Online Harms

Debate between Andrew Percy and Edward Leigh

Wednesday 7th October 2020 Westminster Hall

[Andrew Percy]

It is absolutely shocking. It should not take legislation to deal with it; it is obvious that the content should not be there. We need the Government to legislate, as I shall come on to in a moment, but it takes no brain surgeon to figure this stuff out. Sadly, too many platforms do not do enough.

Then of course there was the shocking Wiley incident, when he was tweeting on average every 87 seconds, which is incredible. There were 600 tweets, on a conservative estimate, which were seen online by more than 47 million people, of vile antisemitic abuse. Let us just consider some examples of it. He tweeted:

“If you work for a company owned by 2 Jewish men and you challenge the Jewish community in anyway of course you will get fired.”

Another one was:

“Infact there are 2 sets of people who nobody has really wanted to challenge #Jewish & #KKK but being in business for 20 years you start to undestand why:”

Then—something completely disgusting:

“Jewish people you think you are too important I am sick of you”

and

“Jewish people you make me sick and I will not budge”.

It took days. As I said, it took, at a conservative estimate, 600 tweets before anything was done about it. Instagram videos were posted. When one platform closed it down it ended up elsewhere. That is despite all the terms and conditions in place.

Enforcement is, sadly, all too invisible, as the hon. Member for Cardiff South and Penarth (Stephen Doughty) has highlighted, with regard to Radio Aryan. I was pleased that Wiley was stripped of his honour, but he should never have been able to get into the position of being able to spout that bile for so long. The best we have been able to do is strip him of an honour. It is completely and utterly unacceptable.

There is a similar problem with other platforms. I want to talk briefly about BitChute. It is an alternative platform, but we see the same old tropes there. Videos get millions of views there. It is a nastier version of YouTube—let us be honest—with videos in the name of the proscribed group National Action, a channel, for example, with the name “Good Night Jewish Parasite”, livestreaming of terrorist content, racist videos about Black Lives Matter protesters and much more; but it is a UK-based platform with UK directors, and while action is taken against individual videos there is, sadly, not enough recourse. Given the time limits, I shall quickly ask two questions and make two comments on legislation and where we are heading.

The online harms White Paper suggested a number of codes of practice, and that seems to have been rowed away from somewhat in recent weeks and months, so that there will be reliance, instead, on the terms and conditions. I do not think that that is enough. I hope that the Minister will confirm that enforceable codes of action will flow. I hope that also if she has some time she will perhaps meet me, and the Antisemitism Policy Trust and other partners, to discuss the matter in more detail.

Will the Minister consider introducing senior management liability for social media companies? The German model for fines is often talked about, but it has not worked. The maximum fine so far issued in Germany is, I think, two million dollars or pounds, which is nothing for Facebook. It can afford to build that into its programme.

There is plenty more I could have said—I am conscious of the time—but I hope the Minister will commit to meet with us and respond to those two points.

[Sir Edward Leigh (in the Chair)]

I remind Members that unless we keep to four minutes, we will not get everybody in.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Andrew Percy and Edward Leigh

Monday 16th January 2017 Commons Chamber

[Andrew Percy]

I would be delighted to meet the hon. Gentleman. The business rate revaluation will have a positive impact for his constituents, and I discussed the issue of high street regeneration with the chair of his local enterprise partnership, Christine Gaskell, just before Christmas, but I am more than happy to meet him to discuss that. We are also looking at proposals that we are working up with Revo on how we can share best practice, because this is very much a varied picture across the country.

[Sir Edward Leigh (Gainsborough) (Con)]

14. Our small market towns are being stripped of their banks: there is no bank now in Caistor, and Market Rasen is down to one. What is the Minister’s policy to try to encourage more competition in the retail banking sector so that we can try to encourage banking in our rural towns?

[Andrew Percy]

This is an important point—the issue has affected my constituency—and one that I am happy to discuss further with the Treasury. The business rate revaluation will have a positive impact on retail property in my hon. Friend’s constituency, as it will across many parts of the north and midlands.

EU Membership (UK Renegotiation)

Debate between Andrew Percy and Edward Leigh

Tuesday 5th January 2016 Westminster Hall

[Sir Edward Leigh (Gainsborough) (Con)]

My hon. Friend the Member for Kettering (Mr Hollobone) has given a consummate performance, in which he really summed up the arguments well. There is only time to give a few headlines. The first hero of this debate is, of course, our Prime Minister because, but for him, there would not be a debate. Even our heroine, Margaret Thatcher, never gave us a full referendum on Europe, so we should thank our current Prime Minister profusely for giving the British people the chance to make this historic decision. It will be a most interesting debate, and I will make one or two points about it.

First, the language should be relatively calm. Authoritative studies prove that leaving the EU, or staying in it, would make a difference of only 1% or 2% to gross national product, so leaving the EU would not be a great disaster that will cost 3 million jobs. If we leave the EU, I am not sure there will be an extraordinary nirvana. Let us have a measured debate and keep things in perspective.

Secondly, we do not want to have a debate based on nationalism. We Eurosceptics are not nationalists; we welcome political co-operation and friendship with all the nations of Europe. We welcome Poles, French and Italians coming to live and work here, but it has to be measured migration. Ultimately, when there is net migration of 300,000 into this country, the British Parliament has a right to try to make a decision on such matters.

This negotiation is a missed opportunity. My hon. Friend the Member for Kettering is probably right that perhaps a third of the population definitely want to leave, a third definitely want to stay and a third are in the middle. That last third probably want the comfort of remaining in some sort of relationship or partnership with the EU, but I believe they want to regain the supremacy of Parliament and regain control over fisheries, agriculture and, above all, migration. Given that we are the fifth largest economy in the world, and given that we are now a self-confident nation, we are no longer, as was the wartime generation, transfixed by the prospect of the loss of empire and the belief that we had to be part of a larger political union. We have moved on, and we are a self-confident, successful nation. I believe that we can create a dynamic, mid-Atlantic trading economy outside the EU that can move forward and increase prosperity for all our people. That is what I will be arguing in the EU referendum, and this debate is just one of the first steps along that path.

[Andrew Percy (in the Chair)]

We have two speakers left—I left some time for interventions—so there will be about four minutes for each speaker before I call the Front Benchers.

Parliamentary Representation

Debate between Andrew Percy and Edward Leigh

Thursday 27th February 2014 Commons Chamber

[Andrew Percy (Brigg and Goole) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart). I particularly agreed with the final part of her speech. She was entirely right to say that we do not always help ourselves in this place. For those of us who do not come from particularly political backgrounds—I did serve as a local councillor for a while, but that was very different from this job—the torrent of abuse that we often have to put up with and the invasion into what were previously perfectly normal lives can be difficult to take. It has made me question on more than one occasion whether I want to continue doing this.

This has been an interesting debate. As I intimated in my intervention on my hon. Friend the Member for Stourbridge (Margot James), I want to talk about social class. Much has been said about gender. This place is under-representative in terms of gender, race and sexuality, but it is also under-representative in terms of social class. That is not often spoken about. There is an intense debate about all-women shortlists. I have always come back at people by saying that there is little use in replacing a privately educated, middle-class man with a privately educated, middle-class woman if the person who misses out is, for example, a working-class, northern mechanic. That does not increase diversity in this place in any real sense.

The only tag that I am interested in applying to myself, apart from the Conservative tag for the purposes of the election, is a working-class tag. I am proud to be from a working-class background. I am the son of a school secretary and a foundry worker. My dad lost his job in the recession of the early ’90s and we spent a considerable period on benefits. He later got a job as a market gardener, which he still does at 69 years of age. I could not have asked for more loving or hard-working parents.

I attended a local comprehensive school in Hull. It was so bad that it was closed down twice. I am probably the one and only Member of Parliament who will come from that school.

I come from a completely non-political background. Most of my family voted Labour. I had a great-granddad who was apparently something of a communist agitator in the ’30s. He was the only political person in my family. The rest of them were Liberals, apart from my grandma, who was a Tory.

I am proud of that background. I am also proud to be the first member of my family to go to university. My parents were the first generation in my family to buy their own home. My grandparents all grew up and lived until they died in social housing or private rented housing. We are all the sum total of our experiences. I am proud of that background, not that I like to whine on about it too much.

I have also been a teacher, which makes me very unusual—a working-class, northern Tory from the public sector. My last workplace was a primary school and that was very under-representative as well, but in that case it was men who were under-represented. It is not only this place that needs to do more to be representative.

Without wanting to whine on, let me say a little about the challenges and difficulties of getting here for someone who comes from a normal background and does not have any money behind them. I was lucky in that I ended up on the parliamentary A-list. I always joke that it was because I turned up for the interview in a frock, but it was not. I hope it was because the party saw that I was working-class—I will not say normal; we will leave others to judge that—and from a profession that was not well represented on these Benches. However, that was largely irrelevant to me because I would have been able to stand in my area as a local candidate.

I was lucky that the selection processes for 2010 had changed somewhat, but in all parties our selection processes still favour people who come from a certain professional or educational background. At many difficult comprehensive schools, pupils simply keep their heads down and try to get on with surviving school, rather than putting themselves forward for things that might exist in other places such as debating societies—not at my school—or wanting to be something called a head boy or a prefect. We did not have anything like that. In many difficult inner-city comprehensive schools, pupils simply keep their heads down and get used to not raising them above the parapet, but the selection process for getting to this place is the complete opposite.

Selection used to be a case of having to make set-piece speeches—who does that benefit? As a school teacher, I was okay doing that; I just thought I was speaking to a load of five-year-olds—actually, they are more frightening that the selection executives of local Conservative associations. However, it certainly feeds into the fact that a lawyer or a barrister will be more used to doing that kind of thing and feel more comfortable with it. We must recognise that the processes sometimes have an in-built advantage for certain people.

[Sir Edward Leigh]

My hon. Friend is not making a speech against the selection of old Etonians is he?

[Andrew Percy]

No, not at all. I am making a speech in favour of ensuring that we select the best people, and create processes that allow the best people—from whatever background or social class—to come forward and succeed.

A lot of the time, we end up with non-local professionals who come in and take the seats. They often do a very good job, but that sometimes disadvantages local candidates whose hearts may be a bit more in their local area. As somebody who came to this with no personal or family wealth, I spent three and a half to four years as a candidate fighting for a marginal seat and not knowing whether at the end I would achieve my aim of getting elected to Parliament. That is a big risk that would put off many people, particularly if they have small children.

The financial commitment is huge. I was lucky to have a very supportive association, and to get a lot of support from the Conservative party, for which I am grateful. I had a really good chairman and agent, Councillor Rob Waltham, who was there to provide support where necessary. One of my local councillors, Caroline Fox, lives round the corner from me, and I would not have survived the three and a half years without her constant support, whether in the form of meals or saying, “I’ll give you a hand in the house,” or whatever. I would not have got here without people such as them.

The time commitment and the impact it has on a career is massive. As I said, I was a school teacher, but I started teaching part time in order to try to achieve my aim of winning the constituency from the sitting Member. That has a massive financial impact, and an impact on my career. Had I not won the seat I would have been greatly disadvantaged and gone back to teaching part time in the primary school where I was when I was elected. That is a great job to have, but it would have left me financially much worse off.