can then choose; we will be taking control. That vote and the votes on subsequent Bills will determine how we leave the EU. That is Parliament ensuring that we are complying with international obligations under UK law.

One of the petitions mentions freedom of movement; its title is “Not to allow freedom of movement as part of any deal with the EU after Brexit”. The Prime Minister has been clear that we need to restrict freedom of movement. By doing so, we can create a system that allows us to control numbers and encourage the brightest and best, but at the moment we are limited in that ambition.

To my mind, one of our biggest pull factors for migration, especially from within the EU, is not benefits or the other things that people talk about, but the jobs that we have created over the last few years. The UK has been a success story in creating many jobs in difficult conditions. Youth unemployment is 48% in Greece, 43% in Spain and 39% in Italy. We can and should attract skilled workers and entrepreneurs from around the world. Naturally, EU citizens on our doorstep are likely to be the most numerous coming in, due to their location. I want to end that sense of entitlement and ensure that skilled workers from around the world, whether from Bangladesh, Australia, America, Canada or India, are on an equal footing with unskilled workers coming into this country from other parts of the EU.

[Royston Smith (Southampton, Itchen) (Con)]

To expand on the pull factors, does my hon. Friend agree that they are not benefits or the obvious things that people refer to, or even what he referred to, but the English language and the national living wage created by this Conservative Government? Those are two other pull factors that we simply cannot change.

[Paul Scully]

My hon. Friend makes a fantastic point. He is absolutely right. That is why I believe the UK will be on a sure and steady footing when we come to negotiate with the EU. Due to the rule of law, our language and the trading history and trading relationships we have built up around the world, we are still an attractive location for businesses and inward investment.