Govia Thameslink/Rail Electrification

Mike Kane Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd July 2018 Commons Chamber

[Joseph Johnson]

I sympathise with my right hon. Friend’s concerns. His constituents, including those who use Hassocks station, which we have discussed on a number of occasions, have endured an unacceptable level of service, and he has been a strong champion for them. They will receive compensation and we will be setting out details of that compensation plan in coming days. It will be comparable, as the Secretary of State has indicated, with the compensation that was given to passengers on Southern about a year and a half ago.

[Mike Kane (Wythenshawe and Sale East) (Lab)]

With trains cancelled and delayed and journey times between Leeds and Manchester airport in my constituency up by 12 minutes, how does the Minister think the northern rail project is going, especially given the news at the weekend that he is reneging on the commitment to electrify the line between those two cities?

[Joseph Johnson]

I have already addressed the issue of the trans-Pennine route upgrade. We await Network Rail’s final project plan for how to make the best use of the £2.9 billion the Government have set aside for it. It is a significant investment, and it is entirely right that the Government seek to secure the best value for money, both for passengers and for taxpayers.

Oral Answers to Questions

Mike Kane Excerpts

Monday 30th April 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mrs Wheeler]

My family will be delighted by how much exercise I am getting, jumping up and down.

We are committed to tackling unfair leasehold practices, which is why we are working with the Law Commission to make buying a freehold or extending a lease easier, faster, fairer and cheaper. We want to ensure that leaseholders have the right support to deal with onerous ground rent, and we will consider further action if developers’ schemes to compensate individuals do not go far enough.

[Mike Kane (Wythenshawe and Sale East) (Lab)]

T9. Given that local services face a funding gap of at least £5.8 billion by 2019-20, when will the Minister provide an update on the roll-out of the 100% business rates retention pilots and end the uncertainty faced by Manchester City Council and Trafford Council, which cover my constituency?

[Rishi Sunak]

I am delighted that Manchester, like several other authorities, is a beneficiary of the Government’s 100% business rates retention pilot, which is ensuring that local authorities keep an extra £1 billion this year. We will announce plans for a further round of pilots shortly after the local elections.

Anti-Semitism

Mike Kane Excerpts

Tuesday 17th April 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mike Kane (Wythenshawe and Sale East) (Lab)]

In the few minutes available, I want to say that, as a Catholic parliamentarian, I stand in solidarity with my Jewish colleagues in the Chamber today. As chairman of the Catholic Legislators Network and the director of Catholics for Labour, I know that we have to fight anti-Semitism wherever it rears its ugly head.

In October 2015, Pope Francis met Jewish representatives and said in a statement that we had, after 2,000 years, reconciled some of our differences. If I had said that in public 500 years ago, I would have been locked up, and if I had said it 50 years ago, I would have been laughed at, but today, some of those differences have been reconciled. In the encyclical “Nostra Aetate” of the second Vatican council in 1965, born out of the horror of the holocaust, the Catholic Church condemned anti-Semitism and asked for a transformation of the relationship. It was not until 20 years afterwards that Pope John Paul visited the synagogue in Rome—he was probably the first Pope to go into a synagogue since Peter the Apostle—which symbolised that new relationship.

I make a plea to my own party and my party leadership. Two years ago, I stood in central London at the Cable Street commemoration of how, 80 years previously, Jews and Catholics came together to fight the fascists. In that period, 20,000 protesters came together to fight fascism and Mosley, and having pleaded with the then Home Secretary, John Simon, to ban the march, forced the fascists to turn around. My hon. Friends the Members for Brent Central (Dawn Butler) and for Ealing North (Stephen Pound) were both at that commemoration. The Labour party and the Labour movement have a proud tradition of standing up to anti-Semitism in this country, and we must maintain it.

I will finish by saying that power, which is a gift from God, is either coercive or relational, and anti-Semitism is the worst possible type of coercive power. Martin Buber, the Jewish theologian, said, when asked whether God exists, that he exists in the space between us. That means we have to build solidarity with one another, day in and day out, to make sure that we create a better world.

Finally, we can look at scripture—Nehemiah—and see that on the return of the Israelites to Jerusalem after their exile, they built the walls of Jerusalem again. Our party walls have been breached, and it is up to each and every one of us to build those walls again. We can do that, and we must do it quickly.

Integrated Communities

Mike Kane Excerpts

Wednesday 14th March 2018 Commons Chamber

[Sajid Javid]

The first thing to recognise is that home education is a valuable and important right, and that will not change. There are many examples of excellent home education, and we welcome those. But we have also, sadly, seen examples—some have been reported recently—where home education has led to a bad outcome for those children and has not helped them or wider society. There will be work across the Government, led by the Education Secretary, who will review the guidelines on home education and ensure that all children being home educated are properly registered. At this point, there is no register of who is being educated at home. We want to ensure that the rights that are very valuable to home education are not abused and that they are protected.

[Mike Kane (Wythenshawe and Sale East) (Lab)]

I agree with the Secretary of State on the role of faith groups in the pursuit of integration. Will he join me in congratulating the Well Project in my constituency, which is underpinned by the Caritas organisation in helping refugees and asylum seekers to integrate through the provision of English as an additional language and through women’s and girls’ leadership? I have to say on a practical level, though, that since the Government privatised the refugee and asylum resettlement project, services have gone backwards. There is a lack of spatial planning, local authorities are being cut out of the equation, and there is no integration with the rest of civil society. We are going to have to work 10 times as hard to catch up with the model we used to have.

[Sajid Javid]

The hon. Gentleman raises the important issue of resettlement. He might be interested to know that one of the policies that we will be reviewing through the Green Paper is about providing the support that is given to people who rightly and legitimately settle in this country on a long-term basis, because we have tended to have an approach, under successive Governments, where once people have their leave to remain, they are left on their own. It is very important to have an approach where they are constantly provided with information and helped along with the process—perhaps a process that eventually leads to citizenship. I am pleased that the Home Secretary will be reviewing that.