Nationality and Borders Bill

Debate between Stephen Kinnock and Lloyd Russell-Moyle

Consideration of Lords amendments
Tuesday 22nd March 2022 Commons Chamber

[Stephen Kinnock]

I guess what matters is results and outcomes. The Government’s attempts to engage have clearly failed; the hon. Member will have his own view of why that may be, but I gently suggest that gratuitously insulting our European partners and allies on a regular basis, as the Prime Minister does, is probably not helping very much.

A particularly disturbing aspect of the Bill is that it seeks to criminalise a person who is seeking asylum for

“arriving in the United Kingdom without…clearance”.

That means that a Ukrainian person who had brought their elderly parents to our country in the early days of the war would have been criminalised under the Bill. Do the Government not comprehend the horrors from which refugees are fleeing? We should not seek to criminalise refugees who are desperately looking for a new home; we should go after the people traffickers. The Opposition therefore fully support Lords amendment 13, which removes the new offence.

[Lloyd Russell-Moyle (Brighton, Kemptown) (Lab/Co-op)]

My hon. Friend is making very good points. Is it not the case that the only way to apply for asylum in Britain is to come through an irregular route, because someone has no possibility of applying for asylum if they are not in Britain? Criminalisation is shutting off almost all legal routes to applying for asylum. In effect, the only way to get to the UK would be to make a false application first via a tourist route or another route, but the Government would then say, in a Kafkaesque way, “You have falsely applied, because you came in via the wrong route.” That is particularly pernicious, is it not?

[Stephen Kinnock]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. The whole thing smacks of a kind of bureaucratic trickery whereby every option is blocked off by some additional piece of bureaucracy. The Bill should have been an opportunity to unlock some of that, but instead it leaves us in stalemate.