It cannot be right to make refugee status temporary

'M a British patriot, I believe in my country.

- Hilton Dawson

Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood

Every week, I meet people who have fled here to save their lives, hoping, sometimes believing, that we will help them. Come thousands of miles, because my country is a beacon of freedom, safety, kindness, tolerance and democracy, where everyone has a chance. It makes me proud.

I'm an immigrant too, just like everybody, come here from Africa, from a variety of other places. From the Black Sea, where we survived the last Ice Age, when this island was frozen solid, uninhabited, under hundreds of feet of ice. Like most men in Northern England I have Viking DNA, traces of the multinational Roman Legions, Normans (who were Vikings) and perhaps a German sailor washed up on a medieval English shore. Common as muck, every single one of us come here by boat.

My people have been in North East England for at least 400 years. While other relatives have set out across the world to America and Australia, mine have stayed firmly here some sailors among them, many more fishermen and coal miners, publicans, latterly schoolteachers. My grandfather and father served in two world wars and my parents and grandparents all voted in the 1945 General Election which gave us the NHS, welfare state, nationalisation. I have been given more opportunities and the chance of a better, longer life than anyone who has come before me in two hundred thousand years.