Small Boat Crossings
Jessica Toale Excerpts(2 days, 3 hours ago)
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Dame Angela Eagle
I said earlier that safe routes would not stop all the channel crossings. There is now an industrialised system run by organised immigration criminals. The Vietnamese would never have a safe route into the UK—there is no visa system—yet they now comprise 20% of the people crossing on small boats. With all due respect to the right hon. Gentleman, I do not think that safe routes would solve the problem.
Jessica Toale (Bournemouth West) (Lab)
The last Government were responsible for an asylum backlog so large that they ended up spending millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money every day on asylum hotels, including in my constituency. As the Minister said, we are now dealing with that legacy, and I welcome her statement. Does she agree that we will take no lessons from the Conservative party, and that we will continue to make progress towards our manifesto commitment to bring down the backlog and end hotel use?
Violent Disorder
Jessica Toale Excerpts(2 months, 1 week ago)
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Yvette Cooper
My hon. Friend makes an important point about the emergency procedure that we brought in to accelerate support and security provisions for mosques. Frankly, everybody has the right the feel safe at their place of worship, without fear of attack. I will send him further details on the precise numbers, but dozens of mosques came forward and were provided with swift support to ensure that they had security in place under the accelerated procedure. It is important that Muslim communities feel safe.
Jessica Toale (Bournemouth West) (Lab)
I am grateful to the Home Secretary for her statement and welcome the range of police reforms that she outlined. I thank Dorset police for their rapid and proactive work with local residents, community groups, mosques, protesters and counter-protesters to prevent two organised protests in Bournemouth town centre from descending into the type of violent disorder that we saw in other parts of the country. It will take time to roll out those police reforms—I hope they include reform of the funding formula, which currently does not recognise the seasonal challenges that we face every year in Bournemouth—but does she agree that we are lucky to have such dedicated and professional police forces on the frontlines, preventing crime and disorder with limited resources?
Yvette Cooper
My hon. Friend makes an important point about the tradition of British policing, of which I think we should feel proud. The idea that the police should operate without fear or favour, that they are operationally independent, and that the police are the public and the public are the police—the tradition of policing by consent—stretches back to Peel. That is why the drop in confidence in policing over recent years is a real challenge, why the Government are determined to turn it around and work with the police to rebuild confidence in policing, and why we will continue to support the police, including with more neighbourhood policing. We should feel proud of and support the British policing model.