On Tuesday the Tory member for Monmouthshire looked at the Daily Mail’s coverage of child refugees arriving in Britain and tweeted: “These don’t look like ‘children’ to me. I hope British hospitality is not being abused.” Why not subject refugees who claim to be minors to dental examinations, he suggested, to establish their true age?
Before breakfast on Wednesday, David Davies was summoned to explain himself on Radio 4’s Today programme, then shuttled over to ITV’s Good Morning Britain studio to be shouted at by Piers Morgan. This country is accepting “comparatively small numbers ... who’ve been through an absolutely hellish time,” Morgan yelled. “And all your response is, ‘Uh, I don’t think they’re the right age. Let’s check their teeth’.” By lunchtime Davies’ dental test had been condemned by the British Dental Association as “inaccurate ... inappropriate and unethical”, and ruled out by the Home Office. At dinner time, when he is finishing up this interview someone from Channel 4 News spots him, and frogmarches him off to another TV studio and another appalled presenter.
“I can’t get a word in edgeways with them,” Davies blinks in bemusement. “My phone’s been going all day. This must be what it’s like to be a minister. I don’t like it at all.”
While unconvinced that he does find the attention unwelcome, I do not doubt his bewilderment. For the life of him, Davies can’t see why his dental test idea has set the cat among the pigeons. Most of his tweets and comments pass, as he says, unnoticed, although he caught a bit of flak for his recent suggestion that the temporary disappearance of Marmite from some supermarket shelves was a calculated bit of Bremoaning by Unilever, and that we should all therefore buy Vegemite instead. Now, not for the first time, the backbencher is in the headlines, and wondering: what did he say that was so bad?
It quickly becomes clear – if not to Davies – that what he said was actually based on a complete misunderstanding. He tells me 12 times in the first 15 minutes that the dental test is “already being used by the government”. In February, he explains, he heard about a court case in his constituency involving a young Afghan man accused of assault, who claimed to be a teenager but looked older. Davies duly tabled parliamentary questions, asking what proportion of asylum seekers had been suspected of making fraudulent claims to be under 18. Of the 500-1,000 subjected to an age assessment each year, came the written answer, between half and two thirds were judged to be over 18.
Now Davies gets out his iPad to show me a gov.uk document about how to assess an asylum seeker’s age, which mentions that teeth can be X-rayed – or, alternatively, wrist bones. “So I don’t think we can deny the test exists!” Has the dental test been conducted on the Afghan in his constituency? “No. But look.” He points at the webpage. “It’s a test that’s already used. And written answers to my questions appear to demonstrate that the test is being used in the UK on about 500 people a year. So I’m not suggesting something new.”
He is simply suggesting that we X–ray the teeth of all asylum seekers in Calais who look “significantly” over 18. “I mean, of course, if they say they’re 17 and the X-ray says 19, we’d give them the benefit of the doubt.” The tests would be conducted by “whoever does it at the moment. It’s already being done at the moment.” But the BDA, I point out, says dentists cannot perform X-rays for non-medical purposes. “That’s what they are saying – but it’s my understanding that it’s already in use.” So dentists are already doing this? “Either that,” he shrugs, “or they’re doing the wrist test.”
Disconcerted by my doubt, he presses: “Would you not say that is the implication of what I’ve got here?” I read the gov.uk webpage closely. It comes at the very bottom of a 17-page list of non-medical methods typically used to determine an asylum seeker’s age, and states that “in some instances” an applicant may choose to challenge the findings of those methods by submitting dental X-rays. There is no suggestion here, nor in anything else he shows me on his iPad, that X-ray dental tests can or ever have been imposed on anyone in this country.
Davies looks taken aback. “Oh. Oh that’s interesting. You could be right there.” He leans in to study the text on his screen. “Mmmm. You could be right.”
After 11 years in parliament, the Welshman retains an amateurishly naive air that is both likable and troubling. He reminds me a lot of Alan Partridge. When I first interviewed him four years ago, he had just called gay marriage “barking mad” on Radio Wales, and was astonished by the exception taken to his assertion that “most parents would prefer their children not to be gay”. Now, as then, the cold certainties of his rightwing pronouncements are difficult to square with their tentative, self-effacing delivery. But if he had seemed out of his depth in 2012, his guilelessness today feels more like the self-belief of someone who knows that even if people still don’t like what he says, now they have to listen.
Notwithstanding his misreading of current practice, if a dental test is such an innocuous idea, why does he think it has caused uproar? He considers this in silence for eight seconds. “I don’t know. You’d have to ask your readers. I’m sure they’d be the first to get angry about it.” Some critics have suggested a dental test evokes slave traders examining teeth in order to determine a slave’s market value. “Well, that’s not the case at all.” Then there are its echoes of concentration camps where Nazis plundered Jews’ teeth for their gold. Davies looks amazed. “I just don’t see this at all. I think some people are trying to make a rather tortuous analogy here. I just don’t get that at all.”
Then he brightens. “Should I try to say, ‘If dental tests are causing an issue and the wrist test is accurate, let’s go with the wrist one’? I don’t really mind. I can’t really see the analogy with slavery or concentration camps – but if that is the main sticking point here, fine, let’s do wrists! I don’t mind me being tested, by the way. No, no, no. Bring it on. If someone thinks this is outrageous, well I’ll be the first to volunteer. Come and X-ray my wrist! Have a look at my teeth! People are saying this is a really intrusive thing to do – well, I don’t feel intruded upon. What’s the problem?”
Davies talks as if oblivious to any connection between how refugees are discussed in Westminster and treated in public. The purpose of a dental test, he keeps saying, is not to “keep people out” but to ensure that provision intended for migrant children is not misappropriated by sharp-elbowed adults. But however good his intentions, or pragmatic his proposal, does he not see that talk of mandatory dental tests dehumanises refugees? That when discussing the most vulnerable of youngsters, tone matters as much as logic?
“I’m slightly concerned that this argument is being used to stifle debate, and that stifling of debate is likely to cause anger. I saw it when people said the Leave campaign might not have encouraged hate crime, but that there’s a correlation between the Leavers and hate crimes. And I refute this.” He sees no causal link between the referendum and the dramatic spike in hate crimes? “No. I think it’s a case of people who lost the referendum trying to use the allegation that their opponents have caused totally unacceptable crimes to shut down debate. And I sense this happening again now. I worry slightly that anyone who raises any kind of concern at all about this is immediately sort of likened to a Nazi slave trader or to someone who supports violence. For the record,” he adds, channelling pure Partridge, “I’m totally and utterly opposed to hate crimes of any sort.” He doesn’t think hate crimes have gone up at all. “The government has just made them easier to report.”
Before entering parliament, Davies had been a Territorial Army soldier, a special constable and a lorry driver for his father’s haulage company. His approach to a debate is anecdotal rather than academic, with a tendency to fixate upon individual sources or details that risks making him come across as rather credulous. Someone told him that an asylum seeker in Wales with grey hair had claimed to be 17, and he references this constantly. He believes our courts use dental tests because “an MP who’s a lawyer told me”, and when I ask for examples of British “hospitality being abused”, he reverts back to the case of the Afghan asylum seeker in Monmouthshire. The sexual significance of owning Erasure albums had preoccupied him greatly during our previous interview about gay marriage, and now he appears to have inferred an awful lot from one gesture a migrant made to him during a recent visit to “the Jungle” camp in Calais.
“I asked one person why he came, and he made a gesture to suggest he would find it easier here to find cash-in-hand.” Davies also saw a caravan that displayed a sign offering to coach asylum seekers in what to say to UK immigration officers. “So, it’s obvious that people are looking for ways to circumvent the rules. They want to come to the UK for a better standard of living. I mean, if it was to escape war or violence, you’ve already done that by the time you get to France.” It was impossible not to feel sympathy, he says. “But your head is saying, ‘Hang on, nobody actually has to be here’.”
Does he not regard anyone in Calais as a legitimate refugee? “Well, anyone in the Jungle would have had the right to claim asylum in France, so at that point, they’re absolutely not coming to Britain from France to escape war and violence. They’re picking the country they most want to go to.” Everyone he met was “perfectly nice, perfectly pleasant,” he adds. “But I suspect that quite a number of people are rather disappointed when they come here and discover the streets are not paved with gold.”
He shudders at the memory of Lily Allen’s recent apology on behalf of Britain to migrants in Calais, disapproves of sending aid to the Jungle, and recently accused the head of the Welsh Refugee Council of having “blood on her hands”.
“I just wanted to point out the obvious fact that if you encourage people to stay in the camp, you’ve got to take some responsibility for it. Showering people with food and clothing and all the rest of it may make you feel good, but actually you’re keeping them in that camp when they don’t need to be there.” He wishes volunteers would stop offering their support, “because you are encouraging people to stay in those conditions”.
When we last met I don’t think either of us expected mainstream opinion and his politics to converge. But the referendum result was “the greatest moment I’ve ever had in my political life”, and he feels the political mood these days is much more to his way of thinking. Ukip’s infamous “breaking point” poster of refugees “spoke to a lot of people”, he says. “There are a lot of angry people out there, because the whole immigration system is out of control.” He lets me read through his inbox of emails about his dental-test comments, and at least half are supportive (“Good on yer!” and so on). Davies feels “very, very comfortable with Theresa May as prime minister,” and would be happy to work for her; his own mum, once a Ukip defector, has rejoined the Tory party. Apart from sterling dropping “a bit too low”, he has no concerns about Brexit, and says no economic data could change his mind.
The MP hopes people will feel that he is hard-headed, not hard-hearted, about the migrant crisis, and worries that Donald Trump “gives rightwingers a bad name”. It is important, he says, to have “empathy”. But when I ask him when he has ever felt vulnerable and penniless and desperate, he says he never has. “There seems to be a fetish now for everyone to have grown up in the back of a shoe somewhere. And that wasn’t me at all. Dad set up his business and it was a bit ropey for a while, but we actually made quite a lot of money in the ’90s. I can’t complain at all. I was making good money, and I had a lovely time as well.”
Should one of the 14 young people photographed arriving in Britain this week be beaten up by an angry member of the public, would Davies feel in any way implicated?
“No, but I would feel absolutely appalled that it had happened, and I’d say that the person responsible needed to be caught and imprisoned. I’m not responsible for beating people up.”
