Mr President, I hope that honourable Members will forgive me if I stand back and ask a fundamental question. Why does the European Union need a common asylum policy? No one would deny that this is an area where countries can gain from mutual collaboration but, of course, there is nothing new about cooperation among our home countries in the asylum field. Since long before the signing of the Treaty of Rome, the Member States of the Union have been bound together by a complex web of agreements covering the right of asylum, the treatment of refugees, the principle of non-refoulement and much else. We must not make the mistake, as we so often seem to do in this House, of believing that the only alternative to EU action is some kind of anarchy wherein no nation consults with any other. On the contrary, the alternative to action at EU level is a negotiation of bilateral and multilateral accords among independent nations. Such accords have two potential advantages it seems to me over Community action. First, they are often well tried and well trusted and established and second, they can, of course, apply to states outside of the European Union. In my own constituency of South-east England the local police and immigration services long enjoyed excellent relations with their French and Belgian counterparts. Indeed, it is at least arguable that we cooperated more closely with other Member States ten years ago than we do today following the entry into force of the Dublin Convention and its flanking accords. Now, how can this possibly be? Well, it was Aristotle who first adumbrated the principle that which no one owns no one will look after. His precept surely holds true among nations as it does among individuals. Put bluntly, a border guard who sees that a traveller is heading for a destination beyond his own frontiers may have little incentive to detain him and so to provoke an asylum application within his own jurisdiction. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for refugees, 93 000 people applied for sanctuary in the United Kingdom last year. This makes Britain the most common destination for asylum claimants in Europe, a position we hold jointly with Germany. But what is most astonishing is that this figure has risen in the United Kingdom by some 40% since the mid-1990s while across the European Union as a whole, it has remained relatively stable. I say ‘astonishing’ because the vast number of applicants in my constituency have passed through several safe countries prior to their arrival there. Now surely a genuine refugee’s priority is to get out of the particular country, not to get into one. Barring exceptional circumstances it is not unreasonable to expect that someone escaping from oppression would apply for sanctuary as soon as he reached a safe state. I am proud of Britain’s role through the centuries as a safe haven for those fleeing from injustice and wrong and I know that Members across this House will feel a similar pride in the honourable record of their countries. That record depends on our ability to distinguish between economic migrants and genuine refugees and it depends critically on our having the resolve to secure our borders against false claimants. As cooperating states we can do this, as a single territory the evidence suggests that we cannot.

Political group: PPE-DE