What goes on in the rarefied atmosphere of the House of Commons is not normally on the radar of the 15-year-old refugee being pimped out on the streets of Paris or Rome. For unaccompanied minors who have made it to Europe, life is all too often brutish and miserable; politics the least of their concerns. But what went on in the Commons on Monday night might have mattered hugely to these unaccompanied children – more than 26,000 of them in Europe, we think – if I and others had managed to persuade enough colleagues that taking 3,000 of them off the streets and offering them protection in the UK from the exploitation and violence to which they are exposed on a daily basis was a good idea. In sending us Lord Dubs’s amendment to the immigration bill, the House of Lords certainly thought so. So does Save the Children and just about every other organisation dealing with child welfare.
The government, however, disagrees. Providing a haven for unaccompanied refugee children from Europe will, they say, only encourage other families to send their own children on the dangerous journey here – as some form of advance party seeking a better life. Instead, as they announced last week – putting flesh on the bones of a welcome announcement first made in January – that we should take up to 3,000 unaccompanied children direct from Syria, North Africa and elsewhere, so that they are not tempted to try to get to Europe alone. When I made my speech in the House of Commons on Monday night, I accepted that the government has a point. But it’s not, in my view at least, an especially good one.
First off, the evidence that unaccompanied minors find themselves in Europe alone and separated from their loved ones as part of a deliberate plan to get a better life for their families is at best flimsy. What parent, after all, willingly hands their child over to others to get them to Europe in the faint hope that they might be able to join them later? Secondly – and much more importantly – it is no answer to those unaccompanied children who already find themselves in Europe, at risk of violence and exploitation on a daily basis, that we are apparently prepared to sacrifice them to discourage others from trying to make the journey they have already undertaken. None. It’s a morally bankrupt argument at odds with the principles for which I believe my country stands.
The other reasons deployed in support of the position that Lord Dubs’s amendment to the immigration bill should not pass were, frankly, even worse. Local authorities cannot cope, it was said, they are overwhelmed by having to deal with children already in their care. Really? Local authorities in the country with the fifth largest economy in the world can’t cope with looking after fewer than five children in each constituency in the country, something for which they would receive extra money from the Department for International Development budget had the amendment carried? Worse still, the argument that it’s a European problem. That France and Italy and Greece and all the rest are not doing enough. Even were that true, so what? Since when did our conscience as a nation start being dictated by the failings of others to shoulder their obligations? And all of this, of course, at a time when the government is trying to persuade us that Britain lies at the heart of a Europe which is supposed to stand together and in which we have a leadership role.
The truth of the matter, I suspect, is that the debate over the right thing to do for legitimate refugees in the greatest migration challenge since the second world war has got bound up with the debate on immigration generally. The two are, however, distinct, and should be treated as such. Doing the right thing by children who have found themselves cold, alone and at risk in Calais and on the streets of Europe’s capitals has nothing whatsoever to do with whether or not the extensive immigration of the last few decades is sustainable, or has been a good thing for the UK.
Going out on a limb, against the whip I take in the Commons, is never an easy thing to do, but it’s made less lonely by the fact that my conscience tells me I am right, and dictates that I should make clear to the government not only that it has got this issue wrong, but that the majority of British people, including my constituents, think so too. These are children, for God’s sake. And they are in need. We need to act now, like we did in the run-up to the second world War with the Kindertransport; like we did with the Asian families expelled by Idi Amin from Uganda; like we did with those from Vietnam who fled their country in flimsy boats in the late 1970s.
It is not too late for the government to change its mind. The House of Lords will, I hope, continue to insist that it does. Mine is not a lone voice, nor, as I have learned in the last 24 hours, is my position a lonely one on the Conservative benches. The government should adopt it.
