Ms Stella Creasy

I represent Walthamstow; once upon a time, the architect of the ECHR, Winston Churchill, was our constituency next-door neighbour. But let us be under no illusions and let us be frank, because people in this Chamber will write off my corner of London as some nirvana of good relations and say that we do not get issues or challenges with immigration: we have people in our community who judge people on the basis of their skin colour and who listen to the social media tropes; and we have people who seek division, who share that common aim and who will find somebody to blame rather than a solution for the challenges we face. Legislation needs to counter that, not facilitate it, because the reality is that across this country there are too many people with too much month at the end of their money, and it is too easy to tell those people that immigrants are the reason why, rather than telling them the truth. The people in my community are not woke; they are wise. They get that some are trying to tell them that immigrants are the problem, when the truth is that it is actually politicians who do not face up to the challenges we have. People in my community, like those across this country—whether they are old friends or strangers, incomers from Hackney or even further afield—can all find common ground if they do not get their bins collected, if they cannot park their cars or if they feel that their children are at risk. In this country, people find humanity in each other—in our common grumbles. That is what it means to be British: to have a moan about the reality of daily life. Those who want to divide us—who tell us the way forward is finding somebody to blame rather than a solution to the challenges—do nobody a service. Let us talk about what we could do in this Bill to make things better. I support new clause 37, in the name of my hon. Friend the Member for Clapham and Brixton Hill (Bell Ribeiro-Addy) from the other end of the Victoria line. We should not be making a profit from children who are seeking to be citizens who have the right to remain here. I draw the Minister’s attention to new clause 44, which I have tabled. We could learn from Australia and New Zealand—those bastions of progressive immigration policy—and introduce a worker’s justice visa. We really need to help overseas workers in our communities who are at the behest of their sponsors. It is outrageous that there are people in this country whose future relies on somebody else’s largesse, rather than their basic human rights. We can learn from Australia and New Zealand in introducing such a visa in order to correct the issue whereby somebody who is clearly a victim of modern slavery cannot stay in the country to pursue that claim, so the person making them a slave cannot be held to account.