Paul Waugh MP: speeches

Speeches

• 5 Jan 2026 · Middle East and North Africa · Hansard source

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  I welcome the fact that, as the Minister said, the UK is spending £116 million this financial year on vital aid to the Palestinians, providing healthcare, food, clean water and sanitation. However, that aid is often stuck at the border because of the continued closure of the Rafah crossing. More importantly, at a time of desperately urgent humanitarian crisis in Gaza, the decision by the Israeli Government to withdraw support or accreditation for NGOs such as ActionAid, CARE International, the International Rescue Committee and the Norwegian Refugee Council is an act of calculated and unconscionable cruelty, is it not? Will the Minister join me in condemning that act and, as my hon. Friend the Member for Cowdenbeath and Kirkcaldy (Melanie Ward) says, urgently consider the question of sanctions against the Israeli Ministers responsible for it?

• 1 Sept 2025 · Borders and Asylum · Hansard source

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  I warmly welcome the content of the Home Secretary’s statement, particularly the UK-France migrant deal, which provides a safe and legal route for all those families who are genuinely fleeing persecution and who play by the rules and want to enter the country legally. The deal balances that with the need to remove from this country and send back to France those who try to jump the queue in small boats. The shadow Home Secretary suggested that the potential figure of 50 returns a week under this pilot scheme is not enough. Under the last Government, 128,000 people crossed the channel; can the Home Secretary remind the House how many of those people were returned to France? It was not 50 a week or 100 a week—it was zero a week, every week for six and a half years.

• 16 Jul 2025 · Engagements · Hansard source

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  Q6. Workers in Rochdale on the minimum wage received a much needed pay rise this summer, thanks to this Government, but honest businesses are being undermined by the menace of illegal working, particularly by illegal migrants from Iran and Iraq in bogus barber shops and fake vape shops. Does the Prime Minister agree that we need to speed up the roll-out of digital IDs, particularly to help our police and immigration staff crack down on this grey market that ruins our high streets and undercuts the pay of British workers?

• 14 Jul 2025 · UK-France Migration: Co-operation · Hansard source

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  On Friday, the BBC interviewed an Egyptian economic migrant named Obaida in Calais who said that he had tried and failed four times to cross the channel but, since the Prime Minister’s agreement with President Macron, he was giving up: “I don’t want to go to Britain any more, because they are making it much harder for us. Every time we try, they deflate our boats and remove the engine. If they make it even harder, I’ll stop trying.” Does that not prove that this new deal to send migrants back to France can be a genuine deterrent, unlike the last Government’s pathetic attempt to claim credit?