Paris Climate Change Conference

Debate between Caroline Lucas and Helen Goodman

Thursday 19th November 2015 Commons Chamber

[Helen Goodman]

The hon. Gentleman is right that we need to have intelligent investment in technology, but I want to draw him back to paying a little attention to the Pope’s encyclical. An over-reliance and an over-optimism about technical fixes when we do not know whether they will actually work has encouraged us to consume too much and to be too destructive. We need to keep such things in the balance as we develop policy.

[Caroline Lucas (Brighton, Pavilion) (Green)]

I am grateful to the hon. Lady for making a powerful speech. She is talking a lot about the papal encyclical—rightly so, since the motion is about it—but will she also pay tribute to things such as the declaration launched in August by Islamic leaders from 20 countries, which similarly urges Governments to take ambitious action in this area? This is not a monopoly of one faith community or another; all faith communities are coming together to make such a demand.

[Helen Goodman]

The hon. Lady is of course right.

The White Paper included a section on the importance of small and medium-sized enterprises. I am afraid that it was greeted with a hollow laugh by people such as George Smith from my constituency. He is an electrician—I have had a ride in his solar PV-powered van—who has spent thousands of pounds training people, but is now concerned that he may have to sack those very people.

Many of us were incredulous about the Government achieving their renewables targets. In the Treasury Committee, I asked the Chancellor whether he was a climate change denier. He responded:

“I am not sure I accept that phrase as a general term in British politics”.

Now we know why: the leaked letter from the Secretary of State to her colleagues says that there will be a 50 TWh shortfall in the delivery of renewable energy targets in 2020, which is a shortfall of 25%. She notes:

“Publicly we are clear that the UK continues to make progress”.

She also notes:

“The absence of a credible plan to meet the target carries the risk of successful judicial review, and…on-going fines imposed by the EU Court of Justice”.

Instead of going back to the Chancellor and saying, “We must think again,” she says that

“we need to reflect...on the emerging strategy once the outcome of the Spending Review is known.”

Strategies do not emerge; they are planned. Fulfilling our part in avoiding global warming over 2° C should be the Secretary of State’s absolute priority.

Transparency of Lobbying, Non-Party Campaigning and Trade Union Administration Bill

Debate between Caroline Lucas and Helen Goodman

Tuesday 10th September 2013 Commons Chamber

[Helen Goodman]

My hon. Friend is right. The problems of substance and process in the preparation of this Bill are numerous and inter-connected. People working in voluntary organisations are always annoyed that politicians of all stripes want to associate themselves with their good works but often want to ignore the hard messages they receive from those organisations. They want to ignore the lessons based on the wide range of practical experience the voluntary sector can bring to the table. This Bill is institutionalising cloth ears on the part of politicians.

It is ironic that part 2 of this Bill should come from this Government, because when the Conservatives were trying to get elected they were proclaiming the big society. Vladimir Putin would be proud to introduce this Bill.

[Caroline Lucas]

New clause 10, which stands in my name and those of the hon. Members for Nottingham North (Mr Allen) and for St Ives (Andrew George), would require the Government to carry out a proper assessment of the effect of third-party campaigning on UK elections, because I want to know what problem the Government think they are trying to fix. Alongside the rest of part 2, the changes made by clause 26 would silence legitimate campaigning voices in the run-up to elections. Equally alarmingly, Ministers are trying to push through this clampdown without a shred of evidence that there is a problem with third sector organisations exerting an undue influence over elections in the first place. As many hon. Members have said, the best way to proceed would be to ditch the whole of part 2 and only introduce changes for which there is a robust evidence base—one that would attract cross-party support—and which could take place after consultation with all organisations affected. That is what new clause 10 proposes.

Some people say that organisations such as 38 Degrees are scaremongering and that the Government’s concessions demonstrate that everything will be fine, but Ros Baston, a solicitor specialising in political and election law, told a number of MPs at a meeting that I hosted this morning that they would be advised to read the briefing from the Electoral Commission itself. Many hon. Members have already quoted from that, so I will not add to that. However, I would point hon. Members in the direction of Sir Stephen Bubb, the chief executive officer of the Association of Chief Executives of Voluntary Organisations, who says that even after these vague concessions have been promised

“the Bill remains fundamentally flawed. Our issue with it is not simply how it affects charities, but the fact it suggests they, and not other groups in society, are to blame for the public’s loss of trust in politics.”

He is very right in that assessment.

I strongly believe that there is a case for revisiting the current legislation, introduced by Labour in 2000 with the primary aim of preventing the emergence of US-style front groups working for particular candidates or parties, because the existing legislation has already been criticised for being heavy-handed in how it goes about achieving what is, of course, a laudable aim. As a result, some fiercely non-party political organisations are already saying that even the current rules have had some dampening effect on the freedom of charities and civil society organisations to campaign on policy issues—not for any political party or candidate—around the time of elections.

The crucial point must be to proceed on the basis not of hearsay but of a sound evidence base. It is right to examine the effect that third-party campaigning has had at elections in the UK and whether it has exerted undue influence over elections. It is also right to look at whether the activities of charities and civil society groups have harmed the public perception of the political system, as the Cabinet Office contends. But such a review must surely also look at whether the opposite is closer to the truth. It must ask whether existing rules are already too restrictive: do they make it unnecessarily difficult for the public to hear the opinions of those who might have different views from particular parties or candidates; are they imposing disproportionate limits on the ability of charities and others to engage in political and policy debate as one way of pursuing their charitable purposes; and are they preventing people from getting together to seek to influence the policies and positions of those who want to become their elected representatives?

Violence against Women and Girls

Debate between Caroline Lucas and Helen Goodman

Thursday 14th February 2013 Commons Chamber

[Caroline Lucas (Brighton, Pavilion) (Green)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull North (Diana Johnson) and I pay tribute to the leadership shown on this subject by the hon. Members for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart) and for Walthamstow (Stella Creasy). We have heard compelling speeches from Members on both sides of the House and I was particularly struck by those from the hon. Members for Totnes (Dr Wollaston) and for Mid Norfolk (George Freeman). Notwithstanding that, I share the disappointment that has been expressed about the lack of vigour from those who sit on the Government Front Bench, in particular. When I asked the Minister of State, Home Department, the hon. Member for Taunton Deane (Mr Browne), this morning about the importance of statutory education in PSHE and violence against women and girls, I was told that it is voluntary and that schools can offer it if they want to. Everything we have heard in the debate this afternoon suggests that that is not enough.

[Helen Goodman (Bishop Auckland) (Lab)]

Does the hon. Lady agree that it is a problem that PSHE is not part of the curriculum in academies and free schools? As we have all agreed during the debate, the problem goes across society.

[Caroline Lucas]

I agree. I also agree with those who said we need a whole-school approach. Yes, PSHE is vital but such education should also be mainstreamed across all other parts of the education system.

The figures, tragically, are all too familiar. In Britain, 60,000 women are raped every year and two women a week are killed by a partner or ex-partner. That culture of violence is doing enormous damage to our young people. As the hon. Member for Devizes (Claire Perry) said, NSPCC research found that so-called sexting is linked to coercive behaviour, bullying and violence and has a disproportionate impact on girls. A YouGov poll for the End Violence Against Women Coalition found that more than 70% of 16 to 18-year-old boys and girls said that they heard sexual name calling towards girls routinely and, even more disturbingly, one in three girls said that they experienced groping or other unwanted sexual touching at school.

In a report published last year entitled “I thought I was the only one,” the office of the Children’s Commissioner found that in the space of just 12 months more than 16,000 children, mostly girls, were identified as being at risk of sexual exploitation. The report highlights that we need to ask why so many males, both young and old, think it is acceptable to treat both girls and boys as objects to be used and abused. That brings me to my key point: violence does not happen in a vacuum. We must recognise the impact of the wider culture, so I want to focus on just one aspect of that—the objectification of women in the media, whether it is in the newspapers, music videos, adverts and video games.

Women have been served up as sex objects in some of our daily newspapers for many years. They show images that would be prohibited on television or subject to the watershed, yet they are sold entirely without age restriction in shops, often at a child’s eye level. As the mother of two sons, there are shops I would prefer not to go into because of the eye-level material that they will see and have seen and because of the effect on them.

Every week we read in the papers cases of women who are killed by their partner or former partner. Every one of these cases should cause an outcry, but rarely warrants a paragraph because it is tragically becoming so routine. The problem was highlighted last year by women’s groups who gave evidence to the Leveson inquiry and later published a report called “Just the Women”. This examined how domestic homicide cases are reported as “tragic” one-off incidents, rather than as part of a well-understood pattern of behaviour. Rape cases in some papers are routinely placed next to pictures of half-naked women. Cases of forced marriage or so-called honour-based violence, a horrible misnomer, are explained in terms of culture or religion—anything but violence against women and girls. Lord Leveson himself suggested that a front-page report in The Sun headed “Bodyguards for battered Towie sisters” about violence against two women from “The Only Way is Essex”, which was accompanied by a picture of one of the women in an erotic pose in lingerie, may well infringe clause 12—the discrimination clause—of the editors code of practice.

No one is suggesting that the media are solely to blame for these attitudes, but their objectification of women and the treatment by some newspapers, for example, of rape cases go some considerable way towards explaining why prejudicial attitudes to women are so deeply entrenched and are so normalised. The chief Crown prosecutor for London, Alison Saunders, has expressed concern about the impact that the treatment of women in the media has on rape cases and jurors’ decision making. She believes that jurors are coming to court with preconceptions about women that affect the way they consider evidence and she says:

“If a girl goes out and gets drunk and falls over . . . they are almost demonised in the media, and if they then become a victim, you can see how juries would bring their preconceptions to bear.”

Fortunately, much needed work is being done with detectives and prosecutors, for example, to dispel myths and stereotypes about women who have been raped or subjected to sexual and others forms of violence, but Alison Saunders asks whether there is

“something more we should be doing”

so that people doing jury service are not being challenged for the first time, and the subject is not one that they are thinking about for the first time.

The answer to that question is, of course, yes. That is why our schools should be taking a lead. Work to prevent violence against women and girls must be an integral part of education policy, delivered in every school as part of the statutory curriculum. It is astonishing that in 2010 40% of 16 to 18-year-olds said either that they did not receive lessons or information on sexual consent, or that they did not know whether they did. Although PSHE education must now teach about consent, it needs to go further and cover all forms of violence against women, including teenage relationship abuse, forced marriage, FGM and sexual exploitation. It should also be linked to work on gender equality and challenging gender stereotypes; otherwise young women and men will never be exposed to education designed to reduce gender violence and to counter the damaging impact of cultural factors, such as the media.

The 1 billion women rising today want a world that empowers young people, rather than represses their sexuality, so work in our schools must allow young people to be more in control of their sexual identity, rather than being dictated to by the media or advertising. Crucially, it must address harmful notions of masculinity and present boys with positive alternatives. The Director of Public Prosecutions and the Deputy Children’s Commissioner have both spoken out about the impact of pornography on young men’s sexually aggressive behaviour, and there is evidence of the negative impact of porn on young men’s attitudes to women.

In my constituency, the domestic abuse charity Rise is an excellent example of existing good practice. It delivers a PSHE preventive education programme on healthy relationships to schools across the city. Our schools also subscribe to the whole-school approach recommended by the End Violence Against Women coalition, where heads take a lead, teachers are trained on the issues, and all students receive comprehensive sex and relationship education which deals with consent, equality and respect. If we are serious about preventing gender violence, those messages need to be reflected not just in our schools but across society as a whole.