Christians Overseas

Helen Goodman Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd May 2018 Westminster Hall

[Helen Goodman (Bishop Auckland) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Mr Hollobone, and I congratulate the hon. Member for Croydon South (Chris Philp) on his powerful speech on an important subject.

Christianity has been dominant in this country for 1,000 years and, for us, it can be difficult to imagine what it is like to be the persecuted. We tend to think of the persecutions of the first century or of the Tudor TV dramas, but the scale of what hon. Members on both sides of the House have described shows that persecution is a large and growing problem. I want to say something about some particular countries, but we need to ask ourselves why this is happening before we can discuss what we need to do.

Hon. Members have spoken about the middle east. Between 50% and 80% of Christians in Syria and Iraq have been forced to move in recent years, according to Open Doors. I, too, commend that organisation’s excellent work in supporting those communities and in bringing the significant problems to our attention. I also commend the work of Christian Solidarity Worldwide, which came to see me recently.

Many hon. Members, including my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Edgbaston (Preet Kaur Gill), talked about the problems in Nigeria, which are particularly concentrated in the north of the country and which have grown recently. My husband was born in Kaduna and his father, who had been a colonial civil servant, died in 2004. At that time, the persecution was a small cloud on the horizon, not the big problem it is today. We need to do more. It is, of course, not easy, and we cannot just go around threatening people, but we need to pay more attention to the problem, as we do to the oldest Christian community, the Copts, whom my hon. Friend the Member for Islwyn (Chris Evans) talked about, and their particular need for protection.

As hon. Members have said, the persecution takes different forms. In some places it is about a religious divide. In some places it is state-driven oppression, particularly in China. In some places it is about people being excluded, and that is what we see in Mexico where, for example, someone in the wrong denomination might have their water and electricity cut off—shocking things, which I will raise when I am in Mexico next week.

It is hard for us to understand why people feel that they are under threat from other religions, that what other religions do threatens their position, or that they are so entitled, and so confident in their own rightness, that they should impose their views on other people. It is important that we increase and improve religious understanding. The Minister probably knows that there is a very good centre for religious understanding at the London School of Economics and Political Science, led by Rev. James Walters. We also need to consider how we can use our aid money. We need to think more open-mindedly about what misunderstandings we have, as well as about those of other people, without in any way saying that any of the abuses are acceptable.

In Vietnam, there are arrests, imprisonments, torture and extrajudicial killings, yet the Home Office wants to send a constituent of mine, who is a Christian, back there. When I asked the Bishop of Durham for examples he knew of persecution, he raised that of a Jordanian Christian woman who came to this country and was then interned in Yarl’s Wood before she claimed asylum. We need to use the aid programme and we need to speak out, but will Foreign Office Ministers please also talk to the Home Office so that the very people who have been victims are not re-victimised in this country?