Online Harms

Debate between Caroline Nokes and Paul Waugh

Thursday 19th March 2026 Commons Chamber

[Paul Waugh]

The Minister for Safeguarding, my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham Yardley (Jess Phillips), has repeatedly emphasised the need to crack down on and outlaw misogyny, as have many of my colleagues. There is definitely more work to do on that, but it is a key part of our violence against women and girls strategy.

It was a pleasure to meet the Smartphone Free Childhood campaign last week—including Zack George, aka Steel from “Gladiators”, whom many Members will also have met—to hear why we need further action to protect our kids from the harm that social media can cause. As the hon. Member for St Neots and Mid Cambridgeshire (Ian Sollom) has already mentioned, harm arises not only from content, but from design features such as algorithmic amplification and endless scroll—features that go beyond a simple age-based ban.

We need to help parents who are desperate for support in combating the daily nightmare of wresting back control from their children’s phones and computers. Suicide ideation, self-harm, pornography, animal cruelty, child sex abuse, anti-Muslim hatred and anti-Jewish hatred are all things that we want to protect our youngsters from seeing online, but we feel powerless in the face of the outrage economy. It is time to stop that sense of powerlessness.

Like the hon. Member for St Neots and Mid Cambridgeshire, I want to praise the BBC’s recent documentary “Inside the Rage Machine”, which reported whistleblowers claiming that Meta made decisions to allow more harmful content on people’s feeds simply because internal research into its algorithms showed that outrage fuelled engagement and monetisation. A TikTok employee gave the BBC rare access to the company’s internal user complaints dashboards, as well as other evidence of staff being instructed to prioritise several cases involving politicians rather than a series of reports of harmful posts featuring children.

I would like to promote the great work that Rochdale borough safeguarding children partnership does to allow parents to access the right tools to protect their children. Other councils across the country are doing similarly great work—solutions are at hand. The Government’s new media literacy action plan should help us all to build resilience against hatred, and the Education Secretary’s recent guidance to schools to be phone free was very welcome indeed.

The Government’s consultation on social media is another huge step forward in creating a healthy relationship between children and the internet. We need to test all the options presented in the consultation so that decisions can be truly evidence based and delivery can be rolled out as effectively as possible. We need to balance the upsides of life online for young people—the friendship groups, the specialised help, and the need to protect free speech—against the very clear downsides.

Finally, we also need to address the offline issues that are often turbo-charged online. For example, why is it that these guys in the manosphere are so popular in the first place? There is the provocation, the riskiness, the sophisticated editing, the addictive nature of their output, the justification that it is “just jokes”, and the get-rich-quick con merchantry of it all. We need to ask how we can provide alternative role models for our boys and young men. How can we help their mental health? How can we repair their trauma? How can we tackle the lack of fulfilling jobs, careers and housing that is so often at the root of scapegoating—whether that is the scapegoating of women, Jews, Muslims, migrants, or their own lack of opportunities?

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Caroline Nokes)]

I call the Liberal Democrat spokesperson.

Middle East: Defence

Debate between Caroline Nokes and Paul Waugh

Monday 9th March 2026 Commons Chamber

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Caroline Nokes)]

Order. I encourage Members to ask short questions and the Secretary of State to give briefer answers.

[Paul Waugh (Rochdale) (Lab/Co-op)]

I shed no tears for the demise of an Iranian regime that murdered and repressed tens of thousands of its own citizens, particularly women, but I am proud that this Government have not joined the US and Israel in this reckless war, which lacks a clear plan and which is hitting my constituents in the pocket and threatening the global economy. Given that this Government have our own independent foreign policy, we are not the handmaiden of Washington, as the Tories would like, nor the poodle of Putin, as Reform is. Can the Defence Secretary say how important it is that the Chancellor is providing new funds for our armed forces who are defending British interests and British citizens in the region?

Electoral Resilience

Debate between Caroline Nokes and Paul Waugh

Tuesday 16th December 2025 Commons Chamber

[Paul Waugh (Rochdale) (Lab/Co-op)]

Some in Reform UK have suggested that its former leader in Wales, the traitor Nathan Gill—he was a traitor—was just one bad apple, yet we have learned in recent weeks that at least eight MEPs who represented the UK Independence party or the Brexit party were approached by Gill at the behest of his Russian paymasters. What is it about parties led by the hon. Member for Clacton (Nigel Farage) that makes them uniquely susceptible to Russian bribes? Could it be that they are already apologists for Putin?

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Caroline Nokes)]

Before I call the Secretary of State, may I entreat the hon. Member? I am sure he will have mentioned to the hon. Member for Clacton (Nigel Farage) that he was going to reference him in the House.

[Paul Waugh]

I referenced the party of the hon. Member for Clacton (Nigel Farage), not him.

[Madam Deputy Speaker]

I think you will find that you used the term “the hon. Member for Clacton”, if you wish to argue back with the Chair.

Public Office (Accountability) Bill

Debate between Caroline Nokes and Paul Waugh

2nd reading
Monday 3rd November 2025 Commons Chamber

[Paul Waugh (Rochdale) (Lab/Co-op)]

This legislation is all about a fundamental rebalancing of power between the state and the citizens it is meant to protect and serve. We have heard powerfully today from many Members about the Hillsborough families and their enduring quest for the truth. Briefly, I would like to add the nuclear test veterans to that list of campaigners for justice, including my constituent, 88-year-old John Morris.

When John was stationed on Christmas Island in 1956, he was told that British troops were building a new runway. In reality, they were testing nuclear weapons, but the weapons that were intended to keep Britain safe from the Soviet threat were far from safe for the men who were out in the south Pacific—they were effectively treated like lab rats, with little or no protection from harm. John is one of 22,000 British troops who were exposed to radiation while on service in the 1950s, and who have campaigned for years about the cancers and other side effects they endured.

John’s son Steven died at just four months old from birth defects. For 50 years, John and his wife faced repeated indignities. They were wrongfully questioned on suspicion of having murdered their son, denied information about how and why their son died, and denied John’s own medical records. Finally, a coroner’s report suggesting that Steven’s lungs might not have formed properly was revealed. John himself has had cancer, and has had a blood disorder since he was 26 years old. He sent me a message today:

“Great news about the Hillsborough law…for us vets, it’s very positive”,

because it will

“make our lives much easier”

in getting the answers they demand. He is pleased that in September, the Prime Minister agreed to meet him to discuss the issue further, and he is looking forward to that meeting.

There is another Rochdale resident whose campaign will, I hope, also benefit from this new legislation: 83-year-old Sylvia Mountain, who used the pregnancy test drug Primodos, which has already been mentioned by some of my hon. Friends. She gave birth to her son Philip in 1963, but Philip died of birth defects just 22 days after he was born. Today is the anniversary of the day her baby died, 62 years ago. Sylvia was told by doctors at the time to stop being “hysterical”, and has been told that no medical records exist to explain her son’s death, but many other women who were prescribed Primodos suffered similar birth defects in their children, as well as stillbirths and miscarriages. Victims of the Primodos test are still waiting for answers. For more than half a century, these families have faced a culture of concealment—of suppressed evidence, misleading official conclusions, and denial of responsibility.

John and Sylvia—two Rochdale pensioners in their 80s, whose lives have been overshadowed by tragedy and loss in ways that are very different, but also very similar—personify the decades of injustice that this legislation is intended to prevent from ever happening again. I pay tribute to both of them for their resilience in the face of unspeakable tragedy and suffering, and am proud to have them as my constituents. John and Sylvia want the state to recognise its responsibilities before it is too late for them and others like them. It is in their name, and that of all the other victims of state power and cover-ups, that I welcome this landmark Hillsborough Bill today, a Bill that it has taken this Labour Government to make a reality.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Caroline Nokes)]

That brings us to the wind-ups. I call Mike Wood.

National Insurance Contributions (Secondary Class 1 Contributions) Bill

Debate between Caroline Nokes and Paul Waugh

2nd reading
Tuesday 3rd December 2024 Commons Chamber

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Caroline Nokes)]

The right hon. Gentleman will be aware that that was not really a point of order. I am sure the hon. Member for Rochdale (Paul Waugh) is getting to the point on the Second Reading of the National Insurance Contributions (Secondary Class 1 Contributions) Bill.

[Paul Waugh]

I am, indeed, coming to exactly that point, because this is set in the context of what the Tories left behind. The clear trajectory of their last Budget was to squeeze day-to-day public spending to just 1% above inflation every year until 2029. That carried dire implications for every unprotected Department—up to £20 billion of cuts a year. The Resolution Foundation calculated that that would be the equivalent of three quarters of the cuts of the austerity years—austerity 2.0.

Sadly, there is no evidence that the former Chief Secretary to the Treasury, the right hon. Member for Sevenoaks (Laura Trott), left her own note for her successor. If she had, it surely would have read, “I’m afraid to tell you there is no money for public services.” If the Conservatives had won the last election, what would that have meant in practice? My right hon. Friend the Health Secretary revealed that when he took office, he was told that the NHS was facing such large deficits it would have to cut 20,000 appointments and operations a week. Thanks in part to the national insurance rises in the Bill, he can now deliver on our manifesto commitment to provide 40,000 extra appointments every week, with our investment in mental health services treating an extra 380,000 patients.

--- Later in debate ---

[Madam Deputy Speaker]

Order. That is the second time the hon. Gentleman has done it: I have left nothing.

[Paul Waugh]

Forgive me, Madam Deputy Speaker. Labour is the party taking tough decisions today and refusing to duck the issues that the Conservatives were so timid to grasp, from planning reform to energy security, from welfare reform to removing tax breaks for the richest.

In the past four weeks, the Conservatives have made £6.7 billion of commitments to cut taxes, but they have not said which public services they would cut to fund them. But the most damning indictment of their low-pay, low-growth, low-investment, low-productivity economics was the model that totally failed. In 1964, the outgoing Tory Chancellor Reggie Maudling bumped into James Callaghan and said,

“Good luck, old cock. Sorry to leave it in such a mess.”

It is a shame that the current Tory party cannot earn up to their own failures with a similar sense of regret or humility.