Lord Dubs (Photography by David Sandison)
11 min read40 min
As Lord Dubs leads the charge against the government’s immigration changes, he talks to Sienna Rodgers about his disappointment in Labour, his hopes for rejoining the EU, and why Keir Starmer must step out of his advisers’ shadow
Alf Dubs was a 12-year-old boy when the British people, focused on the post-war rebuild, gave Clement Attlee a landslide win. It is one of his earliest political memories.
“I was passionately Labour,” he recalls. “I wandered around Manchester looking at the posters and things, because there were no televisions – it was all posters.”
His mother had moved to the city, getting a job scrubbing the floors of a restaurant there, after his father died of a heart attack.
“My mum had taken me to a boarding house near Blackpool, and the people there said, ‘Go to the town square, the BBC will be broadcasting the results’. So, I rushed off, and the lunchtime score was something like Labour 120, Conservative 30.
“I went back. They said, ‘What is it?’ And I explained what it was. A voice at the back said, ‘Oh my god, it’s the end of England.’”
The views of the others at the boarding house did nothing to shake his belief in Labour. “I was young enough to be naïve,” he says. “I saw it all as just: Labour good, and the others awful.”
Sitting in his tiny Millbank office, a mess of papers on his desk and a posed photo with refugee-supporting legendary actor Vanessa Redgrave behind him, the 93-year-old Labour peer sounds much less certain of that today.
Lord Dubs, whose father was Jewish, came to Britain aged six on the Kindertransport from Czechoslovakia to escape the Nazis. As a Labour councillor, an MP from 1979 to 1987, and a peer for over 30 years, he has made it his life’s work – quite literally – to advocate for asylum seekers.
The government’s tough immigration reforms leave him gravely disappointed. Under the latest changes, asylum claimants will have their cases reviewed every 30 months, down from five years. Ministers are also planning to extend the qualifying period for Indefinite Leave to Remain from five to 10 years in most cases, and introduce a new 20-year baseline wait for those granted asylum.
“The danger is that people who are here will feel very uncertain and insecure. After all, what we want to do is to help people to settle and make an important contribution to local communities. Well, if people are uncertain about their position here, they can’t do that,” Dubs explains. “I never felt unable to be secure. I became a British citizen – I just signed a form.”
Lord Dubs (Photography by David Sandison)
Does he feel that Britain is less welcoming now than in the past? “Yes,” he replies. “In my experience, most asylum seekers either want to catch up on their lost education… or they want jobs. They want to work and they want to make a contribution. And those are very simple human requests.”
He is in favour of allowing asylum applicants to work legally once they have been resident in the UK for six months: “They want to demonstrate that they’re not scroungers.”
Angela Rayner recently called the retroactive aspect of the rule changes, which is expected to apply to those who have already arrived in the UK, “unBritish”. How would he characterise it?
“She’s probably got it right. I think it’s very disappointing to do something retrospectively which weakens people’s rights,” Dubs says. “We want to help people to feel secure and welcome, and that local communities want to stretch out their arms and say, ‘Look, you’re part of us’. Anything that works against that, I think, is not in the interest of this country.”
What does he believe the government is trying to achieve through these revisions?
“There’s nothing wrong with trying to keep control of people coming into this country, but they’re doing it in a way which takes away, in my view, from the human rights of asylum seekers.”
“He’s been hemmed in too much by his advisers. If he could be himself more, he’ll be better”
He fears that Labour’s motivation is mostly to target Reform UK voters. “The government are trying to demonstrate that they can be pretty tough, but I think they’re going a bit too far,” he adds. “Anything that takes away from the effectiveness of the 1951 Geneva Convention is morally wrong – and I think the government are getting fairly close to that.”
Dubs says he has not had a meeting with Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood. Has he tried to arrange one? “No. Look, under the Tories, the home secretaries used to invite me!” the peer laughs. Theresa May invited him twice and Amber Rudd once too, he says.
Could it be that Lord Dubs has less influence under a Labour government than he did under the Conservatives?
He points out that under them he secured changes to asylum policy – both for unaccompanied child refugees without family in Britain, via the famous ‘Dubs amendment’, and to continue Dublin-style family reunion routes after Brexit (though this was later ditched).
“So, under those, I managed to have some little successes, yeah. I’m not sure I’ve had any successes at the moment at all.”
He remembers also that Conservative ministers would privately urge him to press on with his campaigns. “I said, ‘You’re not supposed to say that, you’re a government minister’. They said, ‘Never mind. Keep going with your amendment!’”
Dubs, who is putting forward a ‘motion of regret’ in the Lords over Mahmood’s immigration changes, appears worried about how the whips will react to his criticisms.
“The whips are friends of mine. I shall go on being a friend of theirs. I’m not trying to snipe at them or anything. I’m just a bit disappointed.”
What argument do they put to him in their efforts to stop his rebellion? “Oh, no,” he replies. “They don’t try and convince me of the merits of it. I did argue that I was simply putting forward what we’d done in opposition. I was told, ‘But it’s all different. We’re in government now.’”
Ministers will point out that public opinion is firmly on their side, and say failing to tackle immigration in government would be irresponsible. But Dubs insists that his focus on provisions for child refugees are not unpopular – especially if the argument is made.
“Populism can be a very tough business to fight against. But in the end, I think we have to approach human rights issues with certain principles. We have to say something is right, and we stick by what is right.”
Over the years, Dubs has spoken many times with the former human rights lawyer who is now Prime Minister, particularly when he was a shadow minister. One could easily imagine the Keir Starmer of 10 years ago making all of the arguments Dubs does in this interview.
What does the peer make of his premiership?
“That’s a mighty big question. Do you want to ask that big question?” he replies. Yes, why not?
“The general view is, on foreign policy, he’s not been too bad. He’s positioned Britain not too badly on the world stage, and so on. I wasn’t happy about some of the earlier stuff, but anyway…”
Does that mean Gaza? “Yes, Gaza. On Gaza, I think he started off not very sure-footed, and by the time he took up a better position, the damage had been done. But he got to a better place. On Iran, he started being sensibly cautious, and that’s good. If he’s distanced himself from Trump, or if Trump has distanced himself from us, that may not be such a bad thing.”
Key advisers, most notably Morgan McSweeney, have exited the building. The soft left is already perceived to be newly shaping No 10’s direction; after the May elections, it is anticipated that the PM will get a new chief of staff and director of comms, which is seen as an opportunity for it to exert further influence.
“It’s difficult to say. After all, the person who calls the shots is the boss, not the advisers. But I think the advisers seem to have had a bit more influence in the last little while than perhaps is good,” says Dubs.
He singles out national security adviser Jonathan Powell, the New Labour retread Dubs worked with on Northern Ireland, for praise, while saying Starmer “hasn’t had similarly experienced people on the domestic side”.
Dubs expresses the common view in the Labour Party that it must ‘let Keir be Keir’. “Absolutely. He’s been hemmed in too much by his advisers. If he could be himself more, he’ll be better.”
Lord Dubs (Photography by David Sandison)
If the Labour peer had his way, it would not only be Mahmood’s immigration rule changes under threat. He also wants her to end the citizen-stripping that has left Shamima Begum – notorious ISIS bride or grooming victim, depending on your view – stateless.
“Now she’s stuck, having lost three children, and we’ve taken away her citizenship, and the Bangladeshis won’t accept her. We have enough self-confidence as a country to say that one woman, who’s now 26, can come back here – and if she’s committed criminal offences, then she comes before the British courts. But we can’t say indefinitely, ‘You’ve got to stay there forever.’ It’s intolerable,” Dubs fumes.
Sajid Javid revoked her citizenship in 2019 and her appeals in the British courts since have failed. She is now pursuing it with the European Court of Human Rights. Dozens of former British people are in the same situation, Dubs highlights.
“They’re stuck in northern Syria. She’s not the only one, but she exemplifies what the problem is. I think it’s just heartbreaking that one should say to people, ‘You’re stuck there forever,’” he says.
“The court only said the home secretary had the right to take away citizenship. It didn’t say that on the merits there was any just justification for it. The last time I raised it, the government’s line was it’s sub judice because it’s gone before the European Court. But I’ve never known the sub judice argument to apply to the European Court. I’m going to pursue that one.”
“The real problem in the Lords is the way people get in”
Yet Labour’s plans to reduce the size of the Upper Chamber raises the question of whether Dubs will long continue in the Lords as an active peer. The party still intends to introduce a mandatory retirement age of 80.
“I’m not going to hold out against it,” says Dubs, joking that it might force him to “learn how to become a bit of a hedonist”. He does, however, call it an “arbitrary” measure.
“The real problem in the Lords is the way people get in,” he continues. “There’s no appointment system which doesn’t have a taint of corruption. The Tories had it in a very tainted way. But I think even with Labour, there are dangers we can be accused of…” he trails off.
“We put in some very good people. But I think an appointed system is always going to be seen to be tainted, and there’s nothing to beat accountability to the voters. I would like to see an elected Lords, frankly.”
He would favour a Lords with 400 to 450 members, with constituencies the size of seven Commons seats, elected using a single transferable vote system. This sounds a little like Andy Burnham, The House suggests, to which Dubs says, “Andy Burnham has a lot of good ideas”, though he stops short of backing any leadership change.
Dubs is unambiguous, however, in his opposition to Brexit. “Brexit was a disaster for this country. An absolute disaster,” he says. “We were sold it on false promises.” He points to the “complete lie” that “80 million Turks were poised to enter Britain”.
“I probably knocked on as many doors doing the campaign as anybody you’ve talked to, and on the doorstep, they saw our leaving the EU as a way of dealing with immigrants… And it was a lie.”
Advocating further closeness to Europe, he says, is not in doubt. “The question is, how much closer we can get without rejoining? I just believe in the end we have to rejoin,” he concludes.
So, Labour should propose a referendum at the next election, despite all the division and difficulties that would come with it?
“I think we’ve got to bite the bullet,” he says. “I won’t see it in my lifetime, I fear, unless I get a new lease of life, but I would like to feel that in the fullness of time this country will be back in the EU.”
