Anne McLaughlin – 2022 Speech on Migration
The speech made by Anne McLaughlin, the SNP MP for Glasgow North East, in the House of Commons on 16 November 2022.
The £120 million totally wasted on the Rwanda plan could have quadrupled the number of caseworkers and cleared the backlog in asylum cases urgently. Can we have a Department focused on the nuts and bolts of getting the job done, instead of crazy, brutal and counterproductive headline-chasing policies? After all, that is the root of all our problems—that and the lack of safe and legal routes. A number of months ago, I tabled a written question asking for a list of all the safe and legal routes and it would not even have filled half a page. So can we do something about that?
The revelations in ITV’s “The Crossing”, a documentary about 27 channel deaths last November, were utterly heartbreaking and horrifying. Did the Home Secretary discuss with her counterparts how best to ensure that disputes about precisely where a boat is play a distant second fiddle to saving people’s lives?
May I end by saying how disappointed I am? The Minister distanced himself from the Home Secretary’s crass comments on migrants, but today we have heard him talk about murderers and foreign offenders. We are talking about asylum seekers, and he brings up murderers as if they are one and the same thing. It is an absolute disgrace, because he knows the impact that that has on not just asylum seekers but all migrants.
Robert Jenrick
The hon. Lady needs to face the facts. We on the Government Benches will always behave with decency and compassion, because those are our values. But we will not be naive. We are capable of making the distinction between genuine refugees and genuine asylum seekers fleeing persecution and human rights abuses, and Albanian economic migrants coming to this country for all the wrong reasons. We are also perfectly capable of making the distinction between good people who deserve our protection and support, and bad people who are foreign national offenders who need to be removed from the United Kingdom as soon as possible. I am surprised to see her joining in with the Opposition, who want to close down the very detainment centres where we keep those people while we try to get them out of the country.
The hon. Lady says she is disappointed that we are pursuing Rwanda. I think Rwanda is an important part of our efforts to tackle illegal migration because deterrence has to be suffused throughout our entire approach. Everything we do to create further pull factors to the UK ensures more people cross the channel in perilous ways and more pressure is put on our public services. It prevents us from helping the people who genuinely deserve our support, such as those who come from Ukraine, Afghanistan or Syria under our resettlement schemes. I will say again—I have said it before: if the SNP wanted to help with this issue, it would address the fact that proportionately Scotland, in particular SNP local authorities, takes fewer people on those resettlement schemes than any other part of the United Kingdom.
