Contribution
I thank the Leader of the Opposition for her response to the statement. I see that the shadow Home Secretary has been subbed out after his performance at Home Office oral questions, but whether it is the shadow Home Secretary or the Leader of the Opposition herself, I am very happy to take on the Conservative party any day of the week.
Let me start by saying that we will not take any lessons from the Opposition on how to run an effective migration or asylum system. As the Leader of the Opposition knows, when the Conservatives were in Government, they gave up on governing altogether. They gave up on making asylum decisions, creating the huge backlog that this Government were left to start to deal with. In our first 18 months in office, removals are up 23% compared with the last 18 months that the Conservatives were in office, so I will take no lessons from anyone on the Conservative Benches on anything to do with our asylum system. They simply gave up and went for an expensive gimmick that cost £700 million to return four volunteers and was doomed to failure from the start.
The Leader of the Opposition had a lot to say about the European convention on human rights, but I do not recall the Conservatives ever bringing forward any legislation to deal with the application of article 8, the qualified right to a private life. A Bill that sought to clarify the way that article 8 should apply in our domestic legislation or in our immigration rules was never introduced, so I am not going to take any lessons from the people who never bothered to do that in the first place. This Government are rolling up our sleeves, dealing with the detailed, substantive issues that we face, and thinking of proper, workable solutions to those matters.
The position on article 3 has changed across Europe. In my previous role as Lord Chancellor, I was at the Council of Europe just before the summer recess earlier this year, and I was struck by the sheer range of European partners who want to have this conversation. It is important that the British Government lean into that conversation and seek to work in collaboration with our European partners. The one thing that will not work is simply saying that we are going to come out of the European convention altogether. That is not and will never be the policy of this Government because we believe that reform can be pursued and that this is an important convention, not least because it underpins some of our own returns agreements, including the one with France. The right hon. Lady talked about how many years it would take for us to think about reform of the convention, but as she well knows, it would take just as many years to start renegotiating lots of international agreements that would be affected by us coming out of the convention, so I am afraid that, once again, her solution will not work.
I am always up for working in the national interest because nothing matters more to me than holding our country together and uniting it, but if the Conservatives really wanted to work together in the national interest, they could have started by voting for the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill, currently going through the House, that they have voted against at every opportunity. Forgive me if I do not take this newfound conversion to working together in the national interest with much seriousness, but the Conservative party’s track record suggests that it should not be taken seriously.
To not be taken seriously sums up the position of the Conservatives: these are the people that left this Government an abject mess to clear up. They gave up on governing, they gave up on running an effective asylum system, and now they turn up without so much as an apology to the British public, thinking that they have got anything to say that anyone wants to hear.