Tag: Illegal Immigration Bill

Refugee report: July


Refugee report with an update on the current state of play with legislation

July 2023

The Illegal Migration Bill continues its dizzying route to completion, despite 20 defeats in the House of Lords. The Commons has rejected all the amendments, and the Bill will return one more time to the Lords and, presumably, back to the Commons next week before the recess in a process called ‘ping pong’. Despite the enormous interest in this subject and its high political salience, it was reported that fewer than 40 MPs turned up for the debate and only 20 or so stayed to the end.

We are grateful for group member Andrew for this report.

The latest situation update:

All of the Lords’ amendments were overturned by the Commons, but several had some support from the Conservative benches (Tim Lough-ton complained that they had not had enough time to mull over the government’s changes). The Home Office offered several concessions on Monday evening, The bill’s provisions will no longer apply retrospectively to anyone deemed to have arrived illegally from March 7 (10,000 people will escape the legislation’s measures, according to the Daily Mail) … the detention of unaccompanied children will be limited to eight days (significantly longer than the 24 hours backed by peers) … and the detention of pregnant women will be limited to 72 hours (extendable to seven days by ministers). Other issues still in play from the Lords debates include:

• Removing unaccompanied children from within the scope of the Bill
• Allowing anyone not removed within 6 months to re-enter our asylum system and have their claims heard
• Ensuring Local Authorities maintain care of unaccompanied children and that children are protected during the age assessment process
• Ensuring LGBT+ people are not removed to countries where they risk persecution, and that victims of trafficking are not included within scope of the Bill (as sought by Theresa May). These will presumably come up again in the next Lords session.

Elsewhere

The highest number of small boat arrivals on a single day this year occurred last week at 686. The total for the year to last weekend was 12,119, slightly down on last year.

UNHCR report says the worldwide figure for refugees is now 29.4 million excluding Palestine. 76% in low/middle income countries 70% in a neighbouring country. 339,300 refugees returned home and only 114,300 refugees were resettled out of camps last year. UNHCR estimates that 1.5 million people globally are in need of resettlement because they are in a protracted refugee situation, meaning they had been refugees for longer than five years. For each refugee that was returned or resettled in 2022, there were 16 new refugees.

Free Movement have picked up on a story that the Home Office is planning to reintroduce the concept of “reasonable force” to remove families with children. Watch this space.

Small boats

The government does not know how much its new small boats bill will cost or if it will achieve its core aim of deterring Channel crossings, an official assessment has found. Documents published over three months after the Illegal Migration Bill was presented to parliament estimated that it will cost £169,000 to deport each asylum seeker – but it is unclear how many will be removed and what “third countries” will receive them. The only existing deal is with Rwanda and the Home Office refused to publish the actual payments agreed, citing “commercial sensitivities” as a Court of Appeal ruling on the scheme looms.
A report from the Migrant and Refugee Children’s Unit argues that Albania is not a “safe country”, as the Government maintains.

Controversial plans to house asylum seekers on a barge to reduce reliance on expensive hotels will save less than £10 a person a day, according to a report. The report, Bibby Stockholm – At What Cost? from the NGOs Reclaim The Seas and One Life To Live, provides the first detailed estimated costings of the Bibby Stockholm, the barge the Home Of-fice is planning to use in Dorset to accommodate asylum seekers.

On statistics, in correspondence between the head of the UK Statistics Authority, Sir Robert Chote and Immigration Minister Robert Jenrick, Chote commented: “concerns have been raised with us about your statement in the House of Commons on 20 March that :“Today, a majority of the cases being considered for modern slavery are people who are coming into the country – for example, on small boats. We are seeing flagrant abuse, which is making it impossible for us to deal appropriately with the genuine victims, to the point that 71% of foreign national offenders in the detained estate, whom we are trying to remove from the country, are claiming to be modern slaves.”

Minister accused of using the wrong statistics

“The Home Office advised us that the quoted figure comes from a recent report about modern slavery referrals for people detained for return after arriving in the UK in small boats and that your statement was intended to refer to the proportion of foreign national offenders (FNOs) that are referred to the National Referral Mechanism (NRM) as potential victims of modern slavery. The report explains that while an increasing proportion of all those in detention after arriving by small boat are referred to the NRM up from 52% in 2020 to 73% in 2021 (and subsequently falling to 65% between January and September 2022), the proportion among foreign national offenders is much lower (at around 20% between January and September 2022)”. This argument came up again in the Commons when Theresa May claimed Jenrick was using the wrong statistics.

Beyond Europe, it seems that the UN estimates that more than 31 mil-lion Africans live outside the country of their birth, mostly within the continent (only a quarter head for Europe). AlJazeera is running a se-ries of articles on this subject.

The BBC’s More or Less programme presented a special episode on immigration, featuring Colin Yeo as well as several other experts, which is recommended.


Migrant Help runs a guidance and advice helpline to assist asylum seekers in the UK as they move through the process. The charity is not part of the Home Office but is the advice by The Independent, a Migrant Help adviser said: “I am afraid Migrant Help are not contracted to respond to MPs correspondence and have forwarded the attached to the MP correspondence team. Our call handlers will reach out to the service user to see if there is any further support they can provide.
I would like to clarify that not responding to MP enquiries is not a Migrant Help policy but a directive given to us by the Home Office as part of our work under the advice, issue reporting and eligibility (AIRE) contract. I have expressed con-cerns regarding this process

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The curious thinking of Danny Kruger MP


Danny Kruger is the MP for Devizes in Wiltshire

April 2023

UPDATE: 6 July 2024

Kruger wins the newly created seat of East Wiltshire in the 2024 General Election. None of his odd thinking emerged during the election period.

Danny Kruger has become conspicuous in recent weeks as the quasi leader of a group of MPs who wish to see a firmer crackdown on the boat people crossing the Channel to claim asylum in the UK.  The issue of the boat crossings is the subject of considerable political controversy and many people are outraged at the arrivals.

He was in the news recently when it was reported that the government had ‘caved in’ to demands by party rebels, in which he was a leading member, to amend the Illegal Immigration Bill by allowing ministers to ignore European Judges in certain situations.  This sprang from the last minute intervention by the European Court which prevented the deportation flight to Rwanda last year from leaving Boscombe Down near Salisbury. This decision enraged many in the Conservative party and much of the right wing media.

He is in the news again this week for an article in the New Statesman (online) which repeats and amplifies comments about immigrants calling it a ‘national disgrace’.  He goes on:

“The importance of this topic to many voters cannot be overstated.  To put it as plainly as people outside the liberal bubble put it: the small boats scandal shows that the powers that be are not on the side of the British people, but instead serve the abstractions of “human rights”, “international law”, or other signals of the middle class virtue. Lawyers and activists get to buff their own haloes while ordinary people pay the price, in longer queues for public services, lower wages and higher taxes”. 

The placing of human rights and international law in inverted commas is interesting and is a piece with another quote from a chapter he wrote on this subject discussed below.  The article suggests that ordinary people are experiencing difficulties in obtaining public services and having to pay higher taxes because of this immigration.  The facts speak otherwise and a number of Home Office reports demonstrate that immigrants are a net benefit to the UK economy. Mr Kruger may be forgiven for not knowing this as the reports have not been published. Wording such as the ‘abstractions’ of human rights suggest that they are in some way theoretical and is perhaps intended to be dismissive. ‘Powers that be’ is also puzzling since that is the Conservative party of which he is a member. Issues of access to public services is as a result of government policy, austerity and other matters not connected with immigrants.  

In a book produced by a group of backbench Conservatives called Common Sense: Conservative Thinking For a Post-Liberal Age (2021) is a chapter written by Danny Kruger entitled Restoring rights: Reclaiming Liberty. This chapter goes a little way to explain the thinking of the MP.

His chapter contains odd reasoning and some curious logic.  His first claim is that the European Convention on Human Rights, drafted by British Lawyers after World War II [lawyers from other countries were involved so it is incorrect to say ‘British lawyers’] ‘sits uncomfortably with the English tradition of preventing tyranny’.  This will come as something of a surprise to the millions of people who were enslaved and were worked to death in the sugar plantations or those who worked in fearful conditions in nineteenth century factories.  The acquisition and retention of Empire also has many horror stories. Quite where this ‘prevention of tyranny’ was taking place is not made clear.

Human rights are misnamed he claims ‘the rights we really need, and the only ones we really have, derive from something higher and something lower than mankind.  They derive from the idea of God, and from the fact of nations: from a Christian conception of law …’ It would be difficult to locate in the Bible many of the principles enshrined in the ECHR or the Human Rights Act (which Mr Kruger is keen to abolish) if only because these ideas and principles were a long way from a society colonised by the Romans and where practices like slavery were common.  There are many favourable references to slavery in the Bible for example.  The ‘lower than mankind’ element is not explained (although it could be a reference to Psalm 8).

He quotes approvingly the American author Patrick Deneen who wrote Why Liberalism Failed (2018).  Many do not agree with Kruger’s admiration of Deneen’s book regarding his blame of a huge range of society’s ills on excessive liberalism to be odd not to say ridiculous.

His analysis seems to go seriously awry however with the following passage:

“And so, from an early stage we came to think of rights as the means by which we are set free from external pressure, set free from obligations to others; and from there it is a small step to the hypocritical assumption that rights confer obligations on others to satisfy us” p49 ibid.  This is a unique view of what human rights is about.  Surely the point of our system of government is that it does involve governments carrying out policies which are about the wellbeing of those who are governed?  It is why we elect members of parliament to raise taxes and pass laws which make our life as acceptable and as fair as possible.  Who are these ‘others’ he refers to?

To read all of Mr Kruger’s articles and speeches is to struggle to find a coherent strain of thought as far as human rights is concerned.  They are a mixture of false premises, muddled thinking and ideas sprayed around which frequently make little sense.  Yet he appears to be someone of influence in the party at present and is often to be seen being interviewed.

Sources include: New Statesman, the Sun, Evening Standard.

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Salisbury Journal and refugees


Journal publishes forthright piece on the subject of refugees

March 2023

The Salisbury Journal is a local paper in the United Kingdom and is fond of publishing self-promoting puff pieces by our local MPs, so a forthright article by Martin Field in the March 16 2023 edition is worth highlighting. It concerned the controversy surrounding the suspension, and subsequent reinstatement, of Gary Lineker who presents the Saturday night BBC programme on football called Match of the Day. It arose following the publication of Illegal Migration Bill the previous week and Gary’s tweet comparing aspects of the bill to the actions of the National Socialists in ’30s Germany. The tweet caused a huge outrage against both Lineker and the BBC by a number of Conservative politicians together with sections of the right wing media.

Several commentators have wondered, like Field, whether the intensity of the furore was intended to be a distraction from the underlying issue. Field reminds us that the bill proposes that people who are fleeing persecution, who may have a legitimate claim for asylum and have family and relatives here, will never be able to have their claim heard and will be deported.

He says that they [refugees] are not being treated as individuals, as fellow human beings but classified generically, as members of a group, defined not by human characteristics, but by their manner of arrival in the UK.

“Make no mistake. This is a slippery slope. Removing people’s humanity through language is the first step; through law which criminalises them and takes away their rights the second; extremists emboldened the third; [then] inhumane and degrading treatment will follow. The lesson from history is unequivocal”.

In the same paper was a piece by Tom Bromley also referring to the Lineker affair and wider issues around allegations of impartiality by the BBC.

Refugees, and the boat people in particular, have raised great passions in the UK so it is interesting – and encouraging – to read of two commentators in the Journal expressing doubts about the bill and the subsequent events at the BBC.

The Archbishop of York, Stephen Cottrell, declared the bill ‘[it] amounts to cruelty without purpose’ and to be ‘immoral and inept’.

To note that Salisbury MP John Glen and Devizes MP Danny Kruger both voted for the second reading of the bill on 13 March.

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