Braverman says illegal migrants have ‘values at odds with our country’ as MPs prepare to debate bill – UK politics live

Home secretary comments come ahead of final House of Commons debate on the illegal migration bill

Here are some more lines from what Suella Braverman said about the illegal migration bill in her interviews this morning.

Braverman, the home secretary, defended the decision to amend the bill to give the government the power to ignore injunctions from the European court of human rights, saying the ECHR ruling undermined elected governments. She told the Today programme:

We saw last year an unacceptable situation whereby the home secretary made a decision to relocate people to Rwanda and that decision was upheld in the courts, injunctions were refused by the English courts and, at the 11th hour, pursuant to an opaque process in which the UK was not represented, a judge in Strasbourg overruled that decision, undermining a democratically-elected government and a decision to take appropriate action.

We want to avoid a re-run of that scenario. That’s why we have included measures in our bill to afford the home secretary a discretion to consider the case upon its particular merits and circumstances.

She said the government wanted to find space to detain hundreds or thousands more people arriving on small boats – but declined to say quite how many spaces were needed. She told the Today programme “some hundreds, thousands” of extra places would be needed. She explained:

We’ve got an existing detention capacity of 1-2,000 places at the moment. We need to increase that – I’m not going to give you a precise figure.

But what I’m saying is, we don’t need to increase it by 45,000 [the number who arrived by small boat in 2022], no-one is saying that we need 45,000 or 100,000 new detention places.

She said she disagreed with the assessment from the Equality and Human Rights Commission that the bill posed a risk to children. Asked about their claim, she told LBC:

I disagree with their view. The measures that we have proposed are lawful, they comply with international law, and actually they’re humanitarian at core.

The government was tied up in talks yesterday over two amendments, one by Tim Loughton (with 22 Tory names next to it) seeking to restrict the detention of unaccompanied children, and one by Iain Duncan Smith and Theresa May (with 10 Tory names) to exempt migrants who have suffered exploitation in the UK. Rebels make the point that the Sudan crisis underlines the importance of a compassionate policy toward refugees.

Those crossing tend to have completely different lifestyles and values to those in the UK and tend to settle in already hyper-diverse areas, undermining the cultural cohesiveness that binds diverse groups together and makes our proud multi-ethnic democracy so successful.