Oral Answers to Questions

Chi Onwurah Excerpts

Thursday 18th April 2013 Commons Chamber

[The Minister of State, Department for Culture, Media and Sport (Hugh Robertson)]

Everyone across the House will have been appalled by the scenes that we saw at Wembley last Saturday afternoon and early evening. Both the FA and the police are looking very carefully into what happened and the causes behind it. Clearly, kick-off times is one element of that. It would be wrong of anyone here to prejudge that investigation, not least because I am almost sure there will be a criminal element to it, but if any action needs to be taken, the hon. Gentleman has my assurance that that will take place.

[Chi Onwurah (Newcastle upon Tyne Central) (Lab)]

T7. The BBC has committed to £300 million of broadband funding from the digital dividend post-2015, yet despite my repeated questions on the subject, the Minister has refused to say what will happen to that money or even if Broadband Delivery UK will continue to exist post-2015. Can he answer my question now or, if not, can he promise that the answer will be in the forthcoming communications White Paper?

[Mr Vaizey]

I bow to no one in my respect for the hon. Lady, who did a fantastic job when she worked for Ofcom. We are actively looking at the options for spending that £300 million for the last 10%. As soon as we have an answer, she will be among the first to know.

Alan Turing

Chi Onwurah Excerpts

Wednesday 27th June 2012 Westminster Hall

[Dr Julian Huppert (Cambridge) (LD)]

It is a pleasure, Mr Betts, to serve under your chairmanship today. It is also a pleasure to see so many hon. Members from all parties and backgrounds here to speak in this important debate. I hope that, unlike many debates in this place, this will not be a party political debate, and that we can work together to commemorate an important event. Unfortunately, due to the parliamentary timetable, the House was not sitting on Saturday 23 June, on which date Alan Turing was born exactly 100 years ago.

Last week, the hon. Member for Milton Keynes South (Iain Stewart)—it is a pleasure to see him here—made an application, which I and others supported, to the Backbench Business Committee for a debate in the House to commemorate that centenary. It was a pleasure to support that application, but the Backbench Business Committee, in its wisdom, decided that that route was not the best one, and proposed this one instead. I am delighted to have secured this debate to discuss Alan Turing, and the things he did, and the things we did to him.

[Chi Onwurah (Newcastle upon Tyne Central) (Lab)]

I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on securing this important and excellent debate. Does he agree that although this is an excellent forum for discussing the achievements of Alan Turing, it would be good to see more great scientists celebrated on the Floor of the House?

[Dr Huppert]

I thank the hon. Lady for her comments. She is, of course, right. She and I both work to try to promote science, technology and engineering in the broader sense. It is a shame that in this country we do not always recognise scientists—the Clerk Maxwells as much as the Alan Turings. There have been a few links with the House: I have previously spoken to the hon. Lady about one of my predecessors, Isaac Newton, who was the Member of Parliament for Cambridge university. His contributions in the scientific field were perhaps greater than his political contributions. I hope that we will be able to mark the contributions of people in the academic and scientific fields in the years to come.

We have now the opportunity to debate a truly remarkable man and, sadly, a truly depressing chapter in British history. Before doing so, I want to mention Professor S. Barry Cooper of the Turing centenary advisory committee. He has worked tirelessly to spur this debate, and to run a number of events throughout the country to commemorate the life of Alan Turing.

I also want to thank the library of King’s college, Cambridge, which has been a fantastic resource. Alan Turing was a fellow there, as well as a student, and it continues to preserve and promote the life and times of that exceptional man, and his contribution to the modern world. We will not have time today to cover everything that he did, and I invite hon. Members to come and visit the wonderful library at King’s if they wish to know more.

Last Saturday, people throughout the world, including the good people at Google who changed their doodle for the day to a Turing machine, celebrated the centenary of Alan Turing’s birth. The purpose of today’s debate is to contribute to those celebrations, to mark them with our parliamentary brand, and to draw the Government’s attention to the need for us to remember and to commemorate his life in further ways.

In Turing’s famous 1950 article, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence”, which set out the famous Turing test—the test of a machine’s ability to exhibit human behaviour, he concluded that we could see only a short distance ahead, but that we could see plenty there that needs to be done. I suspect that politicians of all colours agree with that statement. If one phrase encapsulates his thinking, his brilliance, and the tragic circumstances in which he was forced to live and die, it is that. He looked at the world around him, exposed what was in front of him, and set a generation of scientists and mathematicians down paths that have changed our world. The tragedy is that no amount of intelligence or foresight could insulate him from a society that was determined to suppress him, and a country that so cruelly mistreated him. Today, we have an opportunity to honour his life and his achievements. One hundred years after his birth, we have a chance to try to put right what the country got so badly wrong.

A citizen of the world from an early age, Turing was born in India before boarding in England. His intellect was recognised very early, and by 16 he was reading Albert Einstein and extrapolating from his work. In 1931, he matriculated at King’s college, Cambridge, having won an open scholarship to study mathematics. By 1935, he had a first-class degree and a fellowship there. He was just 22. In the following year, he published his first seminal article.

I am sure that many hon. Members would like a complete run-down of how the Turing machine revolutionised the theory of computation, and the understanding of mathematical proof through hypothetical computing machines. We are limited by time, and other hon. Members want to speak, so I will refrain from referring to everything that Turing tried to do, but his contribution to human knowledge before reaching his 25th birthday was profound.

After the publication of Turing’s article, he was awarded a visiting fellowship at Princeton, and obtained his PhD. But it was during the war that he first began to have a tangible effect on our country and the world around him. The day after the UK declared war on Germany, he reported to Bletchley Park. He had previously worked for a year part-time for the Government’s code and cipher school, the predecessor to GCHQ. When war broke out, he dedicated himself to the defence of a country that took him for granted.

Turing was immediately assigned to the cryptanalysis of Enigma, the most crucial code-breaking programme of the war effort. So valuable was his contribution to the security services that the papers remained secret and were released only in April this year. They show just how many breakthroughs Turing made in the race to break Enigma. A fascinating question is whether any other human could have made the contributions he made at that time. He was awarded an OBE for that work, but his work remained top secret.

Turing’s contribution to cryptography had a profound impact on the war, but perhaps his most lasting contribution was to computing as a result of his work on cryptography, and the articles he wrote in peacetime. Phrases such as the Turingery technique, the electro-mechanical bombe, and the Banburismus process are hardly commonplace, but they revolutionised our understanding of computers and what they could make possible. Turing’s work directly influenced the creation of the world’s first programmable digital electronic computer. Another fascinating example of which we should take heed is how hard it is to work out what the results of research will be when it starts.

After the war, Turing began work on the automatic computing engine, the pilot of which influenced the construction of the first commercially available computers: English Electric’s DEUCE and the American Bendix G-15. For those achievements, we owe him a huge debt

In the late 1940s, Turing moved to Manchester, and turned his attention to more abstract work in mathematics. Having revolutionised cryptanalysis and modern computing, he then turned to the philosophy of computing and came up with ideas for problems that are still unsolved today. Part of his 1950 paper, to which I referred earlier, created the Turing test. It was designed to ask how to tell the difference between a computer and a human. The test is, essentially, whether someone can reliably tell, without seeing what is happening, whether they are communicating with a computer or a human. Online communications provide a number of examples of it sometimes being hard to tell what is responding but, so far, no artificial intelligence can reliably pass the Turing test.

A version of the test is used daily by millions of people around the world. CAPTCHA—the completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart—is the catchy name for those words that are typed on websites to show that someone is a human and not a computer program. The theory behind that—it is used to secure things across the web every day—is directly influenced by his article 62 years ago.

Turing’s contribution to our understanding of artificial intelligence is no less significant. His idea about how to tell whether a computer can “think” is vital to the modern theory of artificial intelligence. That is not all. In his later years, he worked in mathematical biology—a field that I used to dabble in when I was doing research—and particularly morphogenesis, which is how embryos develop into the organisms they eventually become. He also worked on Fibonacci numbers in plant structures, and his general contribution to the concept of pattern formation is still considered central to the field and has applications in how zebra patterning occurs and many other fields. Again, no one could have foreseen from Turing’s early work where it would lead today, and what would come out of it.

We could spend hours of parliamentary time talking about every one of Turing’s achievements, and I freely admit that I have missed out a huge number of them. Perhaps a full six-hour debate, and many volumes of Hansard, would be enough to list everything that he did, but I hope that the brief summary that I have given provides some tribute to him. But we are not here just to mark Turing’s scientific achievements, or his contribution to the defence effort during the war. Whenever we talk about him, we must discuss how he was treated towards the end of his life, and how he was forced out of the world to which he had contributed so much.

In 1952, Alan Turing was convicted of gross indecency under the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885. His crime was admitting to a relationship with another man. The way it came about is particularly sad—it should never have come about in any way—in that the relationship with the man was, in fact, with somebody who tried to burgle his house. When he reported it, the police became interested in the crime that he had committed by having a relationship with a man in the first place.

When he was convicted, under the laws of the time, he was given a choice of imprisonment or a “cure”—the rather barbaric cure of chemical castration. Faced with two awful choices, he chose the latter, perhaps in the hope that he could continue to live a meaningful life with his liberty at least intact. None the less, he lost his security clearance—essential to all the work that he was doing—his work and even the freedom to discuss his work with colleagues. He lost his right to live his life.

Two years later, in 1954, he died from cyanide poisoning at the age of 41. We have no idea what he could have achieved if he had lived a fuller life. One of the great tragedies is that we did not even give him the honour of a conclusive inquest to understand exactly what went on. We still debate, including in the past week, the circumstances of his death and whether it was suicide or an accident. Some suggest that he created a deliberately ambiguous scenario in which to die. We do not know; we did not check at the time.

A number of tributes commemorate him. His code-breaking machine was commemorated on a stamp. Last week a new plaque was unveiled in my constituency at King’s college, and there are others, which I did not have the chance to look at, in Manchester and on his childhood home. There are academic conferences, symposiums and colloquiums galore, as well as workshops, public lectures, films, art, opera, plays, books, concerts and poetry. The Olympic torch bearer in Manchester ran past his statue to mark it. There has been some interesting discussion about the coming Olympics; I mentioned Turing in the parliamentary links day on the link between science and sport, but I had not realised then that he had entered the Olympic marathon trials in 1948 and come fifth. That would be a challenge for most scientists, computer scientists or engineers today, and one which I will certainly not try to replicate. Nature ran a full issue about Turing. Overseas, Obama has spoken about him and how important he was.

In 2009, the previous Government issued an official apology. I pay tribute to that and am grateful that it happened, but there is still a lack of official recognition for one of the greatest Britons who ever lived, whom Time magazine selected as one of the hundred most important people of the 20th century. That lack of recognition is particularly apparent when we think that it was our Government who so cruelly mistreated Turing and who failed to treat him correctly. We owe it to him to do something further on the centenary.

I accept that the way he was treated as a homosexual was not unusual to him. There is a long history in this country of treating homosexuals in a way that we would now consider completely and utterly unacceptable. I am pleased that the Government have taken steps on the broader issues, with, for example, the Protection of Freedoms Act 2012, which allows the Secretary of State to disregard criminal convictions for homosexual acts by consenting adults. I am pleased that that will now happen to ensure that a person will not be considered as having committed, been charged with, prosecuted for or convicted of a criminal act for such activities. It is important because there are people still alive who bear comments on their Criminal Records Bureau checks about activities that we would certainly not consider criminal now.

There is a lot that we should be doing. The centenary is a good opportunity to mark our debt to Alan Turing and the errors we made as a country. I am sure that hon. Members will talk in more detail about the need to do that. There is a call, supported by a very large petition, for him to be granted a full pardon. It would not change his death or the way that we stopped his work from continuing, but it would be an important sign that the Government accept that Governments made a mistake in the past. It is important to many people who are still affected by the historical decisions that we made.

It is also suggested that Turing be commemorated on a banknote. I accept that banknotes are not the responsibility of the Minister, but I hope that he will listen to that proposal and pass it on to those who print the banknotes. Those two simple acts would make amends for the way in which British society treated such a great man, and embed his story and work into our national consciousness. I hope that the Minister will agree to those suggestions.

[Chi Onwurah]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his generosity in giving way a second time. I agree with the points he makes so eloquently and movingly. Does he agree that Alan Turing, given his life and achievements, would be a much better name, and indeed brand, for technology and innovation centres, which have been named “catapult centres”? Catapults are rather sloppy bits of engineering that have the habit of destroying what they project. I will be writing to the Secretary of State to make that suggestion. Will the hon. Gentleman support it?

[Dr Huppert]

I thank the hon. Lady for her comments. I share the concern about catapults. The idea of a catapult satellite centre seems particularly odd. That is not how I would choose to launch a satellite into orbit. It is worth saying that from an energy efficiency perspective, trebuchets—a slight variant on catapults—are extremely impressive, so there is some interesting technology in that area.

I share her concerns about the name. There is an issue with technology and innovation centres. We could talk about them for about 10 minutes, I suspect. Hermann Hauser, the constituent of mine who came up with the proposal for technology and innovation centres, suggested “Clerk Maxwell centres”. I know that the Select Committee on Science and Technology suggested “Turing centres”. I do not mind which it is. There is a strong case for both and I hope that we can honour both. Either would, in my view, be better names than “catapult centres”. I suspect that renaming scientific research centres is not part of the Minister’s purview, but I hope that he will look carefully at the other suggestions made and, whatever hon. Members suggest, I hope that he will pass them on to the appropriate Ministers for consideration.

Whatever the response, I hope that the Government will take the chance to recognise that in the centenary of Turing’s birth we have the opportunity to celebrate someone whose contribution to our society and world has hitherto not been sufficiently marked. He showed the world the infinite potential of human ingenuity and the machines that that ingenuity could make possible. He changed our world and our society. He showed the world how machines could help humans, and we treated him in the most inhuman way. I look forward to a full debate from hon. Members, who I thank for coming to mark such a great man, and to a full response from the Government. We owe him no less than our full discussion.

Oral Answers to Questions

Chi Onwurah Excerpts

Tuesday 13th December 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Djanogly]

The right hon. Gentleman mentions the fact that the Bill is currently going through the other place and will shortly head to Committee. Of course, the Government, being a listening Government, and the Ministry of Justice, being a listening Ministry, will take onboard the concerns of noble Members in the other place and act accordingly.

[Chi Onwurah (Newcastle upon Tyne Central) (Lab)]

3. When he expects to appoint a new Victims’ Commissioner.

[The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice (Mr Kenneth Clarke)]

I am extremely grateful to Louise Casey for the work she did as Victims’ Commissioner and the advice that I received from her while she was in office. We are considering the future of the role and intend to make an announcement in due course.

[Chi Onwurah]

In 2005, teenager Jenny Nicholl was murdered. Her murderer was convicted in 2008 but her body has never been found. Her mother, a constituent of mine, tells me that she received little support while suffering aggressive media intrusion and insinuations. Murder victims’ families have no formal status in court, are offered no protection from the media and, on average, incur costs of £113,000. Mrs Nicholl found the Victims’ Commissioner a strong supporter and champion. To whom should she turn now?

[Mr Clarke]

When Louise Casey was Victims’ Commissioner, she advised me strongly on giving more resources to the support of bereaved families, and I thought that her advice that we should target our support to victims and their families was very sensible. We are working on that and will continue to do so. I propose to publish a consultation document on a general victims package covering a wide range of areas, and I can assure the hon. Lady that in all our work we intend to give even greater emphasis to the importance of looking after victims, as well as getting justice in their cases.

Oral Answers to Questions

Chi Onwurah Excerpts

Tuesday 20th July 2010 Commons Chamber

The Secretary of State was asked—

[Chi Onwurah (Newcastle upon Tyne Central) (Lab)]

1. What steps the Prison Service takes to communicate to police forces its assessment of the mental state of and threats posed to the public by prisoners immediately prior to release.

[The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (Nick Herbert)]

Police forces are notified of all prisoner releases. Procedures are in place in each prison under the national security policies to ensure that security information about offenders is analysed and shared with the police and other agencies if it is considered that it will help the police to protect the public from serious harm.

[Chi Onwurah]

I referred to the mental health care and status of prisoners. The recent tragic events in Newcastle, on Tyneside and in Rothbury have highlighted how important the provision of good mental health care in prisons is. Will responsibility for that provision be given to local GPs in the reorganisation of the national health service, or will it be under the control of the prison?

[Nick Herbert]

First, I agree with the hon. Lady that it is important that we ensure adequate mental health care for prisoners, a very large number of whom suffer from mental health conditions. She will appreciate that I cannot comment specifically on the case to which she referred, which is the subject of an Independent Police Complaints Commission investigation and a police investigation. We are now considering carefully how the Government’s health reforms should fit in with how we want to provide health services in prisons.

Defendant Anonymity

Chi Onwurah Excerpts

Thursday 8th July 2010 Commons Chamber

[Chi Onwurah (Newcastle upon Tyne Central) (Lab)]

I will not speak for long, as many of the arguments that I wanted to make against the coalition’s proposals have already been made very eloquently and forcefully by fellow Members on the Opposition Benches—and also, on occasion, by those on the other side of the House. With some exceptions, the level of debate on this very sensitive subject has been such as to make me feel very privileged to take part in it, although I still regret absolutely the necessity for me to do so.

I want to share with the House the experience of one of my constituents, to illustrate the distress that the coalition’s proposals are already causing to many people in my constituency. I should say that the family concerned asked me specifically to share this information when they heard of the coalition’s proposals.

I will be keeping the identity of my constituent private. When we hon. Members make reference to victims of other crimes, such as murder or stabbings, we often name them. We do so because we think that brings honour on them. But not in the case of rape. The stigma of rape still contaminates the victim, even in the 21st century. I know that we all believe that that is wrong, and that many Members on both sides of the House, and indeed people across the country, have worked for years to eliminate that stigma, and huge progress has been made. But the coalition’s plans risk endangering much of that progress. That is because giving rape defendants anonymity is a unique fashion of saying to the public, to the jury and to the victim him or herself, that victims are not to be trusted.

My constituent was raped many years ago now, but her experience still impacts on her life and that of her family. Her attacker drove into her, causing her a minor injury. He then apologised profusely and offered to give her a lift home. En route he parked and forced her into a disused building, where he raped her after repeatedly punching her in the face. She was held hostage for many hours. She feared for her life, and indeed her life was in the gift of her attacker. Fortunately, she managed to escape, and fortunately also the police were able to trace the attacker. But even after arrest, my constituent’s attacker viewed his crime with little seriousness. He intended to plead not guilty. He said the victim wanted it all along. After all, she had got into the car with him; she must be in the habit of having such encounters with strangers on the street. And it was only her word against his. One can only imagine how distressing that was not only for the victim, but for her family.

I want to emphasise that the reporting of rape is always a distressing experience for the victim and those who are around him or her. By introducing these proposals, the coalition is now making my constituent and her family relive that experience. In her case, only when another of her attacker’s victims came forward, owing to the publicity and the naming of the attacker, did the case become strong enough that the defendant decided to plead guilty, thereby saving her from the trauma of having to give evidence. That ended the prospect of my constituent having to relive her pain in a court case, but she is still reliving her pain now when she thinks that, if the coalition’s proposals had been in place, her attacker may never have been convicted.

The Government’s main argument, as we can understand it, for giving rape defendants anonymity seems to rest on the possibility of false allegations. It is true that false allegations of any serious crime can ruin lives. It is terribly distressing to be falsely accused of any crime, and we must do all that we can in the justice system to minimise the likelihood of that happening. However, as I believe the Minister acknowledged, there is no greater likelihood of false allegations being made in cases of rape than in cases of other crimes, whereas we all know—we have the statistics to show it—that the under-reporting of rape is far greater than that of other crimes of a similarly serious nature. So why does it make sense to introduce these proposals to give anonymity to defendants when we need to do all that we can to encourage rape victims to come forward?

Hon. Members have discussed the principle that anonymity is awarded in relation to vulnerability, such as that of children. Children, the victims of organised crime and rape victims are given anonymity, but rape defendants do not fit into that mould of vulnerability. Indeed, the Minister said that one reason for giving anonymity was to create—I think that this was his phrase—a balance of arms. I hope that he did not mean to imply that the objective of our criminal justice system is somehow to clear the ground, so that the defendant and the claimant can fight it out like some sort of mediaeval tournament. That would be a regressive step.

I hope that the coalition will understand that these proposals will take our criminal justice backwards and that, if we want to live in a society, as I am sure that we all do, where respect for law and belief in justice are given to all, male or female, defendants and accused, awarding anonymity to defendants will be a most regressive step.