My Lords, despite support in the other place, the Bill has come under a good deal of criticism, both in your Lordships’ House this afternoon and outside Parliament. If this House is not able to or will not offer that criticism but bends silently before the exhortations of the Home Secretary, we may as well pack up and go home. It seems to me that our constitutional duty is to warn, advise and seek to persuade the other place to think things through with care and in a less fevered atmosphere than was apparent when the Bill was debated in the other place. It is in Committee that we can look carefully at the Bill. With the greatest respect to him, I do not think that following the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, into the Division Lobby is the answer to this question.
The aims of the Bill are not in the least bit difficult to understand. They are to deter illegal entry into the United Kingdom; to break the business model of the people smugglers and save lives; promptly to remove those with no legal right to remain in the United Kingdom; and to make provision for setting an annual cap on the number of people to be admitted into the United Kingdom through safe and legal routes. I fully accept that all of those are legitimate policy aims, and in a pre-election period they are just the sort of policy aims that a Government who wish to remain in office through demonstrating their desire to protect their citizens from the expense of illegal immigration and from their having to see on their television screens images of thousands of people arriving in rubber dinghies, and who want to blame “the others” for failing to stop them before they set off, would espouse. However, while simultaneously claiming to be welcoming and compassionate, and portraying the United Kingdom as the victim of others’ failures, or of far-away political upheavals or moral ineptitude, is easy if somewhat lazy politics—and certainly not novel—it runs the risk of creating or encouraging a form of sectarianism.
In the context of the last presidential elections in the United States, sectarianism became a highly moralised political identity that saw the other side as contemptible. The moral component was fundamental. You believe
that you are a member of a select group, and you fervently believe that only you know the moral truth and that the other people are hopelessly and irredeemably wrong. That is the tenor of the thinking we see across the American political divide nowadays. That is the way Donald Trump electioneers and how he describes the people who disagree with him.
This divisive political system has three main components. The first is what is known as “othering”—labelling these people as so different from us that they are almost incomprehensible. The second is called “aversion”—the idea that they are not just different but dislikeable. The third is “moralisation”, whereby they are morally bankrupt. Now sectarianism cuts both ways and moral rectitude does not belong only to one side of the argument. However, there are questions that need to be asked about whether, for example, it is acceptable to redefine one’s relationship to the law or to a long-standing convention on refugees, or to claim that judges who apply the laws enacted by Parliament—this Parliament—are “lefty lawyers”. Is it right to argue that what you think is in your immediate political interest is what is best for democracy? If the stakes are high enough, anything goes. To see where we may be heading, one has only to look at the clauses in the Bill relating to suspensive claims and serious harm; or at Clause 1(5), relating to the disapplication of Section 3 of the Human Rights Act; or at Clause 4, on the disregarding of certain claims; or at the Section 19(1)(b) statement on the face of the Bill. I have been described, I am sure, as many things, but no one I think could describe me as a “lefty lawyer”, and government by insult is not encouraging.
I am truly sorry that I have not been able to agree with my noble friend Lord Howard of Lympne, but I do suggest that we all study with some care the speech of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Etherton, given at the outset of our proceedings.
What is less easy to understand is how the Bill’s four aims are to be achieved in practice. I have no doubt that a Home Secretary could articulate in a persuasive and evidence-based manner how each of those aims can and will be met within the rule of law and in compliance with our existing treaty obligations, most obviously under the refugee convention and the European Convention on Human Rights. There may be both a political and legal case for this Bill and the measures it demands. I genuinely look forward to hearing it, because so far, I have not.
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