Town and Country Planning (Napier Barracks) Special Development Order 2021

Debate between Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb and Baroness Wheatcroft

Thursday 7th April 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Wheatcroft (CB)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, for raising this issue again and, as others have, I pay tribute to the Minister for the hard work she has done throughout this Session and hope that she has a very good Recess.

I speak on this issue because I regularly drive past Napier barracks and, even though there have been improvements—which the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham acknowledged—it is still an extraordinarily sorry sight. For anyone to be incarcerated there for more than a few days must be deeply depressing. Clearly, 12 to 14 people in a dormitory is better than the 26 who were originally there, but it is by no means perfect. The sooner we can get people out of Napier barracks, the better.

I have one specific question for the Minister about the people who are not at Napier barracks but are housed at nearby hotels: the youngsters and adolescent boys. At the height of the summer, those youngsters were in the hotel with windows closed and guards outside ensuring that no one came or left the premises. Can the Minister assure us that innocent children are no longer housed in accommodation such as that hotel with no means of getting fresh air, and that this will never be allowed to happen again in this country?

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, I spend my life in a state of barely supressed fury at the things which this Government do, particularly in their treatment of vulnerable people—whether they are poor, disabled or whatever. When it comes to asylum seekers and refugees, the Government surpass themselves in their cruelty and inhumanity, and I simply do not understand how anyone can accept that.

The High Court judgement was nearly a year ago— 3 June last year—so I ask the Minister: are we sure that, in Napier barracks, the reported intimidation and mistreatment does not happen anymore? Are the conditions still unsanitary and crowded, and are the standards and operational systems still unlawful? These are people who are traumatised. Where I live, we have been discussing what would happen if we got stormed by Russian tanks and, quite honestly, most of us feel that we would just up and run with whatever we could carry—and this is the condition which many of these people are in. Sometimes they have almost nothing; they are traumatised, possibly injured and damaged in all sorts of ways, psychologically and physically, yet we treat them like this. I do not know how it is acceptable; I really regret that we will pass that Nationality and Borders Bill and that we are just going to carry on treating them badly.

Elections Bill

Debate between Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb and Baroness Wheatcroft

Lords Hansard - Part 1 & Committee stage
Monday 28th March 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, on an extremely full exposition of his amendments, which makes me almost superfluous but I will add something anyway. The Minister is leaving, but I just say to him that the Government appear to want to get this excruciatingly poor Bill through before Prorogation. If they are going to do that, will they please accept some of the more sensible amendments so that the Bill contains some useful stuff that we can all use as politicians to make the whole process much fairer? The growing complexity of digital marketing makes online campaigning a major battleground for political dirty tricks; we all want to avoid that.

In 2019, political parties used data from Experian Marketing Services and Facebook to target specific campaign messages to individual voters. They also used Facebook services that allow advertisers to find customers similar to an existing group of customers. This allows targeting by age, location, interests, likes and a whole host of other personal data. The big risk of this, of course, is that political parties can promise anything to all people in a way that they could not before. We have politicians lying to our faces—the Prime Minister stands up and lies at the Dispatch Box. We all see him doing it; some of care and a lot of us do not. We can see it; it is happening. Now, however, there is an industry that would allow politicians to target their distortions of the truth on specific groups of people. The same candidate could target Brexit supporters with a pro-Brexit message, remain supporters with an anti-Brexit message and everyone else with a message saying that Brexit is a waste of time and we should all be getting on with more important things.

The threat to the integrity of our democracy is obvious; this is something we really do have to tackle. We need to move on with the times and be a bit more modern about accepting that we have a problem. There is a real risk that whichever party uses dodgy digital marketing in the most egregious and misleading ways will be most likely to win an election. We are at risk of a digital arms race in which truth and integrity are impediments to getting elected. I urge the Government to pick up at least some of these amendments, which would make our whole political system much clearer, cleaner and fairer.

[Baroness Wheatcroft (CB)]

My Lords, I support these amendments, so comprehensively introduced by the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, in particular Amendment 194B. It is clearly right that overseas actors should be specifically banned from interfering in our political process and publishing propaganda online. It is relatively easy for them to do that.

Clause 39 imposes a duty on those publishing election-related material to make clear the source of that material. The noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, has made clear that this is a loophole big enough for most people to get through; it is simply not enough. It would be naive in the extreme to assume that those who wish to influence our elections are not wily enough to circumvent these sorts of stipulations, and neither are they likely to be put off doing so by the fact that they would be breaking British law, as Amendment 194B would insist.

The bots that churned out online propaganda ahead of the referendum amounted to interference in our electoral process on an industrial scale. We cannot say categorically whether they affected the result, but we know they tried. Yet the Government have neither investigated what happened nor done anything that we can see to prevent such online terrorism. As the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, put it, “So far, so vague”.

As others have mentioned, the Russia report from the Intelligence and Security Committee was highly critical of the Government’s failure to examine what had happened and to take action, yet the Government continue to resist anything tangible. That is why a cross-party group of MPs and Peers, of which I am one, has filed a legal action to try to force our Government to investigate and protect the integrity of our electoral system. That action has today been filed with the European Court of Justice. It will, of course, take a while before it produces anything, and I hope that in the meantime the Government take action that would render such legal action—to prompt them into doing what they should do—unnecessary.

Does the Minister believe that Clause 39, even with this amendment, will prevent malign interference in the UK’s electoral process? Does he really believe that what is being done quietly is having any effect at all? Does he not think that the time has come, if the Government are taking real action, for us to be told about it and for the need for it to be enshrined in law?