The following post is an excerpt from Sir John Major's keynote speech to the Institute for Government delivered on 10 February 2022. The full speech can be read here or watched here. This post contains the section of the speech concerning the government's Nationality and Borders Bill.
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SPEECH BY THE RT HON SIR JOHN MAJOR KG CH
INSTITUTE FOR GOVERNMENT
THURSDAY 10 FEBRUARY 2022
"IN DEMOCRACY WE TRUST?"
[…]
We British are a kindly people. When appeals are made for those in distress – at home or abroad – the good heart of our nation responds with compassion and generosity.
But, increasingly, across the Western world, populist pressure leads governments to be less generous to refugees, asylum seekers and migrants.
At present, an estimated 70 million people are displaced – three times as many as at the end of the second world war. In the next 30 years, climate change may force a further 143 million people to leave their homes.
To this, we must add unknown numbers of families fleeing from intolerable hardship and repression.
The problem is huge and growing. It needs a collaborative and international solution to help refugees, and protect the target communities that now bear the burden. Without such an approach, the next generation will inherit an insoluble problem.
In America, they build walls to keep migrants out. In Europe, they build camps to keep them in.
Here, in the UK, the government wishes to remove British citizenship from dual nationals, without any notice or right of appeal.
It proposes serious action against criminal gangs that traffic migrants – and rightly so. But it also proposes to criminalise the migrants themselves.
We should search our souls before doing this.
Can it really be a crime to be frightened; homeless; desperate; destitute; fleeing from persecution, or war, or famine, or hardship; and to cross half the world on foot and dangerous waters in an unsafe boat, in the hope of finding a better life?
Of course, if the numbers are too large, this creates an appalling problem for local communities. But surely, to seek sanctuary from an unbearable life cannot – morally – be treated as a crime?
Yet, the government's Border Bill proposes to punish asylum seekers who take an unsanctioned route, with a jail sentence of up to four years.
There must be a better way to protect areas such as Kent, than filling our prisons with miserable unfortunates, whose only real crime is to seek a better life.
Prison – for these refugees – is punishment without compassion.
I do sympathise with the awful problem facing the government. But these proposals are not natural justice, and are decidedly un-British.
I hope the government will reconsider.