Persecution of Christians

Debate between Fiona Bruce and Patricia Gibson

Thursday 17th November 2022 Westminster Hall

[Patricia Gibson (North Ayrshire and Arran) (SNP)]

I am delighted to once again participate in a debate on the freedom of religion or belief, specifically the persecution of Christians and the importance of people being allowed to worship their God, however they perceive Him or Her to be. I am grateful to the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) for securing this debate. I know that he cares very much about this issue and often raises it in the Chamber. As others have said, it is important that this issue continues to be on the radar of not only this House but the international community.

It is a fundamental, basic freedom to worship your God, however you perceive Him or Her to be. The freedom to choose who you worship and how you worship is a fundamental human right. We have to remember that those nations that persecute Christians and anyone else who follows a religion to which their leaders are hostile—nations that turn a blind eye to the persecution of a number of their citizens based on their faith—also tend to impose and sanction other breaches of human rights.

Persecution on the basis of faith does not happen in isolation, but it is insidious, cruel, repressive and unacceptable. It often goes hand in hand with the repression and subjugation of women. Forcing people to adhere to a particular set of religious beliefs is often little more than a means of control, which is why those who choose to subscribe to a minority religion in repressive states are considered by those leaders to be dangerous and are subject to persecution—if not carried out by the state directly, then sanctioned by the state.

The means of control often include forcing people to subscribe—even if only outwardly—to a particular religion; making it an offence to insult the dominant religion, as we have heard happens in Nigeria; and making blasphemy a crime punishable by death. The days of preaching to convert people the old-fashioned way is clearly not used in such states. As the hon. Member told us, blasphemy laws are too often manipulated to settle petty scores. Alternatively, people are forced to subscribe and defer to a particular religion or die as a result of some perceived act of blasphemy. That seems to be the choice that many face in such regimes.

In this day and age, we can scarcely imagine from the comfort of the west how horrific living in such a place must be if you are a Christian—the most persecuted religion in the world. The US Commission on International Religious Freedom reported 732 blasphemy-related incidents across 41 countries in the short time between 2014 and 2018. Four of the 41 countries accounted for nearly 80% of all reported incidents of mob activity: Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nigeria and Egypt. Any international engagement by the west with such states takes place under the shadow of the violence and oppression that they perpetrate. It is on that basis that free nations must make it clear that they will not tolerate religious oppression of any kind, and they must use every lever at their disposal—diplomatic or otherwise—to challenge and counter persecution wherever it exists.

I note the comments made by others that Nigeria tops the list of countries with the most violent persecution of Christians. All free and democratic members of the international community must have that information in the forefront of their mind in any dealings with Nigeria or any such state. They must take concentrated and concerted action to challenge and tackle this matter, because hand-wringing and finger-wagging is not working. From Myanmar to Nigeria, Kashmir to Ethiopia, Afghanistan to Somalia, India to Pakistan, and from Saudi Arabia to Iran, at least 360 million Christians have experienced high levels of persecution and discrimination this year alone—20 million more than in 2021. Persecution of Christians is growing, not decreasing.

Every day, around 13 Christians are killed because of their faith. Every day, 12 churches or Christian buildings are attacked. Every day, 12 Christians are unjustly arrested or imprisoned, and another five are abducted. The problem is getting worse. I pay particular tribute to the hugely important work of the charity Open Doors, which works tirelessly to support persecuted Christians around the world. It shines a much-needed light on this persecution on the international stage, so that this horror is not forgotten by members of the international community who value freedom. Open Doors reminds us that its world watch list—the annual accounting of countries that are guilty of most persecution of Christians—is not a compilation list of oppression. Perhaps upliftingly, it lists the resilience of those who hold true to their faith in the face of the greatest and gravest of danger.

Freedom of religion or belief is codified in international law: 41 years ago, in 1981, the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution proclaiming the declaration on the elimination of all forms of intolerance and discrimination based on religion or belief. Despite that declaration, much more needs to be done by the whole international community—of course, I include the UK Government in that—to support freedom of religion or belief around the world. There must be no more important missed opportunities. Sadly, the 2022 international ministerial conference on freedom of religion or belief, which took place in July in London, has a legacy of diplomatic fall-outs but not much more than that on what we have been pushing for today.

[Fiona Bruce]

I talked about the project of creating education materials for primary schools, which was one of the issues talked about at the ministerial conference. That is actually one of about seven streams of works that the alliance is taking forward following ministerial conference, after we analysed the ideas and suggestions. Obviously, it will take some time to bring forward the fruit of that work, but I hope that in 2023 it will become apparent.

[Patricia Gibson]

I thank the hon. Lady for pointing that out.

The push for greater recognition of the freedom of religion or belief will never be solved by one conference—we all recognise that the problem is too ingrained and too great—but it could have been a more significant step on that important path. But I take the hon. Lady’s point: small steps are steps, none the less.

To make sustained and meaningful progress on this important issue, we need the international community in the west, where we believe in freedom, to engage in an ongoing and evolving mission. We need to be braver about challenging repressive nations that persecute their own people for worshipping their own God. We need to be willing to confront them on the international stage at every opportunity. It is unacceptable for any state, any Government or any person to attempt to interfere with someone or persecute them on the basis of what God they choose to worship. Every nation that believes in freedom should say so and be unafraid to stand up for those who are oppressed. That is their moral obligation and duty. If we do not stand up for freedom, what will we stand up for?

Children’s Future Food Report

Debate between Fiona Bruce and Patricia Gibson

Thursday 27th June 2019 Commons Chamber

[Patricia Gibson (North Ayrshire and Arran) (SNP)]

I am pleased to have this opportunity to participate in the debate, although I agreed absolutely with the right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Frank Field), who is a long-time campaigner on these issues, when he said that this debate should give us cause for shame.

The children’s future food inquiry has done a considerable amount of work, gathering evidence from workshops with nearly 400 children across the UK, alongside polling young people’s views and academic research on food insecurity to produce the report that we are debating today. Much of what it tells us, as well as being shocking, is, sadly, unsurprising. I know that the hon. Member for Congleton (Fiona Bruce) means well, but I am afraid that I had to disagree with her when she said that in previous generations things were not quite so bad. I may not be old enough to have a memory of the generations to which she is referring, but I suspect that things were equally bad if not worse, and people just talked about it less.

[Fiona Bruce]

I am not saying that there was not poverty, but what I am saying is this. My grandmother was born in 1900, and what I witnessed was that she knew how to make a little money go a long way in cooking nutritious meals that fed a family. That seems to be something that we have not passed on from generation to generation, but it is one of the solutions that we could seek to achieve for today’s generation.

[Patricia Gibson]

What I will say in my speech may explain more fully why, although I respect very much what the hon. Lady has said and understand the point that she has made, I do not agree with it. I think that the problem of children growing up in hunger has always been with us, regardless of what generation we are talking about, but in this day and age we are no longer willing to accept it. That is why we have debates like this, and why the report was undertaken in the first place.

We can go back even further. I am a great lover of Charles Dickens. A mere glance at his work tells us that every single novel he ever wrote features a deeply neglected child in challenging circumstances. That is a direct result of his having been sent out to work at a very young age himself, an experience born of necessity to keep hunger at bay. He understood that the sanctity of childhood was lost for ever through poverty, hunger, and an uncaring society. Indeed, his childhood experience —his own truncated childhood—scarred him to such an extent that he never forgot it, which is why he always included in his novels a child who was a victim of a society that did not do enough to protect its children from poverty and want.

In her moving speech, the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent North (Ruth Smeeth) shared with us some real-life and very sobering examples from her constituency, which sounded as though they could have been lifted directly from a Dickens novel. That, in this day and age, is utterly and truly appalling. I agree with the hon. Member for Washington and Sunderland West (Mrs Hodgson), who said that the Government’s role was critical if we were to face down hunger in our children. That view was echoed by the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon).

We know that parents want to do the best for their children, but we also know that it is much easier to do the best for our children if we have a reasonable standard of living and enough money to live on, which in turn will give us enough food to eat. In my constituency, child poverty levels average about 30% across each of the distinct towns. We know that that figure is set to rise, just as the figures will in every other constituency in the United Kingdom, which is absolutely disgraceful. My local authority area has the third highest rate of child poverty in Scotland, which is indeed sobering.

Let us not forget that poverty is not just about money. Today we are talking about the importance of food for children, but poverty does not just rob children of access to proper, nutritious, healthy food; it robs them of self-esteem, it robs them of opportunities, it robs them of hope, and it robs them of the secure sense of wellbeing that every child has the right to enjoy. That casts a shadow over them for the rest of their lives.

I know this, because I myself grew up in poverty, the youngest of eight children. After my father’s death, my mother endured struggles with poverty that no one should have to endure—although, to her credit, I had no idea just how poor we were until I was grown up. That is not a hard-luck story. I share it as a way of showing that I understand, as many in the Chamber do, what poverty can do to a family. I know about the barriers that it creates for parents and, in turn, for their children.

The austerity agenda, which a number of Members have mentioned today, and the fact that families all too often feel punished for their poverty, only adds to the damage, the hopelessness, and the erosion of the idea that life could be so much more. The right hon. Member for Birkenhead spoke of people who have not only been condemned to hunger but all too often been condemned to destitution.

We know it is hard for parents to source healthy and nutritious food on an extremely tight budget that can hardly stretch over a normal week. This kind of hunger does not affect just those children whose parents are on benefits; we must face up to the fact that the working poor exist and many of their children are living in poverty.

To help combat this I am proud to say that the Scottish Government have expanded the provision of free school meals to those eligible for free early learning and childcare and free school meals for infants, and plan to monitor food standards in schools. I am pleased that the children’s future food inquiry report acknowledged that.

In addition, there is to be more funding for more children to have access to healthy food during the school holidays. A six-week holiday for Scotland’s schoolchildren with no free school meals can place an intolerable strain on families who are struggling. We cannot sit by and watch our children go hungry, so the children’s charity Cash for Kids is being granted £150,000 to help local community organisations to support children during the school holidays with activities and access to meals, and this funding is the first allocation of £1 million over the next two years to tackle food insecurity outside of term time.

Every child in Scotland attending a local authority school has a right to a free school lunch in primaries 1, 2 and 3, regardless of their family’s circumstances. After primary 3 these free lunches continue if the child’s parents receive certain benefits. Many Members today have called on the Minister to similarly invest in support for children in England and Northern Ireland and I hope he listens to those pleas.

Alongside the £3.5 million fair food fund to tackle food insecurity, we are working hard in Scotland to ensure that everyone can feed themselves and their families to reduce the reliance on emergency provision. These initiatives matter as we see food bank usage rising. Largs in my constituency food bank usage has soared by between 200% and 300% since November last year. In this day and age that is an absolute disgrace. I cannot understand how any elected representative can be blind to or unmoved by the evidence showing the suffering and hardship caused by recent welfare reforms. It is no accident that the roll-out of universal credit, with its five-week wait for payment, has coincided with an increase in the use of food banks.

All claimants are expected to be on universal credit by 2023, including almost 10,000 more North Ayrshire and Arran households. That means that, sadly, this trend of food bank use looks set to continue, with no sign that the UK Government are prepared to pause and properly fix this system which is not fit for purpose and causes unnecessary hardship.

The food our children eat has implications for life chances, as does the food they do not eat. There is little point in trying to tackle the attainment gap if children go to bed hungry—it cannot be done—and I welcome the Scottish Government’s joined-up approach in that regard.

The SNP Scottish Government announced only yesterday that there will be a new form of support, the Scottish child payment, which will provide £10 each week for all eligible children from low-income families under the age of 16 by 2022, and that payment will increase annually in line with inflation. This benefit will be fast-tracked so all eligible under six-year-olds will receive it by 2021. When delivered in full, 410,000 children will be eligible for this payment. This is yet another front we can open up in the war against hunger in our own children, and it has been warmly welcomed by groups such as Menu for Change, Save the Children Scotland, Oxfam Scotland, the Child Poverty Action Group in Scotland and the Poverty Alliance, which describes this new initiative as a “game changer” in the fight against child poverty.

This action from the Scottish Government is expensive, but it is also a political choice to do more to tackle child poverty. I hope the Minister will take note and ask if his Government can afford not to do this. The SNP Scottish Government do not control all the levers of benefits and taxation necessary to truly build the kind of fair society that I believe most people in Scotland want, but with the limited powers they have, they will always do what they can to mitigate poverty while delivering a balanced budget in a minority Administration.

Any debate or report on children’s food and the need to tackle the health implications of the food they eat or the hunger they face is necessarily a discussion about the kind of society we wish to build. What kind of society thinks that children going hungry is ever acceptable? This is an important report, but for all that, it is only a report; it cannot be left to gather dust. It is time for this Government to engage in real reflection on the true cost of hunger to our children and our society, to act accordingly, to fully study the report and to take the necessary action to tackle child poverty and the resultant hunger that is poverty’s bedfellow. It is an absolute disgrace that anybody ever has to go hungry in the United Kingdom. The mark of a civilised society is to combat that in a sensitive and robust way. The Scottish Government are choosing not to pass by on the other side when they see families in need of this basic necessity, and I urge the Minister today to do as much for other families.

Alcohol Harm

Debate between Fiona Bruce and Patricia Gibson

Thursday 2nd February 2017 Westminster Hall

[Patricia Gibson]

Indeed. That appalling and very sad statistic is one that has touched my own family, as I will come on to explain. Alcohol continues to cause premature deaths in some of our most socioeconomically deprived areas and we must take action—I will go on to say how the Scottish Government have taken action.

The hon. Gentleman’s intervention came at a very personal moment in my speech. Indeed, I have a very personal stake in this debate. By all accounts my own father, of whom I have no memory, was an extremely heavy drinker. Was he an alcoholic? He probably was, but alcoholism was not readily talked about in working-class communities in Glasgow in the 1960s. I did not witness my father’s heavy drinking, because he died when I was nine months old, not least because of his heavy drinking. My husband’s father was an alcoholic, which led to his early death. In Glasgow, where both my husband and I grew up, such deaths were not unusual in the past, and even today alcohol-related deaths are still more common in our communities across Scotland than many people would think.

Here is the main point: I am extremely proud of the fact that against much opposition—some of it, unfortunately, on tribal grounds—the Scottish National party Government in Scotland took a very bold decision. They decided that the damage that alcohol was doing to our population, our families and our communities could no longer simply be measured and talked about and that action was needed. What else could kill 22 people each week in Scotland, cause 670 hospital admissions each week in Scotland, cost Scotland £3.6 billion each year and not require bold action?

Such action came in the form of minimum unit pricing. In our supermarkets and similar outlets, alcohol can cost less than bottled water; in some cases, it sells for as little as 18p per unit, which is disgraceful. There is clear evidence from research that shows there is a direct link between changes in minimum pricing, and changes in alcohol harm and consumption. Estimates show that a 10% increase in the minimum price of alcohol is associated with a 32% reduction in the number of deaths that are wholly attributable to alcohol. Work undertaken by the University of Sheffield shows that a minimum unit price of 50p is estimated to result in 121 fewer deaths a year, a fall in hospital admissions of just over 2,000 a year, and a fall in hospital admissions of just over 2,000 a year by year 20 of the policy.

Minimum unit pricing is more effective than taxation, because it is better able to target the cheap, high-strength alcohol favoured by the heaviest drinkers. Such a public health measure is supported by Ireland, Norway, Finland, Sweden and the Netherlands. I know that England is looking at this measure and I urge everybody in this Chamber to support its introduction. It is bold, but it needs to be bold to help deal with the blight that alcohol has cast over too many of our communities.

Global corporations in the alcohol industry fought a hard legal battle against Scotland’s introduction of minimum unit pricing, but the measure was passed with overwhelming support in the Scottish Parliament. It has been tested in the European courts. The appeal against it in the Supreme Court, following victory for the Scottish Government when the measure was tested at the Court of Session, is the final stumbling block to the introduction of the policy. I hope and believe that it will be resolved by the summer at the latest and introduced in short order thereafter.

Responding to the points made by the hon. Members for Congleton and for Luton North (Kelvin Hopkins), in Scotland we have already reduced the drink-driving limit to 50 mg per 100 ml of blood. That means that the rest of the UK—this is a cause for great alarm—has the highest limit in the EU, alongside Malta. I urge the Minister to follow the lead of Scotland and the rest of our EU partners. Reducing the blood alcohol level for drivers saves lives.

[Fiona Bruce]

I am interested to know from the hon. Lady directly how that change has not only saved lives, but changed the drinking culture. How have people changed their attitude towards drinking? One of the points that has been made to us about the Scottish experience is, “Well, it’s only a very few lives that have been saved,” but there is a bigger picture, is there not?

[Patricia Gibson]

There is indeed a bigger picture. Laws do not necessarily change attitudes, but what they do over time is change a culture. They send out a clear signal. The point was made earlier that when people are out and using a car, they tend not to drink. They are more likely not to drink at all due to the reduction in the drink-driving limit. It has also been a great educator for people who are out drinking and not driving, but who might be driving the following day. They decide, “I had better not drink tonight, because I might still be over the limit tomorrow when I get in my car.” We know that many of the people who have been pulled over, had their blood alcohol level tested and been found to be over the drink-driving limit were simply not aware of it, because it was from the previous evening; they had not considered that they might still be over the limit.