Counter-Extremism Strategy
Baroness Fox of Buckley Excerpts(4 days, 5 hours ago)
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Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
I am grateful for the question and the way in which the noble Lord put it. Again, I am slightly constrained in outlining the conclusions of the review before it has been completed. But let me say to him that online extremism and online radicalisation, whatever forum they come from, are extremely important issues and will be a focus of government. Going back to the point my noble friend made earlier, we have to look at a cross-government strategy on this; what happens in communities through local government departments, for example, is as important in preventing radicalisation as what the Home Office and the security services do, and we need to be aware of that. When the conclusions are published and my right honourable friend the Home Secretary has announced and opined on them, I will be able to report back to this House in more detail.
Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)
My Lords, I am sure that Ministers and Members on the Government Benches remember the election in July fondly. But lest we forget, it was marred by ugly episodes of intimidation and harassment. Can the Minister update us on promises from the Home Secretary to specifically investigate, for example, the openly anti-Semitic supporters and red paint-wielding pro-Palestine activists hounding and abusing candidates and canvassers alike? In the context of attempts to use fear to distort election results, can the Minister outline which of the recommendations for safeguarding democracy in the review by the noble Lord, Lord Walney, will be enacted, and when?
Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
There is a Defending Democracy Taskforce comprising a number of Ministers, led by my honourable friend Dan Jarvis, the Minister with responsibility for security and counterterrorism. It is reviewing a range of issues and working across government to ensure that the integrity of elections is maintained. By “integrity” I mean elections being free of interference from abroad and from intimidation at home. I hope that will help satisfy the noble Baroness.
Hezbollah: Threat to the United Kingdom
Baroness Fox of Buckley Excerpts(2 weeks, 5 days ago)
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Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)
I thank the noble Lord, Lord Godson. I would like to follow his excellent introduction by raising concerns about the very same ideological threat posed by Hezbollah to the UK that we just heard about. It is extraordinary how normalised it has become at demonstrations on UK streets that, alongside aggressive, inflammatory anti-Israel chants, we are likely to see placards or hear slogans lauding Hezbollah as freedom fighters and rebranding its recently killed, warmonger leader Nasrallah as a brave warrior. We might ask: are such attitudes solely the spontaneous reactions to a brutal geopolitical conflict?
Something that might give us pause for thought are the words of Mohammad Raad, head of the Hezbollah group in Lebanon’s parliament, who boasted in an interview with Russia Today in June:
“We’re currently investing in protests and demonstrations in Western countries, especially among college students. We already have Muslim students agitating, but it’s the Western students themselves who will destabilize their own countries”.
No doubt there is a bit of hyperbole here, but it is really chilling to hear this explicit threat to the stability of western society, and it needs to be taken seriously. Can the Minister respond to the claim that Hezbollah is investing in demonstrations in the West? Do the Government have any knowledge of such financial support for UK street protests and campus encampments?
There seems to be a concerted attempt by agitators to give popular legitimacy to proscribed organisations, such as Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis and so on, whose USP is the destruction of Israel and whose propaganda is dripping in visceral anti-Semitism. Can the Minister explain how the criminal offence of supporting a proscribed organisation such as Hezbollah is understood? When it is so brazenly vocalised on our streets, but seemingly ignored by the police or authorities, it causes public confusion.
I am resistant to criminalising such verbal support, not only because of the importance of freedom of speech—one of those western values that Hezbollah and other Islamists want to destroy—but because I think we need more speech to counter this threat. If pro-Hezbollah propagandists are agitating on campus, we need to join that battle of ideas to win hearts and minds; but it feels like there is some inconsistency here. The Government seem unabashed at calling out some forms of extremism—rather promiscuously, in my view, calling too many people far right—but where is the high-profile government campaign to name and shame and expose the ideas of those peddling Hezbollah et al’s hateful anti-Jewish ideologies?
In a week that has witnessed the daubing of red paint on Jewish charities, for God’s sake, and respectable opinion calling for boycotts of Jewish authors, perhaps we must take more seriously the bigotry being peddled in the West and realise just how urgent it is that we tackle radical Islamist ideas in public.
Violent Disorder
Baroness Fox of Buckley Excerpts(2 months, 3 weeks ago)
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Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
I am grateful for the noble Lord’s welcome to me coming to this position. The Member for Clacton, if that was the Member he was referring to, is responsible for his own comments, in his own way and in his own time. He should be held to account by people in Clacton and by the wider community for any comments he makes. It is not for me to comment on that; it is for him to make those comments. What I will say is that, whenever things happen—as they do—we need to look at, and take action on, that criminal behaviour and close it down. Sometimes, it happens with summer activity, with people having too much to drink over long nights; sometimes, it is fuelled by right-wing violence and, other times, it is fuelled by other activity. If, underneath that, there are long-term trends of Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, right-wing ideology or, indeed, extreme left-wing ideology, we need to look, in a cold, calm way, at what has caused that, how we deal with it, how—following the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe—we intelligently police it and, ultimately, how we bring people to court if they have committed criminal offences. What Ministers can do is put the architecture together for that. The Prime Minister has been trying to look at the lessons learned from the initial response, which surprised many of us in that week after Southport, to see how we can improve that response and listen to what the police say about their own lessons. If that involves action by the Home Office in support of policing, that is what we will do.
Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)
My Lords, I know that the Government are very conscious of the UK’s international reputation. I want to know whether there is any ministerial concern about the many free speech and civil liberties organisations around the world expressing shock about the degree of state- backed censorship being greenlighted in the wake of the riots. There is a worry that there is too easy a slippage and conflation between physical violence, which we can all condemn, and speech offences. The majority of people have not been incarcerated for incitement. They may have put out bigoted memes that we can deplore; none the less, people in the UK are being imprisoned not for what they do but for what they say. As there seem to be threats of more censorship, I want the Minister to reassure me that we will not end up in a situation where these riots, which were tragic enough, will chill legitimate debate and lead to a censorious, authoritarian atmosphere where people are frightened to speak freely.
Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
There is freedom of speech, and I made it very clear in the wake of the riots that people are entitled to criticise the UK Government’s asylum policy, immigration policy or any aspect of UK government policy. What they are not entitled to do is to incite racial hatred, to incite criminal activity, to incite attacks on mosques or to incite burnings or other criminal, riotous behaviour. That is the threshold. The threshold is not me saying, “I do not like what they have said”—there are lots of things that I do not like that people have said; the threshold is determined by criminal law, is examined by the police and is referred to the CPS. The CPS examines whether there is a criminal charge to account for, which is then either made through a guilty plea and a sentence, which happened with the majority of people who now face time in prison, or put in front of a court for a jury of 12 peers to determine whether an offence has been committed. There is no moratorium on criticism of political policy in the United Kingdom. There is free speech in this United Kingdom, but free speech also has responsibilities, and one responsibility is not to incite people to burn down their neighbour’s property.
King’s Speech
Baroness Fox of Buckley Excerpts(4 months ago)
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Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)
My Lords, I give a warm welcome to the noble Lord, Lord Hanson of Flint. I went to school in Flint, so there is a special connection there. Also, I am full of hope listening to how the noble Lord, Lord Timpson, handled the earlier Statement on the prison crisis, especially on hearing his previous knowledge of and engagement with the nearly 3,000 IPP prisoners still languishing in jail indefinitely. A friendly warning: the Minister should expect to be pestered by many of us on this issue until Parliament’s admitted mistake—an actual miscarriage of justice—is put right.
This focus on prisoners is pertinent while discussing criminal justice in a debate on the humble Address. As legislators, we should be suitably humble about nodding through laws that can potentially imprison ever-greater numbers of our fellow citizens and turn erstwhile innocent people into criminals for activities that have to date been lawful. In that context, the proposal for the full trans-inclusive ban on conversion practices, as we have heard, is worrying. The law is unnecessary, as gay and trans people are already protected by existing laws from those vile abuses described by campaigners for the legislation. The dread is that, instead, we risk criminalising medical staff, teachers, therapists, religious support workers, even parents—and even free speech—for helping gender-confused young people and not simply affirming the disquieting and wrong-headed notion that they are born in the wrong body. Meanwhile, hard-pressed shopkeepers in the future could be punished for selling tobacco products to a 28 year-old and a 27 year-old—one legally, the other illegally. This is a recipe for chaos, let alone creating a thriving black market in cigarettes. As a non-affiliated Peer, I look forward to lampooning this particularly daft law, pushed as a flagship piece of legislation by Rishi Sunak’s Conservative Government and now enthusiastically embraced by the new Labour Government.
Sometimes we should ask: are we creating new laws as a substitute for tackling deeper problems? In his speech on the humble Address, referring to the proposed crime and policing Bill, the Prime Minister declared that we will take back control of our streets. That is good, but how? By giving the police new powers, he says. But are the undoubted problems we have on our streets really because the police do not have enough powers? Would the recent grotesque and disturbing scenes of violence and rioting in Harehills really be solved by the police waving around those proposed new respect orders when, on the night, officers retreated from the streets of Leeds, seemingly abandoning the local community to frenzied criminality?
It is just not serious to suggest that you can solve the deep-seated cultural problem of declining respect in society—a crisis of authority, as it were—by resurrecting those discredited Blairite ASBOs, rebranded as respect orders. What is more, over recent years there has been a proliferation of these quasi-criminal behaviour orders, about 30 at the last count, yet anti-social behaviour is soaring. In terms of civil liberties, these behaviour orders do not specify particular offences, which means that the police can use them in a subjective, expansive and arbitrary fashion, often reinforcing a sense of unfair two-tier policing. On the night of the Euros final, the Met issued a killjoy anti-social behaviour dispersal order banning football fans from the Westminster area, yet it claims that it does not have enough powers to disperse Just Stop Oil or pro-Gaza activists from anti-social disruption here at Westminster on a regular basis.
Finally, it is only weeks since we witnessed one of the most chilling examples of out-of-control streets. That was, sadly, in the build-up to the general election. We saw unprecedented levels of ugly intimidation that mired electoral campaigning. To give a few examples: a trembling rabbi, a Conservative candidate, was surrounded by a hostile mob, screamed at and called a snake; a Labour candidate was hounded off the streets to chants of “Zionist devil”; young female leafleteers were harassed and filmed by older men bellowing “genocide” in their faces; tyres were slashed; campaign offices were daubed with blood-red painted anti-Semitic libel, “Zionist child killer”. This Islamist sectarianism that has burst into public life and poisoned the democratic process must be confronted, not by laws but by courage. Those who try to silence concerns with the accusation of Islamophobia ignore that many Muslims were themselves threatened with Allah’s wrath if they voted for Labour’s infidels. We cannot allow this menacing trend to be swept under the carpet, so it was gratifying to hear the maiden speech by the noble Lord, Lord Goodman, addressing extremism and to hear the Secretary of State, Shabana Mahmood, defiantly declare that:
“British politics must … wake up to what happened at this election”.
Hear, hear. Taking back control of our streets means more of this honest plain speaking and political leadership, and rather less of mealy-mouthed platitudes and performative lawmaking.