Public Order Bill (Seventh sitting)

Debate between Kerry McCarthy and Rupa Huq

Committee stage
Tuesday 21st June 2022 Public Bill Committees

[Dr Rupa Huq (Ealing Central and Acton) (Lab)]

I beg to move, That the Clause be read a Second time.

At the last count, 35 other right hon. and hon. Members, from seven parties, including at least one Member of every party of England and Wales, had signed up to the new clause. I do not know whether the number has gone up since then.

We have talked quite a lot in Committee about what could happen. We have talked about what could happen if someone was carrying, as I am today, a bike lock— I thought I would have to cycle in; I cycled part of the way, to the house of another Member who gave me a lift the rest of the way—and whether I could be criminalised for having that on my person. Could two little old ladies from the Women’s Institute be arrested for linking arms? The new clause, though, addresses what is actually happening every day, up and down our country, at abortion clinics.

Some of the fanciful stuff we have talked about, such as members of Extinction Rebellion gluing themselves to trains, or the blocking of the A40 in my constituency, which I have spoken about, are pretty rare and the exception, not the rule; but every day, women are unable to make their way into abortion clinics to have a perfectly legal procedure. It has been legal in this country since 1967 or 1968, I think—for more than 50 years, anyway. There is disruption not just to the women who use the clinics, but to users of the public highway and local residents. The figures are there—the Home Office has done the crunching—and they show that tens of thousands of women, at a number of locations, are affected every year.

I have previously ventilated this issue through a ten-minute rule Bill and a letter to the then Home Secretary, Amber Rudd. Loads of MPs from both sides of the House signed up to those, because they know, as do their local police forces, what a waste of time it is for the police to have their people tied up in adjudicating between two groups of protesters. There are two groups. There are the anti-choice people, and then there is a group in my constituency called Sister Supporter; its members, who wear pink hi-vis vests, want to escort women into the clinic. There is friction, and the police, who should be fighting crime, are tied up there.

[Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend mentioned the impact of the people outside the clinics on the people going into the clinics, and the obstruction of the pavement and passers-by, but does she agree that there is a difference between the two? As we have discussed in Committee, protests that cause people inconvenience are legitimate, but there is quite a difference between that and the harassment of people making a possibly difficult life choice. Does she agree that there is a difference in the impact on people, and that protesters could hold a protest without being close to the clinic?

[Dr Huq]

My hon. Friend makes a really good point. When is a protest not a protest? These women are subject to harassment. There is a time and place for protest. If someone wants to attack legislators, they should protest here, or they could protest at the Department of Health and Social Care, wherever that is now—I know it is not in Richmond House anymore, because my office is there. There are legitimate places where people can hold a protest without shaming individual women and rubbing their noses in it. We have heard how these things are filmed and put on Facebook Live, and the new clause takes that into account.

The Minister has chided me on this before, but last time there was a Labour amendment on this issue, it also concerned anti-vax protests. The former Minister for vaccines used to have a Friday call with all of us that was very popular, and he pointed out that stuff has been done in law to stop those protests. This is not dissimilar. We said after the horrible Sarah Everard episode that women should be able to go about their lawful business, to use the public highway and to walk down the street without being impeded by others. Some people would describe what is happening outside clinics as a protest; the people doing the “protesting” would say they were holding vigils and offering advice to the women, but there is a time and a place for that, and it is not at the clinic gates when women are making the most difficult decision of their life, as my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol East said. They are not doing it lightly, and it may be for all sorts of reasons, such as fatal foetal abnormality.

Other jurisdictions have similar legislation. The French legislation brackets the offence with causing psychological distress, and the amendment is lifted from British Columbia. Several American states have such an offence, as does Australia. I have given the example of Ealing before, and I am proud that my local authority was the first to set up a public spaces protection order, or PSPO. Ministers have told me, “Well, councils can do that,” but that order was set up in 2018, and only three other councils in the country have done the same, although new locations for such action are popping up all the time. The Minister might not understand, but my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol East and the shadow Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Croydon Central, will know that walking past certain unpleasant things will send a shiver down a woman’s spine anyway. Imagine how that might be magnified when they face a difficult medical procedure. Women can sometimes be uneasy about using the public highway; such activity adds a whole new dimension.

As I say, only three other councils have used a PSPO. Why have other councils not done so? Because setting them up is time-consuming and clunky for local authorities, who have quite a lot on their plate. In Ealing, we have the west London Marie Stopes clinic. It is not just my constituents who use it; women come from all over the country, and women from Ireland historically have used it. We are lucky in Ealing: protesters are moved away from the clinic gates. They are moved only 150 metres away, because there is a main road boundary there. We could be flexible about the limit; it could depend on where the clinic gates are, and where women have to pass. As a mother, I have taken little ones past these groups. We are not just talking about protests; there can also be gruesome images of foetuses and 3D dolls. I have been asked, “Mummy, what’s that?” People who are not even using the clinic have had to divert and use other roads so as not to pass that distressing scene.

Other councils have not followed Ealing because doing so is very resource intensive. We had this situation for 24 years in Ealing before the council took the imaginative route of using antisocial behaviour order byelaws; that is what PSPOs are thought of as being. The order is only temporary; it lasts three years before it has to be renewed, and a huge burden of evidence is needed. There is the principle of consistency before the law. We are lucky in Ealing, but this should not be a matter of luck. People should have equal protection under law, wherever they live, and there should be such restrictions for every clinic. I understand that Birmingham has two clinics, one in the north and one in the south; sometimes the protest gang will be at the north clinic, and sometimes at the south one. The element of uncertainty needs to be eliminated. Life has enough uncertainties as it is.

We are often told in Committee, “There is sufficient legislation.” Opposition Members have at times asked the Government, “Why do you want to create a new offence? There is sufficient legislation out there. These people can be stopped.” In this instance, it is proven that there is not sufficient legislation. Whenever I have ventilated the issue, the idea of taking action has been popular on both sides of the House. As constituency MPs, we all know about the complaints we get in our postbags when a street becomes unusable and police are tied up in dealing with unnecessary stuff. I was discussing this offline with a Committee member who I cannot see in his place today. He has an issue with abortion, but this is not about abortion at all; it is not about the number of weeks before which a person can have an abortion, or about being anti-abortion or pro-abortion. It is just about people not having a protest within the buffer zone, however many metres wide we define that as being. People can make their protest in a way that does not interfere with women’s right to walk into the clinic and have the procedure.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol East pointed out, having an abortion is a huge, difficult decision, and women should be informed of the pros and cons and their choices by medical professionals, counsellors and family members. These things should not happen in the street, in a pressurised environment, and in a distressing and confrontational way that is about trying to bring on all these feelings of guilt and shame.

This issue is just not going away. The number of protest sites is growing year on year. The stuff going on across the Atlantic, where Roe v. Wade is being revisited, is very regressive. I do not want us to take a polarised position in Britain. As I have said before in this Committee, the Ealing decision has been challenged at every level—in the High Court, the Supreme Court and the Court of Appeal—and it has always won. Judges have seen that someone having a medical procedure has a right to privacy that trumps freedom of belief, thought, conscience and expression. The two do have to be balanced, and people can have their protest, but not in a way that interferes with women’s right to use the public highway, and to have a procedure to which they have been legally entitled for decades—for longer than my lifetime. All the medical opinion supports this approach; it is supported by the British Medical Association, all the royal colleges, the nurses and midwifery people, and even good old Mumsnet, who are not normally seen as militant crazies.

I think I have said my bit for now. As I say, this measure was massively popular when it was a ten-minute rule Bill, and that was at the height of covid, so not everyone was in the building, but I think the numbers in support of it were crushing. If there was a free vote on the measure, I think that the House would support it. The Government should adopt it; they can then show that the Sarah Everard case was not in vain, and that something has been done for women and girls, even though there are zero mentions of the issue in the Bill.

Touring Musicians: EU Visas and Permits

Debate between Kerry McCarthy and Rupa Huq

Thursday 18th November 2021 Westminster Hall

[Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Dr Huq, although it is a shame that you are not contributing to the debate because I know what a music fan you are. I do not think that I have to declare my membership of the Musicians’ Union but I will, although, as I always say on such occasions, I have no musical talent whatsoever, unlike some of my colleagues who are speaking in the debate.

The fact that we are here in November 2021—well over five years since the UK voted to leave the European Union—is a damning indictment of the Government’s failure to prepare for the consequences of Brexit. I think that is, in part, political. The Government just did not want to concede that there could be negative consequences to no longer having freedom of movement and to leaving the market. I have seen that in other sectors, too—the labour shortages in food and farming, for example—and the ostrich approach of burying our head in the sand has had real consequences for the people who are affected.

That approach has included ignoring the warnings from the industry. As my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman) said, so many people from across the industry—not just performers, but road crew, lighting engineers, truck drivers and so on—have come forward to try to tell the Government that action is needed, but there has been a refusal to host anything by way of meaningful discussions. An EU official told The Guardian in January that when the EU proposed a standard range of travel exemptions,

“the UK refused to engage in our discussions at all”.

I know there was a bit of to-ing and fro-ing and trying to blame one another for that, but according the EU sources, by June, the UK had still made no approach to remove travel barriers for creative workers.

As well as being political, I think there is an element of incompetence to the Government’s approach. Quite frankly, that is a hallmark of this Government. It is also another sign of the Government’s failure to acknowledge the importance of our creative industries. We have heard about the statistics and the pound signs attached to those industries: we are the world’s second-biggest exporter of music, with an export revenue of £2.9 billion. The value of music, as others have said, is far greater than that. We not only have some of the biggest-selling music artists in the world, but some of the best—those are not necessarily the same thing.

I remember, when I was a student in what was then Leningrad, in the summer of 1984, being besieged by young Russians who were just absolutely desperate to find out more about UK music, which was a lifeline to them and their connection to the west. I remember being asked, on the beach on the bank of the Neva river, how many children Paul McCartney had. I must admit, I did not know, and it was before the internet, but that just shows the soft power connected to our worldwide reputation for music.

We also know that the sector has been incredibly hard hit by covid, which is all the more reason why the Government should pull out all the stops to get it back on its feet. To an extent, the Government have been saved by covid, because people being unable to tour has masked the impact of Brexit on the live music sector. Now that we have, I hope, emerged from the worst of the pandemic, it is absolutely vital that the Government step up the pace on progress.

I am pleased that we have made some progress on visas, although I think it is a bit audacious for the Secretary of State to try to claim credit for that. We need agreements with the remaining six member states, and we also need bilateral discussions, because at the moment, any work is still restricted over all member states to a total of up to 90 days in any 180 days. As we have heard, there is still so much bureaucracy around that.

I will mention carnets and merchandise briefly. We have heard about the costs of taking unaccompanied instruments across borders—those costs are just for the paperwork. We know that smaller and up-and-coming bands in particular do not have lawyers, agents and managers to do all that for them; they have to deal with it themselves, and it is a real deterrent. Tim Burgess from the Charlatans tweeted earlier this week that the band was unable to sell any merchandise during its recent Dublin gig. We know that so many bands rely on merchandise to make a living because of streaming and everything else.

I will finish by talking about cabotage, as I know that that is what is expected of me as a member of the shadow Transport team. UK tour trucks made up close to 80% of the EU market prior to 2016 and Brexit. The three-stop rule for UK trucks forces them to re-route back to the UK, which is incredibly costly and time-consuming if they bother to do so, but most do not, making UK-led tours impossible. The band Public Service Broadcasting recently had to book a German bus for their European tour—something that they described as maddeningly stupid and self-harming. Big US acts have traditionally started their EU tours in the UK, so they fly into Heathrow, pick up the trucks, road crew, sound, lighting, caterers—everything—here. Why would they do that now? They are just going to go to Germany or somewhere else.

We have seen limited progress. The small splitter trucks have been ruled exempt from cabotage rules, and cabotage easement has seen inbound rules suspended on EU-flagged trucks to help the HGV crisis here, but that makes things even worse for UK music hauliers, as it is not reciprocal. UK hauliers have had no Government support to relocate to the EU either—I do not want them to relocate to the EU, but that proposal was put forward by the Government as an answer to the problems back in the earliest stage of the negotiations—so they cannot get around the restrictions that way. The music industry is part of what makes this country great. Why would we want to throw out an integral part of that, and tell it to go and set up shop in France, Germany or Portugal?

UK Music is calling for a derogation from cabotage for all trucks used for cultural events, so I conclude by asking the Minister whether there are active discussions in her Department and the Department for Transport about this issue. When I have tried to talk to the DFT, it has told me that it is a matter for her Department, but when I have tried to talk to her Department, it has told me that it is a matter for the DFT. I rather feel that that has left a big, gaping void in which there are no discussions at all.

[Dr Rupa Huq (in the Chair)]

I call the only person I know who had an album out last week: Kevin Brennan.