Holocaust Memorial Day

Debate between Lyn Brown and Mike Gapes

Thursday 18th January 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mike Gapes (Ilford South) (Lab/Co-op)]

My hon. Friend the Member for Leeds North West (Alex Sobel), in his absolutely powerful and moving speech, made reference to films. There is another—Steven Spielberg’s fantastic work “Shoah” in which survivors living at the time all gave their testimony, speaking in their own words for the record. Hopefully, those words will be there for generations to come.

Twenty-one years ago, I introduced a private Member’s Bill on holocaust denial. It was a precursor to a private Member’s Bill on Holocaust Memorial Day promoted by my former hon. Friend the Member for Hendon, who came in in 1997. We did not get the Bill on denial, but we did get the Bill on memorial. I received an incredible amount of anti-Semitic abuse. For two years after, I received specially printed Christmas cards with the most vile images. The assumption was that I was Jewish. Actually, I am not; I grew up in Ilford and the mum of one of my best friends at school always thought that I was Jewish because I was always round there, but I am not.

Interestingly, after the election in 1997, I decided that I was going to do more about these issues. Then a group was established locally that campaigned against me because I supported a two-state position in the middle east. The group, which called itself the Association of Ilford Muslims—I do not have the time now, but I refer Members to my Westminster Hall debate that I held in June 2001—put out leaflets saying that I was no friend of the Muslims, I was a true friend of Israel, and I represented Tel Aviv South, not Ilford South. Subsequently, the Muslim Political Action Committee UK was set up. It has peddled on the internet and through social media anti-Semitic material, which it dresses up as anti-Zionism. It has targeted people in election campaigns, including in Rochdale, Oldham, Birmingham, Blackburn, in my constituency and elsewhere to try to get rid of people it regards as pro-Zionist MPs—mainly Labour MPs, but Conservatives as well. That has been the power of their message. It is insidious, and it is in our politics.

I am very pleased to say that next Friday in Ilford we are going to have all communities, as we always do—Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, Jews—

[Lyn Brown]

May I just ask my hon. Friend for the venue?

[Mike Gapes]

Valentines Park in Ilford, at the holocaust memorial garden, which was established on the initiative of the former council leader—still a Conservative councillor—Alan Weinberg. We will have our annual service there, and there will be young people from many different schools, including, as in recent years, young people from a Muslim school—the Al-Noor school. We have many different people from different faiths speaking, because that is Ilford today. A century ago, Ilford had a very large Jewish community, but now we have all the different faiths, and they come together.

It is important to recognise that the poison that was put out against me all those years ago did not succeed. I am still here. More importantly, the community has rejected extremists of that kind, but they are still there. They are out on Twitter. They are out on Facebook.

Homelessness Reduction Bill

Debate between Lyn Brown and Mike Gapes

2nd reading: House of Commons
Friday 28th October 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mike Gapes (Ilford South) (Lab/Co-op)]

Last night, I attended an event organised by TELCO, the citizens’ organisation for east London. It is working to establish a community land trust. The event was hosted by the Salvation Army, which, in a few weeks’ time, will open a night shelter in my constituency. It does that every winter. Two thirds of the people who stay in that night shelter will not in any way be affected by this Bill because they have no recourse to public funds. There are many thousands of people on the streets of London who are sleeping rough and who, because they do not have EU treaty rights or for other reasons, have no recourse to public funds. That homelessness problem will continue regardless of what this Bill does.

[Lyn Brown (West Ham) (Lab)]

Is it not true that if we are to deal with street homelessness, which many people think we are talking about when we are discussing homelessness, it will require a lot more money to deal with the very complex needs that those people have?

European Union (Referendum) Bill

Debate between Lyn Brown and Mike Gapes

Friday 29th November 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mike Gapes]

As you know, Madam Deputy Speaker, I always take your advice, having listened to it very carefully.

Amendment 52 is probably the most important amendment in the group. We have now voted for the referendum, if there is one, to take place by the end of 2017. Other proposed amendments to clause 3 have not been agreed to. Specifying the date of 1 March 2015 would oblige the Electoral Commission to present its proposals and recommendations about the conduct of the referendum not just well before the general election—which might be pertinent, because any incoming Government could bear in mind any difficulties that the Electoral Commission had highlighted—but at a time that would allow proper consideration and preparation, including legislation or any other measures that the Government might wish to take, to begin up to two and a half years before the referendum, given that, although we do not know the exact date of the referendum, we have been told that it must take place by the end of 2017.

[Lyn Brown (West Ham) (Lab)]

I wonder whether my hon. Friend was as surprised as I was that his proposals were not already included in the Bill.

[Mike Gapes]

I tabled these amendments for many reasons, but the most important reason is that the Bill is inadequate. It has many flaws, and if it leaves the House of Commons unamended, the other place will have to give it proper consideration and try to remedy the failure of this place to improve it.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mike Gapes]

Apart from the Minister, only two Conservative Members are present, namely the promoter of the Bill and his hon. Friend the Member for Brighton, Kemptown (Simon Kirby), along with one Liberal Democrat. Oh, I am sorry: I forgot the Whip. Whips are almost anonymous, so I never notice them.

[Lyn Brown]

What?

--- Later in debate ---

[Mike Gapes]

I have received several e-mails and letters from British people living in other European Union countries—indeed, there are websites for them—and they are outraged by the idea that they will have no say. Some have been living in France or Italy for more than 15 years but will be unable to register as overseas voters. As I pointed out on a previous Friday, of the millions of British citizens living abroad, only 20,000 are registered as overseas voters. It is a serious flaw in the Bill that British citizens in other parts of the European Union will not be able to participate, but we will consider that under another set of amendments.

I will make some progress. Amendment 17 is fundamentally important. As Members will recall, this House introduced a threshold for the Scottish referendum in the 1970s, which was defeated. As a result, the support for separatism did not secure the necessary figure. The Scottish people did not vote for separatism, but in any case the threshold was there as a safeguard to ensure that a small, vocal and impassioned minority was not able to drive through a fundamental change without the wholehearted consent of the Scottish people at the time.

I believe that a similar threshold should be included for this referendum to ensure that if there is a low turnout the result will not be binding. Amendment 17 proposes that the Electoral Commission should set down rules specifying that if

“fewer than 60 per cent of registered voters take part in the referendum, or the majority in favour of not remaining in the European Union comprises fewer than 40% of registered voters”,

the referendum would not be binding.

[Lyn Brown]

I am delighted that we are considering amendment 17, as the last time we had a politically generated referendum in this country—when we had the elections for police and crime commissioners—only 15% of the electorate voted. Has my hon. Friend heard any noises from the Government Benches on whether they accept his amendment?

[Mike Gapes]

The only noises I have heard from the Government Benches have not been complimentary about any of my amendments—and some of them were not made in the Chamber.

There is also a major danger that different nations or regions will vote in markedly different ways in a low-turnout referendum, with divisive consequences for our United Kingdom. Let us imagine, for the sake of argument, that next September the Scottish people vote against separatism and in favour of staying in the UK but in a referendum in 2017 a majority of the electorate votes to leave the European Union, based on votes in parts of England and with the vast majority of Scots voting to remain in the European Union. We would think that the referendum next September will settle the question of Scottish independence and separatism, but in fact the same issue could be reopened only two or so years later, even though the Scottish people voted to stay in the UK. They might say, “Hold on. We didn’t want to leave the European Union, which is part of our association with the two Unions we are part of: the United Kingdom and the European Union.” We could then have a real problem. The same argument could apply in Wales, Northern Ireland and significant parts of England.

Therefore, if we want to keep the unity and cohesion of our country, we need safeguards to avoid an extreme minority in certain parts of the country driving through, on a low turnout, a referendum result that would lead to the withdrawal of parts of the country that did not wish to leave the European Union and were not inspired by fanatics to take part in a referendum that they did not feel was particularly important.

Bow Match Women’s Strike

Debate between Lyn Brown and Mike Gapes

Tuesday 8th October 2013 Westminster Hall

[Mike Gapes (Ilford South) (Lab/Co-op)]

May I begin with a personal reflection, which I find quite difficult? In 2007, my late daughter played the character Louie in “The Matchgirls” play that was put on by a community association. She had to have stitched to her head a piece of cloth to give the impression of an 11-year-old girl whose hair had fallen out because of the work that she was doing in the Bryant & May factory. I have always been struck by that image and the passion in the performance that was put on by those young people. That image has come back to me during this debate. I did not want to refer to it, but I feel I have to.

[Lyn Brown]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Mike Gapes]

No, I want to carry on. Anyone who has an image of what that factory was like, whether from photographs or from their imagination from reading the stories, will know about the working conditions of women not just in the Bryant & May factories, but throughout the Victorian era during the industrial revolution. Anyone who reads Friedrich Engels’s work about the conditions of workers in Manchester—it was published not when it was written in 1844, but about 40 years later—will know about the conditions of millions of people in this country who built our great cities and our industrial revolution, which made us the workshop of the world, as was demonstrated in the great exhibition of 1851. Britain grew economically and prospered on the backs of those giants—the men and women who built the industrial revolution—but they did not benefit from it. Their work was casual, erratic and not permanent. They did not have pensions or benefit from health and safety legislation and there was no sick pay. They were on what are now called zero-hours contracts, but in most cases they had no contracts. They were dismissed at will, abused, exploited, sexually harassed and treated appallingly by some more senior workers and their employers.

If we are honest—this is topical—we face today a race to the bottom. The ideology of the Government, including the Liberal Democrats who are in up to their necks, is based on a view that we must compete globally by reducing working conditions in this country so that we can be more competitive with our European neighbours, and that Europe must reduce working and living standards to be competitive with the Asian economies that are rapidly industrialising and taking on manufacturing for the world.

Yesterday, I watched an interesting programme on television about the largest container vessel ever built. It is so large that things must be removed so that it is not too high in the water and can go under bridges. It cannot dock in many places. It comes from China fully laden and goes back three quarters empty because we are exporting only our waste products and some specialised equipment, and I am talking not just about Britain. The programme highlighted our massive trade deficit of billions of pounds every month. We import from countries where men, women and children are exploited. In China today and many of its cities the treatment of workers is comparable with the treatment that men and women in this country experienced in the 19th century.

When we talk about health and safety, and the protection of workers, it is important to take a global perspective. I am an internationalist and a socialist, and I believe in internationalist and universalist values. It is time that we left the parochial debate about the situation in this country and raised issues relating to the rights and duties of global companies that do not pay tax in this country and manufacture goods in other countries. They work cleverly so that certain large global corporations have far more power and influence than individual states, even the most powerful states.

I will not digress, but that is why we need international co-operation and a strong European Union that can defend the European social model, stand up against the global multinationals, and work within the International Labour Organisation, the World Trade Organisation and the treaties that we signed with Korea, the United States and other parts of the world for trade and international co-operation. That should be not a race to the bottom, which is the agenda of the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, but a race to protect and raise the living standards of people in the countries that we trade with around the world. That is an argument not for protectionism, but for modern, effective regulation and globalisation. In this century, we cannot live on the basis of total deregulation and a race to the bottom. The values of the women in Bryant & May’s factory 125 years ago are exactly the same that we should argue for today to protect the women in factories in China and elsewhere who are working in conditions that are comparable with what those women were working in.

We have talked about trade unionism in Britain. Trade Unions do not organise enough people in this country. Millions of women work as cleaners and carers in low-paid, casual jobs. On the radio this morning, a lady said that if there is a traffic jam she cannot do her job when she visits the elderly people she cares for because she runs late with resulting pressure. That applies particularly in the care industry. We can do something about that in this country because contractualisation, privatisation, deregulation and zero-hours contracts are a race to the bottom. We must do better, and we must all recognise that that will involve a change in our attitude to the lowest paid people in our country.

We have a national minimum wage. It was a great achievement of the last Labour Government, but it is not high enough. It is impossible to live on the minimum wage in London. We need a London living wage and we need it to be enforced. Let people be prosecuted for failing to pay the minimum wage. Let the Daily Mail and the Daily Express show pictures of those who are guilty of not standing up for British values of fairness, justice and fair pay for men and women. That is what we need in this country today, not the poison that comes from our tabloid press.