Violent Disorder

Lord Hanson of Flint Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd September 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hussein-Ece (LD)]

My Lords, the shocking deaths of three little girls in Southport, followed by the shocking disorder on our streets perpetrated by a minority of violent thugs, was truly frightening. There was racist mob violence in our towns and cities, clearly incited and organised by far-right groups and individuals —mainly online, where shockingly they shared the locations of hotels and hostels housing asylum seekers and migrants. We saw footage of thugs trying to set fire to some hotels, terrifying the people in them. The locations of immigration offices were leaked online, so they were facing attacks as well.

The bravery and professionalism of the police and emergency services are to be commended. They were dealing with what was sometimes an impossible job. However, it is disappointing that the Official Opposition has not mentioned the targeted attack on Muslim communities. They were clearly the focus of these attacks; online, we saw the most appalling Islamophobia and hate crimes. That affects not just Muslims in this country but those perceived to be Muslims, who were of course migrants and asylum seekers—and anyone perceived to be a supporter of or even associated with asylum seekers, or from an ethnic-minority community. I know of what I speak: members of my own family in some of these communities that were targeted, who wear visible headscarves, were terrified. Some of them felt that they could not stay in their homes, in an area such as Walthamstow that was targeted.

Does the Minister agree that to tackle record levels of hate crimes against Muslims we need a consistent and coherent approach to tackling Islamophobia, underpinned by a working definition to better understand what Islamophobia is and is not, in the way that we have—quite rightly—a working definition of anti-Semitism? Six years ago, the All-Party Parliamentary Group on British Muslims put forward the first working definition of Islamophobia after two years of consultation with 800 community groups up and down the country, with all faiths and with victims of hate crimes. That definition was accepted by all parties, apart from the last Government. Will this Government look to revisit that, and start to come to a proper understanding and definition of what we mean by Islamophobia? Do they intend to appoint an independent adviser on Islamophobia—a post that has been vacant for two years? Discrimination, prejudice and hatred damage everyone and the fabric of our society. We must work together to challenge it.

The Statement mentions far-right extremism, which has been on the rise. We saw some people on the streets with signs depicting Nazi emblems. Make no mistake, these people are entrenched in anti-Semitism if they support Nazi symbols and that kind of behaviour. The Statement mentions a review. Can the Minister set out whether enough attention is being given to tackling far-right extremism? Can he say a bit more about how the Government intend to look into that in the review?

[The Minister of State, Home Office (Lord Hanson of Flint) (Lab)]

I thank noble Lords for their contributions. Like the noble Lord on the Opposition Front Bench, I start my response where he started his: with the families of the victims in Southport and the families of the victims in Notting Hill. I cannot begin to imagine the pain that they have gone through, attending a dance class or a carnival and then finding dead bodies of young children and family members at the end of those events. We need to put that at the forefront of our minds. When the event happened on the Monday just before recess, our first thoughts were with the families.

The noble Lord mentioned—as was echoed by the noble Baroness from the Liberal Democrat Front Bench—that there is no excuse for the actions that followed the incident in Southport. It was thuggery and it was appalling behaviour, and it was in much part orchestrated by forces that we need to examine in the longer term and deal with accordingly.

For the interest of the House, we had 40,000 police hours over the course of those riots. I pay tribute from this Front Bench to police officers who gave up their leave, faced attacks, and stood for the values of this House and this Parliament in defending individuals from the Islamic community, and from other communities, who were under attack from forces which should have known better. Such forces will now have time to reflect, during their time in prison following judicial exercise, fair guilty pleas and/or—in due course—criminal convictions.

The noble Lord mentioned police independence. We fully support police independence. However, he will know that the Prime Minister, the Home Secretary, me and other Ministers in the Home Office met police shortly after those events to encourage and understand the response that they were going to make independently. Make no mistake, when criminal acts of intimidation and Islamophobia are committed, properties are burned down and legitimate sources of government support for asylum seekers are attacked, the courts will take action. Ultimately, those who have committed these crimes—if found guilty or pleading guilty—will face considerable sentences. That has been shown in the response to this House.

Both Front Benches have mentioned the question of a review. My right honourable friend the Home Secretary, the Prime Minister and the Home Office team will undertake a review not just of the incidents and the response, and not just of the capability of the response or how it was organised, but of the underlying factors behind those concerns. It will be a review of what led individuals across towns and cities in this United Kingdom to pick up rocks, attack their fellow citizens and attack not just people seeking asylum but long-standing residents with businesses in this country. That is not acceptable behaviour, and I hope that the government response, which I know the noble Lord on the Front Bench opposite has accepted, responded well to that point and has helped to close down the initial concern. But there remain long-term concerns that we need to deal with.

I say to both Front Benches that extremism on all sides is something that we have to take cognisance of; we must be responsible in our approach to it and look at the underlying causes. There is much radicalisation online; there are people in bedrooms on their own being radicalised from both the left and the right, and on a whole range of issues. We need to look at that in the longer term, and my right honourable friend in the House of Commons, Peter Kyle, the Secretary of State for DSIT, is going to look at how Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms have responded and encouraged by their use what happened in the events that we have just seen.

The noble Lord’s question on anti-Semitism is equally as important as the point about Islamophobia. I want to see individuals in this society respected for their beliefs. I was very pleased to see, in discussions I had with members of the Church of England, that they had reached out to colleagues from the Jewish and Muslim communities and, particularly in Southport, had stood side by side to show support and that we have respect for religious beliefs. We respect the differences in those religious beliefs and understand that people live their lives and live their religious beliefs differently, but all have a right to live, breath and support themselves in the communities that we represent. That question of tolerance is one that should come from this House.

Let there be no mistake that a crime is a crime, and when people throw rocks, abuse, intimidate, organise on social media or encourage others to do so—we have 90 convictions of people who encouraged people to burn down asylum seekers’ properties—those are crimes. Those people will be held to account independently of Ministers and of the police, ultimately. The CPS will decide whether to charge, a court will determine whether guilt or innocence is in place and a sentence will be passed. That is a message that we will share—and I know that the noble Lord shares that message too.

I have a final point to make in response to points made by the noble Baroness on the Liberal Front Bench. She is right that the question of Islamophobia is extremely important. We live in a multicultural society. These are people of the Islamic faith who have been born here and whose fathers and mothers have been born here. It is not an issue of race but an issue of faith, and people have the right to express their faith openly, in accordance with their principles. One thing that we did in response to the attacks was to provide additional support to mosques in a protection fund. To go back to the point about anti-Semitism, that has applied equally to Jewish community organisations and facilities. We will continue to do that.

The message that this House should send out is quite clear. We live in a decent society, and those people who committed those offences did so in a way that is offensive to this House. We will collectively review what happened, look at what needs to be done and look at the underlying causes, but ultimately make sure that we have a tolerant, fair and open society.

[The Lord Bishop of Southwark]

My Lords, I express appreciation to the Minister and his right honourable friend the Home Secretary for the Government’s Statement. I extend heartfelt sympathy to the families of the victims of recent violent disorder. I support the Government’s strong and determined response, including the swift apprehension of perpetrators and bringing them to justice. I also applaud the strong and positive signal that this sends: protest cannot extend to violence and abuse. I am grateful that Members of the House have spoken so powerfully on the evil of anti-Semitic, Islamophobic and racist incidents, which the Minister rightly addressed as criminality. In addition to the measures announced, are His Majesty’s Government seeking to address, perhaps through an inquiry, some of the underlying economic and social issues that can render people vulnerable to exploitation and incitement, to their own cost and to the detriment of the wider community?

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

I am grateful to the right reverend Prelate for his response and the questions he has brought forward today. I am particularly pleased, as I mentioned, with the support that was given at the time of the incidents and the discussions we have had with colleagues around the response at a local level from members of the Church of England. I also welcome the condemnation he echoed of violent acts. He will know that the issues of community cohesion he mentioned are difficult issues to deal with, but ones that it is essential that this House and the Government grasp and take forward. I hope he will welcome that the Deputy Prime Minister is going to be leading on community cohesion. We will be looking at what we can do to bring groups together to look at how we bring together all the issues to which both Front Benches have referred.

While I cannot give assurances today on timescales or terms of reference, these will be issues that this House and the House of Commons return to regularly, because we have to tackle the underlying causes of individuals feeling alienated from society. There is no excuse for that behaviour—it is criminal behaviour and will be dealt with as criminal behaviour—but we still have to understand the reasons why people have fallen into that criminal behaviour, just as we would on any other aspect of criminal behaviour. I give the right reverend Prelate the assurance that that will be undertaken by the Deputy Prime Minister and others in the coming months.

[Lord Carlile of Berriew (CB)]

My Lords, in welcoming everything that has been said so far in this debate, and welcoming my old friend to this House and to the Front Bench, I ask him whether he agrees that the actions of online entities such as Channel3Now in Pakistan, allowing online advertising sites to make money by purveying violent, demonstrably deliberate untruths about the country we live in, is wholly unacceptable. I suggest that at least the possibility of further regulation should be used to compel internet entities to see it as their duty to refute the broadcasting of such content.

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

It is nice to see the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, again. We have seen each other in a number of guises over the years, and I am as surprised as he is to find myself here today responding to these issues. He raises an extremely important and valid point. Much of the content that fired the organisation of some of the events we saw, not just in Southport but across the whole United Kingdom, began its life in an internet or social media post that encouraged poor behaviour, not just in the UK but, as the noble Lord said, outside the United Kingdom.

The Online Safety Act was passed by both Houses in the last Parliament and was the child of the previous Government. The level of implementation of some of the measures in that Act needs to be looked at. My right honourable friend Peter Kyle, the Secretary of State for DSIT, has met with social media providers to look at the internet and what role it played, and we will review the policy over time. This is an organically growing issue, but the points the noble Lord mentioned are extremely valid, are registered by this Government and are ones that this Government will look at and take forward in due course.

[Lord Reid of Cardowan (Lab)]

My Lords, I welcome my former colleague to the Dispatch Box again, though in a different Chamber. First, I congratulate the Government on their response to those who used violence and hatred during the period of which we are speaking. They were decisive and fair and observed the separation between politics and operational capabilities. I think it reassured a great many people in this country that the Government acted so quickly and so decisively.

Secondly, I will say how much I welcomed the Minister’s comments about addressing—to use an old cliché—not only crime but the causes of crime. There is no doubt in my mind that there are deep underlying causes to what we saw. The Minister mentioned online social media. I believe they are instrumental but not the underlying causes. In my view, the underlying causes lie in the poisoned chalice that the Government have been given of apparently unlimited immigration, huge reductions in public services and the language used for the past 10 years describing immigrants as “dangerous aliens” whether they are legal or illegal immigrants. Can my noble friend assure me that the Labour Government will address all three causes over the next few years: the nature and level of immigration, the language used about it and the protection of public services? If we do not address those causes, this sort of thing will happen again.

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

Again, I am grateful to my noble friend for his contribution. He knows as much as anybody in this House, given his previous role as Home Secretary, about the difficult challenges that we face here.

To assure him on the Prime Minister’s commitment, we want to review how the policing capability was undertaken. That is not to interfere with operational policing but, following the Prime Minister’s announcement of the national violent disorder programme, to try to bring together good practice, look at where there needs to be resilience and make sure that forces support each other, which is a natural part of the policing landscape. It is extremely important to review what happened. As has been mentioned, we need to look at what happened at Harehills; there may not have been sufficient policing to deal with it. There is a whole range of issues and we can learn lessons. It is not for a Minister to direct chief constables, of the Met or anywhere else, but it is for a Minister to hold them to account and ensure that people, as mentioned by both Front Benches, are protected as a whole.

My noble friend also mentioned the whole question of migration. I spent a long period over the past 10 years as shadow Immigration Minister and know that it is a toxic debate at times. In my view, immigration falls into three or four categories: immigration for everyone from the centre forward of a football team through to a professor or somebody else coming to this country because they are an expert in their field and bringing a contribution to the growth of our economy, versus people coming on a boat seeking asylum or people coming here completely illegally. The debate needs to be put into the context of how we manage that. We need to detoxify the debate to ensure that we deal with asylum and speed up asylum claims; deal with people who have come here illegally, because we must have integrity in the migration system; and make sure that, in doing that, we do not turn away people who will help us grow our economy or bring skills and challenges to our society.

That is all on the agenda. I am still surprised that we are only seven weeks into this Government. We will look at those issues and I will report on progress to this House on a regular basis, as well as being held to account over the next few years.

[Lord Hogan-Howe (CB)]

My Lords, I join in condemning the attacks on police officers, mosques and asylum seekers and the places where people believed they were. I also support the officers who carried on walking forward when they were being bricked, despite occasionally not having the full equipment. We saw, particularly in Southport, some serious injuries to officers who still kept walking forward. They did an excellent job.

I ask the Minister to consider two big issues in the review that he mentioned. First, there was clearly a lack of intelligence at times about the groups involved— what they were planning and how many would turn up. Sometimes over the last few years it has become difficult to use some of the most intrusive surveillance gathering against political extremists. We understand why—obviously, political parties should not be targeted in that way—but, where politics veers into violence, that is a different matter altogether. It is vital that informants, undercover officers and all those intrusive things that only Home Secretaries can authorise are available to use against this type of people, whether from the left or the right—although at the moment we are particularly worried about the right and its ability to organise.

The second area that the review might consider is the number of officers that can be mobilised together quickly and in large numbers. It was mentioned that by the time that the riots started to subside, around 4,000 officers were being deployed. This sounds like a lot, but when you consider that in Notting Hill recently—where two murders sadly occurred—7,000 officers were deployed in about half a square mile, and that the riots of 2011 were only subdued when 16,000 officers were patrolling the streets of this city, I do wonder whether sufficient officers were available quickly enough.

Should things recur, I believe the Home Office has a proper, strategic role to play in this, to ensure that forces are ready and rapidly able to reinforce. I am certainly aware of forces waiting hours for reinforcements to arrive when one would hope it would be minutes.

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

Again, I am grateful to the noble Lord for bringing his significant expertise in this area to the Statement and to the long-term debate on this issue. First and foremost, I join him in paying tribute to the brave officers who held that line in the face of violent attacks that could have caused—and did cause—considerable harm to injured officers. That is a depleting factor on police forces in a particular area.

It is important to note that on Saturday 10 August, 6,675 officers were deployed in a single day to hold back criminal riotous behaviour. Those 6,675 officers put themselves on the front line, but in doing so they were also not doing other duties. That is one of the reasons why, immediately after the riots began, the Prime Minister said he would set up a national programme to look at deployment of resources, capability and how this was dealt with. I hope the noble Lord will welcome this.

The extremely important point was made that intelligence-led policing is absolutely vital to ensure that we get ahead of what is happening. That means using important—but difficult and challenging—tactics which involve looking at social media posts, tracking and looking at the capability of potential offenders and advising forces on how to deal with them in potential hotspots. I have no problem whatever in using the tools available to protect the public, because nobody forces anybody to organise a riot or to attack buildings and mosques and nobody says “Let’s burn this down” unless they are—or are potentially—going to commit criminal offences.

If we can nip those in the bud through the better organisation of policing or by the recognition of techniques that will bring convictions through the independent forces of the law, the police, the CPS and the courts, good on that, because that will protect the type of people that the noble Baroness from the Liberal Front Bench and the noble Lord, Lord Sharpe, indicated need protecting.

[Lord Caine (Con)]

My Lords, I was born in Harehills in Leeds, as I believe was the noble Baroness, Lady Blake of Leeds. It is a terribly deprived community and I still live about three miles from there. Will the Minister, whom I welcome to his post, join me in condemning those who immediately sought to exploit the appalling violence that took place in Harehills for their own political ends, using language that was designed only to stoke division and tension within that community, and did so from the luxury of Milwaukee? I refer, of course, to the leader of Reform UK.

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

I am grateful for the noble Lord’s welcome to me coming to this position. The Member for Clacton, if that was the Member he was referring to, is responsible for his own comments, in his own way and in his own time. He should be held to account by people in Clacton and by the wider community for any comments he makes. It is not for me to comment on that; it is for him to make those comments. What I will say is that, whenever things happen—as they do—we need to look at, and take action on, that criminal behaviour and close it down. Sometimes, it happens with summer activity, with people having too much to drink over long nights; sometimes, it is fuelled by right-wing violence and, other times, it is fuelled by other activity. If, underneath that, there are long-term trends of Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, right-wing ideology or, indeed, extreme left-wing ideology, we need to look, in a cold, calm way, at what has caused that, how we deal with it, how—following the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe—we intelligently police it and, ultimately, how we bring people to court if they have committed criminal offences. What Ministers can do is put the architecture together for that. The Prime Minister has been trying to look at the lessons learned from the initial response, which surprised many of us in that week after Southport, to see how we can improve that response and listen to what the police say about their own lessons. If that involves action by the Home Office in support of policing, that is what we will do.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I know that the Government are very conscious of the UK’s international reputation. I want to know whether there is any ministerial concern about the many free speech and civil liberties organisations around the world expressing shock about the degree of state- backed censorship being greenlighted in the wake of the riots. There is a worry that there is too easy a slippage and conflation between physical violence, which we can all condemn, and speech offences. The majority of people have not been incarcerated for incitement. They may have put out bigoted memes that we can deplore; none the less, people in the UK are being imprisoned not for what they do but for what they say. As there seem to be threats of more censorship, I want the Minister to reassure me that we will not end up in a situation where these riots, which were tragic enough, will chill legitimate debate and lead to a censorious, authoritarian atmosphere where people are frightened to speak freely.

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

There is freedom of speech, and I made it very clear in the wake of the riots that people are entitled to criticise the UK Government’s asylum policy, immigration policy or any aspect of UK government policy. What they are not entitled to do is to incite racial hatred, to incite criminal activity, to incite attacks on mosques or to incite burnings or other criminal, riotous behaviour. That is the threshold. The threshold is not me saying, “I do not like what they have said”—there are lots of things that I do not like that people have said; the threshold is determined by criminal law, is examined by the police and is referred to the CPS. The CPS examines whether there is a criminal charge to account for, which is then either made through a guilty plea and a sentence, which happened with the majority of people who now face time in prison, or put in front of a court for a jury of 12 peers to determine whether an offence has been committed. There is no moratorium on criticism of political policy in the United Kingdom. There is free speech in this United Kingdom, but free speech also has responsibilities, and one responsibility is not to incite people to burn down their neighbour’s property.

[Lord Browne of Ladyton (Lab)]

My Lords, my noble friend the Minister will be aware of the analysis by the European Consortium for Political Research, which was published only two weeks ago and substantially reinforces the question that my noble friend Lord Reid asked. The correlation between the location of violence and the incidence of child poverty in any area was significantly greater than the correlation between rioting and the presence of any of the other, many factors that people have attributed the violence to. Does my noble friend agree that any response to the riots must go beyond punishment and look to restore the essentials of economic equity, viable public services and greater equality, the absence of which appears to make violent disorder significantly more likely?

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

My noble friend makes extremely valid points about the examination of the causes. As I have said to this noble House, the Home Office, via the Deputy Prime Minister and her department, wishes to look at some of the wider issues of social deprivation that may or may not have contributed to these riots. However—if I can again draw both Front Benches opposite back in—we still have to focus on the points that were made in this debate: irrespective of social conditions in a particular area, scapegoating and attacking citizens or individuals who have in many cases no relationship to those causes is simply not acceptable, so they have to face the law. However, those are certainly important issues that need to be examined as part of the long-term mix on preventing further activity such as happened over this summer.