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9.3 pm

Mr. Gerald Kaufman (Manchester, Gorton): The hon. Member for Southwark, North and Bermondsey (Mr. Hughes) referred to the way in which Britain has received people who have fled from other countries. My parents were such people. They were able to flee from eastern Europe, leaving most of the rest of their families behind to be slaughtered in the holocaust. I therefore want to say right away how bitterly I resent the cheap remarks of the hon. Member for Brent, East (Mr. Livingstone) in likening capitalism to what the Gestapo and Hitler did to the Jews, homosexuals and all the other people who were murdered by the Nazis. Such a person is not fit to stand for public office, let alone be elected to it.

I have sat through immigration debates in the House for some 30 years, and there is none that I have approached with greater revulsion than the debate tonight: a debate in which the Conservative party has once again--as it always does when it wants to grub around for shoddy votes--played the race card. Last Monday the shadow Home Secretary, who has suddenly found her voice, besought my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary to use the word "bogus" in the context of the issue that we are debating this evening. I am ready to use that word, because "bogus" is the ideal epithet to describe the Tory pretext for this trumped-up debate tonight. Asylum poses problems--as all hon. Members who represent multicultural constituencies are aware. However, for the Tories to say that there is a crisis, as they do in their nasty motion, is bogus. They talk of a crisis, but yesterday, the leader in The Times stated:

at no point can it be fairly said . . . that the system was really "out of control". In proportion to population, Britain ranks but ninth in Europe in terms of asylum-seekers . . . There is some evidence that the backlog is at last shrinking. The time taken to decide whether to award asylum has been reduced by seven months and record numbers of claims are being processed. A vast expansion in the provision of full-time adjudicators . . . and the creation of a new tribunal centre with 12 courts should further cut the backlog.

Mr. Baldry: Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

Mr. Kaufman: No. Many Members want to speak, so I do not want to take up more time than I need to.

If there is a problem, it was inherited from the Tories--as my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary illustrated in his extremely powerful speech. The Tories' legislative framework prevailed for three years until we introduced the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999. The Tories dealt with none of the genuine abuses.

Unlike my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary--through the 1999 Act--the Tories did nothing whatever to crack down on unscrupulous consultants and solicitors who actively encourage bogus applications for their own financial gain. I draw attention to the crooked and larcenous activities of Abdullah Azad's self-styled welfare centre in Manchester, which cons suckers out of huge sums. For example, Azad is refusing to repay my constituent Mrs. M. Mahmood of 5 Iqbal close £1,000 that he conned her into lending him to pursue a case that was solved by my contacts with my right hon. Friend-- as he will be aware because we corresponded on

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the matter. I call on the Greater Manchester police to investigate the fraudulent activities of this leech--this bloodsucker.

Most people believe that, when the right hon. Member for Maidstone and The Weald was a Home Office Minister, all she did was chain up pregnant women in prison. However, she has a record on immigration, too. In a debate on the Asylum and Immigration Bill in 1995, she told the House:

The deterrent effect of our measures, by reducing the number of people who will try to take advantage of our system, should lower the number of persons who are lawfully resident and who also have to be looked after while applying for asylum.--[Official Report, 11 December 1995; Vol. 268, c. 793.]

If there had been one word of truth in that bogus claim, her so-called crisis would not exist.

In October 1996, the right hon. Lady made another wholly bogus claim. In a written answer, she stated that the measures taken by the Tory Government would

strengthen our immigration control and . . . greatly reduce the incentives for those seeking to enter or remain unlawfully in the United Kingdom . . . The Government believe that it is wrong that people who are admitted to this country on the basis that they can provide for themselves or who are here illegally should receive benefits paid for by the taxes of lawful residents. The measures we have now taken and the work currently in hand will see that they do not.--[Official Report, 24 October 1996; Vol. 284, c. 1W.]

If there was the slightest truth in the right hon. Lady's words, we should not now be facing the problems that my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary is trying to solve.

In addition, the right hon. and learned Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Mr. Howard) blamed my right hon. Friend for passing defective legislation. It was the right hon. and learned Gentleman who passed defective legislation and who signed up to a defective convention. All that happened was that my wicked right hon. Friend did not put right what the right hon. and learned Gentleman and David Waddington got wrong in the first place.

Far more contemptible than anything done by the shadow Home Secretary, the right hon. Member for Maidstone and The Weald, is the approach of the Leader of the Tory party. We all know that, for too many years, it has been the practice of the Tory party to exploit racial and religious prejudice for vote-grabbing purposes, as I know from my constituency. In one election in which I stood, the Tory candidate published a leaflet intended for Muslim voters, saying that I was a Zionist, in order that my religion should deprive me of the votes of people of a different religion. My Muslim constituents were far too sensible to fall for that.

In 1978, during a by-election campaign--she did it deliberately--Margaret Thatcher, when leader of the Conservative party, said:

People are really rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture.

The Tories were up to it then, just as they are up to it now.

The present leader of the Conservative party said that, under him, things would be different, and he wandered aimlessly and foolishly around the Notting Hill carnival, believing that such patronising and condescending activities would assure black and Asian people that the

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Tories were not really racialist. However, this week he has launched the local government manifesto, which talks of

bogus asylum seekers . . . flooding into Britain.

The right hon. Member for Old Bexley and Sidcup (Sir E. Heath) sacked Enoch Powell from the shadow Cabinet for arousing racial prejudice when Powell spoke of rivers of blood. Enoch Powell spoke of rivers; Mrs. Thatcher said "swamped"; The Conservative leader today says "flooding". They have a preoccupation with liquids in connection with immigration policy.

The right hon. Member for Old Bexley and Sidcup sacked Enoch Powell from the shadow Cabinet for arousing racial prejudice. It now seems that it is a qualification for being appointed to the shadow Cabinet is to arouse racial prejudice. If Tory Members challenge my words, let me quote to them what one of their very, very few black candidates--John Taylor, who stood at Cheltenham, and who is now in the House of Lords--said on 27 September 1995. This is their man, not our man. He said:

The Tory party think giving a few cocktail parties for Asian millionaires is race relations.

The Tories are still up to it today. The Hindujas know that they are always welcome at Conservative central office--but the Hindujas have more sense. Mr. Taylor continued by saying that the Tory party

alienate ethnic minorities by pandering to xenophobic voters with promises of crackdowns on immigration.

That is what the Tories' man said five years ago, and it is as true today as when he said it, because it is still happening.

Three days ago, in The Sunday Times, Mr. Mohammed Khamisa, a Conservative activist and a Conservative councillor, wrote an article headed:

What's black and blue and rejected all over? A Tory for 20 years, Mohammed Khamisa wants to be an MP, but the party does not seem to want him. Is race the reason, he asks.

He writes in his article:

Having applied for the position of Conservative candidate for 13 safe and marginal seats . . . I have not even been offered an interview by any of the local Tory associations.

This is the same racist Tory party which Enoch Powell represented, which Margaret Thatcher represented, which the present Leader of the Opposition said he did not represent but which the present Leader of the Opposition is now embodying as much as any of his worst predecessors did.

The Government's record on asylum is praised by ethnic minorities in my constituency--where there is a high proportion of ethnic minorities. At every advice surgery that I hold, genuine refugees come to see me who my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State has treated with generosity and humanity. At my last advice surgery, there was a little boy of 14, a Kurd, who had come to the United Kingdom across Europe last year on a false passport and had been let in to join his brother, another Iraqi Kurd.

The problems that the hon. Member for Southwark, North and Bermondsey mentioned can be solved in very many cases. My right hon. Friend the Home Secretary is good and decent and generous, and he is admired in my constituency among Libyans, Algerians, Liberians, Somalis and people of many other nationalities who owe their presence in this country to him. Major Wellington

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from Sierra Leone has praised my right hon. Friend for what he has done for his family. My right hon. Friend has good policies for genuine applicants, but he is rightly wary of potentially invalid applications of the sort fostered by Azad. My Asian constituents know the difference--they really do.

The Government do not yet have a perfect record on anything, including this issue, but they do have a creditable record on asylum seekers, while the Tory party shows itself again and again in its true, nasty colours. The House should chuck out this nasty and dishonest motion.

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