Economic Activity of Public Bodies (Overseas Matters) Bill

Debate between Lisa Nandy and Richard Graham

2nd reading
Monday 3rd July 2023 Commons Chamber

[Lisa Nandy]

This is precisely the question that the Government have yet to answer, but we hope that will be forthcoming during this debate. I would add to what the right hon. Gentleman said that the local government pension service is already under a fiduciary duty to take prudent investment decisions based on an assessment of the financial consequence of a number of matters, including environmental and social governance, and when it divests on the basis of non-financial factors, it should follow the Law Commission direction that any financial impact should not be significant and that the decision would likely be supported by scheme members. I am not sure what happens when a local government pension fund is taking decisions that would not be supported by scheme members. We are talking about the pensions of 6 million people in this country, and I think these are important questions that the Government must answer.

I want to turn to one of our chief concerns about this Bill, which is the concentration of the decision making and judgment of hundreds of public bodies in the hands of just one person and the implications of that for some of the most persecuted people in the world. There will be significant effects on the Uyghur in Xinjiang, who are suffering such serious crimes against humanity that the Biden Administration have recognised it as genocide. The Secretary of State will have read the impassioned letter from those groups in The Times about the effects of this Bill. Surely we cannot abandon them to their fate. For the Rohingya in Myanmar, for the Tamils in Sri Lanka and for countless others, the concern is that this bad law prevents not just economic action to uphold human rights everywhere, but solidarity with some of the most persecuted people in the world.

As was said earlier, the Bill goes further and clause 7 grants to the Secretary of State or other relevant body the power to issue notices requiring all information to be handed over, if they suspect that a prohibited statement expressing a moral or political view about foreign conduct is in the process of or about to be made, including information in subsection (8) that would normally be protected by legal privilege. Let me clear about the effect of that: this hands over to the Office for Students, the Secretary of State, and the Treasury, greater powers than those available to the security services. I know there are Members on both sides of the House who are deeply troubled by that, and those who are not should consider for a moment how they might feel about this Bill if their party was not in power.

We should not be here. We have long fought for legislation to tackle what is a real problem, and we are determined to give the Government the opportunity to do the right thing. That is why today we are proposing an alternative that allows the Government and this House to keep our promise to tackle a long-standing issue of deep concern to the Jewish community, but avoids tearing up our commitment to human rights, local democracy and free speech, in a Bill that does not even appear to tackle the very problem it seeks to solve.

[Richard Graham]

The hon. Lady has made a number of powerful points. She will have heard me question the Secretary of State about the fact that the Bill is not country agnostic; it is directed primarily at one country and one issue, which is BDS. The question for her is, in a way, the opposite of that, which is that this problem has come to be because of decisions made by Leicester City Council and Lancaster City Council, which are Labour-run councils acting arguably in cahoots with BDS. What does she think the Labour party can do to take away the perceived requirement to have a Bill that seems, at the moment, largely to argue against BDS’s actions against Israel?

[Lisa Nandy]

I listened carefully to what the hon. Gentleman had to say and I support it, but he should please not try to tarnish Labour Members with a record on antisemitism. There are those of us who stood up not just to those who are supposed to be our opponents, but to those who are supposed to be our friends as well. And we will always do that. I give my word, and I give our word on behalf of the Labour party.

As I am about to outline, we have provided the Government with an alternative. Earlier this year we sought to amend the Procurement Bill to ensure that no single country, especially in the cases that we have been describing and the world’s only Jewish state, can be singled out for different standards from others, and in doing so whip up hate and hostility against the Jewish community. It is a real problem. We provided the Government with a solution. They refused it, but we remain convinced that co-operation and consensus is the right approach to tackle what we accept is a very real problem.

Today, the Secretary of State will hear this refrain again and again from Members on his own Back Benches, and across the House: two important principles—the need to tackle racism and antisemitism, which are a scourge on our society, and the need to stand up for human rights, freedom of expression, democracy and our long-standing position on Israel and Palestine, and act in accordance with international law—and those things should never be seen as mutually exclusive or allowed to be pitted against one another.

We have a number of serious suggestions about the way that this problem can be tackled. We have outlined an alternative approach. We have provided the Secretary of State with a solution, and we urge him to take it. Otherwise, he should know that Labour Members will be compelled to vote against the Bill on Third Reading, as I suspect will significant numbers of his own colleagues. It is an outcome we should all strive to avoid. If a pledge to tackle division, around which there is broad consensus, was derailed by a combative approach and a Government who refuse to listen to the wide range of voices that have expressed their concerns, that would be a crying shame. With good will and good faith on the part of the Government, we can proceed together. We have proposed how. The ball is now in the court of the right hon. Gentleman.

Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill

Debate between Lisa Nandy and Richard Graham

2nd reading
Wednesday 8th June 2022 Commons Chamber

[Lisa Nandy]

I agree with my hon. Friend, who reminds us that we have had 12 long years without real action to put power back in people’s hands. He raises a really important point—I think all Members have raised it: that, as long as there are centralising tendencies in Government, and as long as they find their way into Bills such as this, we will continue to undermine the situation. If the Secretary of State does not want to listen to Opposition Members, I urge him to listen to Members on his own side; looking at their faces, I do not believe they will allow this to drop.

We have debated the problems that people face in this House many times. There are simple changes that the Secretary of State could make in order to stop people coming into our communities and extracting from them.

[Richard Graham]

I want to make a couple of very simple points. First, the constituents of the hon. Member for Reading East (Matt Rodda) could have applied to a very good recent fund for brownfield sites; Gloucester was successful in its application.

Secondly, I find it curious that the hon. Lady keeps referring to the regional development agency, which was one of the most disastrous organisations ever created. It did nothing but harm in my city of Gloucester, and all the bad things that it did are gradually being sorted out by this progressive Conservative Government. Could she talk about the Bill rather than Labour’s failures of the past?

[Hon. Members]

Hear, hear!