It is a pleasure to serve under your guidance this afternoon, Sir Roger, and to take part in a debate that has been broadly thoughtful, despite very clear differences of opinion. It is also a pleasure to have sat through and enjoyed the speech of the right hon. and learned Member for Fareham (Suella Braverman), who is the very definition of an activist lawyer, so we are grateful to have her with us. I speak in solidarity with the minority of other Members in the Chamber today who are not legally trained—who are not lawyers. It is right that our voices are heard as well.
I rise in particular to speak in favour of amendments 6 and 7, which stand in the name of my right hon. Friend the Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr Carmichael)—who is indeed a lawyer. First, I want to say something that ought not to be even remotely controversial: the evil trade of shipping people across the English channel in rickety boats needs to be stopped, and those people who are carried across the channel via those means are taking huge risks. We have seen significant loss of life over the years, including in recent times. However, the two amendments I am speaking to seek to challenge the fundamentals of the Bill. I believe this Bill will not do what it says: it will not stop the boats. It will not tackle the issues of deterrence and so on, and even if it did, the Rwanda provisions would tackle only roughly 1% of the number of people who seek asylum in this country.
As well as leading to poor policy, there are a number of errors at the heart of the Bill, because it is based on a series of false premises. There are three basic false premises. The first is the belief that, while this is a global problem and a European problem, the UK’s position is especially awful. I have heard incendiary language in this place and outside it relating to our being overrun or swamped, with people swarming across the channel, and that kind of thing. The reality is that
85% of those who declare themselves to be refugees remain in the region to which they have fled, normally the next country, so a very small minority end up in this continent. Germany takes four times more asylum seekers than the UK, France two and a half times more and Spain two times more. Perish the thought, but if we were to place Britain back into the European Union just for a second for a league table snapshot, we would see that the UK is 20th in the league table of countries among the other 27 in the number of asylum seekers we take per capita. The idea that the UK is overwhelmed by this particular problem is not true, and it does not take account of the realities across the continent and across the world.
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It is also worth bearing in mind that the voter base issue the Government are really dealing with, or think they are dealing with, is excessive immigration in general, yet only 7% of the migrants in this country are asylum seekers. The real issue, and where there is an issue of our being overwhelmed, is that the last time I checked, 165,411 asylum seekers are waiting in the backlog. On past experience, 75% of those people will be counted as refugees and given approval by this Government, so we know that the people coming here are broadly genuine refugees, and a different 75%—or a not entirely coterminous 75%—of them are waiting more than six months. When Members get letters in their postbag and emails from people outraged about this issue, it is usually less about the boats crossing the channel than the fact that a local hotel is full of asylum seekers, not being used for its primary purpose, and there is a reason for that.
Those asylum seekers do not want to be in such a hotel; instead, they want to have their cases treated quickly. When I was in Barrow in the constituency of my neighbour the hon. Member for Barrow and Furness (Simon Fell) a few months ago, I talked to asylum seekers who would rather be told to leave the country and be given a negative decision than waiting the year or more that they have waited so far. One guy told me he had been an Afghan interpreter for the British Army in Afghanistan, but we had left him behind, and the only way he could find to get to this country was to come via an irregular route. These are the people we are talking about, and the reason we are in the situation we are in is the Government’s failure to tackle the backlog. The first false premise this Bill is based on is that the UK’s problem is somehow different and greater than any of our neighbours’ or, indeed, somehow separate from the problem that affects the whole of planet Earth.
The second false premise is that the only way to control migration—or 7% of it, because asylum accounts for only 7% of UK migration—is to duck international law and become a pariah. The right hon. and learned Member for Kenilworth and Southam (Sir Jeremy Wright) pointed out, more eloquently and in more detail than I am going to, the importance of the United Kingdom being credible internationally. We listened to the Prime Minister earlier this week, and we are aware of what the UK Government are doing and what the UK military is doing alongside the US in the Red sea, and the justification for that, which I hear, understand and accept, is that this is about upholding the rule of law. If we want to walk on the world stage and be a leader—to be people
with influence—then we need to be not among those who habitually break the rule of law and think these things do not apply to them.