Illegal Migration Bill

Debate between Tom Hunt and Patrick Grady

Tuesday 11th July 2023 Commons Chamber

[Tom Hunt]

I am sorry, but I will not be taking any interventions.

Ultimately, what Brexit was about in many respects was taking back control of our borders, and controlling the migration system. If it gets to a point where we feel that, even having delivered Brexit, the popular sovereignty of the people’s wish to decrease net migration and tackle illegal migration robustly is impossible, it is only right that we then look at the legal infrastructure and the different arrangements that this country is subject to. We must listen to the British people, the vast majority of whom do support this Bill. They want to see it enacted and I will be supporting the Government every step of the way. I really hope that, before we get to the summer recess, this vital Bill gets Royal Assent.

[Patrick Grady (Glasgow North) (SNP)]

When the Minister was first appointed, I thought that he was largely going along with the Home Secretary’s language and policy on refugees and asylum seekers out of a sense of loyalty and collective responsibility. But as this Bill has progressed, it appears from the statements he has made in the Chamber and the responses he has given to questions and to Westminster Hall debates that he really has drunk the Kool-Aid. I think he genuinely believes the Government’s rhetoric: that this country is being invaded, that people who come here fleeing war, persecution and famine are actually economic migrants on the make, and that outright hostility and denial of their basic human rights is the only way to dissuade them from coming here. So hostile does he want the environment to be, he will not even allow a splash of colour and cartoons on the walls of the family reception centres. It is more than disappointing. It is worrying that the Government’s attitude seems to be that the way to stop people coming here from countries where they are at risk of oppression and human rights abuses is to create an environment that is at least as hostile as the place from which they are fleeing.

That would explain the Government’s opposition to Lords amendment 1. The safeguards that it provides should otherwise be seen as absolutely essential, and make it clear that nothing in the Bill requires the Home Secretary to break with international human rights law and the treaties and convention that this country has been signed up to for decades. Nowhere in the Conservative manifesto was there a commitment to take the UK out of these conventions, so their Lordships have every right to continue to press this and similar amendments during the next stages of their proceedings.

The Chair of the Justice Committee said earlier that this was an incorporative rather than an interpretive amendment. Perhaps the Lords will come back with something in lieu that will be more attractive to the more level-headed elements on the Conservative Back Benches. But then perhaps that is what the Government have been looking for all along—the Government want a fight with the House of Lords, they want a fight with the Supreme Court and the Home Secretary certainly wants an excuse to withdraw from the European convention on human rights. Those perhaps are the real purposes of the Bill, and the impact on refugees and asylum seekers is really only secondary.

It is ridiculous that we are being asked to consider these amendments barely 24 hours after the Lords gave the Bill its Third Reading. It shows the Government’s contempt for both Houses of Parliament. The explanatory notes and the amendment documents were only available through the Vote Office at 7.45 last night, as the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton) said, and yet the Government are proposing 58 motions to disagree with the Lords in their amendments this evening. If that is not picking a fight, I am not sure what is. Well, let us have that fight. Let us vote on all 58 of them and then see how desperate the Government and their Back Benchers are to get this Bill on to the statute book.

Almost all the amendments made in the Lords speak to a basic humanity and respect for the rule of law and the fundamental principles of the global asylum system. That is essentially what the Lord Archbishop of Canterbury’s amendment 104 calls for. Government Members may wish to wish those Lords away, but they are supposed to support the House of Lords and the system that exists. If they want to pick away at it, that is fine, because I do not think there should be a House of Lords in its current form.