Referral of Prime Minister to Committee of Privileges

Debate between Diane Abbott and Jeremy Corbyn

Thursday 21st April 2022 Commons Chamber

[Ms Diane Abbott (Hackney North and Stoke Newington) (Lab)]

In our arcane system, the Prime Minister can sit as judge and jury on himself. As other Members have pointed out, this is a ridiculous system. I am willing to bet that the Prime Minister will not find himself guilty, even though the Metropolitan police have found him guilty of at least one breach of the covid rules, and my guess is that there are more crimes to come. This is a breach of rules that his own Government wrote, and that he then took to the airwaves to defend.

The Prime Minister

“sometimes seems affronted when criticised for what amounts to a gross failure of responsibility. I think he honestly believes that it is churlish of us not to regard him as an exception, one who should be free of the network of obligation which binds everyone else”.

Those are not my words, but those of his former classics master at Eton. It is not hard to draw the conclusion that those words still stand, so it is natural that we have had no proper apology to the British people for his multiple breaches of covid rules. This Prime Minister is both capable of multiple lawbreaking and incapable of genuine contrition. This attitude to the rules has marked his entire career, both in journalism and in this House. For him to say “I am sorry for any offence caused” is not an apology for repeated wrongdoing. For him to say, “I was not aware of my own rules” is the defence of the ignorant, which does not stand in law. And for him to claim, “I have not misled the House”, “All the rules were obeyed” and “No rules were broken” is a serious cover-up. I could use another word, but I will refrain out of respect to you, Madam Deputy Speaker.

For the Prime Minister to say there were no parties at No. 10 when 50 financial penalties have been handed out, when he attended many of those parties and stood barman for at least one of them, insults the intelligence of the people of Britain. The issue with the Prime Minister is that he clearly believes there is one set of rules for him and his cronies, and another set of rules for the rest of us, including the electorate. These were not just rules but orders from the Prime Minister and his cronies, who consider themselves to be better than the ordinary people of this country.

[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Ind)]

Is my right hon. Friend aware that, while the Prime Minister was organising parties in No. 10 and showing complete contempt for his own rules, working-class communities and young people in overcrowded flats all over Britain were in lockdown? The mental health crisis that we still have around us was intensified by the very strict operation of those rules, and many young people faced massive £10,000 fines for organising parties. Is it not just one law for Boris Johnson and his mates, and a different one for everybody else?

[Ms Abbott]

My right hon. Friend makes a very important point. We are told that we must rely on the integrity of the Government if the rule of law, the principle that no one is above the law and, even more importantly, people’s respect for the political system are to be upheld in this country. Well, we shall see.

Conservative Members have complained that the Opposition are engaging in politics, and of course there is a political dimension. My email inbox has been deluged with complaints about this matter, and I am sure I am not alone. I am sure many Conservative Members, if they dared admit it, could say the same. The Prime Minister has to accept that this is not just a Westminster row that nobody outside SW1 is concerned about.

The public—Tory voters, Labour voters and those who have never voted at all—have had to endure untold misery during the Prime Minister’s premiership. No fewer than 190,000 people have died from covid, and more than 1 million people have long covid. Because of the rules, as we have heard, so many people were unable to be with their loved ones as they were dying. These are the people the Prime Minister is scorning. These are the people to whom the Prime Minister thinks he can get away with making a manifestly ingenuine and mealy mouthed apology. It did not have to be that way.

The background of this issue is that living standards are plummeting, the NHS is in crisis and the spring statement rubbed salt into the wounds, making tens of millions of people worse off. I do not believe the public are in a mood to forgive and forget. The Prime Minister and his acolytes like to say he was at the party for only nine minutes. Many people would have liked to have been with their loved ones for nine minutes when they were dying.

The country wants the Prime Minister gone and these Benches want the Prime Minister gone. He broke the law. The question for Conservative members is very clear: are you just going to do nothing, today and in the future, while Boris Johnson sacrifices you to save himself, as he has done throughout his life and career?

Financial and Social Emergency Support Package

Debate between Diane Abbott and Jeremy Corbyn

Wednesday 25th March 2020 Commons Chamber

[Ms Diane Abbott (Hackney North and Stoke Newington) (Lab)]

Does my right hon. Friend share my concern for that particular group of victims who are people with no recourse to public funds? They cannot work in a situation where so much of the economy has been closed down, and they have no legal rights to benefits of any kind—even the paltry level of benefits that the Government are talking about. They are not the only group, but these people face destitution. I raised that with the Home Secretary on Monday. We have still not heard anything about what the Government are going to do to protect people and their children who have no recourse to public funds

[Jeremy Corbyn]

I thank my right hon. Friend for her intervention and for what she is doing about that. There are people with no recourse to public funds all over the country. Typically, they are people who are seeking asylum, their case is going endlessly through Home Office processes, and they are not getting help or an answer. Many groups are doing their best to help them. I pay tribute to the north London liberal synagogue for its monthly drop-in sessions and the support that it gives those people, and to many others, but it should not be down to charities to do it. We need to ensure that those people and their families are supported throughout this crisis. This is yet another lesson about the dislocation of our society and the way in which we treat people.

Every single person in this country can now see how important public services are, and looking beyond this crisis, they must never again be subjected to the damaging and counterproductive cuts that have taken place over the past 10 years. The hard truth is this: austerity has left us weaker in the face of this pandemic. We should not have gone into it with 94% of our NHS beds already full, with 100,000 NHS job vacancies or with a quarter of the number of ventilators per person that Germany has. Ventilators are our most precious resource in this crisis; we should not have begun with so few. We need more of them urgently, and we need the staff trained to use them urgently as well.

We all have a duty to do what we can for the collective good, to come together and to look out for each other—for our loved ones, our neighbours and our communities. But we also need collective public action to be led by the Government. That is the only power that can protect our people from the devastation that coronavirus could wreak on us.

This crisis demands new economic thinking. We cannot rely on the old ways of doing things. A major crisis we face as a society cannot and will not be solved by the market. Coronavirus, the climate emergency, huge levels of inequality, increasingly insecure patterns of work and the housing crisis can only be solved by people working together, not against each other.

The corporations and giant multinationals that weald so much power in our economy and appear to have the ears of the Prime Minister and presidents worldwide will always put private profit ahead of public good. Just look at the actions of Tim Martin, the chair of Wetherspoon—he told his staff, who are paid very little while he has raked in millions, to go and work in Tesco, instead of standing by them in their hour of need. Look at the attempts of Mike Ashley to keep his shops open, putting his staff at risk. The insatiable greed of those at the top is driving another crisis, one even more dangerous as we look to the future: the climate emergency. Oil companies and fossil fuel extractors continue to damage and destroy our planet, our air and our wildlife, threatening the future of civilisation itself. We need to find the same urgency to deal with that threat as we now see working against coronavirus.

The coronavirus crisis will not be solved by those driven by private profit and share prices. It will be solved by the bravery of national health service workers and those who are on the frontline. It will be solved by communities coming together in all their diversity. It will be solved by the Government and public institutions taking bold action in the interests of the common good. The crisis shows what government can do; it shows what government could have always done. We have found the money to give more support to people in financial hardship. We have found the money to increase investment in our national health service. We have found the money to accommodate the homeless in hotels. If we can do it in a crisis, why could we not have done it in calmer times as well?

We are learning, through this crisis, the extent of the interdependence of each of us with each other. If my neighbour gets sick, I might get sick. If the lowest-paid worker in a company gets sick, it could even make the chief executive sick. If somebody on the other side of the world gets sick, as they did in Wuhan’s province¸ it makes us all sick. Indeed, the virus is now hitting Syria and the besieged Gaza strip. If the healthcare systems of Europe cannot cope, just imagine what it will be like for countries in the global south. Save the Children has warned of the

“perfect storm conditions for a human crisis of unimaginable dimensions.”

This virus knows no national boundaries, and neither should our capacity for compassion and care for our fellow human beings. The internationalism of the doctors from Cuba who have gone to fight the virus in Italy is inspirational, as is the action of the European Union, which has given €20 million to help tackle the crisis in Iran at the present time, despite the sanctions. It is a scandal that sanctions have prevented many Iranians from accessing vital medical supplies, putting each other at risk and, inevitably, putting all of us at risk. The old trade union slogan goes, “An injury to one is an injury to all, united we stand, divided we fall.”

People across our country know that. So many are showing such compassion in the face of adversity, as we see when we look at how people are coming together. Mutual aid groups have been springing up all over the country, with thousands of people organising to protect their communities. It is inspirational to see people who have never spoken to each other before suddenly getting together in this time of crisis and realising that they live in the same street and they need that help and support for each other. It is that spirit which will take us forward. There is no doubt that after this crisis our society and our economy will be, and will have to be, very, very different. We must learn the lessons from the crisis and ensure that our society is defined as a society by solidarity and compassion, rather than insecurity, fear and inequality.

Housing Supply (London)

Debate between Diane Abbott and Jeremy Corbyn

Wednesday 15th July 2015 Westminster Hall

[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Lab)]

The length of the speech of the hon. Member for Enfield, Southgate (Mr Burrowes) proves the failure of self-regulation in the House of Commons and, indeed, anywhere else. I will genuinely attempt to be as brief as possible.

There is an enormous housing crisis in London, and it is getting worse. Someone walking around the streets of London on any night will see the number of people now sleeping rough, without benefits and begging. Every day, people are being evicted from the private rental sector to make way for somebody else moving in on a still-higher rent. There is something brutal and unnecessary about the way in which many people in this city have to live.

The abject failure of Government policy to address the issues of housing in London is making the situation worse and worse. Nothing that the Government have proposed since they were re-elected in May is going to do anything to alleviate the crisis facing large numbers of people in London.

First, there is the idea of cutting most local authority tenants’ rent by 1%. I have no particular problem with that, but I hope that the housing revenue account will be compensated accordingly by central Government; otherwise, it will lead to an investment problem in the future. Then there is the bizarre idea, which I suspect is a Trojan horse for changing the whole local government rent regulation system, of charging market rents for those earning not very high incomes—median incomes. I was talking last night to a well qualified and experienced social worker in a London borough who is worried about applying for promotion, because success would put his salary up, which would more than double his rent. A salary increase of more than £10,000 a year would leave him worse off. That is a ludicrous situation. Council tenants should pay a council rent that they can afford.

[Ms Abbott]

Does my hon. Friend agree that one of the aspects of putting up council rents for people who earn a little more is that the earnings will be household earnings, which means that the rent for two people on an average salary in London will go up? Is not putting up rents in that way a tax on aspiration?

Budget Resolutions and Economic Situation

Debate between Diane Abbott and Jeremy Corbyn

Wednesday 8th July 2015 Commons Chamber

[Jeremy Corbyn]

I welcome the fact that the Chancellor has changed the method of calculating poverty to produce the statistics that he wanted in the first place. He is doing extremely well on statistical changes, and I admire his gymnastics in that regard.

This Budget, with its benefit changes, is essentially an attack on the poorest and on young people. What do the Conservatives and the Chancellor have against young people? We start off with a third child onward policy. What is that about? If the Chancellor is saying that children deserve to be supported through child benefit—I guess we all agree on that—why does it stop after the second child? If a family happens to have four or five children—some of us come from families of three, four or five children—is he saying that the third, fourth and fifth children are less valuable than the first and second? What has been suggested is outrageous.

[Ms Diane Abbott (Hackney North and Stoke Newington) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that this Budget is particularly bad for Londoners? Two thirds of Londoners on tax credits are actually working, so, far from encouraging people to go back to work, this Budget is a particularly cruel attack on working Londoners.

[Jeremy Corbyn]

Indeed; my hon. Friend is absolutely correct. Although London has very high property prices and a number of extremely wealthy people—it is the centre for some of the world’s wealthiest people—it also has appalling levels of poverty. Some of those people in desperate poverty are being forced out of London by a combination of the high rents and the benefit cap, and the proposal now is to reduce the benefit cap. I am not pleased that we have to spend £25,000 or more on supporting some families, but from the way that this statistic is presented by the Chancellor, one would imagine that the entirety of that £25,000 went immediately to that family. Well, it does not; it goes straight into the pockets of a private landlord, just as the in-work benefit often goes to subsidise low wages. I am pleased that we are getting something approaching a living wage, though it is not very different from what the minimum wage would have been by that time anyway. We must look very carefully at the issues surrounding this Budget.

There are also other problems for young people, such as cuts in benefit, their inability to access housing or to get a reasonable level of room rate if they are single, the continuation of the low wage rates and the conversion of all grants into loans for those from poorer backgrounds who were hoping, planning and aiming to go to university. What is it that the Conservative party has against the young people of this country? I find it very strange.

I represent a constituency that, in housing terms, has about 40% council tenancies, about 30% social private rents and about 30% owner-occupation. Because of the benefit cap and the very high rents in the private rented sector, many people are being forced out of the community. The same thing is happening all across central London. Those who say that it does not matter because they do not represent a London constituency should think on: this principle could apply everywhere else. The Chancellor’s proposals on housing are very interesting.

Mental Health and Well-being of Londoners

Debate between Diane Abbott and Jeremy Corbyn

Thursday 12th February 2015 Commons Chamber

[Ms Abbott]

I am grateful to you, Madam Deputy Speaker. As ever, you are punctilious about matters of order.

London boroughs spend about £550 million a year on just the social care costs of treating mental disorders. Another £960 million is spent each year on benefits to support people with mental ill health. Across the population, the net effect of those wider impacts substantially affects London’s economy, infrastructure and population. Mental health is not simply an issue for health and social care; it is an issue for everyone. Mental health conditions debilitate London businesses each year by limiting employee productivity and reducing the potential work force. Every year £920 million is lost owing to sickness absences, and a further £1.9 billion is lost in reduced productivity. Moreover, the costs extend more widely: the staggering sum of £10.4 billion is lost each year to London business and industry as a result of mental health issues.

The London criminal justice system spends approximately £220 million a year on services related to mental ill health, and other losses such as property damage, loss of stolen goods and the lost output of victims cost London a further £870 million. Those costs are already too high, but treatment costs are expected to grow over the next two decades. Mental health issues also prevent physical health conditions from being addressed properly. However, mental ill health remains one of the least understood of all health problems. The problem is exacerbated by the existence of an obstinate and persistent stigma that prevents people from talking about mental health or paying attention to the debate about it, and therefore prevents us as a society from addressing it properly.

I want to say a little about the issue of parity of esteem between mental and physical health. The continuing lack of parity of esteem, in terms of both funding and attitudes, underlies some of the mental health problems not just in London, but throughout the country. As the daughter of a mental health nurse, I am very clear about the fact that there is no parity of esteem between mental and physical health. My mother came here as a pupil nurse in the 1960s, and was part of the generation of West Indian women who helped to build our NHS. She took time off work to bring up a family, but she returned to nursing in the 1980s, and her subsequent career in mental health exemplified the issues involved in the lack of parity of esteem.

The first thing that I want to say about parity of esteem is that those who might be described as the high fliers in health do not necessarily go into mental health. That has always tended to be the case. I shall never forget something that happened in 1987, when I was a brand-new MP. The then chief nurse at City and Hackney told me that I must visit the hospitals in the area. She said that I should meet her at 10 pm, and she would take me to the three major hospitals in hospital: Bart’s, Homerton, and Hackney mental hospital. I met her, and we went around Bart’s. She did not think it in any way remarkable that in Bart’s, even at the dead of night, we did not see a single black nurse. Then we went to Homerton, where there were quite a few black nurses doing the night shift. The chief nurse said to me innocently, “You know, they”—meaning nurses of colour, I assume—“seem to prefer the night shift; our day shift is quite different.”

Then I went to Hackney mental hospital. Although this happened in 1987, I have never forgotten it. The mental hospital was, literally, an old workhouse. It was as grim as anyone could possibly imagine—and, of course, all the nurses there, day and night, were BME. I am afraid that that pointed to a lack of parity of esteem, in the context of the way in which nurses were allocated and the direction in which their careers were leading. I am not in any way detracting from the specialists in mental health, but in respect of nurses there has long been a stratification when it comes to who should work in mental as opposed to physical health.

My mother was a devoted mental health nurse who dealt with geriatric patients with dementia. When my brother and I were older and she went back to nursing, she worked in a hospital outside Huddersfield called Storthes Hall. Thankfully, it has now been closed. It was another former Victorian workhouse, and it looked exactly like a Victorian workhouse. One had only to visit that hospital, see the conditions there and then visit the new Huddersfield royal infirmary in the centre of Huddersfield to see physically demonstrated the complete inequality in services offered to people with physical illness as opposed to people with mental illness.

For a number of years, there has been more focus on mental health in all parties, which is to be welcomed, and more focus on the importance of parity of esteem. However, the financial issues are a challenge. For many years, mental health has been chronically underfunded and it has the reputation of being a Cinderella service. At national level, mental health accounts for 28% of the pressure in the NHS, yet on average clinical commissioning groups spent just 10% of their budget on mental health in 2013. Separate investigations by Community Care and the BBC showed that mental health trusts had their budgets cut by 2.3% in real terms between 2011-12 and 2013-14. The effects of some of those cuts have been felt throughout the system. There have been difficulties in accessing talking therapies. Service provision is creaking at the seams. Over 2,000 mental health beds have been closed since 2011, leading to several trusts with sky-high bed occupancy rates.

There is no question—perhaps Ministers will query this—but that austerity and issues with welfare, access to housing and unemployment have put some of London’s most deprived communities under pressure. Welfare cuts, the lack of stable tenancies and improperly enforced employment regulations must have an effect on the incidence of mental health-related illness. Therefore, on the one hand we have cuts to funding and on the other a rise in the conditions that affect people’s well-being and ultimately their mental health. That is a double-edged sword that spells disaster for the well-being of Londoners.

The specific mental health needs of LGBT Londoners are not discussed often. For a long time, London has been a city where young people come to find themselves. It is an inclusive environment where LGBT people are welcome. London boasts a dynamic gay scene and has successfully hosted World Pride. LGBT Londoners are now able to get married, to raise families and are equal before the law. We must safeguard those achievements by ensuring that they have access to appropriate health care and mental health provision.

It is time to change the stereotype that LGBT people are busy partying and having a good time. Unfortunately, it is not a wholly accurate depiction of the community. There are various estimates about the incidence of mental health problems in LGBT groups, but research I have seen says that sexual minorities are two or three times more likely to report having a long-standing psychological or emotional problem than their heterosexual counterparts; and that two out of five LGBT people will experience a mental health problem at some point in their lives, which is quite a high proportion. In 2014, Stonewall said:

“Compared to the general population, lesbian, gay and bisexual people have higher rates of mental ill health as well as alcohol and drug consumption. Lesbians are also more likely to have never had a cervical smear test, while gay and bisexual men are more likely to experience domestic violence.”

Particularly among young LGBT people, we see rising levels of self-harm. Homophobic behaviour is going unchallenged in the workplace and on London’s public transport system, and hate crimes against LGBT people remain stubbornly high. There are also issues about access to mental health services for LGBT groups.

The situation is even worse for black and minority Londoners who identify as lesbian, gay or bisexual, among whom rates of suicide and self-harm are higher than among than the population generally. Some 5% of black and minority ethnic lesbian and bisexual women have attempted to take their own life in the last year, compared with just 0.4% of men over the same period, and one in 12 have harmed themselves in the last year compared with one in 33 in the general population. What are the Government doing to improve the training of NHS staff on the specific health needs of LGBT people and black and minority ethnic LGBT people, because at present they are both challenged with higher levels of mental health issues but have difficulties accessing services?

There are particular challenges in London associated with the recent reorganisation of the NHS, moving responsibility for public health to local authorities. In principle that move makes it much easier to address the social determinants of ill health, including mental health, but the concern is that because of pressures on local authorities funding for mental health will drop and the ability to provide London-wide services for groups, such as the LGBT community, will weaken.

The House will know that my party is not proposing to put the NHS through a further reorganisation when we return to office in a few months’ time. However, it would make sense for existing structures in London to monitor outcomes for LGBT people throughout the capital, and given the complexity and size of London we cannot simply take a one-size-fits-all approach to LGBT issues.

Young people today are living in a time of unprecedented pressures, with smartphones, the internet, a world of 24-hour communication, new avenues for bullying, new fears and new concerns. The issues are plain to see in the growing demand for services for young people across London, with London hospital admissions for self-harm rising from 1,715 in 2011-12 to 2,046 in the last year. At least one in 10 children in the UK is thought to have a clinically significant mental health problem, which amounts to 111,000 young people in London. The impact of childhood psychiatric disorders costs London’s education system approximately £200 million a year, and in 2013 the Children and Young People’s Mental Health Coalition found that 28% of joint health and wellbeing strategies in London did not prioritise children and young people’s mental health.

What are the Government doing to ensure that joint strategic needs assessments look at, and include information about, the size, impact and cost of local children’s mental health needs, to ensure that sufficient services are being commissioned? Will the Minister ensure that data about BME young people and children will be comprehensively included in the new national prevalence survey of child and adolescent mental health being commissioned by the Department of Health? Concerns have been raised in this House previously about the funding of services for children and adolescents, but it is clear in London in particular that there is an unravelling crisis in relation to young people and mental health.

As I said at the outset, London’s youth, and youth nationally, live in an era of unprecedented pressure. Data obtained from a freedom of information request of top-tier local authorities in England by the mental health charity Young Minds revealed that in 2010-13 local authorities in London cut their children and adolescent mental health service budgets by 5%, at a time of increasing pressure on young people. The latest data show that Southwark cut its budget by 50%, as did Lambeth and Hounslow. Tower Hamlets cut its budget by 30%, and Haringey cut its budget by 10%. Those are some of the most deprived boroughs in London, and if they are really cutting their expenditure on young people’s mental health care to that extent, it is very serious.

[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Lab)]

I thank my hon. Friend for giving way and congratulate her on securing the debate. She must be aware that the cuts in mental health budgets are, basically, arbitrary because no one knows what the long-term demand will be. No one knows what levels of demand are not being met within communities because people are afraid to come forward even to discuss their need for some kind of help. This is a huge problem and it needs to be given much greater attention by the Department of Health.

[Ms Abbott]

My hon. Friend is right to say that the cuts are arbitrary, and they certainly do not account for unmet need. In my time as a Member of Parliament—my hon. Friend must have had similar experiences—I have met many mothers and other people who are unable to access the mental health care that they need, particularly talking therapies. Cutting provision at a time when we do not even know the size of unmet need is very dangerous.

I want to turn now to mental health care provision for the black and minority ethnic community. I have looked at this issue over many years, and I believe that the manner in which the mental health system fails people of colour is a tragedy that has been consigned to the shadows for too long. As well as talking about parity of esteem between mental health and physical health, we need to talk about a parity of care between all sections of the community, and at this point that is not happening. I hope to set out briefly some of the findings of the research that has been carried out over the decades on black people and mental health, but my central point is that black and minority ethnic people are not getting parity of care and service. This is a long-standing issue that goes back decades, and I call on the Government to do what they can. I shall also call on the incoming Labour Government to pay attention to this issue in a way that has not happened in the past. Governments genuinely need to understand and address these needs.

Black and minority ethnic mental health is a particular issue for London because half Britain’s black and ethnic minority community is inside the M25. Sometimes it is hard to get the data we need, but we know, for instance, that in Lambeth—less than a mile from this Chamber—more than half the people admitted to acute psychiatric wards, and more than 65% of the people in secure wards, are from the Caribbean and African communities. I know from regularly visiting Hackney’s psychiatric wards, and the Hackney forensic unit, that the proportion in Hackney is as at least as high, if not higher, than that. We have accurate statistics for Lambeth, but we only have to walk into psychiatric wards across London to see that the majority of beds in the big mental health institutions such as the Maudsley are occupied by people of colour.

I remember, as a new MP in 1988, raising the disproportionate number of black people on wards with the head of psychiatric services in City and Hackney. I asked, “Why are so many people on your wards black and minority ethnic? It’s way out of proportion even with the population of City and Hackney.” City and Hackney produced three very senior psychiatric doctors to talk to me about this. They turned to each other, paused, muttered, and one suggested that it might have something to do with “ganja psychosis”. Another then ventured the opinion that perhaps more mad people were migrating from the Caribbean. I had to say to him, “It’s hard enough to get into this country if you’re sane; it is to the highest degree unlikely that the authorities are allowing all these mad people to come into the country.” But the striking thing about that conversation was that it was not some casual conversation on a ward; the head of psychiatric services had marshalled the three most senior psychiatric doctors in City and Hackney, and the only explanation they could offer for their wards being full of black people was “ganja psychosis”. I was struck by how low the level of knowledge was and how low the level of interest was.

I also know from my years as a Member of Parliament how many black families are struggling with the consequences of the mental health system’s failure to offer the right support at the right time, and the help and services to which they are entitled. One of the saddest things I see in my work as a Member of Parliament is black mothers, single heads of household, struggling with black males in their household who clearly have chronic mental health problems. I have had women come to see me who have been assaulted by their own son. When they are told that they should go to a GP and that perhaps their son needs to be sectioned, they say,” No, no, no.” That is because there is a terrible fear in the black community of the mental health system. Some women would rather risk assault by their own son and live in fear than consign their son to the mental health system, because their understanding is that once that system gets their child, the child is pumped full of drugs and never comes out again or, if they do, they are not the same. So it is time this Government and any incoming Government give more attention to issues relating to black people and mental health.

Those issues have not altered in decades: there are disproportionate numbers of black people, particularly men, in the system; we are more likely to be labelled “schizophrenic”; we present later to the system, which makes matters worse; we are more likely to come to the mental health system through the criminal justice system, particularly by being picked up by the police on the street and finding ourselves sectioned; and we are less likely to be offered talking therapy. I remember going in the ’90s to a mental health therapy centre in west London that specialised in talking therapy and did excellent work. I noticed that there were no black and minority ethnic people there and when I asked about this I was told, “Oh, we find that black and minority ethnic people don’t benefit from talking therapy.” That is an extraordinary attitude. We need to do more to make talking therapy available across communities, including BME communities. Black people are also statistically more likely to be offered electroconvulsive therapy—in other words, they are more likely to be plugged into the mains. There is also a terrible history of deaths in mental health custody, which are often to do with the type of restraint used and a fear of a violent black male. There is a whole string of such cases, of which Sean Rigg’s is one of the most recent.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Hackney North and Stoke Newington (Ms Abbott) on obtaining the debate. It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Hendon (Dr Offord) and I am delighted that he had such a profitable morning at the Whittington hospital in my constituency. The ambulatory care centre is indeed excellent. It was a product of a community and all-party campaign to defend the A and E department some years ago. We won that campaign, and as a result we have a thriving A and E department and a new and very efficient ambulatory care centre. I attended its opening with colleagues. It is a great place and I am glad that the hon. Gentleman was well treated there. I hope he will write and tell the hospital so.

The point that the hon. Gentleman raised on policing, on which I intervened, is serious. I make no general criticism of the police force as a whole, but I do think that when the police are called to an incident in a shopping centre, or in the street or elsewhere, they need to be well aware that some of the people there may be suffering from a mental crisis, may be mental health patients, and need to be treated with some degree of care and understanding. Many police officers are very understanding and very careful about that; I am not trying to make any general criticism. I just think we need to send a gentle message to the Metropolitan police that within training, there should be as much awareness as possible of the mental health conditions that exist within the community.

We have moved on a long way in debates on mental health in this House during the time that I have been here. When I was first elected, a person with a mental health condition was not allowed to stand for Parliament. The Speaker had the power to section Members of Parliament under the Mental Health Act—may still do, for all I know. Mental illness was generally the butt of humour—of universal jokes—so that people going through a crisis, perhaps depression, felt unable to talk about it and felt it would blight their career prospects in any walk of life if they did talk about it. Consequently, only if they had the money did they seek private help and private counselling; if they did not have the money, they suffered, and might lose their job and end up with a blighted career.

All of us can go through depression; all of us can go through those experiences. Every single one of us in this Chamber knows people who have gone through it, and has visited people who have been in institutions and have fully recovered and gone back to work and continued their normal life. I dream of the day when this country becomes as accepting of these problems as some Scandinavian countries are, where one Prime Minister was given six months off in order to recover from depression, rather than being hounded out of office as would have happened on so many other occasions.

The issues that I shall raise are much the same as those raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Hackney North and Stoke Newington in opening the debate—on the disproportionate extent to which the people one finds in mental health institutions come from the black and minority ethnic communities, and the socio-economic imbalance on mental health issues. People who lead stressful lives, without housing security, without job security, without financial security, frightened about the consequences of what their children are up to or whether their children can get a job and so on, are sometimes affected by levels of stress that the rest of us would not even want to think about.

The access point to mental health services is usually the GP. That is the great thing about the national health service, although sometimes it is the problem of the national health service. A GP surgery at its best is brilliant, recognises the holistic needs of the patient and does its best to accommodate those holistic needs. The GP system at its worst is a single-handed GP who may have been there a very long time, become rather set in their ways, is not very interested in people coming to them with stress or other psychiatric-related problems, and does not refer them for any kind of therapy or counselling.

I am concerned about the length of time people wait for counselling or support. A report commissioned by the British Psychoanalytic Council and the UK Council for Psychotherapy, based on over 2,000 psychotherapists working across the NHS, the third sector and in private practice shows that in the NHS and the third sector

“57% of practitioners said client waiting times have increased over the last year, 52% report fewer psychotherapy services being commissioned in the last year, 77% report an increase in the number of complex cases they are expected to deal with.”

The report continues:

“The strain on publicly funded therapy services means that the private psychotherapy sector is increasingly ‘picking up the pieces’ with individuals who have been failed by the NHS. The vast majority of private therapists (94%) report they regularly see clients who feel let down by the NHS”.

I am absolutely not attacking the national health service. That is the last thing I want to do. I want the national health service to be there and available for all. I do not want it to so ration its services that those with fairly desperate needs are forced to suffer, seek voluntary help if they can get it or, if they can afford it, get private support.

There are excellent local organisations in my area, including iCope—Camden and Islington Psychological Therapies Service, and the Women’s Therapy Centre, which do a great deal to improve the local service and put a lot of pressure on the local health authority. An excellent report was produced by Louise Hamill and Monika Schwartz, who both work in my area and have done a great deal of work on the subject. I urge the Minister to have a look at that report and at the very serious proposals that they put forward.

The network for mental health did a survey which identified the 10 most important issues relating to mental health treatment. I will not list them all, but the most important seems to me to be access to timely and appropriate treatment. If someone going through a mental health crisis or depression cannot get seen by somebody, they become more and more agitated and stressful. If we have target times for cancer treatment, we ought to have target times for being seen and getting the necessary support at times of mental stress. Likewise, reducing stigma and discrimination is important, as is looking at the effects of benefit and welfare system reforms.

I have had far too many anecdotal reports from constituents and others who go for a Department for Work and Pensions availability for work test. If they have a physical disability, it is usually fairly obvious and it can be quantified and, we hope, taken into account in how the interview and test are conducted. If somebody has a mental health condition, it is not so obvious and cannot be so easily quantified. There are far too many cases where the stress levels are unbelievable for people who have been forced into these tests. Their condition has not been taken into account, they have been declared fit for work, and they then go into a crisis of stress because they feel they simply cannot cope. It is place where we could all be, and we should have some respect for people in that situation and do our best as a society to help them get through it.

That leads me on to education and publicity and how these issues are dealt with. The media have got somewhat better. It is now not routine for TV and radio comedians always to make jokes about people being stressed out, mad, depressed and so on. Things have moved on a bit and I pay tribute to colleagues in all parts of the House who have stood up in the Chamber during the annual mental health debate and said exactly that about ending discrimination.

[Ms Abbott]

Does my hon. Friend agree that one of the worst examples of the way in which the media treat mental illness was The Sun which, when the well known boxer, Frank Bruno, had mental health issues, had a front page headline, “Bonkers Bruno”, for which it eventually had to apologise?

Iran (UK Foreign Policy)

Debate between Diane Abbott and Jeremy Corbyn

Thursday 6th November 2014 Commons Chamber

[Ms Diane Abbott (Hackney North and Stoke Newington) (Lab)]

I am grateful for the opportunity to speak in this important debate on Iran. If we look at the middle east today—which is at risk of conflagration from end to end, whether it be in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Israel-Palestine or even Afghanistan—we will see that Iran is a key player. If we are to resolve some of the issues, Her Majesty’s Government and this House must take a nuanced and sophisticated approach to our relationship with Iran. It is not helpful to talk about Iran, or even its regime, as a monolith. As most of us should know, there are separate and distinct factions within the regime that are jostling for supremacy at any given time.

I do not wish to take away from the seriousness of the human rights issues in Iran. My hon. Friend the Member for Hammersmith (Mr Slaughter) has mentioned his constituent, Ghoncheh Ghavami, a British resident who is subject to imprisonment, apparently for a year, for going to watch a men’s volleyball match. I think that any British person would be shocked at any regime that treated somebody in that fashion. As we have heard, she is on hunger strike for the second time in protest against her illegal detention, and her lawyer has seen court documents stating that she has been sentenced to a year in prison. The prosecutors, however, have not confirmed her sentence, so she is in limbo. That is an appalling way to treat a young woman. Although I think it is correct that this particular case should not form part of the issues relating to international relationships and so on, she is a British resident who is being treated extremely cruelly and unfairly. This is an humanitarian issue and I want Her Majesty’s Government to do more to help this British resident, who is subject to a cruel and unusual punishment for doing no more than going to watch a sporting match, which British women do every day of the week.

[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Lab)]

I apologise for missing the first part of the debate. I was part of the delegation to Iran, and I constantly raised issues of human rights and human rights concerns. Does my hon. Friend agree that as appalling as this case is, it is unfortunately not that unusual in Iran, and that any future relationship with Iran must include a tough human rights dialogue to insist that it signs up to and obeys all the human rights conventions and has a genuinely independent judicial system, so that such appalling travesties of justice cannot continue?

[Ms Abbott]

It is very important that any negotiations with Iran have a human rights component.

In any agreements that we reach with Iran, it is important that we make due speed before the effects of the mid-term elections in the USA work through, because those results risk jeopardising the success of the negotiations. There are people in the US Senate who are desperate to see Obama fail, and who are preparing additional sanctions against Iran. They have just made enormous gains in the mid-term elections, and are emboldened. I believe that additional sanctions will be a disaster. They will play into the hands of hardliners in Iran, who have a vested interest in the status quo and no interest in Iran having relations with the rest of the world. Additional sanctions will kill the negotiations. The big players who have sponsored the new sanctions Bill are Kirk and Menendez. They are strong supporters of the state of Israel and also want nothing more than to inflict lethal damage on the Obama presidency. It is important that we make due speed on negotiations with Iran before American domestic politics intervene and make such negotiations impossible.

As some Members have recognised, there is a reformist wing within the Iranian regime—Rouhani, Zarrafi and others—who despite a massive uphill battle are challenging the conservatives, and have promised the Iranian people that better diplomatic relations will end the sanctions. If the US and its allies are seen to backpedal, that will prove the reformists wrong in the eyes of the hardliners, and set the situation back. Her Majesty’s Government must ensure that that does not happen and that domestic US politics do not threaten what the rest of the world community has patiently created, and there should be a strong message to that effect.

We must also offer a carrot to the Iranians, and not just sticks that reinforce the idea that the UK is siding with the US as an imperialist aggressor. One long overdue carrot would be to reopen the British embassy in Tehran, as was said earlier. It would be illogical to try to have open and honest dialogue with a country, or even to criticise it, if there is no diplomatic presence. We are shooting ourselves in the foot by not having a formal diplomatic presence, and we have left an open vacuum for Russia, China, India and the rest to fill. Furthermore, a British embassy is symbolic of the United Kingdom’s relationship with the people of Iran. As I have tried to say, one should not conflate the regime with the people, and we want at all times to make it clear that we as British people want a good relationship with the Iranian people.

My final point is one that was made earlier: the importance of dialogue and diplomatic relations. That is not just important for the nuclear deal, but it is in the UK’s national interest to have diplomatic and economic ties with Iran in terms of exports and our general economic interests. As I said at the beginning of my remarks, Iran has influence over Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and Palestine, and it might be key in defeating ISIS. It is probably the only player that can force Assad to compromise.

I am sorry to say this to hon. Members, but nothing is gained by simply regurgitating a cold-war narrative or realpolitik when it comes to “explaining” Iranian motivations in the middle east. It is one of the few countries in the region that has enjoyed a level of peace since the end of the Iran-Iraq war 25 years ago. It has developed into a nation comprised mostly of young people, with 80% being under 40, most of whom are urban—70% of Iranians live in cities—and far more progressive in relation to women than some of the regimes in the region to which we are allied, such as Saudi Arabia. For example, 60% of university enrolments in Iran are women.

While being clear and firm in its condemnation of human rights abuses in Iran, I urge the House to recognise that we are nearing an historic point. Sanctions have artificially stunted economic growth in Iran, and it would be a missed opportunity not to establish ties with it now. The regime is not a monolith, as I have said, and it has the second biggest reserves of gas in the world and the third largest oil reserves. It is in the interests of the British economy, British business and the British people, as well as of peace in the region, to try to establish a more sophisticated, nuanced and constructive ongoing diplomatic engagement with Iran than we have seen in the past.

Mental Health

Debate between Diane Abbott and Jeremy Corbyn

Thursday 16th May 2013 Commons Chamber

[Ms Diane Abbott (Hackney North and Stoke Newington) (Lab)]

I apologise to the House for not being present for the debate’s opening speeches, which was due to circumstances beyond my control. I certainly meant no lack of respect for this debate; I think these Backbench Business Committee debates have been one of the more important and successful innovations of this Parliament, and mental health is a particularly important subject.

I congratulate the right hon. Member for Sutton and Cheam (Paul Burstow) on leading the debate in a detailed and informative fashion, and my hon. Friend the Member for Bridgend (Mrs Moon), who raised a number of important points, including alcohol abuse and its impact on mental health—those two issues are inextricably linked. I follow the hon. Member for Totnes (Dr Wollaston) in saying that if we are concerned about addressing alcohol abuse, one issue—although not the only issue—must be to do something about the flood of cheap alcohol that is overwhelming some of our communities, and put in place a minimum price for alcohol. I am glad to say that that is the Labour party’s policy.

I congratulate the hon. Member for Broxbourne (Mr Walker) on his speech. I remember a similar debate last year in which he made a moving speech about his experience, which resonated country-wide. Since then, he has shown great leadership in the mental health all-party group. He made a number of important points, including the fact that although the NHS can be good at managing symptoms, it is not necessarily so good at addressing their underlying causes. I will return to that issue when I mention Atos later in my remarks.

I am sorry to have missed the remarks of my hon. Friend the Member for North Durham (Mr Jones). He is always well worth listening to, and he too received country-wide respect for his contribution to last year’s debate on mental health when he spoke about his personal circumstances for the first time on the Floor of the House. He made a number of important points, including that mental illness and depression are equal opportunity conditions. They do not discriminate; they affect all social classes and backgrounds.

The hon. Member for Romsey and Southampton North (Caroline Nokes) spoke about a number of issues, including borderline personality disorders and the way that eating disorders affect women and girls. She made the important point that, although we sometimes associate mental disorders with socially marginalised communities and persons, eating disorders can affect the most high-achieving, educationally focused girls. That issue should not be trivialised because it is harming the life chances, health and well-being of many young women up and down the country.

My good Friend the hon. Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn) made an important speech about mentally ill people in prison. When getting caught up with the “prison works” narrative, it is worth remembering how many people in prison are either illiterate or simply mentally ill, and if we want to contain the number of people in the prison estate, we must address the mentally ill. My hon. Friend also mentioned black and minority ethnic communities and mental health, and I will return to that point later.

The hon. Member for Totnes made an important speech and mentioned social exclusion and BME mental health. My hon. Friend the Member for Croydon North (Mr Reed) made an important speech about Olaseni Lewis and the issue of black and minority ethnic persons detained under the Mental Health Act 1983. I am glad that the Minister has agreed to meet my hon. Friend and engage with him and the family on that issue. The hon. Member for Harrogate and Knaresborough (Andrew Jones) also made an important speech.

My hon. Friend the Member for Bolton South East (Yasmin Qureshi) made a speech about—among other things—the importance of a holistic treatment for mental health issues and taking account of people’s different cultural backgrounds, which I thought was important. There was, as always, an interesting and provocative speech from the hon. Member for Southport (John Pugh), and I was interested to listen to the hon. Member for Battersea (Jane Ellison) who spoke about mental health and female genital mutilation—if it had been my choice, her speech could have gone on longer. I thought she raised important issues, and the House should respect the lead that she has shown in addressing the issue, which is difficult for people outside the affected communities to address. If in future some young girls are not subjected to that child abuse because of her work, she will deserve the congratulations of this House. The hon. Member for Finchley and Golders Green (Mike Freer) also made an important contribution.

We have heard figures for the incidence and prevalence of mental health problems, and because it is a Cinderella service and a Cinderella issue it is always worth reminding people that one in six people in Britain is affected by mental illness at any one time. In other words, almost every family will have experience of mental health. It is not something that happens to other people, but something that happens in our own families. One in four of us will suffer from mental illness at some point, and by 2030 depression will be the leading cause of disease around the world, costing the NHS a further £10 billion a year. The criminal justice system will also pick up the bill because 70% of those in our prisons have a mental illness. Mental health problems cost British business almost £26 billion a year.

The subject has been addressed by my right hon. Friend the Member for Doncaster North (Edward Miliband) who made an important speech to the Royal College of Psychiatrists in October last year. The key points he made are worth reporting and concern the importance of breaking down stigma—something that the House dwelt on at length in last year’s debate—and the importance of parity of esteem for mental health within the NHS. My mother was a mental health nurse in Huddersfield, and her hospital was a former Victorian workhouse on the fringes of Huddersfield. Having an old workhouse outside the city for mental health issues, and mainstream health services in the centre, illustrates the lack of parity of esteem for mental health in relation to the services we offer, and also to practitioners at every level within mental health services.

Finally, my right hon. Friend the Member for Doncaster North mentioned the importance of mental health in our society, and argued that good mental health does not start in hospitals but in workplaces, schools and communities. He took the opportunity last October to announce the formation of a taskforce on mental health in society, which will look in particular at employers and the role they play.

[Jeremy Corbyn]

Perhaps my hon. Friend can help me. I hope that the taskforce will also look at issues surrounding the voluntary sector and its excellent work within the mental health service, as well as the dangerous tendency of franchising out mental health services to the private sector by some mental health trusts that do it for profit rather than care.

[Ms Abbott]

My hon. Friend’s points are well made.

Let me consider the future for mental health and set out for the House how important the role of local authorities can be in addressing the social determinants of mental ill health. Public health has become the responsibility of local authorities. They have a ring-fenced public health budget, and despite all their pressures and difficulties—which I do not seek to minimise—there is an opportunity for local authorities to do important and interesting work, bringing together education and housing with health care to address mental health problems and intervene in them early.

I was shocked to hear of a social housing project near King’s Cross that, presumably to make its tenants more manageable, did not want to give tenancies either to people who had a history of rent arrears or to people who had a history of mental health problems. Such things need to be highlighted and addressed. Sitting responsibility for public health with local authorities could address mental health, particularly in respect of early intervention and preventive work with children in schools.

I gave a speech this morning on the crisis in masculinity. We need to focus on the mental health challenges that face men. Whether it is because they are unwilling to come forward or because of stress in society, we know that, during a recession or economic downturn, suicide rates among men increase. Suicide is currently the biggest cause of death among under 35s. In planning services nationally and locally, we need to pay particular attention to that issue among others.

The hon. Member for Totnes made an important point. She said that, in our desire to reduce health tourism—a desire supported by the Opposition—there is a notion that people will need their passport when they turn up to see their GP. That runs the risk of making it harder for the socially excluded to access health care—many simply do not have a passport or such documentation.

I will not speak at this point about the merits or otherwise of the welfare reforms, but there is a lot of anecdotal evidence that they are having an effect on the mental health of some who are caught up in the system. There is a lot of anecdotal evidence that Atos, as it is currently configured and as it currently operates, does not meet the needs or seem to understand the problems of people with mental health challenges.

Public Disorder

Debate between Diane Abbott and Jeremy Corbyn

Thursday 11th August 2011 Commons Chamber

[Ms Diane Abbott (Hackney North and Stoke Newington) (Lab)]

When I saw the flames on the streets of Tottenham on Saturday night, I had a deep sense of foreboding because I knew that it was only a matter of time before the same problems came to the streets of Hackney, not just because we have many of the same underlying social conditions but because the same gangs run backwards and forwards across the border between the two communities.

I want to stress that the pictures that people have seen on their television screens of looters in Hackney do not represent my community. What represents my community is the hundreds of people who turned out the following morning to clean up Hackney and to make good their community. I want to thank my council officers and my chief executive, Tim Shields. It is easy for Westminster politicians to denigrate council officers, but when people arrived to clean up Hackney at 10 am, council staff had been there before them and had swept Mare street and the surrounding streets, and everything was clean and orderly before 8 am. Council officers in Hackney had also been up all night monitoring CCTV, monitoring buildings in the high street for arson, and making sure the police got there to stop arson so that we did not see buildings in flames, as we saw in other parts of London. I would like to thank the emergency services and my borough commander, Steve Bending, who did the very best with the resources that were available to them.

[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Lab)]

When my hon. Friend describes the response of the police in Hackney, does she share my concern that there was a poor and slow police response to what happened in the Tottenham Hale shopping centre? Does she agree that any inquiry into the policing activities must examine why there was so little police availability for that incident?

[Ms Abbott]

I entirely agree with my hon. Friend, but one has to admire people’s willingness to stand up for their community and defend their community. We saw on the streets of Hackney members of my Turkish community, wanting to defend their restaurants. However, we must be careful about vigilantism. It is one thing to defend one’s business, but it is for the police to be on the street defending communities. We have seen what happened in Birmingham. I worry about vigilantism tipping over into ethnic conflict in some of our big cities.

Some Members of the House are talking as if disaffected, violent, criminal urban youth, with no stake in society, are overnight phenomena. I put it to the House that in London, to my knowledge, we are looking at the third generation of black boys who have been failed by the education system. I do not say this today because I have read about it in the paper. Ever since I have been a Member of Parliament this is an issue I have worked on. For 15 years I have had conferences about London schools and the black child, trying to bring the community together, trying to bring mothers together, trying to encourage them not to blame the system, or the schools, or politicians, but to take responsibility for their own children’s education. I have held workshops in Hackney for the black community, for the Turkish community, and I have had six years of running an award scheme for London’s top achieving black children. And I tell the House this: it has been impossible to get publicity for much of this activity, just as many ordinary people in our communities who are working hard with young people and people on estates cannot get publicity. But when people riot, the media is all over our communities, and the next weekend they will be gone, leaving us with these issues.

Let me say, in the very short time available, that one of the things that I have learned from years of work, in particular around urban youth and the black family, is that most families want to do the best by their children. Members are getting up and talking about bad parents. Some of these mothers want to do the best, but they struggle. I gave an award a few years ago to a young man who came here from war-torn Somalia at the age of eight and he got a first from London university. He lived on a grim estate in Brent. His brother was in a gang. It is not just about toxic areas, toxic estates, toxic families; these are individuals. Let us hope that what is happening to boys and families in urban communities is not just this week’s issue, but is something to which the House will return and give the attention it deserves.

Middle East, North Africa, Afghanistan and Pakistan

Debate between Diane Abbott and Jeremy Corbyn

Monday 16th May 2011 Commons Chamber

[Ms Diane Abbott (Hackney North and Stoke Newington) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend had the wisdom to vote against this ill-fated intervention. Does he agree that it is concerning that we are sending so-called advisers to the region? In other interventions of this kind, where advisers go, troops cannot be far behind.

[Jeremy Corbyn]

The parallel is Vietnam 1963, when several thousand CIA advisers descended on that country. That eventually turned out to be 500,000 US troops, 100,000 of whom died there. A million Vietnamese also died in that conflict. We should be slightly more careful, more sanguine and less gung-ho about the process.

Turkey has tried to bring about a peace process, as has the African Union, but what hope is there for a peace process and a diplomatic settlement if the language coming from NATO and others is, “We are going to win this conflict”? That is the subtext.