European Union (Withdrawal Agreement) Bill

Lord Mann Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords & 2nd reading (Hansard)
Monday 13th January 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Mann (Non-Afl) (Maiden Speech)]

My Lords, it is a privilege to contribute for the first time. I thank the staff of the House for their kindness, wisdom and wit in recent weeks, and my introducers, the noble Lords, Lord Sacks and Lord Clarke of Hampstead. The rabbi and the postman; how my parents would have smiled.

I suspect that all of you will have heard much of the Battle of Cable Street, but not of the Battle of Holbeck Moor. Two weeks before Cable Street, Mosley and 1,000 Blackshirts assembled on Holbeck Moor in Leeds. Some 30,000 local people turned out, and the fascists were promptly removed from the city. There is no written testimony, and there are no photographs or artists’ drawings; it is a silent history. For 70 years my family lived alongside Holbeck Moor in those two-up, two-down, back-to-back terraces and cobbled streets. I cannot claim with certainty that one of them threw the cobble that put Mosley in hospital, but there were 30,000 heroes yet nothing recorded.

The true face of this country and the true story of the election is this: in Derby North, Christopher Williamson got 635 votes and lost his deposit. In West Bromwich East, George Galloway got 489 votes and lost his deposit. This is the innate decency of the British people yet again. Across the entirety of the country, people are saying, very vocally and unequivocally, “We reject the extremism of anti-Semitism.”

I wish to pay tribute to Theresa May. Three people have gone to prison in the last two and half years who targeted, among others, me, my family and my staff. She stood by me and my family at that time when some others did not. I salute the integrity and courage she displayed in setting up the Hillsborough inquiry and the national child abuse inquiry when she did not have to. I represented 30 survivors of child abuse—I advise some still—and I thank my staff who assisted in empowering those 30 people; they had to go to hell and back in learning their testimony. So thank you, Theresa May, for that.

We have power: the question is what we choose to do with it. I look at this curious place today. I shall hold my peace for the moment, but now is the time for an era of enlightenment. The northern working-class communities where I come from expect the dignity of being heard. Are their views, their visions, their votes not as valuable as the next person’s? There is no greater poverty than that of being discounted. Imagine retired coal miners who spent 12 months on strike and the women who stood tall alongside them while their children went without. Their anguish at this last election is incalculable, but their determination to see through their democratic decision is not. But that is not for me the defining image of the election, so let me conclude on what is. In north London on election day an elderly Jewish couple, who had voted Labour their entire lives, wept as they went into the polling station, sobbed as they voted and cried as they left it.

I have a role now on anti-Semitism. I am rightly independent and, as ever, I shall work cross-party, but I will be no bystander in driving out the stench of intolerance from the party that in 1906 my family helped to create in the city of Leeds, in the streets around Holbeck Moor.