A familiar sight around the halls of the Palace of Westminster is that of Labour peer, Lord Alfred Dubs, making his way from one meeting to another, usually with a bundle of papers under his arm.
The genial Dubs is one of the most active members of the House of Lords. Official parliamentary records show he speaks in the upper house more frequently – and usually more eloquently – than most MPs do in the House of Commons.
He is also 92 years of age and still going strong; he will be 93 on December 5th. He is widely viewed in the Labour Party as its voice of conscience on matters related to asylum and refugees. His stance on the issue is borne of personal experience.
Dubs was born in pre-war Czechoslovakia to a Jewish father and non-Jewish mother. Aged six in 1939, he was put on a train to Britain as part of the Kindertransport effort to evacuate children from Nazi-controlled areas, bringing them west to safety.
His father had moved first to London when the Germans invaded Czechoslovakia in March, 1939. Dubs has often told of how, later that year, he made the long journey to Britain alone as a small boy, via train to the Hook of Holland and a ferry to Harwich in Essex. His mother would join the family in Britain later that summer.
Dubs’s escape was arranged as part of a Kindertransport journey overseen by London-born stockbroker Nicholas Winton, who saved hundreds of mostly-Jewish children from Nazis. He paid London families who were willing to take in the children.
When his exploits were belatedly recognised much later, in a 1988 episode of BBC’s That’s Life, Winton earned the nickname the British Schindler, a nod to Oskar Schindler. Theresa May later unveiled a statue to Winton at Maidenhead railway station.
Dubs was reunited with his saviour in 2002. Winton was then aged the same as Dubs is now. He went on to live to 106. The peer could be around for a long time yet.
However, Dubs’s compassionate views on the issue of asylum and migration appear to be slowly going out of fashion at the top of the Labour Party, as its leaders feels the hot breath of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK on the back of their necks.
On Tuesday, Dubs described the new asylum policy put forward a day earlier by home secretary Shabana Mahmood as a “shabby thing”.
The biggest reveal in Mahmood’s changes to the system is that British authorities will begin deporting entire families of failed applicants. Dubs accused her of using children as “weapons”. In the kindly old peer’s world, that was about as excoriating a condemnation as Mahmood could receive.
Yet the testy language in her statement on the issue of deporting families suggests the lady is not for turning. Britain’s right turn on migration won’t spare families.
Mahmood’s policy document stated: “We do not currently prioritise the return of families. As a result, many families of failed asylum seekers continue to live in this country, receiving free accommodation and financial support, for years on end.
“Our hesitancy around returning families creates particularly perverse incentives. To some, the personal benefit of placing a child on a dangerous small boat outweighs the considerable risks of doing so. Once in the UK, asylum seekers are able to exploit the fact that they have had children and put down roots in order to thwart removal.”
Dubs told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that Mahmood’s statement, especially when it came to asylum seekers and their children, left him “depressed”. He said it would “increase tensions” in local communities, adding: “We are going in the wrong direction.”
Even if Dubs is the party’s conscience on the issue, Mahmood will likely ignore the contributions of the peer.
[ UK asylum system ‘out of control’ and dividing country, says home secretaryOpens in new window ]
She may have to pay closer attention to some of the rumblings of discontent among Labour MPs at the stridency of her policy statement language, particularly on the issue of the families of asylum seekers.
Most of the rebels are the left-wingers who are usually not enamoured of the leadership anyway. Stella Creasy MP said the measures represented “performative cruelty”. Nadia Whittome MP said Mahmood had thrown asylum seekers’ families “under the bus”.
But they weren’t all the usual suspects. The more moderate and measured Sara Owen, a Luton MP who chairs the women’s committee, said the proposals were “repugnant”.
Mahmood ticked her off in the Commons debate on Monday for wrongly, as the home secretary saw it, suggesting that the British state was going to start confiscating the jewellery of arriving asylum seekers.
Some of Mahmood’s proposed policy changes will have to pass votes in the House of Commons, where the mettle of Labour rebels will be really tested.
Labour MPs in the Red Wall constituencies of England’s midlands and north are on the frontline of the party’s war with Reform UK. Their constituents are among the Britons most supportive of a migration crackdown. And so Red Wall MPs are broadly supportive.
People like Dubs may be Labour’s conscience on migration, but the party’s brutal political realities may hold more sway these days.
