Meeting of the Parliament 17 June 2014
Following on from Clare Adamson’s speech, my tangential knowledge of the experience of a refugee relates to Hector Fuentes, who came to the UK in 1976 having been expelled from Pinochet’s Chile after three years of imprisonment during which he was tortured physically and psychologically. He was told on more than one occasion that he was to face a firing squad purely for having left-wing political opinions.
Amnesty International campaigned for many Chilean prisoners to be released, and Hector thought that he was going to go to Paris. However, one grey morning, he found himself in Sheffield instead, with very little English. Clare Adamson has just described how the miners in Scotland supported and welcomed the Chileans, and Hector and his comrades were supported and welcomed by the people of Sheffield. He lived there for a period of time and eventually married my younger sister. He has lived in the United Kingdom for almost 40 years now, contributing to our economy. His is a success story. The only thing that he still finds difficult is the British winter weather.
In advance of the debate, I read through the contributions of Lord Roberts and Baroness Lister to the debate on the Immigration Bill in the House of Lords on 17 March, and I had great sympathy with some of the points that they made. For example, Baroness Lister argued that the time limit debarring asylum seekers from accessing the labour market should be reduced from 12 to six months—she did not say that it would go altogether—in order to reduce the danger of asylum seekers being forced into the illegal shadow labour market and being subject to totally unregulated exploitation and exposure to criminal elements involving trafficking and other horrendous abuses. She also pointed out that the report of the Joint Committee on Human Rights on its inquiry into the treatment of asylum seekers considered that, in a number of cases, their treatment breached the threshold in article 3 of the European convention on human rights for inhuman and degrading treatment. The report stated that the policy of enforced destitution should cease, that the system of asylum seeker support was a confusing mess and that a coherent, unified, simplified and accessible system of support for asylum seekers should be introduced. That ought to have happened but it has not.
Yesterday, Jack McConnell argued that the UK could have a regionally flexible immigration policy that would recognise that the issues are different in different parts of the country. We know that he piloted a form of that when he was First Minister, through the fresh talent initiative. I do not know the detail of his proposals and whether he also imagined the approach extending to asylum, but I am attracted to the idea of a flexible UK policy, because I think that it would avoid some of the difficulties that could present themselves if an independent Scotland had a very different immigration policy.