Online Safety Bill

Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 1st February 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a privilege to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan—and slightly intimidating. I draw the House’s attention to my register of interests: I am a director of the Antisemitism Policy Trust and a director of HOPE not hate, and I remain the chief executive of Index on Censorship. I have also had appalling experiences online. In all these capacities I have been intimately involved with the passage of this legislation over the last two years. Like every one of your Lordships, I desperately want to see a better and safer internet for all users, especially children and the most vulnerable, but I worry about the unintended consequences of certain clauses, particularly for our collective and legal right of freedom of expression.

There are certain core premises that should guide our approach to online regulation. What is legal offline should be legal online. We need secure and safe communication channels to protect us all of us, but especially dissidents and journalists, so end-to-end encryption needs to be safeguarded. Our ability to protect our identities online can be life-saving, for domestic violence victims as much as for political dissidents, so we need to ensure that the principle of online anonymity is protected. Each of these principles is undermined by the current detail of the Bill, and I hope to work with many of your Lordships in the weeks ahead to add additional safeguards.

However, some of my greatest concerns about the current proposals relate to illegal content: the definition of what is illegal, the arbiters of illegality and, in turn, what happens to the content. The current proposals require the platforms to determine what is illegal content and then delete it. In theory this seems completely reasonable, but the reality will be more complicated.

I fear what a combination of algorithms and corporate prosecution may mean for freedom of expression online. The risk appetite of the platforms is likely to be severely reduced by this legislation. Therefore, I believe that they are likely to err on the side of caution when considering where the illegality threshold falls, leading to over-deletion. This will be compounded by the use of algorithms rather than people to detect nuance and illegal content.

I will give your Lordships an example of an unintended consequence this has already led to. A video of anti-government protests in Lebanon was deleted on some current platforms because an algorithm picked up only one word of the Arabic chants: Hezbollah, an organisation rightly proscribed in the UK. But the video actually featured anti-Hezbollah chants. It was an anti-extremism demonstration and, I would speculate, contained anti-extremist messaging that many of us would like to see go viral rather than be deleted.

Something is already twice as likely to be deleted from a platform by an algorithm if it is in Urdu or Arabic, rather than English. This will become even more common unless we tighten the definition of illegality and provide platforms with a digital evidence locker where content can be stored before a final decision on deletion is made, thus protecting our speech online.

The issue of deletion is deeply personal for me. Many of your Lordships may be aware that, as a female Jewish Labour Member of the other place, I was subjected to regular and vicious anti-Semitic and misogynist online abuse—abuse that too often became threats of violence and death. Unfortunately, these threats continue and have a direct effect on my personal security. I know when I am most vulnerable because I see a spike in my comments online. These comments are monitored—thankfully not by me—and, when necessary, are referred to the police, with the relevant evidence chain, so that people can be prosecuted.

Can the Minister explain how these people will be prosecuted for harassment, or worse, if the content is automatically deleted? How will I know if someone is threatening to kill me if the threat has already gone? I genuinely believe that the Government wish to make people safer online, as do we all, but I fear that this Bill will not only curtail free speech online but make me and others much less safe offline. There is significant work to do to make sure that is not the case.

Oral Answers to Questions

Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent Excerpts

Thursday 4th July 2019 Commons Chamber

[Jeremy Wright]

I will certainly look at what is happening at the Priory centre, but I know that the hon. Gentleman will appreciate, as I do, that £8 million was found in the Budget to support Coventry city of culture, and we both look forward to it being a tremendous success.

[Ruth Smeeth (Stoke-on-Trent North) (Lab)]

T4. As we head towards the long summer holidays, sports centres are becoming increasingly important for families. Two years ago, Staffordshire County Council pulled the plug on my pool at the Kidsgrove Sports Centre. After lots of false starts and undelivered promises, we are still without a swimming pool. Will the Minister meet me to discuss how we can actually deliver a pool for my constituents?

[Mims Davies]

I would be happy to meet the hon. Lady. Sport England is active in communities to ensure that nobody is barred from getting involved in sport, and swimming is crucial as we come to the summer holidays.

Centenary of the Armistice

Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent Excerpts

Tuesday 6th November 2018 Commons Chamber

[Ruth Smeeth (Stoke-on-Trent North) (Lab)]

It is a huge responsibility to follow the last two extraordinary speeches from my friend the hon. Member for Beckenham (Bob Stewart) and my right hon. Friend the Member for Leeds Central (Hilary Benn). I think that everyone in the Chamber was touched by both.

We use the phrase very easily, but it is a genuine privilege to take part in this debate and to pay tribute to all those who serve and have served and especially to the memory of all those who fought in the great war of 1914-18 and their families. For the first time in history, an entire generation was touched by the horrors of war. One hundred years on, there are still no words to articulate the sacrifice they made or the debt we owe. There can be no tributes to meet the measure of the price paid, lives lost or impact on our society.

In the spirit of honour and remembrance, however, we try as best we can. As we approach the centenary of the Armistice, it has been awe-inspiring to see the outpouring of support and commemoration across the country, especially in my own constituency. I recently had the great pleasure of visiting the Weeping Window installation at Middleport pottery, installed in the heart of my constituency. As well as being a powerful and beautiful commemoration of our fallen heroes, the ceramic poppies that cascaded from our bottle kiln served as a beautiful tribute to our own city’s heritage and craftsmanship.

These commemorations convey so clearly and so movingly the Potteries’ wartime history and the people of our community who lived in the shadow of war. North Staffordshire has a proud military tradition, past and present, and my constituency is home to many service families, for whom this season of remembrance holds a deep importance. I am sure I speak for everyone in this place when I say to them: thank you. Thank you for what you have done for our country and for the sacrifices you have made in our defence.

In each of the six towns of Stoke-on-Trent and the villages and communities in between, our permanent memorials have been joined by other tributes as our community comes together to pay our respects. One example is the brilliant There But Not There project, which was honoured in the recent Budget. It is an art installation whose aim is to put figures representing every name on local war memorials in the places around the country where their absence was felt, whether in schools, workplaces or places of worship. From St John’s Church in Burslem and its beautiful poppy display to Milton parish church, where parishioners have knitted more than 3,000 poppies to adorn their building, local people are doing their part to mark this historic occasion.

As part of the Stoke-on-Trent Remembers campaign, a series of silhouettes—made and designed locally by Andy Edwards and PM Training—has been installed in each of the six towns. The 8-foot-high steel figures depict a real account of a local person’s experiences of war. There are stories such as that of Corporal A. P. Oakes, of Scotia Road, Burslem and the 1st Battalion, North Staffordshire Regiment, who was present for the Christmas Day truce at Flanders in 1914. In his diaries, Corporal Oakes described his experience of that all too brief moment of humanity between the trenches:

“Our chaps started to shout across good humouredly, and the Germans replied in the same spirit. Then both sides got on top of their respective trenches, and one man from both sides met half way. Then peace on earth, good will to all men! was the order of the day, or rather the night... They all seemed anxious for a speedy termination of the war and one fellow made us all laugh by saying that both sides should stand back-to-back and advance.”

Across our community, there have been so many wonderful stories of commemoration. I was particularly struck this week by news that a quilt embroidered by 60 soldiers who had been recovering at the Stoke War Hospital had been rediscovered more than 100 years after it had been stitched. The quilt had previously been unveiled at Newcastle-under-Lyme’s municipal hall in 1917, and raffled to raise funds for the hospital. It is a beautiful and touching reminder of the hardships that so many faced in those years. I hope that that beautiful quilt will end up alongside the recently found “Bayeux tapestry” of world war one, painted in 1923 by members of the 5th Battalion, North Staffordshire Regiment to remember 960 of their fallen comrades. It is now on display at the Potteries Museum in the constituency of my hon. Friend and neighbour the Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central (Gareth Snell).

It would take far more time than I have today to offer a full account of North Staffordshire’s contributions to the war effort. Undoubtedly, such a history would include the likes of Corporal Albert Ernest Egerton, a Potteries soldier with the Sherwood Foresters, who earned the Victoria Cross during the Battle of the Menin Road Ridge on 20 September 1917. Corporal Egerton single-handedly charged a machine gun nest, shooting three German gunners, and forced the surrender of 29 enemy soldiers. His comrades in that assault included another Stoke-on-Trent soldier, Sergeant Major E. Kelly, who led a charge in which four machine guns were taken out of action and 30 enemy troops captured. He received the Distinguished Conduct Medal for his actions.

These were incredible acts of heroism, but such acts were repeated a thousandfold by so many men, from the Potteries and beyond, who risked, and so often lost, their lives in the defence of their country and of the men serving beside them. These were the extraordinary deeds of ordinary people.

[Mr Francois]

Does the hon. Lady agree that as she has two pages left and only 15 seconds, an intervention would come in handy?

[Ruth Smeeth]

The right hon. Gentleman is a good man.

This Sunday, one century on, we will honour and remember those people. We will remember, too, all those who have lost their lives in all the conflicts since and pay our respects to today’s serving and veteran armed forces personnel. However, as chair of the all-party parliamentary group on the armed forces covenant, I am all too aware that we owe much more than respect. We owe a duty of care to those who continue to serve in our military. That means ensuring that the armed forces covenant is really delivering and that our service personnel are getting the support that they need. It also means supporting local groups such as the brilliant Staffordshire Tri Services and Veterans Support Centre, so that they can continue to work to support veterans.

At the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, we will remember them. But we must ensure that our history informs our present and that our commemoration of those who have gone is matched by our commitment to those who remain.