Chinese and East Asian Communities: Racism during Covid-19

Catherine West Excerpts

Tuesday 13th October 2020 Westminster Hall

[Catherine West (Hornsey and Wood Green) (Lab)]

May I say what a delight it is to serve for the first time under your chairmanship, Mrs Cummins, and how great it is to have a rugby league champion in the Chair?

That was a powerful speech by my hon. Friend the Member for Luton North (Sarah Owen), who found the time and the passion to secure the debate. It is fitting that the debate is taking place this week, not just because it is looking at hate crime but in the context of the Black Lives Matter movement.

In the last couple of years we can all admit that bigotry has been emboldened, whether against the Jewish community, Muslim communities or the East Asian community here in the UK, who are the subject of today’s debate. This is not just about the UK; we have heard first hand from my hon. Friend about her experiences, but we know that the issue goes across many different cultures. She mentioned Mr Trump, and I want to touch on the background to the current trade war between China and the US. There are legitimate issues to be debated about trade and commerce, but that must never be confused with racism against Chinese people.

Some of the debate turns into the “Chinese Communist party.” We know that some Chinese people based in the People’s Republic of China do not have a choice about whether they are party members or not. It is not good enough to say the “Chinese Communist party”—we should just say “the Government”, in the same way that we might criticise another Government for other things. My hon. Friend mentioned some of the issues we are currently worried about in the People’s Republic of China—about Hong Kong, Xinjiang and Tibet—but equally we need to talk today about the fact that many East Asians are under so much pressure.

I was delighted to go and see the chairman of our local mental health trust, Mr Mark Lam, an experienced computer technician at the height of his career who is giving his time and energy to lead the mental health trust at a challenging time. As a result of covid, there is a 20% increase in demand. At the end of the meeting I said that I was going to participate in today’s debate. He said that he has experienced anti-Chinese feeling a number of times. Many Chinese people in our communities, when they are asked, say that they have experienced a terrible sense of discrimination.

I am afraid it is not just words. There have been physical attacks, spitting, trying to run people over and a number of very violent and despicable acts. Today is our opportunity in Parliament to say that we do not stand for it, that we want equality and that we want the bigotry to stop.

My second point is about the lack of role models. I would love to see more Chinese people in our media, being our anchors and newsreaders, and in our soaps. Our soaps do an amazing job; I am thinking about “Hollyoaks,” as we have some Liverpudlians with us today. They tackle difficult social issues and I wonder whether this might be something for one of our dramas to take up, to try to challenge views and teach our community in a real way, showing the hurt and how the issue is holding back community cohesion.

My final point is about the local picture. One of the terrible results of the global financial crash was the cuts to local government. Local government used to provide a small amount of funding for a number of different services—a meals on wheels service or a day centre, for example. It was a way of mixing everyone up—“Come and have a meal together. Come and have a game of mah-jong or chess. Let’s talk to each other and get to know each other.”

Since the cutbacks to local government, I have noticed how lonely people are and how they are not experiencing the fun things about their neighbours. They are not trying each other’s food or going shopping as much. It is heartbreaking to see older people in particular sitting on their own outside a supermarket or in a café, when they could be with other people and getting to know one another.

I hope that some of the money coming out of the Treasury now can go towards local government and community cohesion and, in particular, that we will look at ways within the political parties to promote role models. We obviously have a role model here, in my hon. Friend the Member for Luton North—and the hon. Member for Havant (Alan Mak) is a Minister in the Government, I believe. I am sure that there are others whom I have not remembered today. We have a few councillors, but we should be looking much more carefully at how we in politics can promote role models. It is the way we learned about Black Lives Matter: by listening to others. It is the way we have learned about racism against other Asian communities: by having role models in politics or other fields.

I hope that we can look not just at the geopolitics of covid and the role that important leaders such as the President of the US play. I hope that we can also look at the local picture, the fragmentation of our society, and the lack of services to bring people together. Finally, I hope that we can look at role models within politics so that we can promote diversity and in particular make a study of why we do not have more Chinese role models within our politics. I will conclude there because I am keen to hear other contributions. I thank everyone for taking part in the debate and I just wish a few more had joined us today from the Conservatives. Maybe next time.

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[Rachel Hopkins (Luton South) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Cummins, on what I believe to be your first occasion in the Chair. I want to congratulate my neighbour, my hon. Friend the Member for Luton North (Sarah Owen), for securing this important debate on Chinese and East Asian communities’ experience of racism during the covid-19 pandemic, particularly this week, during National Hate Crime Awareness Week. It is important to take the opportunity to raise the importance of reporting incidents of hate crime when they happen, as that will help prevent them happening to others and help the police and other agencies better understand the extent of hate crime in a local area and, therefore, better respond to it. I hasten to add that all public services must also be properly resourced to do so.

A 2019 House of Commons Library briefing shows that police-recorded hate crime offences have continually risen since 2012-13. The rate of hate crimes against Chinese people between January and March this year was nearly three times that of the previous two years, according to data released by UK police forces to Sky News. The far right is constantly seeking to normalise racist attitudes and behaviours, and we have seen legitimate criticisms of the actions of the Chinese Government being hijacked by those people who want to sow division in society. Moonshot, which specialises in monitoring extremist content online, found that between February and April there was a 300% increase in racist and violent hashtags against China and Chinese people. They analysed more than 600 million tweets, of which 200,000 contained hate speech or anti-Chinese conspiracy theories. I urge the Government to address the horrendous abuse online in the upcoming online harms Bill. Facebook and Twitter must be accountable for what is published on their websites.

[Catherine West]

Does my hon. Friend agree that international students who are in the UK, who travel to many of our constituencies, are often subject to very bad racist abuse and that something needs to be done about that as well?

[Rachel Hopkins]

I welcome my hon. Friend’s intervention. With the University of Bedfordshire in my constituency of Luton South, we welcome many international students from China and other East Asian countries. They are welcome in our town and we do not want the rise in hate crime towards East Asian and Chinese people to deter them from coming to the UK to study. It is a great opportunity, so I thank my hon. Friend for raising that important point.

We are also increasingly, and sadly, seeing hard-right politicians and movements across the world using racist language. That has been mentioned already. It is a disgrace to hear Donald Trump call coronavirus the Chinese virus or the Chinese plague. However, racism towards East Asian, South-East Asian and Chinese people is not restricted to politicians abroad. It is a disgrace that the right hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Anne-Marie Trevelyan), the International Development Secretary, shared a racist meme. Racism is never a joke, and sharing that meme shows the judgment of the individuals running our country.

The Chinese state must be held accountable for its failings and human rights abuses, but the far right is being encouraged by media reporting that has provided ammunition to far-right activists seeking to normalise racism. In Germany, Der Spiegel magazine ran a cover image of a person in a protective red suit and gas mask, under the headline “Made in China”. In the UK, The Economist also ran a front page with an image of the earth wrapped in a face mask adorned with a Chinese flag. The Government must tackle hate crime by making social media and media outlets accountable for how they spread hate or fuel division. We need accurate health messaging that does not discriminate against a community.

Finally, building on the point raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Hornsey and Wood Green (Catherine West) about role models for young people, my final comments are on the importance of anti-racist education. I am a supporter of the UK’s leading anti-racist education charity Show Racism the Red Card and a member of the all-party parliamentary group for showing racism the red card. This Friday is Wear Red Day and I encourage everybody to show their commitment to anti-racism education and to tackling all forms of racism by wearing red on Friday.

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[Bambos Charalambous (Enfield, Southgate) (Lab)]

It is a genuine pleasure to serve under your chairmanship for the first time, Mrs Cummins. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Luton North (Sarah Owen) on securing this very important debate and on her passionate, thought-provoking and groundbreaking speech, and I thank her for sharing her shocking childhood experiences of racism. That was a telling and very poignant part of the debate.

As hon. Members have so eloquently highlighted, one of the social consequences of the coronavirus pandemic has been the alarming rise in online hate speech against the Chinese and East Asian community. The pandemic has provided fertile ground for extremists. Conspiracy theorists have fuelled hatred and are exploiting people’s fears. Left unchecked, fake news about minority communities has circulated online, sowing the seeds of hatred. That causes division and damages community relations in our society and it has been allowed to grow to such an extent that some are emboldened to abuse and attack the Chinese and East Asian community. Those in positions of responsibility have done very little to call out the racism or to challenge the fake news and hate speech.

[Catherine West]

Does my hon. Friend the shadow Minister agree that those in authority, including police colleagues, could have better training on this specific sort of racism, given the pandemic?

[Bambos Charalambous]

My hon. Friend makes an excellent point on an issue that I will come to later in my speech. Training is absolutely essential so that people recognise and treat seriously any forms of racism, so that it is dealt with swiftly and so that people are not frightened to report it.

It is deeply disappointing to hear the President of the United States, Donald Trump, call coronavirus the China virus and give legitimacy to this racist trope. It is also deeply regrettable that nothing has been done to challenge this view by our Government. Nobody has spoken out against it, and that desperately needs to happen. I hope that the Minister will deal with that in her remarks.

The Government have a moral duty to keep our communities safe, and that includes speaking out against hate speech and dispelling falsehoods no matter where they come from. The explosion of hate speech on social media has been alarming. I know that the most mainstream platforms are taking steps to remove false information and hateful content. My hon. Friend the Member for Luton South (Rachel Hopkins) mentioned the 200,000 hashtags of hate speech and conspiracy theories against the Chinese and East Asian communities, which was quite alarming. Recently, the Select Committee on Home Affairs had a session in which it heard that Facebook had deleted 9.6 million hate speech posts in the first quarter of 2020; 9.6 million is an alarming number, and that is just the ones that it has removed.

The issue is not just content removal. That is not enough on its own. More needs to be done to dismantle the microtargeting of ads and the algorithms that recommend the next piece of visible content, which may be just as harmful. This rabbit hole is compounding the effects of online hate speech and fake news. The ads and algorithms make decisions for users about what they can see online, and essentially that amplifies the content, so that is an issue that also needs to be addressed.

We need wider regulation of social media platforms to tackle hate speech and its wider distribution. Although I appreciate that the online harms Bill will come before Parliament next year, action is needed now. I highly recommend the Institute for Strategic Dialogue’s impressive report, “The First 100 Days: Coronavirus and Crisis Management on Social Media Platforms”. That goes into detail as to how hate crime and hate speech are spread on social media platforms.

I mentioned earlier in my speech that online hate speech has evolved into physical hate crime, and we heard a number of examples from hon. Members in today’s debate. Figures from police forces across England and Wales have revealed that at least 267 offences against, I quote, “Chinese people” were recorded between January and March during the covid-19 crisis. That included assaults, robberies, harassment and criminal damage. The rate is nearly three times that of the previous two years. I believe that those figures are just the tip of the iceberg. In conversations that I have had with representatives from the Chinese community in London, I have been told that attacks are far more common. They are under-reported, because the community do not believe that the police take their complaints seriously. To allude to the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Hornsey and Wood Green (Catherine West), the issue is about training as well.

The lack of vocal Government support and the severe cuts to policing over the last decade have left the community despondent. They feel that they have no empathy or understanding of the effect that such attacks have. I am pleased to see that the community are getting organised on this issue and demanding action. One group that they have formed is End the Virus of Racism. I congratulate it on calling for zero tolerance for racism and for the full protection of the law following the threefold increase in hate crime towards people of South-East Asian and Chinese heritage during the coronavirus crisis. The police must take hate crime seriously and listen to victims; otherwise, it will continue to be under-reported.

[Catherine West]

From his previous job as a lawyer, is the shadow Minister aware of a lot of cases that have been prosecuted, or is this an under-prosecuted area?

[Bambos Charalambous]

Again, my hon. Friend makes an excellent point. Where there is a lack of empathy, there is also a lack of cases that proceed to trial. I am not aware of the actual figures for this issue, but rape is also an issue where the lack of empathy with victims leads to fewer cases going to trial. The victims do not want to take it further because they do not feel they will be treated seriously. There is an excellent rape review by the Victims’ Commissioner for London, which I highly recommend.

I welcome the calls for greater research, a national strategy and a taskforce to scrutinise the data and address the impact on community cohesion—hon. Members also raised the need for more community cohesion. The increase in hate crime has fuelled a steep rise in demand for victim support and has put additional pressure on community groups, but at the same time their income has been slashed and their resources are more stretched than they have ever been. Any solution to hate crime must include the Government funding of those vital services. My hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Riverside (Kim Johnson) made a point about the need for helplines, and these communities need funding so that the helplines can function in this time of great need.

In July, the Commission for Countering Extremism produced an excellent paper entitled “How hateful extremists are exploiting the pandemic”. It highlighted how different communities were experiencing racism due to the pandemic. It said:

“Government needs to include clear plans to counter extremism in their response to this and future crises. It should also publish a new counter-extremism strategy urgently to ensure that it can strategically respond to the activities of extremists in our country. This strategy should include:…An assessment of how extremism manifests locally, the harm it causes, the scale of support for extremist narratives and how best to pre-empt extremist activity. This should also include a mechanism to provide bespoke support to local authorities most affected…An assessment of who is most susceptible to extremist narratives and a plan of what interventions they will put in place to engage and support those people…A commitment to ensure hateful extremism falls within the remit of the new online harms regulator and that existing laws on inciting hatred should be enforceable online…Plans to build an understanding of how conspiracy theories contribute to extremism. Including how they are utilised by extremists, what the scale, impact and harm is, and how to counter them…Separately, the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government must drive forward a COVID-19 cohesion strategy to help bring different communities together to prevent extremist narratives from having significant reach and influence.”

That is from a Government-funded body.

Racism has no part in any civilised society and should be stamped out completely. To do that, we urgently need sustained action. We need to call it out, tackle it online and physically, and show solidarity with our communities that are experiencing racism. We need to ensure that complaints are properly dealt with and that our communities are supported.

In conclusion, I ask the Minister, when will the Government publicly speak out to condemn the anti-Chinese hate speech and the racism against the Chinese and East Asian community? When will she speak to her ministerial colleagues to ensure that more is done to remove online hate speech and algorithms that fuel hateful content? Will she speak to her colleagues to ensure that the police take the reporting of hate speech seriously and work to build trust with the communities affected? Finally, will she support the additional funding for community groups representing those affected by racism and hate crime, and those providing support services?

It is no surprise that the annual hate crime statistics, which were released this morning, show an 8% increase in reported hate crime over the past 12 months. Unless something is done now, there will be long-term damage to community relations, which will take years, if not decades, to repair. I urge the Minister to take action now.

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[Kelly Tolhurst]

As the hon. Gentleman knows, I speak regularly with my colleagues across Departments when dealing with a whole host of issues that affect the United Kingdom, in particular in my new role as in the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government. I have only been in post for about three weeks now. I will definitely pass that sentiment on to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

[Catherine West]

While the Minister is talking to her colleagues in Government, will she also speak to the Universities Minister to say that this debate has raised the specific issue of international students such as Mr Mok, whose case was talked about, and to ask for an action plan to deal with it?

[Kelly Tolhurst]

I commit to doing as the hon. Lady asked. It is important that we remain committed to, and steadfast in standing up for anyone who finds themselves a victim of hate crime or of any hate, because, sadly, our Chinese and East Asian communities are not alone in that experience. We know that bigots are only too happy to spread hatred against Jewish and Muslim communities and others if it suits them.

This Government have a zero-tolerance approach to those who commit such acts. The perpetrators of hate crimes in relation to covid-19 are being punished. The Crown Prosecution Service has prosecuted a number of people for crimes involving racist abuse on the basis of perceived Chinese ethnicity. We will continue to stand shoulder to shoulder with people of Chinese and East Asian heritage, and this Government have shown that time and again, supporting not only those who have made these islands their home, but people who visit for tourism or access to our world-class education system, which we spoke about this afternoon. Also, our generous offer to those from Hong Kong eligible to come to make a new life here stands as testament to our solidarity. Although the level of hate crime towards people of Chinese and East Asian heritage appears to have reduced since earlier this year, the Government have no interest in showing complacency.

We will continue to ensure that victims are supported wherever possible and to bring people who carry out hateful attacks to justice. We already have one of the strongest legislative frameworks in the world to protect communities from hostility, violence and bigotry and to deal with the perpetrators of hate crime. We will strengthen that framework through measures set out in our online harms White Paper and bring forward world-leading legislation to make the UK the safest place to be online.

We intend to establish in law a new duty of care on companies towards their users, which will be overseen by the independent regulator, and we will not stop there. We have asked the Law Commission to undertake a full review of the coverage and approach of hate crime legislative provisions. It has opened a public consultation and will report to Ministers early next year.

We will also consult on our hate crime action plan. It has guided our work over the past four years and has been well regarded, but now is the time to consider whether we can be even more ambitious. We will consult widely in the coming months to ensure that we build an effective new approach, which will benefit from the input of many of our diverse communities. I look forward to the Chinese and East Asian communities playing their part.

I want to pick up on a point made by the hon. Member for Enfield, Southgate (Bambos Charalambous) about the police. He highlighted the annual statistics that were reported today. One of the elements that shows progress in this area is that we are seeing more of an understanding from the police of what hate crime is and the ability to categorise it, so that it is being better reported. I hope that we will continue to see that work in the statistics, but I totally agree with the comments that have been made: while we are seeing progress in this space, we need to continue with the work to make sure that the complexities are understood and articulated in the reporting, and that when individuals feel they want to report to the police, they are comfortable in doing that. I was pleased to hear that 87% of the Chinese community surveyed trusted their local police, in comparison with the national average of, I believe, just over 76%.

On spending to work with our communities, we have committed to spend through the faith, race and hate crime grant scheme, which enables local groups to bid for grants for work, including with schools and young people. That is a £1.5 million pot. We also have the integrated communities action plan, with more than 70 commitments within that plan, and we are working towards completing them.

Comments have been made about members of my party. I am not here to speak for individuals, and I am unaware of some of the details. One thing I am very comfortable to say is that the party I represent stands against any form of racism. I am very proud to be part of a party that holds that position, whether people agree or not. In my role as a Minister in MHCLG, I will do all I can to make sure that all communities in our country have equality and feel parity through the work we are doing. It is something that I have had experience of in other roles as a Minister in this Government over the past two years. I am looking forward to working with colleagues as we progress the action plans as we move through covid.

This week being National Hate Crime Awareness Week, it is a moment to reflect on the challenges that confront us and reaffirm our commitment to tackling hatred. I believe that today’s debate has been an important part of that, and we should all stand together to condemn hatred and bigotry in all forms, and focus instead on what ties bind us together. I end by thanking everyone for their contributions to today’s debate, and look forward to further conversations with colleagues as we progress some of the work I have outlined this afternoon.