Bangladesh: Attacks on Hindu Community

Debate between Catherine West and Barry Gardiner

Monday 2nd December 2024 Commons Chamber

[Barry Gardiner (Brent West) (Lab)]

(Urgent Question): To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs if he will make a statement on the situation in Bangladesh and recent attacks on the Hindu community there.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs (Catherine West)]

The UK has a long-standing commitment to the protection of human rights. The UK champions freedom of religion or belief for all; no one should live in fear because of what they do or do not believe in. We are working to uphold the right to freedom of religion or belief through our position at the UN, G7 and at other multilateral fora, and in our important bilateral work.

Just last month, as my hon. Friend the Member for Brent West (Barry Gardiner) is aware, I visited Bangladesh, where, as part of our programme, I met Chief Adviser Professor Yunus and Foreign Affairs Adviser Touhid Hossain. At the meeting with Chief Adviser Yunus, I discussed the full range of bilateral issues, including the importance of protecting religious minorities in Bangladesh. The UK Government support freedom of religion or belief and freedom of expression in Bangladesh through both our political advocacy and development programme funding, providing up to £27 million from March 2023 to February 2028 under the Bangladesh collaborative, accountable and peaceful politics programme for protecting civic and political space.

On the Hindu community in Bangladesh specifically, I was given assurances by the interim Government in Bangladesh that support was available for minority communities in Bangladesh in the lead up to Durga Puja —a national festival. We were pleased to see the establishment of a special policing unit, which was active in protecting mandaps—the Hindu worship sites—as I am sure my hon. Friend is aware.

The UK Government will continue to monitor the situation, including making representations from this House, and will engage with the interim Government in Bangladesh on the importance of freedom of religion or belief specifically as it affects the Hindu community.

[Barry Gardiner]

Thank you for allowing this urgent question, Mr Speaker.

Since the fall of the previous Government in August, Bangladesh has seen more than 2,000 incidents of violence, most of which have been targeted against the minority Hindu community. Hindus make up less than 10% of the population of Bangladesh. As my hon. Friend will be aware, anti-Hindu violence has been a recurrent event in Bangladesh. Indeed, earlier this year, the Jamaat-e-Islami party was banned after riots in which 200 people were killed.

While Bangladesh no longer has the secular constitution of 1971 and became an Islamic state in 1988, there are none the less supposed to be protections for minority religions under the constitution, including articles 28 and 39. However, these appear not to be being enforced. There are reports of police and army standing by, as more than 20 places of minority Hindu and Sufi worship were vandalised and their worshippers attacked. This came to a head on Friday, when extremist groups from the Jamaat-e-Islami party attacked two Hindu temples in Chittagong and conducted a campaign of orchestrated violence against the Hindu population.

A leading Hindu monk, Chinmoy Krishna Das, a former leader of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness has been arrested. ISKCON is a worldwide branch of modern Hinduism with its UK headquarters at Bhaktivedanta Manor in Bushey, many of whose worshippers live in my constituency of Brent West and the surrounding areas of north-west London. People are concerned that while he was engaged in exclusively peaceful protest, he has been denied due process, charged with sedition and refused bail, yet none of the individuals who attacked the temples has been apprehended or charged. On Saturday, senior Bangladeshi journalist Munni Saha was taken into police custody following an attack on her car by a large mob in Dhaka, and released only under the provisions of the criminal code.

The situation is clearly on a knife edge. With such large diaspora populations in the UK and large Hindu communities with strong links to the community in Bangladesh, I ask my hon. Friend what more she can do to have discussions with the Bangladeshi Government and other partners in the region to ensure that tensions are lowered, the rule of law put into effect, and calm and order restored.

[Catherine West]

My hon. Friend is right to raise these concerns. Our high commission, based in Dhaka, is in detailed discussions with the interim Government of Bangladesh on how to verify and record the number of incidents or attacks against communities, and indeed small businesses, where there have been reports of such attacks, as well as taking remedial action and indeed working on prevention.

That is why, in the week we visited, we were pleased to hear that the special policing unit had been set up. We stand ready to offer advice on law and order, but know that that is part of the road map towards a more stable Bangladesh. We are aware of the statement of concern from the Indian Government following the arrest of Chinmoy Krishna Das, a well-known Hindu leader, on sedition charges. The UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office desk is closely monitoring those developments.

Conference Adjournment

Debate between Catherine West and Barry Gardiner

Tuesday 19th September 2023 Commons Chamber

[Barry Gardiner (Brent North) (Lab)]

Madam Deputy Speaker, I would like to begin by saying how much I admired the way in which you so sensitively and generously responded to my hon. Friend the Member for Mitcham and Morden (Siobhain McDonagh) when she spoke about her campaign on glioblastoma in memory of her sister. You really did speak for the whole House, and it was greatly appreciated.

The pleasure of participating in such a debate is in the range of topics covered, and I agree with many of the subjects that have been chosen. The hon. Member for Chatham and Aylesford (Tracey Crouch) spoke very well about the badger cull and the importance of science, and my hon. Friend the Member for Rochdale (Tony Lloyd) spoke very well about the importance of science in deep-sea mining.

Sometimes we need to fact-check our speeches, and I took the opportunity to fact-check the complaint made by the hon. Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman) about the Mayor of London giving himself an exemption on his car. I am reliably informed by the Mayor’s office that this is not the case, and that the Mayor’s own car does not have an exemption. As we think of Sir David, who was such a part of this particular debate, we need to temper our criticisms so that people who are as high in public life as the Mayor are not unduly targeted.

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

I thank my hon. Friend for correcting the record. It is so important that Parliament, above all, has correct information. We cannot let misinformation flourish, given how social media goes round and round very quickly, which can be detrimental to the public discourse.

[Barry Gardiner]

I challenge the House to fill in the missing word. As safe as—[Hon. Members: “Houses.”] Members have said it but, for too many people, that saying has become a rather sick joke. Today I want to share the story of my constituents for whom their house, their home, has been anything but safe.

Damask Court, a block of flats in my Brent North constituency, was completed in 2014. I was first approached by residents in March 2019, and they reported that their building was “swaying.” The floors were moving and, in high winds, the whole building shook. I was told that the roof was leaking so badly that water poured through the electrical sockets and the windows had dropped by 8 cm in two months.

As the House could imagine, I immediately visited the property and took photographs of water streaming through the light fittings and dripping on to a child’s bed. The same day, I wrote to the chief executive and the chair of the board of Apna Ghar Housing Association, which owned the block. I also wrote to Steve Wood, the chief executive of the National House Building Council, which had provided the warranty for the development.

Six weeks later, on 1 May 2019, NHBC replied stating that these structural issues had been reported by tenants to the builder, Parritt Bellamy, within its two-year liability period, but that Parritt Bellamy had gone into administration and the original development company, Asra Housing, had simply sold up and walked away. The NHBC visited the property to assess the structural issues under part B of its Buildmark warranty, and this is where the problems should have stopped. They did not. They were only just beginning.

At the end of November, I discovered that: essential supports for the core of the building were missing; the floors were overstressed, causing the swaying movement when residents walked across them; the roof had been incorrectly fitted, causing the leaks; the floors throughout the flats were bowed; and the balcony floors were defective.

Apna Ghar, the new owner of the development, advised residents in December that it had submitted a claim to the NHBC. It also advised that its chief executive was leaving the housing association “with immediate effect.” As the problems unfolded, this became a repeated pattern. Everyone simply walks away, except for the tenants, of course. They are trapped—trapped in an unsafe building.

In 2019, I asked the NHBC to clarify when the investigation work would be completed. I requested a copy of the full report when it became available and asked for a date when the remediation would commence. I did not receive a copy of the report, but at the end of July 2019 the NHBC said the investigations were complete and that it had offered Apna Ghar two options to settle the claim. At that point, Apna Ghar went incommunicado, so in October I arranged to meet two representatives from the NHBC. They were apologetic, they fully understood the serious concerns raised by residents and they were anxious to do everything possible to resolve the matter. They promised to revert to me and provide a full update. I felt reassured, but I was mistaken, as I never did receive their full report.

During the general election period in December 2019, another tenant contacted me, and she was extremely distressed. Her letter said that

“the building is constantly shaking, my home floods whenever it rains and I am unable to sleep for fear of the building falling down. I and my three children go to bed fully clothed, with our shoes on, in case we need to leave the building quickly.”

I was so concerned that I immediately visited her home, and it was truly shocking. I demanded a meeting with the new chief executive of Apna Ghar and showed him the photographic and video evidence of what I had witnessed—and then the country went into complete lockdown. I continued to write to Apna Ghar throughout 2020 and 2021, but I received no responses. The reason I was eventually given is that after our meeting the chief executive had resigned and not been replaced—another person had simply walked away.

I learned from another resident that Apna Ghar had written to them claiming that it was in regular contact with NHBC and that there were no reported structural issues within the building. That was a lie. I again demanded that Apna Ghar should provide me with a copy of the independent report, but, again, there was a total failure to respond. It would not even provide copies of the first and second stage complaints, which would have allowed me to refer the matter to the ombudsman. In March of last year, another resident in the block advised that because of the leaks and the water damage, which had not been repaired for seven months, her three children were all sleeping in one room. All these families have been failed at the highest level. There has been a total disregard from Apna Ghar of its legal obligations under section 11 of the Landlord and Tenant Act 1985 and under the Environmental Protection Act 1990, and of the duties set out in section 4 of the Defective Premises Act 1972.

In January of this year, when one of my constituents lodged a formal complaint, she received a response from solicitors employed by Apna Ghar, who acknowledged that she had indeed reported that her bathroom floor was damaged in December 2021 and admitted that this had not been fixed by September 2022. However, they claimed that because the member of staff who received the original message no longer worked there, they could not help. The same legal team has claimed that it is not Apna Ghar’s fault, because their client acquired the block from another registered provider of social housing. What my constituents want to know is: when Apna Ghar acquired Damask Court, was it aware of the structural problems that had already been reported to the builder and the developer? What due diligence was undertaken before taking ownership of the block? Did it purchase Damask Court at a discounted price because of the problems?

The same solicitors have now also advised me that there are

“ongoing discussions with the National House Building Council (NHBC) regarding the defects affecting the block.”

That is strange, given that I had already been told back in 2019 that the NHBC had made an offer to the housing association to pay for the remediation of the whole building. Four years on, the solicitors are apparently instructed that the NHBC claim will “need to be resolved”, that remedying the defects is going to require

“a significant programme of works”,

but that all complaints to date have been

“handled within a reasonable period of time.”

That is nonsense. The fact is that nobody, not the quantity surveyor, the project manager, the building control officer, the builder or the developer, and not the NHBC, should ever have signed off that building as fit to live in—it never was. Parritt Bellamy, the builder, walked away; Asra Housing Group, the developer, walked away; two chief executives of Apna Ghar walked away; and yesterday I received from a resident a copy of a notice from the acting chief executive of Apna Ghar Housing Association, advising the residents of Damask Court that

“your new landlord will be Tamil Housing Association”.

Yes—finally it seems that Apna Ghar is walking away too.

The Building Safety Act 2022 provides no relief to my constituents in Damask Court. The Government know there are thousands of families going to sleep tonight in unsafe apartment buildings—going to sleep like that little family who confessed to me that they went to bed fully clothed and with their shoes on, just in case they had to get out quickly in the night. I have just one question for the Minister: when will the Government act to end this misery?

Trade Bill

Debate between Catherine West and Barry Gardiner

Report stage & 3rd reading & 3rd reading: House of Commons & Report stage: House of Commons
Monday 20th July 2020 Commons Chamber

[Catherine West]

I rise to speak to new clauses 17 and 11, and on the principles of workers’ rights, national health service protection, and environmental and human rights. First, in relation to workers’ rights, we could not imagine a trade deal with such a country as Colombia when we know that the International Trade Union Confederation rates it as the most dangerous place to be a trade unionist. That means that the lives of many Members in the Chamber, who may be members of a trade union, could be at risk. To begin a trade deal with such a country without even mentioning workers’ rights seems to me to be absolutely ridiculous.

The problem with the Bill is how silent it is. It is silent on workers’ rights, as I have said. It is silent on the real protection of the NHS. We have had some reassurance on the NHS, but in particular I am worried about medicines and the cost of medicines, and about our data. We know that the national health service, unified as it is, provides the most fantastic data for research and for pharmaceutical companies. My fear is that, if we do not have more protection in the Bill, it will be open to those companies, through whichever country they are based in, to have a kind of values-free trade negotiation, which we as MPs will not be able to scrutinise effectively, and they could end up using our data, which, given the extent, longevity and detail of that data, is probably the best health data in the world. I therefore seek reassurances from the Minister on that specific point.

On environmental concerns, in leaving the European Union, we are leaving the gold standard of environmental protections, but it would be easy to write that protection in and lead on that in this Bill. Instead, the Bill is almost values free in terms of the importance of the environment. After covid, climate change and dealing with the climate emergency are probably the biggest concerns of our generation.

Many Members have mentioned the gold standard of food. I would also say that not everybody can afford to shop at Waitrose, which is the supermarket that has said that it will not buy low-quality goods. Many people will not be able to afford not to buy the cheapest food, particularly following the economic crash we are entering, the worst recession for 200 years, so we have to see the Bill in that context.

[Barry Gardiner]

Does my hon. Friend agree that many people who go to restaurants or to fast-food outlets will have no way of knowing the provenance of the food that they are consuming? It is not simply a matter of labelling in the supermarkets.

[Catherine West]

My hon. Friend makes such an important point. It is one that I will not repeat.

On the question of our role in this place, surely the past four years have taught us that people want us to be here to make these decisions. Tucking away a bit of legislation in the Library for 21 days is not what we are here for, and nor is running upstairs to an SI when we are in the middle of all-party group and all the rest. We need to have proper scrutiny in this place and the Select Committee needs to have an enhanced role. Having enjoyed my time on the International Trade Committee, I feel very strongly that it should have a key role in ratifying the role of the Trade Remedies Authority Commissioner. If that six-month commission continues, the Committee should also have a role in appointing its head. I will be lobbying very hard with colleagues who represent very rural seats—unlike Hornsey and Wood Green, which is one of the most urban seats—to have a proper commissioner continue in that role. Why have it for six months; let us have it forever. Let us have the International Trade Committee ratifying those two appointments. Let us also have a trade union voice and an industry voice on the TRA. If there is one thing that we have learned from covid, it is how well the TUC has worked and how well the CBI has worked together. They have led our Government and told them what to do on covid. Why cannot they do that with the Trade Bill?

We can get on. We can move forward together, but we must try to militate against this strong executive model that we have been saddled with by having these other checks and balances in place. We can do that through this Bill tonight and by supporting the sensible cross-party clauses, which share a lot of support. Let us try to enjoy that consensus building because we are in a new chapter. Let us not spoil it by having an inferior Trade Bill that is silent on the key issues of the day that concern us, be they human rights in China, environmental standards, which we have had a legacy of from our 40 years in the European Union, or the important question of what we are doing here as MPs.

Future Free Trade Agreements

Debate between Catherine West and Barry Gardiner

Thursday 21st February 2019 Commons Chamber

[Barry Gardiner]

I certainly do agree with my hon. Friend. Some in the Secretary of State’s party have been claiming that no deal would be better than a bad deal. Others have been claiming that going on to no deal would be no problem at all, that we would be trading on WTO terms. I am sure that she also wonders, if working on WTO terms is as good as those Conservative Members believe it to be, what the green sunlit uplands are that the Secretary of State is speaking about in terms of getting rid of the WTO terms in all these new trade agreements. I think he was the one who referred to having it both ways earlier, but it rather seems to me as if he is doing just that.

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

The Secretary of State’s reference to the sunny uplands of post-Brexit trade rather prompts the question why the Government Benches are not a little fuller today. Would my hon. Friend like to comment?

[Barry Gardiner]

There is no need for me to comment. The empty Benches are screaming my hon. Friend’s point louder than I could amplify it.

Trade Bill

Debate between Catherine West and Barry Gardiner

Tuesday 9th January 2018 Commons Chamber

[Barry Gardiner (Brent North) (Lab)]

I beg to move an amendment, to leave out from “That” to the end of the Question and add:

“this House recognises that on leaving the European Union, whether or not the UK concludes a new long-term customs union with the EU, it will need effective legislation to implement agreements with partner countries corresponding to international trade agreements of the European Union in place before the UK’s exit, to implement procurement obligations arising from the UK becoming a member of the Government Procurement Agreement in its own right, to establish a Trade Remedies Authority to deliver the new UK trade remedies framework, and to establish powers for Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs to collect and disclose data on exporters, but declines to give a Second Reading to the Trade Bill because it fails to set out proper procedures for Parliamentary consultation, scrutiny, debate and approval of future international trade agreements, fails to protect the principle of Parliamentary sovereignty in the implementation of those trade agreements previously negotiated by the European Union and in respect of changes to existing government procurement regulations arising from the UK’s or other countries’ accession to the Government Procurement Agreement, fails to establish sufficient scrutiny procedures to replace those that have pertained while the UK has been a member of the European Union, fails to guarantee that European Union standards and rights will be protected in future trade agreements, and fails to render the Trade Remedies Authority answerable to Parliament or representative of the full range of stakeholders.”

May I take this opportunity to wish you, Madam Deputy Speaker, and all those in this place who in their various ways serve the public, a very happy new year?

Our country is in the throes of an extraordinary change in our constitutional arrangements. At this stage, no one can be entirely certain what the structure of our future relations with the European Union will be, but the Labour party is clear that the country cannot be left without the capacity to defend our manufacturing industry against unfair trading practices. Indeed, many Opposition Members will wish that the Government had been more keenly aware of the need for strong action on trade defence when our steel industry was put into crisis by the unfair dumping of Chinese steel, or when the United States took entirely unjustified action against Bombardier in Northern Ireland.

The need for a Bill to establish a trade remedies authority, to establish our independent membership of the WTO government procurement agreement, to enable us to maintain strong trading ties with partner countries that have had historical agreements with us through the EU, and to establish the power to collect and share trade information—all are uncontroversial requirements. However, the way in which the Government have gone about this process is not uncontroversial; it is quite the opposite.

On the face of it, this is a modest little Bill that has a lot to be modest about. The four things that the Bill does, it does badly. But what is worse is that the one thing it absolutely should have done well—namely, to provide appropriate parliamentary scrutiny and oversight of our country’s trade agreements—it fails to do entirely.

We were repeatedly told that the Trade Bill would provide the basis for the country’s future trade policy once we had left the EU. To quote the Queen’s Speech policy paper from last June:

“The Bill will put in place the essential and necessary legislative framework to allow the UK to operate its own independent trade policy upon exit from the European Union.”

It does not do that. Instead, it represents yet another attempt by the Government to appropriate to themselves powers that should by rights be afforded to Parliament.

I must acknowledge my bias: I voted to remain in the EU and I think our country has embarked on an act of economic self-harm. But I am 100% certain that those of our fellow citizens who did vote to leave the EU did not vote for sovereign powers to be taken away from the bureaucrats, as they regarded them, in Brussels, only to be handed over to the Secretary of State for International Trade. They thought—indeed, they were told—that we were taking back control to our sovereign Parliament, yet the Bill contains Henry VIII powers that explicitly give Ministers the right to amend primary legislation.

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

Does my hon. Friend agree that it is somewhat anomalous that for the past 18 months we have talked about nothing but the sovereignty of Parliament, yet we as parliamentarians now have to beg for a role in our future trade arrangements?

[Barry Gardiner]

My hon. Friend makes an entirely fair point, and it is a criticism that I hope will be prosecuted fully in Committee.