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Migrant Workers (Regularisation)

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Dagenham (Jon Cruddas) on getting the debate. Following the point made by the hon. Member for Ryedale (Mr. Greenway), nobody should underestimate the large number of people who feel very strongly about the fundamental injustice that is being done to twilight communities throughout the UK. We should not necessarily measure public opinion by the screaming headlines of the Evening Standard, the Daily Mail or the Daily Express. There are an awful lot of decent people out there who take a different point of view. We should not approach the threat of the BNP like a rabbit in the headlights of car; we should tackle it head-on and say that it is leading us into a disgusting, nasty, divisive society. We must stand up for an inclusive society that recognises the rights and needs of everybody in our community, and be prepared to invest properly in it. On Monday morning, like other colleagues, I took part in a refugee week awareness event in Islington. The council and the refugee forum produced an excellent booklet describing not the disasters or failures but the successes of migrant communities in coming into the area, promoting cultural diversity, producing new businesses, work and educational achievements and developing the strength of inner-city London an awful lot. I congratulate everyone involved in that. We should examine the positive aspects of how migrant communities have contributed and achieved so much in our society. Without the level of migration to this country that we have had over the past 30 years, when, as my hon. Friend the Member for Dagenham said, we have had a falling birth rate, what kind of education service, science base and transport service would we now have? An awful lot of the successes of the British economy in the past 30 years have been built on people coming here and contributing massively to our economic well-being and development. The other side of the matter is the sadness of people having to flee from oppressive regimes, some of which we supply arms to, and the tragedy of people dying in boats while trying to cross the Atlantic to get to the Canary islands, Italy or Spain. We should develop a foreign policy based much more on human rights and an ethical dimension to deal with the problems that people are trying to flee from in the first place.