Nationality and Borders Bill

Steven Bonnar Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 20th July 2021 Commons Chamber

[Steven Bonnar (Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill) (SNP)]

Disturbing, dysfunctional and destructive—three of the most commonly used words by my constituents in their correspondence to me when discussing this anti-refugee Bill. To my mind, the Bill is nothing more than a ploy by this consistently callous Tory Government to take a sledgehammer to a 60-year-old treaty, the only global legal instrument that there is to deal with the protection and rights of refugees. This UK Government are torching their international human rights obligations under the 1951 UN refugee convention. We as representatives in this place are in very real danger of assisting in the committing of crimes against humanity by turning our backs on those in need of safety and on how this Bill will criminalise these people. History will shame us all in every essence. That is why I oppose the Bill in the name of the people of Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill.

This legislation will be nothing short of a punishment to those fleeing war, persecution and human rights atrocities. It will create an asylum system that undermines international law and will cost the already failing Home Office vast amounts of time and money. This legislation, despite the Government’s promises to increase safe and legal routes for people urgently requiring refuge around the world, will contain no such commitments whatsoever. The Tories have actually boasted that this Bill will create a “global Britain”, able to act as a force for good; instead, this is a cruel, callous piece of legislation that fails in both practical and moral terms and reneges on our international responsibilities.

The Bill will cause misery to thousands of people, leaving behind what is already a toxic legacy for this Home Secretary, and will introduce a further embedding of a racist, hostile, xenophobic environment for us all to contend with in our daily lives as it leaks from this place into our society. This anti-refugee Bill will not solve any of its real problems, which have been caused not by the comparatively small number of people who do seek asylum but by decades of Governments in this place and their complete mismanagement. Successive UK Governments of any hue have failed time and again to operate an effective and efficient asylum system, fundamentally failing to deliver timely and high-quality decision making. Nothing in the Bill will make the necessary improvements. Instead, taken together, the Bill’s provisions will slow the process down, increase delays, increase destitution and mental illness, and cost the purse and, more importantly, the people of these countries much, much more while it destroys lives and relationships with our global partners.

Many asylum seekers have lived through dreadful experiences and faced devastating loss. The Home Office’s plans will only add to that trauma. Asylum claims in the UK are falling and are at historically low levels, with a 24% drop in the last year alone, yet the Home Office is pandering to scare stories and myths from the far right with the introduction of this Bill. As a result, this legislation will not only seek to criminalise asylum seekers, but create more bureaucracy and a bigger work load for officials, lengthening an already delayed process and trapping people further in limbo for years to come. There has been no real attempt to engage with experts on this approach. Almost 200 organisations have criticised the consultation associated with this Bill, framing it as a “sham” with a premeditated outcome. I could not agree in any stronger terms.

A message from his eminence Pope Francis that we all received for the forthcoming World Day of Migrants and Refugees stated:

“We are all in the same boat and called to work together so that there will be no more walls that separate us, no longer others, but only a single ‘we’, encompassing all of humanity”—

a vision that could not be further from this Tory Government’s agenda.



The UK once had a long history, they say, of welcoming people escaping conflict, poverty, oppression and natural disaster. That tradition should have been protected under any new legislation, recognising the interconnectedness of our global family, and cognisant of the colonial past of this place’s empires. The Home Secretary’s plans to send asylum seekers thousands of miles away, to be processed in third-world countries, are both insane and inhumane. The idea that asylum seekers can simply be shipped off somewhere else while those claims are assessed, is frankly a fantasy. Asylum seekers are people. They are human beings, not packages to be disposed of.

The UK needs only to look at Australia’s experience to learn that overseas processing centres for asylum seekers cause incredible psychological damage. They are eye-wateringly expensive, and they do nothing to deter asylum seekers. It could not be clearer: the Home Secretary is deliberately misinterpreting international law to pander to her own political base. That cannot be denied. The idea that the system is broken for some unknown structural reason is complete and utter nonsense. After 11 years in power, the responsibility for that lies firmly with this Conservative Government. The Bill will do nothing to fix things. It will only make a rotten system worse.