Nationality and Borders Bill — House of Commons, 2021-07-20
Topic: Immigration
Alison Emily Thewliss (Scottish National Party, Centre-left): Eid Mubarak to my constituents and all who are celebrating. There are lots of things I could say about the UK Government’s Nationality and Borders Bill and their plans for immigration. I have been overwhelmed by the number of constituents who have been in touch to ask me to oppose the Bill, and I can assure them that I share their horror of the legislation. Criminalising those who seek sanctuary and who have survived experiences so disturbing and so distressing that they struggle to describe them is absolutely abhorrent I agree with Members who have said that the asylum system is broken, but the Bill is certainly not how I would go about fixing it. The Home Secretary’s plans to offshore reception centres, echoing Australia’s failed and expensive experiment, are dehumanising and brutal—such places are not for people who have suffered trauma. I commend to colleagues Behrouz Boochani’s auto- biographical account of the Manus Island detention centre, "No Friend but the Mountains". If the Home Secretary has read the book, it is certainly not meant to be taken as a "how to" guide Seeking asylum is not a crime, but this Tory Government are attempting to make it so. The all-party parliamentary group on immigration detention, which I chair, has been taking evidence from medical and legal experts, as well as from people who have stayed in the Home Office’s quasi-detention facilities at Napier barracks and Penally camp. What we have heard so far is incredibly worrying. People moved to facilities were taken from their accommodation without notice or explanation to a place surrounded by gates, fences and barbed wire. They were not told how long they would be there. They described to the APPG how right-wing protesters came to demonstrate outside, and how people came to stare through the fences at them as if they were animals in a zoo. Even though they could move around the local area, they were made to feel completely unsafe in doing so Ministers may claim that they are screening for vulnerability, but the evidence is clear and the tools that the Home Office is using to identify both physical and mental vulnerabilities during initial screening are woefully inadequate. Health experts have described the impact of Penally and Napier on those who were forced to live there. This is already, remember, a very fragile population—people who have been exploited, trafficked, tortured, seen their families killed or raped, or been subject to sexual violence themselves A third of residents at Napier said they felt suicidal—a much higher ideation rate than would be expected among asylum seekers living in the community. People suffered from lack of sleep and shared dorms with people experiencing night terrors and physical pain caused by the torture they had been through. There was even the mundane, everyday pain caused by lack of basic health and dental care. In addition, there was an outbreak of scabies owing to the lack of laundry facilities to wash clothes and bedding, and residents suffered the indignity of having to share the cream to treat it among themselves Legal experts have described the difficulties that those accommodated in such camps experience in gaining access to legal advice, or even knowing their right to access a lawyer in the first place. There are issues with the capacity of local immigration lawyers to take on cases and being able to work with a lawyer when there are no private spaces in which to discuss the case, which is a breach of people’s article 8 rights. Some have described being woken in the morning to be told that their substantive interview would happen imminently, with no time to prepare Then, of course, we have covid. Public Health England, the independent chief inspector of borders and immigration and Her Majesty’s chief inspector of prisons all raised concerns about the impact of communal living on the spread of covid-19. The Home Office chose to ignore that. A former resident of Napier barracks, describing the covid outbreak, said that "all you could hear was people coughing…it was like an apocalypse" Communal living in the camp made it impossible to prevent the outbreak of a highly infectious airborne virus, with shared sleeping, washing and eating space and a lack of soap and sanitiser. At Penally, it was reported that the isolation room had no toilet and washing facility of its own I note with interest that the ICIBI report will be out on Thursday. Will there be a statement in the House on the findings of the independent chief inspector of borders and immigration? If not, I would expect some kind of answer on that in the Minister’s summing up. Such facilities are highly inappropriate and they must all be closed, not just expanded, as the Home Secretary suggested. If they are offshore and people are unable to access them, we can bet that there will be even less scrutiny of the conditions None of this cruelty is happening by accident. Criminalise those who escape war and brutal regimes—people who can hardly go to the Government who killed their family to make a polite request for travel documents. Make the experience as awful as possible for those who make it here, despite all the odds. Deny adequate medical and legal support, so that it is harder for asylum seekers to make their case. Put people in camps to keep them from making friends, building support networks and putting down roots. Give them a pittance to live on, so that they cannot survive. My constituents and I do not support this anti-refugee Bill. We want none of this brutal hostile environment. All refugees are human beings, who deserve safety and dignity like any one of us, and no one is illegal.