Knife Crime: Children and Young People
Debate between Judith Cummins and Luke Taylor(2 weeks ago)
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Luke Taylor
I completely agree. I will come on to that later in my speech. I have spoken to the organisers and leaders of the Chris Donovan Trust in my constituency. They spoke about the challenge of getting into some schools to talk about knife crime, because of the perception that talking about it was a problem in itself. That was so frustrating to hear.
We need to have honest, open conversations with young people in schools. Teachers must be equipped with materials to educate the next generation, so that we break the cycle of violence. Even if a child is not at risk of committing a knife-related offence, educational programmes serve a critical role. They can teach children about the consequences of knife crime long before they consider carrying a weapon. That is vital. We need to reach young people and win the war for their hearts and minds before the prevailing climate of fear and the harbingers of toxic mindsets start their offensive. I urge the Government to consider introducing mandatory personal, social, health and economic lessons on the consequences of weapons possession, and to put the principles of restorative practice on the curriculum, in recognition of the great work of groups such as the Chris Donovan Trust in my constituency. We teach children from an early age about the dangers of diseases caused by smoking or alcohol; why, then, are we not having open discussions with them about the health risks associated with carrying a knife? Creating safe spaces for discussion, and building relationships with young people, can ensure intervention before thoughts of crimes arise, and deaths can be prevented.
To fully realise the nourishing, community-focused element of a public health approach, though, we must invest in youth services and community programmes that engage young people. Winning the war for hearts and minds means providing young people with opportunities to build skills, pursue education, and find alternatives to gang culture and criminal activity. However, as was mentioned in many speeches, we have seen a dramatic decline in youth services funding over recent years, with cuts totalling £1.1 billion since 2010. This has left too many young people without the support they need.
Investing in youth services is not just about providing safe spaces; it is about providing young people with alternatives to violence, so that we break the cycle of crime, shift the culture of violence, and empower communities to work together to prevent crime before it escalates. The targeted early help and integrated support team at Sutton borough council in my constituency does exactly this kind of work, offering opportunities to young people who are not often afforded the luxury of such attention elsewhere in their lives. However, these programmes rely heavily on grants from the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime, the Ministry of Justice, and violence reduction services. Those grants are subject to constant uncertainty, often approved at the last minute and often only allocated for 18-month to two-year periods, preventing proper forward planning. We must do better than that. We need to consistently get serious funding to these initiatives in a timely manner. I echo the calls from the hon. Member for Dulwich and West Norwood (Helen Hayes) about funding for these community schemes.
Lib Dem Members will continue to push the Government to make youth diversion a statutory duty, so that every part of the country has a pre-charge diversion scheme for young people up to the age of 25. That will ensure better outcomes for young people and less strain on police resources, but let us be honest with ourselves: police resources are already strained beyond breaking point in too many places, and education and early intervention alone are not enough to properly implement a public health approach. Visible community policing starts with actual police numbers in our London boroughs. To tackle knife crime, it is important for young people to see bobbies on the beat in London. Their active and engaged presence creates a sense of safety and security. We have to get back to meaningful community policing, returning the police to their proper duty as a positive, engaging arm of the state in people’s lives.
Building trust between young people and the police is also crucial. This trust communicates that there is no need to carry knives for protection, as young people know that the police are there to keep them safe. As I have said before, when 17-year-old Ilyas Habibi was stabbed to death outside Sutton station in my constituency in December 2023, he was just minutes away from a police station. If we cannot expect visible policing in town centres and the areas closest to police stations, how little have we come to expect of community policing? To be clear, that is not a criticism of the police, but a criticism of successive Governments and mayors, who have consistently failed to get the police the resources they need to do their job. In London, far too many police are abstracted away from the communities they are supposed to serve to help plug gaps.
I was deeply concerned to learn of Sadiq Khan’s budgeting decisions, which have led to dedicated police officers in schools in London being removed. Under the “A New Met for London” plan, officers will no longer be stationed in schools as part of the safer schools officers programme. While the plan claims that officers will still work closely with schools, the change reduces the consistent direct contact between officers and young people. That contact is crucial in building relationships with young people to foster trust. There should be plenty of positive interactions and experiences with the police throughout young people’s formative years. That can be achieved through school assemblies or classroom workshops. Young people need to understand that the police are there to keep them safe on the streets and are not the enemy, but when sparse police resources are focused on only the most extreme forms of deterrence, such as live facial recognition and stop and search, and when there is no community focus, it is unsurprising that they do not.
The hallmark of a meaningful public health approach that invests not just money, but serious political capital, is that it brings together all groups in our communities. It creates a coalition of care, breaks down the silos between projects, and builds a team across society committed to doing what it takes to rescue young people. On behalf of countless experts, professionals and parents, and on behalf of young people, I implore the Government to build that team, to create that coalition of care and to finally implement a meaningful public health approach to knife crime.
Pakistan: Freedom of Religion
Debate between Judith Cummins and Luke Taylor(4 months ago)
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Luke Taylor (Sutton and Cheam) (LD)
I congratulate the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) on bringing forward this debate and allowing us to discuss this incredibly important issue in this House.
On 25 November 1981, the General Assembly of the United Nations passed resolution 36/55, which said:
“Discrimination between human beings on the grounds of religion or belief constitutes an affront to human dignity and a disavowal of the principles of the Charter of the United Nations, and shall be condemned as a violation of the human rights and fundamental freedoms proclaimed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.”
Nearly half a century has passed since those words were written, and they came just seven years after the passage of the second amendment to the constitution of Pakistan, which declared that Ahmadi Muslims were
“not a Muslim for the purposes of the Constitution or the law.”
My speech will concentrate on the Ahmadi community, but that should not diminish the persecution and discrimination suffered by other communities, which has been mentioned by many hon. Members.
Many decades on, we still find ourselves grappling with the critical injustice, prejudice and persecution that that amendment enshrined in law and enabled. That is what the current legal framework in Pakistan has done. It has enabled not just legal exclusion and prosecution, but ongoing hate speech and violent persecution. Extremist clerics in Pakistan have called for Ahmadi Muslims to be hung or beheaded, for their women to be murdered to prevent more Ahmadi Muslims from being born, and even for the Government of Pakistan to understand that if they do not act, the people will take matters into their own hands and kill Ahmadi Muslims themselves. If anyone has any lingering doubt about whether that awful rhetoric extends only to calls for violence within Pakistan’s borders, I refer them to one rally this year where the following was said:
“We have to strangle each and every Ahmadi…You have no idea how powerful this slogan is! You will raise it here, an Ahmadi will die in Great Britain.”
That abhorrent rhetoric has no place in a democratic republic such as Pakistan, and I know from conversations with many of my constituents, as well as Ahmadi Muslims across London, that it absolutely terrifies Ahmadi Muslims in Pakistan and here in the UK.
We too often forget that rhetoric has consequences, and violent rhetoric becomes violence as surely as night becomes day. Sure enough, violent hate crimes across Pakistan and around the world against Ahmadi Muslims are at shocking levels. This year, four Ahmadi Muslims were killed in a targeted manner. Tahir Iqbal, president of a local Ahmadi Muslim community, was shot dead by two motorcyclists. Zaka ur Rehman, a dentist, was killed in his own clinic by two gunmen. In both cases, no perpetrators have been identified and brought to justice. In Sadullahpur, two Ahmadi Muslims, Ghulam Sarwar and Rahat Ahmad Bajwa, were murdered in separate incidents on the same day. The alleged perpetrator, a 16-year-old student of a madrassah, confessed to the killings, citing religious reasons—16 years old. I invite hon. Members to recall the poisonous rhetoric that I have just outlined, and to which that young man must have been exposed in order to carry out such a heinous act.
It seems that violence against Ahmadi Muslims is rarely investigated, and in many cases is seemingly encouraged or enabled by local officials and policemen in Pakistan. In June, 30 Ahmadi Muslims were arrested for the crime of celebrating Eid. Ahmadi homes were attacked, an Ahmadi mosque was ransacked, and the police stood by and did nothing. Earlier this year in January, it is alleged that local police in the Punjab region, acting under instructions from a local official, took part themselves in another disconcertingly common and awful act of hatred: the desecration of tombs in an Ahmadi Muslim graveyard. Desecration is a particularly cowardly and heinous act, and serves only to underscore the severity of the situation facing Ahmadi Muslims in Pakistan.
Freedom of worship is inextricably linked with freedom of expression and speech, and as a Liberal I will always place the greatest currency on that most cherished of virtues.
But as all liberal societies have found, freedom of speech cannot extend to freedom of hate speech or the freedom to incite violence and hatred, and the Pakistani Government ought to be reminded of that fact in our bilateral engagements. Nobody should have to live like that, and to face hatred, threats, violence and death just for worshipping their own religion in a peaceful manner in a democratic country. It goes against every principle we hold dear in the community of international law, and against our every principle as an open, democratic, tolerant nation ourselves, not least as a nation that is bound to Pakistan by a common history, a common language and a track record of collaboration on tackling extremism in the region. We must be a critical partner of Pakistan. I call on the Government to respond to the concerns raised in the House today and to please come forward with reassurances that, at every single opportunity, the plight of Ahmadi Muslims in Pakistan will be raised with the Government of that country. Our conscience calls on us not to turn a blind eye.
Ahmadi Muslims, like members of all faiths, deserve to worship free from intimidation and discrimination. The Liberal Democrats have long been in favour of a rigorous, values-based foreign policy that puts our money where our mouth is. We cannot just talk a good game on protecting minorities around the world and standing up for the fundamental freedoms outlined in the declaration of human rights; we must use our leverage with Governments such as that in Pakistan to encourage them to take serious and concrete steps towards making it a reality. This should be an issue that unites us across the House—I am encouraged to hear that it does—and one that reminds us not just of our obligations under international law but our moral duty to those facing oppression everywhere.