Sri Lanka

Clive Efford Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd April 2019 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hunt]

I can absolutely give my hon. Friend that assurance. I am pleased that he mentioned GCHQ, because it has done a spectacularly important job in recent years in helping us to understand the Daesh networks and how they operate online. That has played a significant role in the defeat of Daesh in recent months, at least in terms of their territorial possessions.

[Clive Efford (Eltham) (Lab)]

I thank the Foreign Secretary for his statement and my right hon. Friend the Member for Islington South and Finsbury (Emily Thornberry) for her response. They set a perfect tone for this exchange. As my hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle upon Tyne North (Catherine McKinnell) just said, we must consider how we behave and set high standards for how we conduct our politics if we are going to show leadership at times like this. Intolerance can reach into all our communities. Yesterday was the 26th anniversary of the murder of Stephen Lawrence, and such events bring home to us the need for us all to face up to intolerance wherever it is.

If the Bishop of Truro is conducting an inquiry looking specifically at the Christian faith and at how Christians are being persecuted around the world, we must avoid any suggestion that we are setting up one religion to be more important than another, because people may seek to prey on that. I know that the Foreign Secretary would want to avoid that, but we must be aware of it.

[Mr Hunt]

I entirely understand why the hon. Gentleman raises that issue. I reassure him that we support freedom of all religious belief; it is just that we think that Christianity has been slightly left behind for various reasons. More Christians are persecuted than those of any other faith, so we want to ensure that we are giving that the proper attention it deserves without excluding any other faith from our concerns.