Refugee Crisis in Europe

Tom Tugendhat Excerpts

Tuesday 8th September 2015 Commons Chamber

[Tom Tugendhat (Tonbridge and Malling) (Con)]

I stand here proudly as the grandson of a refugee who came here in the 1920s. When my great uncle came as a Jewish refugee from Austria later in the late 1930s, the nation’s security was in such question that he was interned, as was every other adult Jew leaving Austria or Germany. I therefore welcome the Government’s efforts to take the nation’s security seriously while not damaging the right of refugees to come. It is right that, as we have done in the past, we balance our security with our generosity.

It is also right that we treat the cause, and not just the symptom, so I welcome the Government’s position. It is easy to say we should take more individuals, in theirs ones and twos, tens and even thousands, but unless we address the cause, we will be talking about millions, not thousands. Only 3% of the population has so far left the region, leaving 97%, and it is right that Britain has made the single largest contribution per capita in helping those people. That 97% is being helped by Britain. That is what we are doing for Italy and Greece. We are stopping the migration by supporting those in the region.

More than that, we are helping Syria. It is not enough to take the fittest, the strongest, the cleverest and the richest—those able to make the trip—and to integrate them into our societies to have them as our professors, our doctors and our lawyers. They would undoubtedly contribute handsomely to our future, but they should not be stolen like that.

Civil wars tend to last between seven and 12 years. Tragically, we are already four years into this one, but that means—I hope this is true—that we are approaching the final stages. I cannot tell the House whether that is guaranteed or not—nobody can—but we all hope very much that the war will end and soon. At that point we will want the people nearby to be able to go back and rebuild their society.

That is why I call on Her Majesty’s Government to do one more thing than they are already doing: to use the good offices of the Foreign Office and the efforts of the Minister for the middle east, the Under-Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, my hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth East (Mr Ellwood), who has done much already on this, to talk to our allies in the region—the Jordanians, the Turks, the Lebanese and the Iraqis—and to extract financial support from our Gulf allies and the other wealthy nations so that the camps can be used not just as refuges, but as lily pads from which we can jump back into Syria with economic development. If we can turn the camps—as others have in other parts of the world—into zones of industry and economic growth for refugees in exile, they can re-import their labour, their ideas and that drive back into Syria, so that instead of needing to have a Marshall plan lasting 30 or 50 years to support Syria, it will rebuild itself in half that time.

It is possible. The Government are making the right noises and doing exactly the right things. I would encourage them to go further and harder on that path, but I am very grateful for the work of the Home Secretary and the Prime Minister.