Windrush

Tom Tugendhat Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd May 2018 Commons Chamber

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

Having worked in a Government Department and having had to produce papers for Ministers, does my hon. Friend agree that the failure to have any record to go back on means that there is no historical precedent, which affects future decision making?

[Jeremy Quin]

My hon. Friend is right: it puts civil servants in an invidious position. I would never discuss any advice that I might have been privy to in those days, but this puts civil servants in the most horrendous position. As I said to the Chairman of the Home Affairs Committee, the right hon. Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper), there are many Opposition Members who served their country with distinction in government. Before they vote to establish this precedent, I ask them to consider what the implications would have been for the men and women providing them with advice to the best of their ability, and for the advice that they might have received.

This wide-ranging motion would set a deeply damaging precedent. What makes it even worse is that it incorporates confidential advice directly relating to our relationship with other independent states, and in its last line it might even be encroaching on the minutes of a Cabinet Sub-Committee, which risks undermining the basis of collective Cabinet responsibility.

We all want to ensure justice for the Windrush victims, but I do not believe the motion is a responsible way to go about achieving that.

--- Later in debate ---

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

Thank you for calling me to speak in this important debate, Mr Speaker.

This debate touches the very heart of us. For so many of us, it is fundamentally about fairness. It is a debate about how people should be treated fairly. It is clear that all of us feel that a gross unfairness has been done to people who have been here legally, are part of us and are very much part of the fabric of our community. It is an unfairness that, sadly, started generations ago and has persisted for far too long.

Many Members have spoken, so I will not take up much more time. I simply want to say that that unfairness applies not only, as many have said, to the Windrush generation in the purest sense, but to a wider community who have come from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, the African nations, the middle east and all over the world. One community I would particularly like to highlight, because it is one that touches me personally, is the Jewish community, who have come over the years and have also suffered unfairness through immigration at various points. I realise that that is in many ways tangential to today’s debate, but the point about fairness in migration is that it must include everyone or it includes no one.

I celebrate the fact that we have a son of the Windrush generation representing Her Majesty’s Government—is that not an image of the British dream if ever there was one?—and that he is not referred to as a British-Pakistani. He is not referred to as a British-anything. There is no qualifier. Nobody here is referred to as a British-anything. We are all simply British. That is a huge enrichment for our national life. It has made us, as a country, so much stronger.

I will end by saying how proud I am that this House is represented by so many different communities and by so many people who have come here very recently or many generations ago. The fairness we speak of today—this aspiration of equality that we all seek and too often fail to achieve—is at the heart of Britishness. It is therefore at the heart of the duty of the Home Office to deliver it. I know the new Secretary of State will do just that.