Discrimination in Sport

Debate between Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi and Rosena Allin-Khan

Wednesday 12th June 2019 Commons Chamber

[Dr Allin-Khan]

It gives me great pleasure to congratulate the Bristol family mentioned by my hon. Friend. I will address homophobia later in my speech. She is absolutely right that it needs to be given the same priority as racism and gender discrimination, so I thank her for her intervention.

This past season, rarely a week has gone by without an incident being reported. Numerous teams walked off pitches in lower leagues. Danny Rose admitted that he cannot wait to see the back of football because of the abuse that he has been subjected to. Wilfried Zaha highlighted just some of the truly awful tweets he receives, including one branding him a “diving monkey”. The #Enough campaign and subsequent social media boycott organised by the Professional Footballers Association saw players, pundits and organisations take a real stand against the abuse they receive. In a piece of tragic irony, however, some participating players even received racist abuse during the boycott itself. I know that the Premier League, the English Football League and the FA all feel very strongly about this issue.

[Mr Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi (Slough) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend is making an excellent speech. Many of us joined sportsmen and women across our country in the 24-hour social media boycott to express our solidarity and to show our disgust at the amount of racism online. Does my hon. Friend agree that the Government are not doing enough to hold social media companies to account? They need not only to work with social media companies, but to show solidarity with organisations such as Show Racism the Red Card, which lead the way on this.

[Dr Allin-Khan]

It is almost as though my hon. Friend had read my speech. He is right about the sterling work of Show Racism the Red Card, which works tirelessly in schools to ensure that racism is rooted out from the heart, where it never deserves to see the light of day. Kick It Out has also worked for many years to eradicate that blight on our beautiful game.

Sadly, discrimination in sport, as in society, also extends to gender. Now retired from the pitch, former Arsenal and England player Alex Scott is a successful and respected TV pundit. Despite 140 caps for the England women’s team, multiple FA cups, several premier league titles and a Champions League trophy, Scott is still subject to intense sexist abuse. Alex Scott has said that she receives sexist insults online every single day.

Outside the pundits’ box, things are hardly better. In March, The Daily Telegraph surveyed more than 300 elite sportswomen from 20 sports and found that, shockingly, more than a third had been subjected to sexist comments from fans or social media, more than half had been the victim of gender discrimination and almost a third said that they had suffered sexual harassment.

When I called out an incident of sexism aimed at a female BBC reporter, in one day alone, I received 1,000 abusive tweets, including one from a former footballer and pundit who still presents on the radio today. He said, “Imagine being offended by it,” then called me an expletive. Other colourful tweets directed at me included: “Get a grip, woman”; “Get a life, silly girl”; “Tell her I’d give her a slap”—another expletive—and then a threat that I might get a slap; and “Shut your mouth and get back to the kitchen to make my tea”. I am rather good at making a cup of tea, particularly a builder’s brew, but I have no desire to get into any kitchen and make a cup of tea for someone directing social media abuse at me. Those tweets remain online today.

Draft Gaming Machine (Miscellaneous Amendments and Revocation) Regulations 2018

Debate between Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi and Rosena Allin-Khan

Monday 17th December 2018 General Committees

[Dr Rosena Allin-Khan (Tooting) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms Ryan. I thank the Minister for her opening remarks.

This is an important day for those of us who want to see meaningful gambling reform in this country. FOBTs have long been the scourge of the high street, but today, due to the work of tireless campaigners, both inside and outside the House, we are poised to reduce the maximum FOBT stake to £2. The reduction will have a real impact on the prevention of problem gambling, so I welcome that decision.

I pay tribute to the people who got us here, particularly my hon. Friends the Members for West Bromwich East (Tom Watson) and for Swansea East and the charities GambleAware and Gambling with Lives, but it is a shame that it has taken so long. I trust that the strength of feeling shown in the House and the resignation of a Minister of State whom I greatly respected, the hon. Member for Chatham and Aylesford, will act as a sufficient deterrent to future Secretaries of State who may wish to put industry profits before people’s lives.

[Mr Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi (Slough) (Lab)]

We fully support the draft regulations, but does my hon. Friend agree that it should not have taken the resignation of a good Minister to get us into this position? The Government should have listened to vigorous campaigning by so many colleagues and charities, rather than having to be forced into this scenario.

[Dr Allin-Khan]

My hon. Friend makes an excellent point: it should not have taken this long for us to reach this point, nor should it have required such extreme measures as the resignation of a fantastic Minister who will be sadly missed. Nevertheless, the draft regulations are a landmark in gambling reform, and the Government deserve some credit for eventually taking action to protect people from gambling harms. I hope that this is just the beginning.

The Opposition will not hamper the progress of the draft regulations, since they are designed to reduce problem gambling, but we have some areas of concern, which I hope the Minister will address. There is still a great deal that we can do to reduce the number of problem gamblers in the UK and prevent future generations from falling into the same traps. The whistle-to-whistle ban announced this month on gambling adverts in live sport is an encouraging sign that the gambling industry is open to reform, but we must ensure that it is meaningful, that live sport online is properly regulated, and that other media such as radio are not forgotten.

Labour recently published its review of problem gambling and its treatment, which proposes a handful of reforms that the Government could implement to make a very real difference. The levy on gambling operators to fund research, education and treatment should be raised from 0.1% to 1% and should be compulsory. New clinical guidelines should be developed so that problem gamblers can receive the best possible care and treatment, and the NHS’s funding should be increased so that it can provide that care and treatment across the country. Betting on credit cards should be banned, and it should be possible to block certain debit card transactions so that gamblers can be in control of their spending. Problem gambling rips families’ home lives apart. The Barclays mobile banking app is the first high street bank app to feature debit card transaction blocking, but I hope that other banks follow suit.

Those are straightforward steps that the Government could take very quickly, and I sincerely hope they do, but we also need to widen the conversation around gambling reform to ensure that we think about the industry as a whole. We know that the two main centres of gambling activity are high street betting shops and online gambling sites. By reducing FOBT stakes, we have addressed a major problem in high street betting shops, but more needs to be done. We need a conversation about whether we are prepared to accept the clustering of betting shops in areas of high deprivation, where the people who are most vulnerable are also the most targeted by gambling companies.

Preventing problem gambling in shops is crucial, but so is tackling online gambling. The most obvious issue is online gambling advertising, which is effectively not age-restricted and can be found on almost any website. However, there is also the issue of gambling within online games, whether that is betting on skins in Fortnite or betting on horse-racing in Grand Theft Auto. We need to explore the impact that these parts of games have on the minds of the young people who predominantly play them.

This is a day to remember for UK gambling reform, but more importantly it is an opportunity to recognise what is still to be done. We owe it to the people we represent not to stop here.