Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)

I am grateful to the noble Lord for giving way. First, I pointed out the Asylum and Immigration Appeals Act 1993, which is Conservative legislation. I could have gone on. I know that the noble Lord thinks my peroration has been too long already, but we can compare the minutes afterwards in Hansard of how long people are banging on. I was trying to point to a long and noble tradition in his party of caring about the refugee convention and trying to do what the noble Lord, Lord Harper, suggested we must do: differentiate the genuine refugees, who need to get here and be processed and considered before you can separate the wheat from the chaff. Secondly, the noble Lord should not let the fact that the messenger is unattractive to him be to the disadvantage of the amendments—try to ignore me and just consider the amendments in detail. I suggest that they do not offend his ambition of controlling borders or the ambition of the noble Lord, Lord Harper, of differentiating between perpetrators and gamers of the system and people who may well turn out to be genuine refugees. The noble Lord, Lord Harper, has made points about the public on many occasions and their warmth towards desperate Ukrainians, Hong Kongers and so on. Those people were rightly given safe and legal routes to the United Kingdom, in a way that Afghans, Sudanese people and others in equally dire straits were not. The drafters of the refugee convention always understood that that might happen and that some desperate people might have to flee by irregular routes. You do not know who is a refugee and who is not until you have considered their claim.