I have waited for a very long time to speak on the Bill. On Second Reading, I think I waited for four hours but did not get called. I have waited for a good amount of time today, too, but it has only made me more determined to get my points across.
I did not sign any of the amendments before the Committee, but I have sympathy with many of them, particularly amendment 131 in the name of my hon. Friend the Member for Devizes (Danny Kruger), amendment 132
in the name of my right hon. Friend the Member for Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland (Mr Clarke), and amendments 133 and 134 in the name of my hon. Friend and very senior colleague the hon. Member for Stone (Sir William Cash). Although it might surprise some people, I have a little bit of sympathy with amendments 72 to 75 in the name of my hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton), but I do not think that now—before we have sorted out the scourge of illegal immigration and its impact in this country—is the right time to pursue such amendments.
In a general sense, it will not surprise people to know that I welcome the Bill. We have 45,000 people a year entering the country illegally. They are mostly young men, as has been statistically proven; many are from safe-origin countries; and every single one of them has gone through France and multiple other safe European countries but has refused to claim asylum. They have decided to shop between different safe European countries, and they have come here. Being an economic migrant and moving to the UK because there are job opportunities here is a very noble dream, of course, but my advice to them is to engage with our legal migration points-based system, and we will make a determination as to whether their dream and our needs meet.
We are the party that believes in controlling our borders. We are the party that believes in strong border controls. Labour Members get incredibly sensitive whenever anybody suggests that they believe in open borders, but I simply say to them, “Show me the evidence. Show me the evidence that you believe in controlled immigration. Show me the evidence that you don’t believe in open borders. When I look at your record, every single thing you vote on is against precisely those things, so I don’t think it is unreasonable for me and colleagues to come to the conclusion that you are opposed to all border controls. As I say, show me the evidence.”
I turn to amendment 131. When the Rwanda policy was first introduced, a lot of us supported it because we saw what had happened in Australia. Australia had had a massive problem with illegal immigration, but it went down the route of offshore processing, and today it no longer has that massive problem. It is quite simple. A few Opposition Members are saying, “Australia did not work”, but we looked into this in detail and met Australian officials, and it did work. We think that going ahead with the Rwanda policy, if it were given a chance to work, would provide a significant deterrent. It would save lives at sea, and would enable us to operate the compassionate, controlled asylum system that virtually all of us in this place want.
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It was incredibly frustrating for us when, despite the Brexit referendum in which a majority of people in the country expressed a wish to take back control of our borders, and although we had an elected Prime Minister seeking to implement a policy to do precisely that, at the very last moment—even though our own courts had OK’d it—a foreign judge in another land thwarted the whole thing, gumming it up in the courts for nearly a year. My constituents can see how much that has damaged our democracy. It is, in fact, deeply damaging, and it is an unsustainable state of affairs for us, as a sovereign country, to be in a position in which that is allowed to happen.
We were promised that the Nationality and Borders Act 2022 would resolve all these issues, but we are still standing here, and tens of thousands of people are still entering the country illegally every year. That foreign judge was able to ensure that the flights to Rwanda did not get going—and how many channel crossings have come about as a result? The High Court took six months to reach a conclusion, although hopefully the Appeal Court will give the scheme the green light next month, and if the Supreme Court does not call it in, there could be flights going off next month. Then we will see whether the approach works or not; I think that it will.
Many Members on both sides of the Committee have discussed whether there is public support for the Bill, but it is clear from what I have heard that there is overwhelming support for it in the country. We all engage with our constituents, and I have engaged with mine, so I know that the support for the Rwanda policy is also overwhelming, as is the anger. I will not speak about the amendment on hotel accommodation that will be debated tomorrow—well, I will, briefly. There has been extremely strong opposition to the use of a hotel in my constituency. At a time when many of my constituents are struggling to get by, struggling to pay their energy bills, they see people who have entered our country illegally—mainly young men—staying in a four-star hotel. Twenty-eight of my constituents who worked in that hotel were pressured to resign, and there is also the wider economic impact of the lack of bed space in the town. My constituents are appalled by this.
Others, of course, take different views. Last weekend a number of Labour councillors and a prospective Labour parliamentary candidate supported the use of a hotel by those who enter our country illegally. That is an interesting view and one that I would advise those people to change, given that according to surveys I have carried out, many people who still intend to vote Labour—I do not know why—have hardline views on immigration. I suspect there is a risk that this conflict might be exposed, and, of course, I will be playing a role in that.
We often hear Labour Members say, “If we have safe and legal routes, all these problems will go away.” It was fascinating to hear, for the first time, a shadow Minister say that Labour supports a cap on safe and legal routes. We do not know what the cap would be, but we do know that many people would fail in that regard, and would probably still try to enter our country illegally in small boats. What would the Labour party do with those individuals in those circumstances? They do not know, of course.
My hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham spoke earlier about safe and legal routes, and I think that that is a place we need to get to, but I also think that we have to take the public with us. Right now, understandably, the majority of people in the country are furious about illegal migration. They are furious about people jumping the queue. We need to deal with that, and once we have dealt with it we can move to that place where we talk about safe and legal routes, but I think that right now is too soon.
There are hundreds of millions of people in the world who would like to move to our country—[Interruption.] Of course there are hundreds of millions who would like to move to our country and who could conceivably get refugee status, so if we talk about a cap and safe and legal routes, we need to talk about prioritisation. The
question is: is it right that we prioritise young, single men from Albania over, for example, some of the refugees I met two weekends ago? Where was I two weekends ago? I was at the Rohingya camp in Bangladesh. It was the third time I had been there. Do you know who I spoke to? Overwhelmingly women and children who had fled directly from Myanmar. Some of the women had been raped, some of their dads and their brothers had been killed, and when I asked them what they wanted, all they said was that they wanted to go home safely. They do not have a choice about shopping between different European countries or about where they go. They do not have that choice.
I want us to have compassion as a country, I want us to have a cap and I want to have safe and legal routes, and once we get control of the system I might be happy with that cap being quite high. I might want us to play our role, but realistically, with limited resources, every person who comes in illegally from somewhere such as Albania means one less person that we can support from somewhere like that Rohingya camp. They are working directly against the interests of some of the most vulnerable in the world. That is a fact.
I am incredibly pro genuine refugees. Once we get the small boat situation sorted out and once we tackle illegal migration, we can put in place a cap, driven by compassion. If there is an unforeseen disaster somewhere, such as a huge earthquake in another country, I am sure we will be able to come back to this place to ask our elected Chamber to extend that cap, and I think most people in the country would support that. But where do we want to get to? We want to get to a place where we take a large number of some of the world’s most desperate people, but to get there we have to get control of the system and deal with the people smugglers.
I know that this Bill seems tough, but it is the only way. It is the only plan, and I am proud to speak in favour of these amendments, particularly amendment 131 tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Devizes (Danny Kruger). The Opposition have brought up Winston Churchill, but the idea that if he was around today he would support a situation where our democratic Chamber was thwarted by foreign judges undermining the law brought forward by our elected Government is for the birds. That would not be the case.