My father Erwin was a Polish Army officer, a doctor who spent much of the Second World War restoring daring Polish pilots injured during sorties over Germany. In June 1940, he was at La Rochelle, in France. Shortly after Dunkirk, a large number of Polish soldiers were rescued from La Rochelle. Many died under enemy bombing.
The small, Scottish coal ship on which Erwin embarked took him to Glasgow, and from there to the requisitioned castle in Perthshire used for the injured Polish pilots.
Erwin had left behind his family, including his middle-aged parents, his sister and her family, his young wife, and their baby daughter Renata. All were murdered by the Nazis, except little Renata.
Renata survived, hidden and protected in sometimes nightmarish circumstances. Frederika, a distant relative who ensured Renata’s survival throughout the war, was part of Jewish underground operations within Poland. In 1945, Frederika, working as a civil servant in Poland under a nom de guerre acquired to conceal her Jewish family background, was able through the Red Cross to reunite Renata and Erwin in London. Erwin and Frederika married and I am their son.
My father was a lifelong Anglophile. The huge sorrow of his losses he rarely spoke about. He was possibly the most reasonable person on earth, a clever and thoughtful man who made the best of things. For him, becoming a GP in Burnley was truly becoming an Englishman. He refused to be classed as a refugee: he had been offered UK nationality as a recognition of his military service.
I think he became almost unaware that his accent was foreign. In my extraordinarily secure childhood, my parents spoke English to each other (except when having the occasional row) and were very firm with their children that we were English. Such is childhood conditioning that I never heard their accents — to me they sounded like Robert Dougall and Angela Rippon.
Of course they were refugees. My ever reasonable father was proud at my becoming a barrister (less so when later I became an MP). English legislation was the bedrock of their survival. They were safe under our law. Erwin, quoting to me from the Manchester Guardian, which dropped daily through our Burnley letterbox, taught me about the importance of the United Nations and its treaties, and, as he would have it, most of them were based on English legal aspirations.
I wish he had met the great jurist Lord Bingham, whose dictum, “the rule of law does not require that official or judicial decision-makers should be deprived of all discretion, but it does require that no discretion should be unconstrained so as to be potentially arbitrary. No discretion may be legally unfettered”, exactly reflected Erwin’s views that he wished me to carry.
And so it has been, until recently. Currently I am chairing a commission of experts who have been asked by the Woolf Institute in Cambridge to produce a report on the integration of refugees.
I do not claim to speak for the whole commission, as we are in the middle of our work. Part of my contribution will be that the successful integration of refugees depends on self-evident requirements and qualities. The requirements include efficient and speedy determination of legitimacy and integrity as asylum seekers and refugees; the safe removal of those without proper claims; and international cooperation for safe removal if possible to their home country or the last country from which they came, thus enabling hard-pressed staff to concentrate on dealing with real claimants.
The qualities include access to suitable accommodation, educational opportunity, the prospect of learning the English language and British ways of life, early access to the labour market, and, where appropriate, the recognition of professional and academic qualifications acquired elsewhere. We should enable refugees to become as confident as my father about their acquired Britishness.
The lessons I learned from my father, from Lord Bingham, from my 50 years as a lawyer and from my political observations since my first election to the Commons 40 years ago, are now negligently being trashed by the government. They see international law and treaty obligations as dispersible, even disposable. Yet those are the very people who (rightly) screech the loudest when other countries behave with similar disrespect for the law.
In the World Justice Project Rule of Law Index for 2022, the UK is 15th, below Germany, Ireland, Australia and Belgium — some being countries accepting a far higher proportion of refugees than Britain. We will fall by at least ten places if the government has its way in totally excluding from protection those who arrive here in small boats.
As Netanyahu is finding, stepping away from the rule of law rouses public protest and political opposition. There is no need for the UK government to be disgraced by scrapping important legal obligations. The problems could be solved by more efficient government, short-term urgent action to clear the huge backlog, a problem not of law but of perennial inefficiency.
