Refugee Crisis in Europe

Stuart C McDonald Excerpts

Tuesday 8th September 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mrs May]

I absolutely agree with my hon. and learned Friend. If he has a little patience, I should like to say something later in my remarks about what we are doing in that respect.

I set out the four main areas of effort and should like to address each briefly. The first is aid spending. Since 2011, the UK has been at the forefront of the international response to the humanitarian crisis in Syria. Our financial contribution of more than £1 billion is the largest we have ever made to a humanitarian crisis and makes us the second-biggest bilateral donor in the world. To put it in context, the amount of money we are spending is almost as much as the rest of the European Union put together.

The United Kingdom can be proud that we are the only major country in the world that has kept our promise to spend 0.7% of our national wealth on aid, and prouder still of the difference that that money is making. Our support has reached hundreds of thousands of vulnerable people across Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey, Egypt and Iraq. It has paid for more than 18 million food rations; it means that 1.6 million people have access to clean water; and it is providing education to a quarter of a million children. Last week, the Government announced an additional £100 million of aid spending. As the Prime Minister told the House yesterday, £60 million of that will go to help people who are still in Syria. The rest will go to the refugees in neighbouring countries—Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon. More than half of that new funding will support children, particularly those who have been orphaned or separated from their families.

UK aid from the British people is helping the victims of the Syrian conflict where and when they need it most. Without our aid to those camps, the numbers attempting the dangerous journey to Europe would be much higher. The Government have always been clear on this point: we must stop people putting their lives at risk by taking those perilous routes, as my hon. and learned Friend pointed out a few minutes ago.

[Stuart C. McDonald (Cumbernauld, Kilsyth and Kirkintilloch East) (SNP)]

Does the Secretary of State agree that one group of people who understandably will continue to want to travel to the UK is those from the region who have family members who are already settled here as refugees? Our tightly drawn family reunion rules limit the numbers who could benefit from them. Will she commit to a review, and an extension of, the family reunion rules so that more can benefit from them?

[Mrs May]

The hon. Gentleman makes an important point, but there are alternative routes for those who are looking for family reunion here in the UK. Under current family reunion provisions within the immigration rules, those who are granted asylum or humanitarian protection in the UK can sponsor immediate family members to join them here. We have arrangements in place that are helpful to those who wish to join family here in the UK.

I want to make another point about the perilous journey. An important point was made by my right hon. Friend the Member for North Somerset (Dr Fox) yesterday. He said:

“If we are genuinely to help refugees, this cannot simply be about helping the fittest, the fastest and those most able to get to western Europe. We must help those who are left behind in the camps, who are sometimes the most vulnerable.”—[Official Report, 7 September 2015; Vol. 599, c. 34.]

Indeed, the right hon. Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper) has made that point herself—she made it on one occasion when we discussed the issue last year. She said:

“There has always been cross-party agreement that the majority of refugees should be supported in the region”.—[Official Report, 29 January 2014; Vol. 574, c. 881.]

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Holloway]

Give me a couple of minutes. Just let me get into my stride.

Instead, those who are refugees should be offered a well-resourced place of safety—perhaps in Europe, but more probably in a safe place in the region where they live—and if it turns out that someone is an economic migrant, they should be taken home. This is not xenophobic: it is moral, practical, fair and sustainable over many years. As I see it, it is the only way to slow the number of bodies landing on the beaches and to allow Europe to re-establish control of its borders, which it has now lost. If we fail to achieve this, millions more people will make these journeys and we will be overwhelmed in the years ahead and less able to send resources to the region.

There are big disparities in security and economic opportunities between nations, and they will not be solved by short-term measures, such as giving hundreds of thousands of people asylum within Europe. It is not an idle exaggeration or scaremongering to say that over the coming years we are looking at potentially hundreds of millions of people seeking a better life in Europe. The numbers have grown and will grow as long as we continue to reward these journeys with the opportunity to settle in Europe.

Let us be hard-headed about this: not all migrants are refugees. By way of illustration, Al Jazeera reporting from the Greek side of the border with Macedonia showed that large numbers of Syrians were trying to dissociate themselves from people from other places. It said:

“They want to separate themselves from the other nationalities; the Pakistanis, the Afghans, the Iraqis...what they say is that all these other nationalities claim to be Syrians as well, because it is the Syrians who have the most valid claim to asylum.”

When populations flee war or famine, they generally flee together, as I saw as a television reporter and a soldier. They flee with the elderly, the infants and the women as well as the men. [Interruption.] Yes, I would. The current migrants are overwhelmingly working-age males who have paid a hefty price to make the trip. Most of the countries they came from are certainly poor, but they are not at war. It costs thousands to board a smuggler’s boat and a lot of money in the months before to travel to it.

As a TV reporter in the 1990s, I remember doing a piece about landlords in north London ripping off the housing benefit system. I was living in a house with a lot of people, including many from Congo, many of whom had been soldiers. I remember lying on my bed in this room that I was sharing with half a dozen of these guys, and I thought to myself, “Who is more likely to get to England and to north London: is it the soldier who had an AK47 and a fistful of dollars or the widow with seven children and not a cent to her name?”

Some years ago, I lived under cover for a couple of weeks in the Sangatte camp in Calais when I was working for ITV. I think there are some parallels with the situation today. Living side by side with people in the camp, it seemed to me that the overwhelming majority of the people who got as far as Calais were economic migrants. Every night, hundreds of us, all young men, would burst out of the camp as it started to get dark. We would spend the night cutting the wire, trying to get on to freight trains; we would be picked up the next morning by the French police and what we called the police taxi service to take us back to the camp.

If I had been one of those guys—then from Iran, Kosovo, the Kurdish areas of Iraq and Turkey—I would have done exactly the same as they did. How can we possibly criticise people for wanting a better life? Most were doing just that—looking for a better life. In many cases, their families had sold land to get the money to pay the people smugglers, and they had travelled to northern France unchecked. This still seems to be the case in Calais today. Not long ago, many people got out of an unsafe country to get there and they travelled through many safe countries subsequently. What they are doing now is trying to get into their country of choice.

[Stuart C. McDonald]

Is the hon. Gentleman aware of the information sent by the Immigration Minister to the Home Affairs Select Committee, confirming that the most common nationalities among those at Calais included Syrians, Eritreans and Afghans? Refugees can be wealthy as well. The fact is that the United Nations has been absolutely clear that this is a refugee crisis and it is very likely the majority of people at Calais are refugees. Why does the hon. Gentleman persist in peddling myths?

[Mr Holloway]

The hon. Gentleman did not listen to what I said. I said that those people had been through dozens of safe countries by the time they get to Calais. It is quite possible to be a refugee and an economic migrant. [Interruption.] One of the appalling truths about the Syrian bodies washed up on the beaches is that they previously got to safe countries and are now choosing to come to Europe. Again, I would do the same. Likewise, people in this country have claimed asylum in this country and then they go back on holiday to the places from where they have claimed that asylum. I could not get my hair cut the other day for that reason.

Australia used to have a severe—[Interruption.] Labour Members should rise to intervene if they want to say something.