Child Sexual Exploitation: Grooming Gangs

Lord Maginnis of Drumglass Excerpts

Tuesday 13th March 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Young of Cookham]

My Lords, child sexual exploitation is a vile crime and it is not exclusive to any one community, culture, race or religion. Political or cultural sensitivities should not get in the way of tracking down offenders and preventing future abuse. I say to noble Lords that we should be careful about our language in this matter, not least because I am about to repeat a Statement on inflammatory letters inciting a “punish a Muslim” day on 3 April. We need to be careful about how we approach this.

There is nothing in the Koran that encourages the sort of activity the noble Lord has referred to. In any case, the Koran would be trumped by the law of the land. Islam, like all world religions, does not support, advocate or condone child sexual exploitation. Indeed, respect for women is inherent in its faith. As my noble friend Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon has just told me, one of Islam’s phrases is, “Paradise lies at the feet of the mother”.

As for encouraging a debate on Islam, the Government are supporting an initiative by British-based Islamic leaders of all denominations to dispel the poisonous interpretations of Islam peddled by al-Qaeda and Daesh. We are taking a number of other initiatives to minimise the exposure of children to sexual abuse from whatever source.

[Lord Maginnis of Drumglass (Ind UU)]

My Lords, I believe many people will be grateful to the Minister for clarifying that point, but is there not a contradiction in our own society, where we fail? I ask about a questionnaire sent out by Brighton and Hove City Council, asking children as young as six or seven, or their parents, for their gender perception. If we are allowing this type of information to be collected, for what purpose? It is to condition people as they grow up. Will the Minister look at our so-called liberalism, which enables this to happen and prevents the police getting on with their duties?

[Lord Young of Cookham]

My Lords, that goes slightly wider than the specific Question. I am aware of the debate taking place on transgender issues and the whole debate about at what age, if at all, children should be allowed to express their own sexual preference. This is not a subject on which I am an expert. I am very cautious about entering into it, but I will certainly draw what the noble Lord has just said to the attention of the relevant Ministers at the DfE.

Iran: Human Rights

Lord Maginnis of Drumglass Excerpts

Tuesday 10th June 2014 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Maginnis of Drumglass]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what action they have taken to co-ordinate international representations about the execution of Mr Gholamreza Khossravi Savadjani, a political prisoner in Iran’s Evin Prison, and about the use of capital punishment and the human rights situation in Iran.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, we are aware of the execution of Gholamreza Khossravi on 1 June this year. The right to life is a fundamental human right and the UK opposes the use of the death penalty in all circumstances. The UK continues to call on the Iranian Government to implement a moratorium on the death penalty and to guarantee the rights and freedoms of all Iranians.

[Lord Maginnis of Drumglass (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for his Answer. It is quite disappointing in so far as what seems to dominate is the relationship that his Government want to have with Mr Rouhani. Will he acknowledge that since President Rouhani was elected there have been more than 550 executions? They are running now at the rate of two a day. The influence of Rouhani across the frontier in Iraq has led to killings running at the rate of about 1,000 a month with 4,000 Iraqis being injured. All in all, since we intervened in Iraq not so many years ago, do we not have a responsibility to Iraq and Iran to make amends by standing up and publicly and internationally exposing the injustice to the people we left behind?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I think the noble Lord’s last remark is a reference to the PMOI. I recognise that it is a linked issue. The UN rapporteur’s most recent report on human rights in Iran demonstrates that human rights in Iran continue to be awful and that Iran is the second most frequent executor of prisoners in the world after China and indeed, in terms of size of population, the largest. We have no illusions on the quality of prison life, the use of torture or the absence of an adequate rule of law within Iran. Nevertheless, Iran is a complex political structure. It is not as simple a dictatorship as some of the states with which we have to deal. We think it is worth while pursuing an opening with the new president, and we are cautiously and carefully negotiating to see what is possible. The noble Lord shakes his head, but I think we have learnt from our experience in Iraq that blundering into a country with a large army and overthrowing the regime does not always lead to a much better outcome. Evolution is better than revolution.

Syria and the Use of Chemical Weapons

Lord Maginnis of Drumglass Excerpts

Thursday 29th August 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Maginnis of Drumglass]

My Lords, in deference to noble Lords’ patience after more than five hours of debate, I am not going to repeat what has been said by many who are more experienced than I. Hence, I want to look not exclusively at Syria but at the United Kingdom in relation to the current Syrian provocation. I would suggest that we as a nation have for the past 16 years become an abject follower rather than an incisive leader of world opinion. How sad. I do not believe that the United Kingdom can, from this point in history, take a military initiative that will benefit us or the various people in the Middle East, including Syrians, who are daily the victims of sectarian warfare and sectarian oppression.

We should not evaluate the situation in the Middle East on the basis of the United Kingdom’s Christian-based values—although, I suppose, this Government have largely abandoned those, too. Of course one deplores that there are several hundred victims of chemical weapons, and we have a responsibility to identify and cite before a war crimes court those who have ordered or executed these outrages. I heard a debate between the noble Lords, Lord Lea of Crondall and Lord Carlile, about the effectiveness of that. Citing leaders before a war crimes court would, from the moment we did so, cause the perpetrators and those who follow them to recognise that whatever they may achieve in the short term they have become internationally irrelevant and international pariahs until the day they die. Why do we imply that the hundreds who died as a result of the use of chemical weapons are any more to be regretted than the tens of thousands who have died equally horribly, up to this moment? Will we, however accurately we target whatever we identify as appropriate, add one iota of justice to the situation?

I have lived with sectarian conflict for many years. That was where religion was used as an excuse for terrorism. However much we may take so-called appropriate action in Syria, will it produce other than justification to those who regard religion as a cause—who are willing to become human bombs—whether in Iraq, Syria or here on the streets of London? I will not even venture into the capacity of Syria or Iran to attack our sovereign bases in Cyprus.

Moreover, we are in danger of deluding ourselves that if we can minimise deaths arising from our intervention and concentrate on Assad’s armaments Russia would not resupply? Russia will do so. We must know that the ineptitude of the United Nations as an arbitrating organisation would be even further neutralised by any direct provocation that led to a greater schism between the western powers, Russia and so on. Nor do we need provocation such as the preordained red lines, or was it lines in the sand? What a presidential own goal that was. I listened to President Obama this morning. He sounded so implausible that I cannot help but wonder why we British, with hundreds of years of diplomatic experience, appear almost blasé about tagging ourselves to his coattail. Let us just pause at this point and examine where we have failed and where we could have more effectively intervened diplomatically but failed to do so. I am not going to give the House a long list, but I think of Zimbabwe, where for years we virtually ignored the plight of the Matabeles; of Cyprus, where we have long and carelessly abdicated our guarantor responsibilities; and of Northern Ireland, where we subsidise ex-terrorist prisoners at seven times the rate that we compensate the victims of their terror. That is where our Government have failed for so many years now.

I conclude by expressing the hope that my contribution might just help bring a degree of reality to the questions we face. Perhaps at another time we can develop opportunities rather than, like today, trying to build justice on the sands of hopelessness that we would import from Washington.

Social Policy

Lord Maginnis of Drumglass Excerpts

Wednesday 16th June 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Maginnis of Drumglass]

My Lords, I am grateful to the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leicester for having sought this debate. It is timely, appropriate and particularly relevant. I apologise to the noble Lord, Lord Wei: an intervening duty prevented me from getting into the Chamber, but from the shadows I listened carefully to what he had to say and found it inspiring. If he lives to be the oldest Peer in this Chamber, he will contribute a great deal during that time.

I am sadly aware not just that our nation now tries to survive on compromised ethical values, so that it appears to be almost improper to acknowledge the basis of our moral values, but that individual, family and community expectations have escalated too far beyond what is good and necessary for a happy and stable society. After 27 years in Parliament, I think that I know why, how and from where much of the problem derives. It is basically because what should be a Government of the people has now become a Government for the people. Government—this was particularly evident during 13 years of new Labour, but it does not apply exclusively to any single party—has become largely a cabal of detached intellectuals whose reason tells them that they know what is best for everyone else and who would be content to have what I will call a United Kingdom that is totalitarian in effect and authoritarian in nature. Some would seek to cover that objective with the euphemism “a nanny state”, but that is too simple and very dangerous.

For some reason, the previous Government had resolved that discrimination was wrong and that all society should be tarred with the same broad brush. As a result, we should become little more than computerised numbers; we should carry identity cards; we should all be seen as potential child abusers and be vetted if we regularly drive our grandchildren and their pals to and from school; and we should be subjected to potentially 42 days’ interrogation if under suspicion. Just yesterday, it was ordained that, if parliamentary colleagues and I were to have a preview of the Saville report, we should be prepared to submit ourselves to what was literally five hours’ house arrest. What folly; what an insult; what an incentive for one simply to surrender to the idea that as individuals we no longer have responsibility to make judgments or set personal standards but should merely go with the flow.

In your Lordships’ House, we have already nullified some of the greater aberrations of the previous Government, but why is all this happening in the first place? However bright and intellectually competent our elected colleagues in the other place may be, too many of them have virtually no concept of “of the people”. It was decided some years ago that your Lordships’ House should not be dominated by a single stratum of society. After 18 years’ experience in another place and nine years here, I think that this House in its present form does a tolerably good job. I believe that, in our lives outside this House, we have, overall, more meaningful contact with society than have many of those in the other place. It is now about time that we had a critical look at how and why the other place has lost touch with society. As well as encouraging intellect and education—and, as a schoolmaster, I have respect for that—we must have experience. We cannot have a relationship between government and society when the greater part of government has never properly belonged to or participated among society, never done real jobs, never managed or organised and never served as an integral part of society.

My challenge to government is that, for every intellectual giant who comes to the Front Benches via Oxford or Cambridge, or wherever, there has to be another who comes from industry, from business, from the land, from the caring professions and from real hands-on experience and who is “of the people”. Only then can we begin to restore the partnership between government and civil society. If we had government that, like many of us in your Lordships’ House, knew the practicalities of evaluating things, running things and even understanding things that impact directly on society, we could stop administrating this country by expensive and faceless quangos, by committees and by minders, with their thousands of CCTV cameras, and become, once again, a proper democracy where leaders can be valued for their experience, judgment, observance of moral rectitude and practical responsibility. We have sadly gone so far in the opposite direction that it will take resolve, time and more than a modicum of common sense to achieve this. Can we start today?

I cannot speak about government and society without mentioning how personally hurt I was yesterday by the Saville report and the Government’s capitulation to what we saw on television last evening to be a well orchestrated hangover from a 30-year campaign of terrorism. Of the families of the 496 who died in 1972, over 97 per cent were ignored. The report lacked balance—3,720 died during the terrorist campaign, so the £192 million pounds spent on Saville represents a mere 0.37 per cent of the victims. I know that the Prime Minister tried valiantly to balance his remarks, but from my perspective 40 years of education is no substitute for 40 years of hands-on experience. For 99.6 per cent of those families, the Government’s identification with civil society was absent, just as was any apology from the Northern Ireland Assembly’s Deputy First Minister and one-time terrorist commander and killer, Martin McGuinness.

I conclude my remarks with a practical proposal that deals with one of the most pressing issues affecting the relationship between government and society—law and order and our escalating prison population. We now have over 85,000 in our prisons. I am glad that the right honourable Ken Clarke has recognised the extent of the problem. If I were to evaluate it in financial terms, I would point out that the £45,000 that it costs annually to keep a person in prison—maybe this comparison makes sense—is greater than it would cost me to send a grandchild to Eton for a year. Over 40 per cent of prisoners reoffend within five to six months of release from prison. These are the Government’s own figures.

On this issue, the Government are letting society down. The nub of the problem is largely that we have failed to differentiate between criminals and offenders. I shall define that. Criminals are those who, as a profession, dishonestly exploit society for a living, who virtually dictate what happens in our prisons and who dominate young offenders. My definition of “offender” is one who breaks the law through a deficit in his character, which may be, and often is, that he lacks proper communication skills—certainly that represents 25 per cent, some would say as high as 40 per cent, of our prison population. We send them to share the company of those who are dedicated to crime and then release them to a disorganised and inadequate lifestyle where their godfather mentors are able to exploit them further. According to Marina Kim on “Talking Politics”, in 2007-08 recidivism cost our economy more than £9.5 billion.

Rather than repeating myself, I refer to a speech that I made on 19 December 2008, at col. 334, when I proposed a clearly segregated two-tier prison system, where we would not provide the criminals with a steady stream of potential offenders but where we would accommodate offenders within a safer, protective system that allowed the probation service, social workers, families and communities to rediscover social responsibility, and where every pound spent—properly targeted and managed by a Minister who understood the nature of society—could make such a difference.

Today government and society seem to exist on different planes. We have allowed that to happen as we scrambled over one another to get a bigger and bigger share or control of the power of money when times were good. The chasm between government and civil society was not inevitable, but we allowed it to occur. Perhaps now, in more straitened times, we can grasp the opportunity to pause and consider how we can effectively restore the ethos of decency and responsibility and bring a greater degree of humanity back to our relationships.