TENSIONS surfaced between bishops and Conservative peers within the House of Lords on Wednesday, as issues of contemporary slavery, the protection of kids, and the rule of law in relation to Rwanda were debated.
By close of play, the Government had suffered an additional five defeats on amendments to the Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill at its Report Stage. This included a call, supported by bishops (Comment, 6 March), to discover and protect victims of contemporary slavery and human trafficking from being removed to Rwanda without their consent.
The amendment from Baroness Butler-Sloss, which had been debated throughout the first day of the Report Stage, on Monday (News, 5 March), was agreed by 246 votes to 171.
Another amendment, to be sure that no unaccompanied children could be deported to Rwanda, was agreed by an equally large margin: 265 to 181. A version of this had fallen on the Committee Stage (News, 23 February).
It was brought by Baroness Lister and supported by the Bishop of Chelmsford, Dr Guli Francis-Dehqani, who said: “Safeguarding shouldn’t be some burdensome requirement but an ethical and legal imperative. It is because of this that I repeat the request that I made in Committee for a toddler’s rights impact assessment to be published. . .
“This amendment would help mitigate the chance of an individual being sent erroneously — once they are, in truth, a toddler — by sensibly awaiting the results of any age assessment challenge before their removal.”
Referring to the recent report from the Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration, which concluded that “there was no assessment of the collective needs of the kids,” the Bishop said: “Errors have been made within the age verification process and kids have been subjected to unsafe adult environments in consequence.”
She concluded her speech: “Finally, the golden rule, ‘Do to others as you’d have them do to you,’ could easily be rephrased for this context into the query, ‘Would you consent to this plan of action for your individual child or grandchild?’”
Lord Lilley (Conservative) later countered: “Would she [the Bishop] send a toddler in a ship from France, a protected country, to the United Kingdom?”
She responded: “I feel that’s the unsuitable query. The point is that, behind every considered one of these figures, there are individual stories of enormous amounts of trauma that the majority of us cannot even begin to contemplate. I don’t have the desire to make a judgement about what goes on before any individual gets on a ship.”
Earlier in the talk, Lord Lilley had suggested that Archbishop Welby needed to envision his “white privilege” and “colonial assumptions”.
During the primary day of the Report Stage, on Monday (when the Government was defeated in the primary five divisions), Lord Lilley — in response to arguments that Parliament couldn’t, by law, state whether a rustic was protected — had argued that “the Blair Government did just that” through the Asylum and Immigration (Treatment of Claimants, etc.) Act 2004. This requires a listed third country of removal to be treated as a spot where the person’s life and liberty should not threatened or, where the person shouldn’t be susceptible to deportation to a different country, in contravention of the Refugee Convention.
Responding, Archbishop Welby had referred to Winston Churchill’s advocacy of the European Court of Human Rights after the Second World War — linking domestic law to international law — to make it clear that making a legitimate domestic law didn’t all the time mean that it was the precise thing to do.
“The Government should not doing something on the size of what we saw at that stage,” Archbishop Welby had said. “But they’re difficult the precise of international law to constrain our actions.” He went on to inform peers that “the purpose of international law is to stop governments going ahead with things which are unsuitable,” and that “it’s a basic rule of ethics and morality that two wrongs don’t make a right.”
On Wednesday, Lord Lilley took the primary opportunity in the talk to reply to the Archbishop. “Of course, neither do two rights make a unsuitable,” he said. “I don’t recall him, any right reverend prelate or any lawyer, over the various years that that [2004] Act was in place, ever decrying it in the way in which they decry this proposal. What is the difference?
“The first is that, in those days, the list was all of white countries, and now we’re coping with a black country. I warn the Most Reverend Primate that he had higher check his white privilege and his colonial assumptions, or he might find himself in trouble with a few of his bishops.”
In an interview with The Spectator, published on Thursday, Archbishop Welby brushed off the concept that the Lords Spiritual were “all the time on the Left”. The Bishops had been “as objectionable” to Labour policies when Sir Tony Blair was in power, he said.
He was also amused by MPs who held the view that clerics mustn’t “preach politics from the pulpit”. “It . . . principally goes back to Thomas Becket. Don’t be political means be political, but not in a way I don’t like,” he said.
Going back to the Rwanda plans, Archbishop Welby said: “There’s a number of what the Government says which I entirely agree with. Boats should be stopped. We must limit access to our borders: three-quarters of 1,000,000 in any yr seems to me to be far too many. And so we should have good border control. And we must pursue, go after the traffickers. That I totally agree with. . . We just don’t agree with the means and could be unsuitable in that.”
