Violence Reduction, Policing and Criminal Justice

Alan Brown Excerpts

Wednesday 15th November 2023 Commons Chamber

[Mr David Lammy (Tottenham) (Lab)]

The whole House will want to send their deepest condolences to the hon. Member for Oxford West and Abingdon (Layla Moran) after what we have just heard.

This has been a strong and powerful debate on the King’s Speech, and all hon. Members, despite the most challenging and difficult circumstances in the middle east, feel very grateful for the depth and quality of the contributions. We also heard the most outstanding maiden speech from my hon. Friend the Member for Rutherglen and Hamilton West (Michael Shanks). It was thoughtful, humorous and full of lived experience and fantastic Scottish history. I am sure that his career in this House will be very successful.

We had a lot of contributions about crime of course, given the nature of the debate, and it was good to hear from the Chair of the Justice Committee, the hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Sir Robert Neill). He was right to remind us about the cost of imprisonment and that every prisoner costs £47,000, and about the importance of the Government adopting a Labour position on shorter sentences. I was grateful to hear the Secretary of State moving in a Labour direction and disagreeing on this occasion with his colleague, the right hon. Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Sir John Hayes) who is not in his place at the moment —[Interruption.] Forgive me, he is.

We also heard from the Chair of the Home Affairs Committee, my right hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull North (Dame Diana Johnson), who raised spiking as a growing issue in our country, along with sexual exploitation, as well as the need to move forward with a statutory description. We heard from my right hon. Friend the Member for Garston and Halewood (Maria Eagle) and my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, West Derby (Ian Byrne) about the long campaign for justice and a Hillsborough law, and about how painful it was, and will be for many people, that, despite the report of Bishop Jones, that measure did not find its way into the King’s Speech two and a half years later. My hon. Friend the Member for Merthyr Tydfil and Rhymney (Gerald Jones) raised policing in Wales, and my hon. Friend the Member for Dulwich and West Norwood (Helen Hayes) spoke about the horrible scourge of knife crime, and the failure to ban Rambo and zombie knives. We are still waiting.

Let me turn to the amendments and the horrors of war that I know every Member of this House and so many of our constituents are all focused on tonight. I will start with a meeting I held two weeks ago in Cairo with the Egyptian Foreign Minister. He reminded me that it has been almost exactly half a century since Egypt and Israel were at the height of the Yom Kippur war—a 25-year pattern of conflict that some feared would never end. There were devastating losses in the Sinai and whole armies facing encirclement by the Suez canal. Few expected the narrow diplomatic openings to lead to lasting peace, but diplomats seized those narrow openings.

Then, in 1977, Sadat came to Jerusalem, setting the two countries on a path to a peace that has held ever since. Minister Shoukry reminded me of that. Although it may seem impossible in the toxic fog of war, peace is always possible in the end, so 39 days since the start of the war between Israel and Hamas, I ask the House to remember that peace is never simple, and never won easily.

[Alan Brown (Kilmarnock and Loudoun) (SNP)]

Much of the language is about a ceasefire. The Pope, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Save the Children, UNICEF, the World Health Organisation, the UN Secretary General and several EU Prime Ministers have all called for a proper ceasefire. Is it not time that Labour moved its position and actually used that word “ceasefire”—a proper one to let humanitarian aid in?

[Mr Lammy]

I will turn to those issues shortly. Everyone in this House wants the fighting to end. The central debate is about the steps to bring that about, and there is a discussion across this place among Members, all of whom want peace and all of whom want to see the loss of life come to an end. [Interruption.] I respect the hon. Member’s position, and I will come to that in a moment.

Peace is never won easily; peace is possible because of diplomacy, because of compromise and because of negotiation. It is our duty in this House to support all the necessary and practical steps to get us there.