Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill

Debate between Lord Winston and Baroness Kennedy of Shaws

Report stage
Monday 17th January 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Winston (Lab)]

My Lords, I hope the noble Lord does not think I am being discourteous to the House by making a short intervention in this important debate. We have to be very careful about legal definitions of sex and gender. Primarily, the definitions are not legal but are in fact biological, as I have said in this Chamber before. That is a problem. That is one of the reasons why I agree with what the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, just said. For example, we have to understand that there are situations in which there might well be problems with—whatever you call it—misogyny or hate. Take a transgender woman who was originally assigned as a male and still has the genes of a male, and possibly some of the hormonal function of a male, who competes in a sporting event. That is a difficult issue that has not yet been properly dealt with. Clearly, it is quite likely that from time to time those sorts of situations will cause considerable anger, hostility and all sorts of effects that might be an offence under the Bill. We at least need to record that and decide how we deal with it.

[Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws (Lab)]

My Lords, I support the amendment, and I want to deal with one or two things that have come up in this discussion. The noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, suggested that the evidence base is very thin. The evidence base of women receiving threatening and abusive behaviour and sometimes assault, accompanied by expressions that make it very clear that it is directed at them as women, is substantial. I have just been receiving evidence for a working party in Scotland, and over this past year it has been shocking to see the extent to which this is a serious problem for girls and women. It should not be underestimated, and of course it is accelerated by social media, which is encouraging the kind of verbal assault that is so disgusting and disgraceful that it is hard to imagine women and girls having to deal with it in their daily lives. It really is endemic, so I do not think that what we are trying to do here can be minimised.

As for suggesting that we introduce a complicated debate about the comparatively very few women who are trans women and might be included in this, that seems just extraordinary to me. It is a diversion from the fact that women, who make up more than 50% of the population and are not a minority, are experiencing this on a daily basis. Let us get real about it.

The noble Baroness, Lady Newlove, has pointedly made something part of her amendment. She says that the focus of this is on the perpetrator. How does it come about that an aggravation is used? It is because there is evidence, in addition to the evidence of a regular crime, that it has been motivated by antagonism and hatred towards women.

Of course, misogyny is wider than simple, old-fashioned hating. It is about a sense of entitlement, usually by young men, towards women and their bodies. The ways in which women have to experience verbal nastiness of a high level undermine their self-confidence and self-expression, so this is really damaging in our society. The noble Baroness, Lady Fox, says it is a nonsense to suggest that this leads on to more grievous crime. I am afraid that it is not a nonsense, because we know that it normalises certain kinds of behaviours that then go undetected by the police.

I really want us to think seriously about how we stop this happening. When women say this has to stop, what is the answer? A misogynistic aggravation is not the answer; it will not solve all the problems, but it is a starting point to let women know that misogyny is taken seriously by the legislature. That is why I support this amendment to the Bill.

Higher Education and Research Bill

Debate between Lord Winston and Baroness Kennedy of Shaws

Monday 9th January 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws (Lab)]

My Lords, I, too, support the noble Lord, Lord Kerslake, in his Amendment 65. There should be such a duty on the Secretary of State, although it makes me think about the duty on the Lord Chancellor to protect the independence of the judiciary. We do not see that being lived up to in the way that we would like, so just placing duties on Secretaries of State does not always deliver the outcomes that we want. But I certainly support the noble Lord, Lord Kerslake.

I want to give some comfort to my noble friend Lord Stevenson because I share many of the concerns expressed in his amendment. I am not in favour of for-profit universities: I should make that very clear. The ideal of the university is so precious and important to our nation. We should ask ourselves this question: where is a world-class university that is for-profit? The answer is that there is not one—not Harvard, Yale, Oxford or Cambridge.

[Lord Winston]

MIT?

[Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws]

MIT has some provisions in its statutes that ensure that the money is fed back into MIT for research at the highest level. If that were part of the standards that we expect of the new private universities, one might feel rather differently. But my concern is that, if you speak to Americans in the field of education and higher education in particular, they look with envious eyes. Yes, they have grand universities, wonderful new liberal arts colleges and some great state universities, but they feel that in Britain we have, across the board, a much higher standard of university than can be seen in parts of the United States.

One thing that concerns them is that they went down this road themselves some 10 years ago. They let the business world bring all its entrepreneurship into the university world and by God, they are regretting it now. They have started having scandals. It has even reached our ears about Trump University, but only because Mr Trump’s name has of course become rather more familiar for other reasons. He was sued by students on the basis that the university set itself up claiming that it would deliver education in the world of business, but in fact the students were absolutely short-changed and exploited. Many of them were ordinary working folk who had thought that it would advance their careers, and in fact they were taken to the cleaners.

A pay-off is now taking place, but there are other cases in the pipeline. We should be very wary about where this will take us. There is the idea that universities could set up without any probationary period to show that they are acting in a proper way. My noble friend Lord Stevenson suggests in Amendment 2 that there should be a period of four years. I certainly agree that there should be a serious period of time to see whether these new institutions will be up to the standard we want this country to be recognised for.

I rather like the idea that “UK universities” will become the kitemark for institutions that follow the traditional pattern, but I am afraid that I must say to the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, that the pursuit of modernity has to be approached with some caution. I say this particularly when remembering so well the New Labour years. I regret the mistake made by New Labour in its enthusiasm for markets. I have great enthusiasm for markets and I like all aspects of them in their right place, but I do not like their consolidating interests such as the utilities. I do not like markets where you do not get real competition, and I certainly do not like their entering areas of our public life like education and health, where the result is in fact a diminution of investment. So I am very concerned about what the Bill means.

I appreciate what the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, said earlier about his children and their friends going to universities where they felt rather short-changed because they did not get the teaching they expected. I am happy that the Government are seeking to pursue good teaching by creating the right kind of framework, and I have no objection to some of the things proposed in the Bill. However, I am concerned about autonomy and the potential for interference by Government and bodies that are basically a part of Government. I am also really concerned about this business of introducing into the sector profit-making universities which basically will be a milch cow for hedge funders and the like. I have no hesitation in saying that I am concerned about us going down this road, and I support the attempt by my noble friend Lord Stevenson to find a way through that will reconcile the mistake that Labour made when it said that profit-making universities could be brought into the system. I do not think we will relish that in the years to come.