Nationality and Borders Bill (Twelfth sitting)
It is a pleasure to follow my friend, the hon. Member for Sheffield Central. When there are no safe and legal routes —or very few, as we have discovered throughout our many debates in this Committee—refugees will travel by unsafe means. We leave them no other choice. An estimated 40,000 refugees and other migrants died between 2014 and 2020 in the process of moving between countries, so as you said during a previous Bill Committee sitting, Ms McDonagh, we all of course want these dangerous crossings stopped.
We need to establish a network of the safe and legal routes the Government keep claiming the Bill is all about. But if it was about safe and legal routes, the Government would not be spending so much time, energy and money on introducing this so-called pushback policy for vessels found in the English channel. In the Bill, they refer to ships, but they have stretched the definition of what a ship is beyond recognition: it is now anything that appears to float. I feel the need to emphasise that for the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent North—I see his ears pricking up at the mention of the word “Stoke”. Given his comment that he is happy to holiday in Greece, and that refugees should therefore just stay there, he clearly thinks people are arriving here on cruise ships. He really ought to look into this issue a bit more before he casts another vote or speaks another word. The Bill specifically talks about
“any other structure (whether with or without means of propulsion)”.
That is because people are making these perilous journeys on the flimsiest of vessels, so desperate are they.
Let us not sanitise things by talking about the pushing back of boats, ships or vessels of any description. Let us call it what it is: a policy of pushing back people—human beings. That is who we are pushing back. Who are these people? They are not, as the Home Secretary disgracefully claimed yesterday, economic migrants who just want to stay in UK hotels. Several very well-respected refugee organisations have spoken to me this morning to express their anger over those words, because as the Home Secretary knows, it is not true. The Home Office itself, over which she presides, accepted that 98% of those who arrived on boats in 2019 were asylum seekers, so I repeat: it is not true.
Who are these people, then? Migrant Voice and Amnesty International, in their evidence to their Committee, said that they are often babies; children; pregnant women; people who are ill; people with physical or mental incapacities; people suffering the traumas of past slavery, torture, or the frightening journeys they are on or have taken; or people who are afraid. Guess what? Young men, with the exception of being pregnant, can also be all of those things. It is clear that it takes just one person to panic or misunderstand an instruction for lives to be in jeopardy—the lives of all those aforementioned people.