Dr Zubir Ahmed

Can I start by also acknowledging the concerns of the women of Piddington who are viewing this debate today up in the Gallery? Those concerns are not limited, of course, to Piddington. They also include my constituency of Glasgow South West, which has historically had the highest number of asylum applications of anywhere in the United Kingdom. It is a matter of record that I have asked the Home Secretary to look at this urgently to see whether my city of Glasgow and my constituency of Glasgow South West can be afforded some extra breathing space as they contend with their own issues of housing and social cohesion. I have made similar pleas to the Scottish Government in relation to priority housing rules and local connection rules. Both sides in this debate have acknowledged that day zero of this issue is not today and that it did not start two years ago. It started long ago, or perhaps 14 to 20 years earlier. We are not where we would wish to be, but we must be careful about the tenor of the debate, because legitimate concern about safeguarding and about how we tackle asylum and the backlog can quickly bleed into issues of multiculturalism—that has already been spoken about today—of ethnonationalism and of immigration more widely. I can tell you for a fact that after this debate, some very uncharitable comments will be made on my social media because of my background. Therefore, I think it is an important moment to also put on the record that, largely, over the last 100 years, this country has been the most successful at integration and immigration possibly in the history of mankind. I am an example of that. My immigration story began 100 years ago when my grandfather took a boat from Calcutta, went to Hong Kong and became a member of the British Hong Kong police force, and then in 1963, when my dad took a journey by road to come from Pakistan into Glasgow to drive buses and then taxis, and he still does so today in his 80s. We must always remember, once this debate starts to bleed out into other issues, to stand firm against those who would wish to use it as an instrument for championing deplorable ideas like ethnonationalism that, unfortunately, have also been espoused at times by Members of this place, either intentionally or unintentionally. The issue itself does need to be gripped because when it is not gripped, it is precisely minority communities that are first and foremost in the firing line for abuse and attack.