Dangerous Drugs

Debate between Alison Thewliss and Lloyd Russell-Moyle

Tuesday 12th September 2023 Commons Chamber

[Alison Thewliss]

That is not how the market works. We have had the Misuse of Drugs Act for 50 years and it has not stopped anybody from taking heroin, cocaine or anything else. Those drugs are quite moreish and people tend to keep taking them regardless of the legislation put before them to deter them. It does not work. What we need to do is go after the suppliers, but from what the Minister said it seems to me that the Government have no intention of doing that.

The Minister also talked about the broad legitimate use and the regulations he will bring forward on that. Without seeing them, it is difficult to see how effective this will be. If that legitimate use is incredibly broad—it must be to allow people to continue to buy the substance to run their cafés and produce whipped cream—he will find it very difficult to continue that enforcement game. We have no sight of those regulations tonight, so I argue that it would be irresponsible of the House to pass this statutory instrument without having seen the other part of the equation.

[Lloyd Russell-Moyle]

Is there not a danger that the “broad uses” clause will mean that good, middle-class white people, with houses where they can consume this drug in private, will be able to continue to do so and poor, working-class young people in parks, possibly predominantly black, Asian and minority ethnic, will end up being criminalised, as with many other drugs?

[Alison Thewliss]

That is a legitimate question and a legitimate risk, but I do not see it in the Government’s impact assessment.

There is also nothing about the preventive actions that the ACMD talks about in its report. There is nothing about a public health campaign, education or wider knowledge of the health impacts of the drug, which the ACMD recommends that the Government take forward. There are things such as B12 deficiency, nerve damage, incontinence and erectile dysfunction, but the Government are not promoting a plan of how to disseminate that information to people.

I worry—as do the neurologists who have written to the Government with their concerns about further regulation and criminalisation—about stigmatising people who have used this substance and want come forward and get support. Criminalisation will make them less likely to come forward. By criminalising, the Misuse of Drugs Act dissuades people, particularly women, from coming forward for help. The Government have said nothing tonight or in the impact assessment about whether people are less likely to come forward for medical support for having used the substance if they are criminalised.

Furthermore, if kids are using the drug, what support services do the Government intend to put in place to tackle addiction in that age group? If that is a problem, what is the Government’s specific response for addiction support for young people who abuse the drug? The Minister had nothing to say on that whatsoever.

Let me come to the position of Scotland on this issue. The Scottish Government responded to the ACMD report on the use of nitrous oxide and were crystal clear, saying:

“The Scottish government has and will continue to promote a public health approach, rather than continuing the failed war on drugs. It is our view that banning nitrous oxide will further criminalise people for their drug use, serving only to heap additional harms on vulnerable individuals, our young people and communities while doing little to improve the health of these individuals.”

The point about health is absolutely crucial. The Government have said nothing about the health impacts of the drug and intervening on it. What they have outlined in the impact assessment is the cost. They say, in an incredibly vague paragraph on page 15:

“Total costs across all monetised set up and ongoing costs are estimated to be between £19.6 to £178.1 million…with a central estimate of £67.9 million…over the 10-year appraisal period.”

That is an incredibly wide range. The Government, again, are not explaining exactly why they should pass the legislation. They also say at the top of page 19:

“There is limited evidence available to estimate how nitrous oxide misuse may change following the intervention.”

They want to spend tens of millions of pounds and they do not even know whether the intervention will have an impact.

Framing this issue under the Misuse of Drugs Act does not recognise tackling addiction as a public health issue. It is a public health issue. We cannot arrest our way out of a public health issue. It does not tackle the reasons why people are taking this drug in the first place, not does it tackle supply or public health. The Home Affairs Committee recently concluded in its report on drugs that the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 and the Misuse of Drugs Regulations 2001 require reform. The report says:

“We recommend that the UK Government reform the 1971 Act and 2001 Regulations in a way that promotes a greater role for public health in our response to drugs, whilst maintaining our law enforcement to tackling the illicit production and supply of controlled drugs.”

This SI does nothing about production and supply, and nothing about public health.

We are here tonight because the Government have decided that something must be done, and this is something. The Scottish National party opposes this SI and will vote against it tonight. It criminalises people at unclear cost. There is no sense of tackling the source, reducing demand or treating this as a public health issue. It is bang on form—if I may say so, Mr Deputy Speaker—that the Labour party is going along with this unevidenced drivel. In Scotland, we want a humane drug policy. We have a caring and compassionate human rights-informed drug policy for Scotland, but we do not yet have the powers to implement it. Until such time as the Scottish Government have full control over all our powers as a normal independent country, we seek the devolution of drug laws to allow us to deal with them as a public health issue, as they should be.

Economic Crime (Transparency and Enforcement) Bill

Debate between Alison Thewliss and Lloyd Russell-Moyle

Committee stage
Monday 7th March 2022 Commons Chamber

[Lloyd Russell-Moyle (Brighton, Kemptown) (Lab/Co-op)]

I am pleased to see the amendments that would lower the threshold to 10%. In the prelegislative scrutiny of the Registration of Overseas Entities Bill, the Government indicated that they were willing to lower that threshold through secondary legislation. Has the hon. Lady received word from the Government that they will now honour that promise that they made to us only a few years ago?

[Alison Thewliss]

I have not received that assurance from the Minister, but I would be glad to do so. The hon. Member for Brighton, Kemptown (Lloyd Russell-Moyle) and I served on that Bill Committee together, and a lot of the evidence that was given at the time still stands today. Many of the things we were warned about, such as shifting things into trusts, have happened, and the Government need to act on the warnings that they were given.

Turning to schedule 4, the register proposed in the Bill is not as transparent as the Scottish register, which will come into force on 1 April. Transparency International and the Chartered Institute of Taxation have said that the UK Government could learn from Scotland on this. As I say, Scotland’s register of persons holding a controlled interest in land in Scotland goes live on 1 April, and I would like to thank Jennifer Henderson, the Keeper of the Registers of Scotland, and her team of experts for taking the time to meet me last week to discuss this.

Transparency International has warned that this Government’s proposed register could not be as transparent as Scotland’s because the legislation as drafted does not require the disclosure of the ultimate beneficial owner of the property, but rather the disclosure of the beneficial owner of the overseas entity that in turn owns the property. Scotland’s register notes, per piece of land, who the beneficial owner of the land is. For example, it notes which companies have land registered to them, and who has significant control of those companies. I am sure that I could draw a diagram that would explain this better than my description, but my understanding is that if a holding company has five or six different pieces of land for three oligarchs, the Scottish register would show which oligarch each piece of land belonged to, but that the register as laid out in this Bill would not. I ask the UK Government to consider taking a lesson from Scotland, to speak to Registers of Scotland and to review changes such as this, so that we can properly understand who owns what.

The Chartered Institute of Taxation said that

“if the government’s aim is a public register of ownership of land it does not achieve this”.

It also said:

“The UK Government may also want to look at the Scottish approach which is to reveal the person who has ‘significant influence or control’ over the owner or long-lease tenant of land and property in Scotland.”

According to the Scottish Government, this means that

“it will be possible to look behind every category of entity in Scotland, including overseas entities and trusts, to see who controls land.”

Further to this, I would be grateful if the Minister could provide the clarification that the Law Society of Scotland has asked for on the way in which the two registers will interact, on how any disputes will be resolved—including on what is registered and what takes precedence—and on whether any additional resource will be provided directly from the UK Government to Registers of Scotland so that it can continue this work.

It is vital that Companies House reform does not slip off the agenda. We would have pressed new clause 4 to a vote, had it not been so similar in intention to the official Opposition’s new clause 7. It is unfortunate that all we are getting on Companies House will be a White Paper. We have already had extensive consultation on this, and we know the problems. They are obvious, and the Government have no excuse for not acting on them today.

Health and Social Care Levy

Debate between Alison Thewliss and Lloyd Russell-Moyle

1st reading
Wednesday 8th September 2021 Commons Chamber

[Alison Thewliss]

What the hon. Gentleman fails to understand is that we are starting from very different points. He does not acknowledge that, and he does not understand it.

The response from equality and anti-poverty groups has been absolutely damning. The Women’s Budget Group has said:

“We believe there is a fairer way to fund social care. This is because, as they currently stand NICs are more regressive than income tax—with a lower threshold at which payments start, and a higher rate threshold beyond which employees pay a lower rate.”

The Resolution Foundation has described the policy as “generationally unfair”. Paul Johnson of the IFS has said:

“Remains the case pensioners will pay next to nothing for this social care package—overwhelmingly to be paid by working age employees”.

[Lloyd Russell-Moyle (Brighton, Kemptown) (Lab/Co-op)]

There are many ways in which this policy could have been made progressive, one of which would have been to look at the upper threshold for national insurance, which has not been addressed. A young graduate will now have a marginal tax rate higher than a rich Conservative on the Government Benches.

[Alison Thewliss]

The hon. Gentleman makes an excellent point. For young people who have perhaps struggled through this year, who have graduated and who are going out into the world of work, it is a real hammer blow to their prospects.

Many families are already facing a historic £1,040 cut to their annual incomes and are staring down the barrel of impending cuts to universal credit and working tax credit. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation has described the new levy as adding “insult to injury”. The New Economics Foundation has calculated that 2.5 million working households will be affected by the £20 a week cut to universal credit and the increase in national insurance. On average, they will lose out by £1,290 in the next financial year. Working households are doing their very best to put food on the table and support their children, and this cruel UK Tory Government caw the legs from under them.

Parental Involvement in Teaching: Equality Act

Debate between Alison Thewliss and Lloyd Russell-Moyle

Tuesday 25th June 2019 Commons Chamber

[Lloyd Russell-Moyle (Brighton, Kemptown) (Lab/Co-op)]

I grew up in a relatively white, and middle-class we could say, suburb of Brighton: a town called Lewes. The people of Lewes will hate me calling it a suburb of Brighton, but it is. And I could have lived my life as a child never really interacting with people of different faiths, and never really interacting with and learning about different kinds of family units. I grew up in a family of a mum and a dad who were married before I was born and who remain married now, but the reason why I understand that there are different family units and people of different religions is that from the very get-go at school we read books and were told stories about different families. When the school was going to introduce a book about a child who was perhaps Muslim, it did not call an all-parents meeting to consult and say, “We’re going to be introducing a book which will introduce a character this semester or term who might not quite look like the kind of characters that you see every day in Lewes.” No, the school got on with it, and parents accepted it because leadership was shown not just by schools but by many people in the community making it clear that that was the right thing to do.

These are often rather mundane books. Many of these stories and educational methods are pretty mundane and may be about a mermaid or two penguins, or whatever the particular story is about; they are not actually that exciting. When they are being introduced, do I expect the headteacher to have to call an all-parents assembly to consult on that particular fiction book that is going to be introduced, and which is at the right reading level and of course is generally appropriate for those children? No, I do not. Actually, I think it is rather dangerous to expect teachers to have to teach on that basis. It would be ridiculous if they had to call an all-school assembly every time they wanted to introduce something new in biology, for example, or if they were going to teach arithmetic this month rather than just equations.

The approach that we need to adopt in treating this issue is one of talking about all the different ways the world works through storytelling and narrative telling. This is not about telling individuals what goes in and what goes out; it is about talking about what love means. That is also important for keeping our children safe. If we do not teach children the basic facts about what appropriate relationships are, what friendships mean by comparison with loving relationships, or how relationships between adults differ from relationships between children, we allow them to be vulnerable to predators, either at that young age or later on in life.

[Alison Thewliss (Glasgow Central) (SNP)]

The hon. Gentleman is making a really excellent speech. My daughter has just come back from school—the Scottish schools finish up pretty soon—with a whole bundle of things that she has learned in primary 1. A lot of that is about relationships and it is pretty basic stuff. Does he agree that if some children in a class are not taught the same things as all the others, they will find out about them from the other children in the class anyway? They might as well all get the same information and a good, responsible education from their teachers.

[Lloyd Russell-Moyle]

Quite! We all know how the game of Chinese whispers works, and the danger is that if children learn things second hand, the message will have been garbled or lost by the time it reaches the third child down. If we are going to teach our children about these ideas of respect and if we are going to keep them safe, we need to do that in a whole way.

I was taught by my parents that of course it did not matter who you fell in love with. I can remember as a child hearing nursery rhymes about falling in love with different groups of people. That is the kind of family I grew up in, and I feel very proud to have had parents who introduced those concepts. My sister is a happily married heterosexual, and she had those songs sung to her as well when she was young. They did not make me gay, but they made me feel comfortable with who I was. Let us be honest, however. Parents are loving, but there is no qualification to be a parent. There are some good parents and some bad parents. My mother is a linguist and an English teacher, but she knows absolutely nothing about physics or maths—she dropped out of science at GCSE—and if I had been taught science by my mother, I would not have been able to go on to do my physics and chemistry A-levels, as I did. We understand that parents are the primary lovers of their children, but they are not always the best people to give them a holistic, rounded education, because they have not experienced all the different elements and aspects of the world.

People in positions of responsibility, whether they are teachers or Members of Parliament, have a responsibility in these debates to show leadership. It was the Labour Government between 1997 and 2010 who showed leadership. If we had followed the mob and listened to what the opinion polls were saying at the time, it is unlikely that we would have made much progress at all on LGBT rights. We would not have made progress on abolishing section 28, for example, because Brian Souter was busy ploughing money in to garner public opinion in one way. We as politicians have to recognise that public opinion can be whipped up by dangerous forces, and we have a moral responsibility to sometimes make a judgment, not on whether there has been consultation—that was a totally vacuous argument that had no content to it—but on the content of the objections, to analyse and review them. That is something that the hon. Member for Birmingham, Hall Green (Mr Godsiff) has failed to do in this debate even once. Not once did he articulate the problems with the content of the curriculum.