William Cash
Main Page: William Cash (Conservative - Stone)Department Debates - View all William Cash's debates with the Cabinet Office
(9 years ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
The Prime Minister
I thank the right hon. Lady for what she says. She is right that, as the external border of Europe, Greece plays an absolutely vital role and that it is vital that the registration of migrants as they arrive takes place properly. My understanding is that we have given more, I think, than any other country in Europe to the European Asylum Support Office, EASO, so we are certainly putting in the resources, even though, effectively for us, Greece is not our external border; our external border is the border controls at Calais, because we are not part of Schengen. So we are doing what we can; we will continue to see whether more can be done, but she is right that making sure that people can be properly documented as they arrive will be a vital part of our security.
Sir William Cash (Stone) (Con)
The planned carnage in Paris shows the danger of allowing declared jihadists to return to their country of origin. Will my right hon. Friend be good enough to review the counter-terrorism legislation to prevent declared UK jihadists from returning to the United Kingdom, whatever human rights or the charter of fundamental rights may say? We must put the lives of the people of this country before human rights.
The Prime Minister
I thank my hon. Friend for his point, and I have a huge amount of sympathy with it, and that is why in the counter-terrorism legislation that we passed we took further steps to confiscate people’s passports. If someone is a dual national, we can strip them of their UK citizenship if we think that they no longer merit citizenship of this country. We now have the power—it was controversial but the Home Secretary and I pushed it forward—to exclude temporarily even British nationals from returning to the UK. I am all for looking at options for going further to make sure that we keep ourselves safe, but it was very contentious at the time. This situation is demonstrating that we were right to stick to our guns.