First World War: Empire and Commonwealth Troops

Baroness Benjamin Excerpts

Monday 4th June 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Benjamin (LD)]

My Lords, I too thank the noble Lord, Lord Lexden, for securing this important debate, especially in the light of the recent unfortunate events surrounding the Windrush generation. I declare an interest as a patron of the Windrush Foundation.

In the 1950s, when I was a child in school in Trinidad, each day we would line up in the playground, dressed in our neat school uniform and sing “God Save the Queen”. We were proud to do this as we had been educated to believe that we were British. We had learned all about British history, British heroes, poets and writers. We were never told anything about our African roots and how we came to be in the Caribbean. For centuries this was a similar experience for millions of people across the Commonwealth, who felt British, swore allegiance to the motherland and bravely fought for her security, safety and prosperity. Britain was confident it could call on fighters and protectors from what was then called the Empire.

World War I is often depicted as a war bravely fought by white soldiers, but a bit of determined research shows us that there were thousands of black and Asian soldiers in World War I. As the West India Committee archives show, the British Army has for centuries recruited soldiers from all corners of the Empire and transported them to far-flung corners of the globe to fight under the British flag. My family were part of that recruitment, and my two uncles fought and died for Britain in the Second World War.

When World War I began, many West Indians, from almost every British Caribbean island, patriotically volunteered to fight for Britain, joining the British West Indies Regiment. They were generally used as construction troops and field attendants. In doing so, they sustained heavy losses. In Palestine and Jordan the British West Indies Regiment saw front-line service against the Turkish army. In France, Egypt and Italy the men served in auxiliary roles. Although at first they had to face racial abuse, they soon became admired for their courage, physical strength and tenacity. Many received medals for bravery or were mentioned in dispatches.

By the end of World War I more than 15,500 West Indians had joined up and served with the allied forces. They experienced military service in Italy, Egypt, India, France, Belgium, Palestine and Iraq, as well as east Africa. Records show the British West Indies Regiment fought during the Somme offensive in September 1916. Although many died and many more were wounded or spent years as prisoners of war, their sacrifice was largely ignored. Most history books do little to acknowledge the contribution of Commonwealth soldiers in World War I.

Many injured soldiers were cared for by the heroic Jamaican nurse Mary Seacole, whose long overdue statue I unveiled in 2016. It stands across the river from here, looking at Parliament from the grounds of St Thomas’ Hospital. Some of the wounded Commonwealth troops she cared for were brought back to Britain to convalesce and many of them continued to live and work here decades before the “Empire Windrush” arrived in 1948 with Caribbean passengers, including ex-service men and women.

The contribution of Commonwealth soldiers is unquestioned and should be commemorated. In 2002 I produced a television programme about the construction of the Commonwealth Memorial Gates, which stand at the top of Constitution Hill. The noble Baroness, Lady Flather, was instrumental in their creation. The gates are a beautiful memorial—a true legacy—and I suggest that it might be fitting to hold a commemorative service there this year, with the Prime Minister and other government Ministers attending. Will the Minister tell the House whether this is something the Government might consider?

Furthermore, it might be appropriate to use the 70th anniversary year of the arrival of the “Empire Windrush” as a focal point to recognise the dedication, bravery and sacrifice Caribbean and Commonwealth people have made and continue to make to Britain, by establishing 22 June as an annual “Windrush Day”. I look forward to hearing the Minister’s reply.

Social Media: News

Baroness Benjamin Excerpts

Thursday 11th January 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Benjamin (LD)]

My Lords, I too congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, on her sterling work and on securing this important debate. I declare an interest as vice-president of the charity Barnardo’s, which in 2004 produced the first ever publication in the UK to address growing concern about the ways in which children and young people may be at risk of harm online. Just One Click outlined the ways in which children were sexually exploited using the internet and mobile phones. Some were forced to pose for abusive photographs. Others were subject to sexual assault broadcast live via pay-per-view websites.

Barnardo’s 2015 report Digital Dangers recommended that there needs to be an assessment of products, such as games and apps—both those currently in use and those in development—to ensure there are safeguards in place to prevent children being harmed. This should include manufacturers providing evidence that every effort has been made to ensure that children are safeguarded.

Each day, every nine minutes, a web page shows a child being sexually abused. To combat this harrowing crime, countries need to work together on an international level. I appreciate the challenges that social media companies face daily to monitor content. On an average day Facebook has 1 billion users sharing photos, live videos and messages in a vast variety of languages. However, in 2017 it came to light, through a BBC investigation, that Facebook failed to remove up to 80% of images that were reported by users as containing sexual images of children. By failing to adequately address harmful content, or put in place effective mechanisms of reporting, corporations are blatantly avoiding the moral responsibility to protect those vulnerable children and young people in our society.

Last month, an investigation by the Times revealed that child sex abuse images continue to be published on YouTube. I hope the Minister will be able to tell the House how this material can continue to be available in the light of the role of the Internet Watch Foundation? I hope he will also set out how the accessibility of this type of material will be affected by a number of new policy initiatives.

First, will YouTube come within the scope of the social media code of practice that is proposed as part of the internet safety strategy and, if so, how will the code constrain similar content? Secondly, will the children’s age-appropriate design code, which will be introduced after the Data Protection Bill becomes law, reduce the amount of this sort of material on YouTube—a site that is so popular with many young people? Thirdly, how will the BBFC tackle this sort of material in its role as age-verification regulator under the Digital Economy Act 2017?

In 2016 and 2017, I raised the question of how social media and media sites would be treated under the Digital Economy Act. In her evidence in 2016 to the Lords Select Communications Committee, on which I sit, the noble Baroness, Lady Shields, stated:

“Twitter is a user-generated uploading-content site. If there is pornography on Twitter, it will be considered covered under ancillary services”.


We know that a vast amount of pornography shown on media sites is user-generated. I should be grateful if the Minister would update the House on the remit of the regulator in relation to user-generated content on YouTube channels and other social media. How is it coming along?

The Government have made a good start, first with the Digital Economy Act 2017, publishing the Internet Safety Strategy Green Paper, and working with the tech industry. However, for us to become the safest place in the world for children and young people online, we need to create a culture where social media and online platforms act ethically and feel a sense of social responsibility, integrity and morality when creating, maintaining and updating platforms, and are subsequently held to account. For the sake of the future, let us put children’s well-being first.

Online Gambling

Baroness Benjamin Excerpts

Thursday 23rd November 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Benjamin (LD)]

My Lords, I, too, congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Browne, on securing this important debate. I am pleased to be able to speak in the debate because many people have contacted me to raise their concerns about children becoming addicted to online gambling and being targeted for this abuse. To fully comprehend the situation that children are being lured into, think of how children are offered free drugs at the school gates by drug dealers to get them hooked. This can be compared to children and young people being targeted to gamble online. I was shocked and horrified when I looked online and saw how the nation’s children are being targeted. Gambling addiction is not given the attention that it desperately needs, like drugs and alcohol abuse, especially in relation to young people, yet it is just as disastrous and much more common than a lot of people think, sadly with an alarming suicide rate.

Gambling addiction devastates lives. It goes under the radar and is extremely embarrassing for victims, especially for pre-teens and teenagers in secondary school. As they have no income, pupils are often cornered into stealing for a stake—it produces out-of-character actions that will impact negatively on their home and school life. The organisation Odds/Off has set up a gambling awareness and abuse prevention programme and has found that nine out of 10 problem gamblers started gambling between the ages of 11 and 16 and did not understand the severity and reality of this dependency until it was too late.

My concern is how easily children become involved in online gambling. Believe it or not, it is surprisingly easy for a young person to download a gambling app, open an account and start actively gambling. All they have to do is lie about their age. It is rare for gambling companies to ask for any form of photo ID until the user attempts to withdraw winnings, yet they can credit their account with unlimited funds without photo ID. This means that, as long as the child is losing their or their parents’ money to the bookmakers, the gambling company will not make any attempt to stop them. This has to change.

Before I get on to the facts and figures, I want to raise an important point of policy, which I hope the Minister will respond to. The question is: where does the responsibility for protecting children from online gambling-related harm lie in the current flurry of strategy documents that are being published? The Government’s Consultation on Proposals for Changes to Gaming Machines and Social Responsibility Measures says at paragraph 5.11:

“The Government is committed to ensuring young and vulnerable people are protected from gambling-related harm—both online and offline”.


It goes on to refer to the recently published internet safety strategy Green Paper as addressing,

“the responsibilities of companies to their users, the use of technical solutions to prevent online harms and government’s role in supporting users”.

However, there is little mention of online gambling harm in the Green Paper. I am concerned that there is a risk that the protection of children from the harms of gambling online will fall through the gap and that this aspect of regulation will not receive the attention that it fully deserves.

Why should I be concerned about this? Because, as the Government acknowledge in their Green Paper,

“there is an association between early gambling participation and problem gambling in adulthood”.

Statistics published by the Gambling Commission on 14 November show that public trust in gambling is falling dramatically. It says:

“There are also significant public concerns about the volume, nature and scheduling of gambling advertising and the impact this could have on future generations”.


We should be concerned about what is happening to our children now and the impact that it could have on them in later life. According to figures published in 2016, more young people are gambling than are smoking or drinking. Not all of the gambling is online, but some of it is. Some 3% of 11 to 15 year-olds have spent their own money on online gambling, but 6% have gambled online using their parents’ accounts, either with or without permission. Even if children are not gambling online, they are seeing adverts for gambling online. Some 63% of 11 to 15 year-olds have seen gambling ads on social media and 57% have seen them on other websites; 9% of young people are following gambling companies on social media.

Gambling seeps into our children’s consciousness. Some of this enticement is very subtle. An investigation by the Times in October revealed that more than 30 online gambling games targeted children through the cunning use of children’s storybook characters, cartoons and things that are relevant to them in their life, such as sporting heroes, especially football stars. Some of the products did not involve real money and were a fairly blatant example of the online gambling industry trying to entice our children into gambling. Professor Mark Griffiths of the International Gaming Research Unit at Nottingham Trent University has said:

“Research has shown that when we look at those children who are problem gamblers, the number one risk factor is playing games online for free”.


I welcome the joint letter of 20 October from the Gambling Commission, the Advertising Standards Authority, the Committee of Advertising Practice and the Remote Gambling Association, all saying that action would be taken against such ads. But, like many others in this House and the general public, I am concerned that letters such as this are just not going far enough and that more effective action is needed. I refer again to the Government’s gambling paper, which says:

“The Government is clear that on gambling advertising, as with other aspects of social responsibility, more should be done by operators and others who benefit from gambling to minimise the risks to vulnerable people”.


The Government are consulting on a number of proposals to give more teeth to the Gambling Commission’s licensing code if there are breaches to the industry’s advertising codes. However, I question whether these actions go far enough. One of the three licensing objectives in the Gambling Act 2005 is,

“protecting children and other vulnerable persons from being harmed or exploited by gambling”.

Given that, why are the Government not prepared to go further and amend the Gambling Act to make it an offence to provide any form of game for children that involves the act of gambling, even if the currency is not real money? Perhaps the Minister can tell the House why this option is not being pursued. Can he also tell the House how the Government are ensuring that the current regulatory framework provides sufficient protection to children at a time when gambling and online safety are under the spotlight once again?

I am concerned that the industry does not seem sufficiently motivated to address any of these issues. It would be far more effective for the Government to use their regulatory powers in Section 123 of the Gambling Act 2005 to introduce a statutory levy. This money would have to be sufficient to meet the needs of Britain’s 430,000 problem gamblers and to develop preventive measures to help the further 2 million people who the Gambling Commission says are at risk. More important, the Government must also ensure that sufficient attention is given to preventing children and young people from becoming addicted to online gambling and protecting them from the long-term misery associated with it. It is our moral duty to do so because, let us not forget, childhood lasts a lifetime. So this debate is a wake-up call—to parents, teachers, the Government, the industry; in fact, to the whole of society—if we truly care about our children’s future and want to save them from falling into the pit of despair of addictive gambling abuse. Let us work together to protect and safeguard our children and young people from online gambling abusers.