Murnaghan Interview with Stella Creasy MP, Labour, 23.10.16

ANY QUOTES USED MUST BE ATTRIBUTED TO MURNAGHAN, SKY NEWS

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Now the so-called Jungle camp in Calais is to close this week and the UK government is hurrying to fulfil its promise to bring unaccompanied minors to Britain.  One of those who has led the fight of course to bring the children of Calais to Britain is the Labour MP Stella Creasy who joins me now, very good to see you.  Your overall feeling on the closure of this camp, is it a good thing or a bad thing?  It seems an awful place.

STELLA CREASY: What’s a bad thing is that there are 10,000 people who are asking for help and they haven’t had an answer of whom a thousand of them are children.  Now tomorrow the bulldozers and the French police are going to start to move in and that question still remains, what happens to those people?  How do we treat them fairly and with dignity?  The problem has been that for so long people have wanted to avoid the question, answering it and doing it in a way that is fair and people can have confidence in is happening at very short notice.  

DM: And so we get this promise that the UK government has made about unaccompanied and indeed minors who have a right to be here because of family links, it all seems very last minute.

STELLA CREASY: Look, we passed the Dubbs Amendment in the name of the amazing Alf Dubbs back in May this year.  I went out to Calais over the summer and one of the things that struck me was very simply there was just nobody there to make that then happen.  Now I think the government should get plaudits for the fact that actually things have started to move but it is obviously happening at very short notice and that is the real concern for many of us, there is a lot to do.

DM: There was an EU referendum around then, do you think it was that?

STELLA CREASY: I think for too long the government has felt that this has been somebody else’s problem and actually as you say, many of those children and the children you have seen come here this week have family here so under international law they have had the right to be here.   In fact Citizens UK informed our government back in July of 100 children who had the right to be in the UK, then in August they gave them another list of children and then in September they gave them a list of children who under the Dubbs Amendment we felt it was in their best interests to be here in the UK.  That it has taken until October to act is a problem but they are acting and I think they should get recognition for that.

DM: But why do you think that problem developed?

STELLA CREASY: Well that would be a question you would need to ask perhaps Theresa May who was of course responsible for this and indeed Amber Rudd.  What we are focused on right now is look, a hundred children or so have come here and yesterday we saw the first girls coming here and we saw the first children coming under the Dubbs Amendment.  That’s just 1% of that total population in Calais and there are still a lot of children who need an answer, who do need processing and I cannot stress enough, one of the things that has been so depressing this week is people querying this safe and legal route which has involved a lot of verification, a lot of checks, it’s taken a lot of work by the voluntary organisations to get it right.  Those children are starting to come here but there are still many more who when those bulldozers move in will be in Calais and will need our help.

DM: You say the questioning, do you mean those that might not be 18, might not be under 18?

STELLA CREASY: I mean those people who have downloaded a Twitter app, which is a great fun app to check people’s age, and somehow decided they are experts in our immigration and asylum system.  One of the things I say to people about all of this is it is absolutely right to ask questions but it is then wrong not to do your homework.  The tests that are being done in Calais, this is a legal and a safe route for these children to come here, that is why they are coming here, that is why yesterday …

DM: But it is significant if some of them aren’t children.  There was that statistic wasn’t there, that up to September 2015 two-thirds of so-called children who arrived here turned out not be children.

STELLA CREASY: I’m really glad you asked about that statistic, Dermot, let’s debunk it.

DM: Go on.

STELLA CREASY: Actually what that statistic was about was the total number of children who have been here illegally or arrived illegally, so for example they turn up at Heathrow, of then a proportion of whom there were queries about their age.  Then the proportion of those that actually it was found they were not young, so actually 80% of the children in total were children not 60% weren’t children.  There is some very, very shady work being done about the numbers and it speaks to a broader problem that we have here which is actually if we want to do the right thing and say actually a young child who has nobody else in the world, we will do our fair share of helping them because they are fleeing from a war zone, they are fleeing from conflict, actually we’ve got to have confidence and trust in our system so ask the questions but then do your homework.

DM: Okay but what about dental checks?  Apparently 17 other European countries carry those out, why are you against those?

STELLA CREASY: Again, I know people find experts perhaps a bit old hat but I’m going to listen to dentists on this and dentists will tell you it is not an accurate test, so first and foremost it would be a waste of money and also it is actually quite bad for your health because it does involve radiation.  So actually are we going to say that it is in Britain’s interests, it is the best of Britain to apply a test to a child that is bad for their health because we don’t think the other extensive tests which involve their paperwork, interviews, talking to their family members who are here in the UK to verify their stories, are better?  I think people need to be proud of the fact that actually, albeit far too late, the government has started to get a process in place.  They should be worried about the children who are still there and getting it right for them and we need to make sure we have a better system in place so this doesn’t happen again.

DM: So what about the children then that do get here?  It is almost the case in some of their cases of out of the frying pan into the fire because they are not being adequately looked after, they are being stuck we are hearing today into one of these detention centres which isn’t adequate is it?

STELLA CREASY: No and one of the things about this is that just getting these children here is the start of helping them get their lives back on track.  Many of these children could go on to do amazing things in our communities if we can help them get back on their feet.  They have seen some horrific things, they are incredibly vulnerable, they have got a lot of psychological problems, they are coming from war zones, conflicts, they have seen their parents be killed, it is a horrific place so actually when they get here they need either to be reunited with their families so they have some stability or they need decent fostering places and a new start but I think it is a really powerful testament to the goodwill of the British people that we are prepared to do that.

DM: How many would you take?  Would you take as many as are there or …?

STELLA CREASY: I would take every child who has a legal right to be here in the UK.  So when I met children in Calais who had family here in the UK, who’d been there for months, there were children who gave up hope and who tried to get here illegally and a couple of them ended up dying, some of them have gone missing in that time period.  Those children had a legal right to be here, I think we still have responsibility for them.  I have been asking government, you may have seen me get up and ask Theresa May directly what’s happened to those children, there were 18 of them that we knew had gone missing, have we found them yet?  So I think those who have a legal right to.  For the children who have nobody else in the world, so the Dubbs children, maybe their parents have been killed, they have been completely lost, then actually I think we should take our fair share.  Now I think that’s about looking at what we can do with the French but we are talking about 1000 children, so in total 500 seems to me a pretty good number.

DM: Good talking to you Stella Creasy, thank you very much indeed.