Illegal Migration Bill

Tommy Sheppard Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 13th March 2023 Commons Chamber

[Tommy Sheppard (Edinburgh East) (SNP)]

Gary Lineker and others are right to caution about the use of language in this debate, but I think it is important that we also understand why people use the words they do. When the Home Secretary talks about invasion, when she refers to “us and them” continuously and when she tries to characterise this problem as there being millions of people waiting to come to the shores of this country, she does so for a particular reason. She does it because, generally speaking, the people of these islands are compassionate and fair-minded, and in order to get acceptance for proposals that are so inhumane and so brutal, it is first necessary to dehumanise and then demonise the people to whom those words refer. That is why the public are invited to regard migrants as some sort of amorphous collective menace and a threat to our way of life and our wellbeing, rather than the truth, which is that they are an assembly of some of the most wretched people on the earth, who have undergone unimaginable horror and have stories to tell that most of us would never wish to experience.

Let us be honest: the problem of small boats is one entirely of this Government’s making. For years, they have been playing a game of grotesque political whack-a-mole, in which the hammer of Government policy has come down on the heads of the world’s most vulnerable people every time they try to find a route through to the shores of this country. We have got to a situation where the legal routes are now so non-existent or so limited that most people have simply no alternative but to put their lives in the hands of the people smugglers on the shores of France. The truth is that until and unless we open up those safe, legal routes, this problem will continue.

The Government’s novel approach to the increasing number of people claiming asylum is now simply to make it illegal to claim asylum in the first place. That is a grotesque and absurdist logic that Franz Kafka himself would be proud of. I have heard a lot of Conservative Members talk about criminal gangs. Let me tell you this, Madam Deputy Speaker: if I was organising an organised criminal group and I was engaged in people smuggling and modern-day slavery, I would be rubbing my hands in glee at these proposals, because they alter the balance of power between these criminal gangs and the people they oppress by removing the redress and the rights that people have when they come to this country.

Finally, there is a lot of talk about how many millions this is costing. Getting rid of the cost is quite simple: process the applications and allow people to work and pay taxes while they are being considered. That would solve the problem overnight.