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Home Affairs and Communities

I thank my constituents for sending me back to the House for the tenth time. My obligation to them is to carry on working on their behalf, regardless of their religion or ethnic origin and to try to ensure that a good Labour Government work well in their favour. My right hon. Friend the Home Secretary has dealt with a number of the issues that relate to the legislation proposed in the Queen’s Speech. When it comes to the issue of immigration, my constituents are grateful for the fact that the primary purpose rule was abolished. They still remember it eight years later. They are grateful for the fact that an appeal system has been introduced for visitor visas, and I hope that my right hon. Friend will maintain that. The problem for my constituents too often is that where the policy on paper is one that they find acceptable and attractive, in implementation it does not always work as well as it ought to do, and they have asked me, during the election campaign and since, to represent to the Government that after eight years of welcome office, which my constituents have supported throughout, the Government should get a much stronger grip on the immigration and nationality directorate of the Home Office so that the policies work in the way that my constituents wish them to do. There are two aspects to that. First, there are aspects relating to the bureaucracy preventing my constituents from obtaining what is their right. If, as I do, I have a constituent who serves in the armed forces, who has served in Afghanistan and who later this year is to serve in Iraq, it is absurd to say that because there are problems with my constituent’s wife’s immigration record she should go back to, of all places, Zimbabwe, to apply for readmission to this country. Where a constituent of mine has had her husband allowed, under the Government’s legislation, to join her in this country and has then given birth to twins, and the husband has then violated his permission to remain in this country by leaving her and not sustaining the marriage, that constituent, who has been on the telephone to me again today, has a right to believe that that man, with no proper basis to remain in this country, should be thrown out of this country, rather than, although illegally here, obtaining legal aid to try to gain access to those babies until they are 18-years-old. I very much hope that in this Parliament we will deal with the reality of cases and not allow bureaucracy to get in the way of cases. Again and again—I have written to my right hon. Friend about cases even during the general election campaign—constituents of mine with work permits awarded to them by the immigration and nationality directorate, who have been offered jobs by employers who wish them to take up those jobs, are being sent back to countries of origin such as Bangladesh in order to obtain the right to remain here even though they have work permits. I have several such cases now, and such absurdities should be stamped on by my right hon. Friend. On the other hand, I strongly believe that where people are blatantly violating the immigration rules the Home Office should act on that and remove them from the country. At a recent surgery, a woman from Iran came to me with a letter from the Home Office that said, in bold and underlined, ““You must now leave the country.”” She had no intention whatever of leaving the country and said that she had come to me to ask if her National Asylum Support Service payments could be resumed. My constituents, of whatever ethnic origin, think it unjust that people who live in accommodation provided by the National Asylum Support Service should insist on remaining here when they have no right to do so. They want such people to be thrown out of this country and immigration law to work firmly, but they also want people who have a good case for remaining in this country to be treated in a sympathetic and practical way. My constituency is a dispersal constituency for asylum seekers. Some of those people have no right to be in this country because their applications and appeals have failed—such cases may involve people who have failed to gain access to an immigration appeal tribunal, who have failed in their appeal to that decision and who have failed the human rights appeal, too. People who have exhausted every single immigration process are remaining in this country and doing their best to live on my constituents’ taxes. I say to my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary that although good cases are treated well, it is about time that bad cases were dealt with firmly. The people of Gorton want people who will work and contribute to the economy to live in Gorton. At the same time, some people simply want to batten on to my tax-paying constituents, and I cannot see why my constituents should put up with it. During the general election, the Conservative party dealt with immigration in a disgusting way—when I was walking along the street, a man of African origin said to me, ““They talk about me as though I cannot hear what they are saying.”” Those politics operate on the basis that large numbers of people who are citizens of this country or who have the right to remain in this country are somehow beyond the pale. If the Leader of the Opposition had substituted, ““Jews””, for, ““immigrants””, when he discussed immigration during the general election, people would have said that he was conducting an anti-Semitic campaign. Anti-Semitism is bad and racism is bad, and the Conservative party conducted the nastiest, filthiest campaign of my political life on that issue. What is more, it conducted the campaign on the advice of a Commonwealth immigrant, who contributed nothing to the economy and who, having pocketed his money from the Conservative party, is returning to the country from which he emigrated. My constituents, of whatever ethnic origin, are not racists—they are fair and decent, and they want people to be given a chance. At the same time, when people exhaust every single process in the Government’s decent legislation, are told to leave and do not do so, I expect my right hon. Friend to deal with them, including those who ignore deportation orders. Immigration policy must be fair and firm: in these years of Labour Government, I look to my right hon. Friend to make sure that the fairness continues, that the firmness is enforced and that all of my constituents, regardless of ethnic origin, have confidence in this Government’s immigration policies.