A Liberal Democrat MP has won widespread praise after his illuminating monologue about immigration, and the real problems behind it, on BBC Question Time.
The party’s former leader Tim Farron was responding to questions around the Rwanda deportation scheme which Labour scrapped as soon as it got into power.
But the pressure is on the government to come up with its own form of deterrent, and there is speculation that Keir Starmer is looking to copy Italy’s deal with Albania to process asylum seekers.
However, over on BBC One last night, the MP for Westmorland and Lonsdale shone a new light on the issue – and called for government “competence”.
Farron began: “The unpleasantness about this debate is matched only by the complete lack of proper information.”
He continued: “The reality is 85% of refugees settle in the country next to where they come from.
“Ignore the ones who come through France on the way to here – the French take three times more refugees than we do, the Germans take four times more refugees than we do, if we put us back in the European Union just for a snapshot, we are 19th in a league table when it comes to the refugees we take per capita.”
Farron continued: “Do we need deterrents? Yes. I’ll tell you what is the best deterrent – competence.
“If you assess people when they arrive – and they’re not illegal immigrants, they’re people seeking asylum – when you go through looking at people from Sudan, Afghanistan, Syria, Iran – 90% plus of these people turn out to be genuine refugees.”
He said a competent government should assess them quickly and send the ones who are not refugees back, “that is your deterrent”.
“Rwanda was a waste of money,” Farron said. “If we’d spent that money on caseworkers, we could have processed these people, return the ones who aren’t refugees in a humane way, and let the ones who are genuine refugees become British, pay their taxes, and become part of our country – and we should be proud to admit them.”