Societal Impact of AI: Government Policy

Debate between Iqbal Mohamed and John Hayes

Wednesday 8th July 2026 Westminster Hall

[Sir John Hayes (South Holland and The Deepings) (Con)]

I rise in support of much of what the hon. Member for Poole (Neil Duncan-Jordan) has said. He has done a service to this Chamber, and Parliament more generally, by highlighting the threats that AI will bring.

Perhaps I can set the scene by reminding Members present that it took 25 years for Parliament and successive Governments to recognise that the internet must be regulated. That is extraordinary. When I was in the IT industry back in the ’80s and ’90s, I became aware of the concept of the internet—before it was widely spoken about—and even then I knew the harm it might do.

In 2000, at the beginning of the new millennium, I was privileged to be able to speak at the Spalding Gentlemen’s Society, with which I do not imagine you are familiar, Ms McVey, but suffice to say it is a learned society of the old school—it now does admit women, you will be pleased to know. It has a lecture programme on all manner of things, and I was pleased to be invited to give the first lecture of the millennium. Then, I warned of what the internet might do. Most of the audience, by the way, disbelieved what I said. It was a very civilised meeting—it was not raucous in any way—but they could not quite come to terms with what I predicted.

What I predicted then has come to pass. What has occurred is the distortion of public discourse, the enabling of widespread fraud and the provision of the means for every imaginable form of harm, from hardcore pornography being available to children, to internet gambling addiction, suicide sites and much more. Now, the prospect of AI will make all that still more chilling. As the recognition of what is real and what is invented is increasingly blurred, it will become more and more difficult for people to navigate the inevitable vicissitudes that pervade every life.

Imagine a future where the once secure certainty of what really exists is so undermined that people can no longer believe what they are told and have no place to go to establish that certainty—the basis on which we all gauge reality and are able to live reasonably productive lives. I see wellbeing being affected by that detrimentally; unless the Government take very urgent and extremely serious action, that will happen far more quickly than anyone here envisages.

[Iqbal Mohamed]

Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that one of the primary obligations of any Government is to keep their citizens and the people living in their country safe from all avoidable harms? AI is a major potential cause of harm, and it is avoidable. Does he agree that the Government cannot wait 25 years to catch up?

[Sir John Hayes]

I absolutely agree. That is why I began by describing what has occurred over the last quarter of a century and the misunderstanding—a pervasive one that affected all political parties and Governments of all kinds—that a dangerous fascination with novelty was more important than the certainty that I have just outlined.

The hon. Member for Poole is right to issue a clarion call for action. Let me go into a little more detail. He is right, for example, that we have allowed a handful of multinational corporates, which have displayed a carelessness to the effects of what they do, to wield immense power—more power than national Governments. It is increasingly difficult for Governments to pull levers that affect these people, because they exist beyond the purview of this House or of any Government Minister. They have shown by their example that carelessness, and only when they have been prevented from doing harm have they ceased to do so.

I am delighted that the Government are now taking steps to prevent children from accessing social media and mobile telephones; I would like to go much further, actually, and I hope the Government will. I called for the ban on phones in schools, along with many other Members of this House, a long time ago. But AI makes all that more serious, because the AI available through that technology, which has the ability to distort the very nature of reality, will be immensely difficult to control. And yet we must try to do so. Legislation is not always the only means of doing that but, as the hon. Gentleman set out, it certainly must play a part.

Umberto Eco described the internet as the “empire of imbeciles”. Over time, it has become impossible to distinguish experts from idiots, and every bar-room bigot now has an audience of millions. Most people had a sense of proportion; my parents were working-class people who left school at 14, but they had a very good sense of what really mattered. Now we have elevated trivia to an extraordinary degree and, as a result, that sense of proportion, which was once taken as read, can no longer be guaranteed.

Immigration Reforms

Debate between Iqbal Mohamed and John Hayes

Tuesday 17th March 2026 Westminster Hall

[Sir John Hayes (South Holland and The Deepings) (Con)]

There has been too much immigration into this country for too long, and that is certainly the view of the vast majority of the people I speak to in my constituency. I suspect it is a widespread view among law-abiding, patriotic Britons from all kinds of backgrounds.

Three myths have been perpetuated to sustain the level of immigration that we have endured. The first is that it is necessary for our economy—that we need labour. What migration has actually done is to displace investment in domestic skills, to perpetuate a labour-intensive economy at a time when we should have been automating and taking out labour demand, and to feed the greed of those employers who, rather than paying a decent wage for employees who understood their rights, were happy to take cheap labour. Those have been the effects of the arguments about the economy.

The second myth has been about multiculturalism: this curious notion that we can absorb all kinds of people into our country without a shared sense of belonging, a common sense of what being British is all about, and that these co-existing subcultures would somehow cohere. In fact, as Trevor Phillips, himself of course the child of migrants, argued long ago, we have ended up with the ghettoisation—his words, not mine—of large parts of our country, with co-existing subcultures, without the bonds that bind us together in the shared sense I have described.

The third myth is that migration would not have a detrimental effect on some of our public services. Just imagine the figures for a moment—I am speaking now of legal migration. Between April 2022 and March 2023, the number of people entering Britain was 944,000—944,000 people extra in a year—yet when we debate housing, transport infrastructure, the health service, the availability of dentists and GPs, we never consider the effect of population growth at that scale on the demand for all those services.

[Iqbal Mohamed (Dewsbury and Batley) (Ind)]

The right hon. Gentleman is making an extremely eloquent speech. Of course we understand that the more people come into our country, the more the pressures on our public services will be exacerbated. The numbers he cited are post Brexit, under his former Government. If I remember correctly—I apologise if I get this wrong—net migration before Brexit was around a quarter of million people, mostly skilled labour or for specific work. After Brexit, the Europeans had to return, and we ended up allowing thousands of people to work in our care sector, in our NHS and in service industries that had too many vacancies. How does he explain the policies of his Government, which led to net migration rising from a quarter of a million to 900,000-plus, and what would he do differently today?

[Sir John Hayes]

The hon. Gentleman is of course right. The blame for all this should not be laid exclusively in the hands of the Labour party or Labour Governments. Successive Governments have administered a regime that has been out of tune with the sentiments of the vast majority of the population, who know what I have said is true. For the hon. Gentleman is right to say, too, that those successive Governments have allowed unsustainable levels of net migration.

If we look at the history, however, we see it was once quite different. In 1967 net migration was minus 84,000, in 1987 it was just 2,000, and in 1997 it was 48,000. It is in my time in this House—although, I hasten to add, not at my behest—that migration has soared, and we have begun to accept that hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people can be added to our population without taking account of the fact that that brings additional pressure on public services. That is not to say that many of those people do not make a positive contribution to our country—of course they do, in all kinds of ways—but to ignore the facts in terms of, for example, the growth in demand for housing is a dereliction of duty of which politicians across the political spectrum are guilty.

Women’s State Pension Age: Financial Redress

Debate between Iqbal Mohamed and John Hayes

Thursday 3rd July 2025 Commons Chamber

[Sir John Hayes (South Holland and The Deepings) (Con)]

The purpose of this place is, of course, to make laws, to amend them and sometimes, if we are in opposition, to stop laws being made. But it has another purpose: to hold those with power to account. We do that as individual constituency MPs all the time, taking up cases on behalf of constituents, but this case not only affects the WASPI women in my constituency; I take it up for all the WASPI women, inspired by the leadership of my friend, the hon. Member for Salford (Rebecca Long Bailey), and others across the House.

It is unusual in this place for Government Members of Parliament and the official Opposition—Labour MPs and Conservatives—the Liberal Democrats, the SNP, the DUP and Plaid Cymru to all come together in common cause. That speaks volumes. It says that we recognise that these women were unjustly treated. But it is not just our recognition that counts; the ombudsman too recognised exactly that. When an ombudsman states that maladministration in DWP’s communication about the Pensions Act 1995 resulted in the complainants losing

“opportunities to make informed decisions about some things and to do some things differently”,

and that that diminished their “sense of personal autonomy” and financial control—and that is just one of its findings; maladministration, inappropriate communications and the failure to deal with complaints punctuate the ombudsman’s findings—for a Government not to respond to the ombudsman is frankly unacceptable.

[Iqbal Mohamed (Dewsbury and Batley) (Ind)]

Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that taking this step to ignore the findings of an ombudsman sets a really dangerous precedent that could be exploited by private companies and by Departments?

[Sir John Hayes]

I do agree with that. It was a case powerfully made by the hon. Member for Salford that this case is very much about the relationship between the ombudsman and Government, and between this House and Government. That connection between independent scrutiny by the ombudsman and our ability as a House to hold the Government to account lies at the heart of this issue, and that is exactly what I was about to say.

This question is about the WASPI women, but it is also about something still more profound. I hope the Minister will recognise that, in the decisions he takes, he will set an important precedent—a precedent that will affect exactly those kinds of relationships.

I will reveal to the House what the Minister already knows: when this matter was considered by Ministers, a submission would have come forward from officials. I have no doubt at all that it would have offered several options. Option A might have been to satisfy the WASPI women in full; option B might have been to come to a partial settlement, which they perhaps would have accepted; option C would have been to do nothing. The Government chose—despite all the pledges in opposition by the Deputy Prime Minister, the Work and Pensions Secretary and the Prime Minister himself—to take that final option of doing nothing.

I find that very surprising. Knowing how reasonable the campaigners are, I suspect that, had a partial settlement been offered, they might well have met the Government halfway. They might have understood that the cost was substantial and that they had to compromise to some degree—although let us just explode one myth: that all these women are privileged and advantaged. Many were not. Many, when they faced a longer period before they could retire, were in ill health. Many had caring responsibilities. Many were hard up. In campaigning for those women, mindful of those disadvantages, we are speaking for people who otherwise would be powerless. Minister, it is not too late to get this right. For the WASPI women have a just cause, and surely, in the name of decency as well as in the name of good democracy, justice must be done.

Palestinian Rights: Government Support

Debate between Iqbal Mohamed and John Hayes

Tuesday 4th March 2025 Westminster Hall

[Iqbal Mohamed (Dewsbury and Batley) (Ind)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Sir John. I congratulate the Father of the House, the right hon. Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh), on bringing this important debate. I will cut down my speech to the bare bones and focus on the rights of the Palestinians as attributed to them by the Government here.

I believe that the UK’s denial of Palestinian rights for more than a century has directly led to the situation we face today. What rights have we denied them? As right hon. and hon. Members have mentioned, they have a right for the UK not to refuse to recognise their state, their homeland. They have a right not to be starved and denied essential life supplies, such as water and medicines. They have a right not to be unlawfully killed by Israeli forces and settlers at any point in their daily lives. They have a right not to be unlawfully and violently evicted from their homes, and forcibly displaced.

They have a right not to face abusive detention and torture in Israeli prisons. They have a right not to face movement restrictions, blockades and checkpoints that prevent pregnant mothers reaching hospitals to deliver babies. They have a right not to face discriminatory laws passed daily by the Israeli Knesset. They have a right not to undergo collective punishment and not to be sexually abused trying to live their lives.

To conclude, it is clear that successive UK Governments and many in this House have denied the rights of Palestinians, and continue to do so in blind loyalty in defence of Israel and its many war crimes. Palestinians are as human as any Israeli or Ukrainian, and deserve the same rights from the UK.

[Sir John Hayes (in the Chair)]

The shadow Minister and the Liberal Democrat spokesman have agreed to have slightly shorter times. I will try to get two more people in for one minute each.

House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill

Debate between Iqbal Mohamed and John Hayes

Committee of the whole House
Tuesday 12th November 2024 Commons Chamber

[Sir John Hayes]

The hon. Gentleman seems to be making a case for an elected second Chamber. Does he imagine that that Chamber would be elected at the same time as this one, in which case it would be a duplicate because the electorate are very unlikely to vote in different ways on the same day, or is he suggesting that it would be elected at a different time, in which case the Chamber that was elected most recently would surely claim greater legitimacy and therefore greater authority?

[Iqbal Mohamed]

The right hon. Member makes a very important point. I, as a new Member of Parliament, am not educated or informed enough to answer it immediately, and I would defer to the House to define how that process would work.