Grenfell: Government Response

Baroness Hodge of Barking Excerpts

Monday 10th June 2019 Commons Chamber

[James Brokenshire]

I would be very interested to hear any further details from the hon. Gentleman in relation to cases he is pointing to. I know the Minister for Housing has had regular surgeries with a number of the families involved about the decision process and the support they are receiving, and indeed from the taskforce itself with the challenge and the information it gives me. I would be very pleased to meet the hon. Gentleman and talk to him about those cases. He is right: it is hugely humbling to meet the survivors and the bereaved, and see the dignity and humility that they show. I think many of us who were at the Speaker’s reception earlier today will have felt that very keenly, with the profound impact it certainly had on me and I know on others in this House, too.

[Dame Margaret Hodge (Barking) (Lab)]

Mr Speaker, I am sorry I could not join your Speaker’s reception today, because I was with those of my constituents in Barking—on Barking riverside—who are the survivors and victims of the terrible fire that took place yesterday. I hope you will give me a little leeway in what I have to say.

The pictures on the estate are horrific. Thankfully, nobody died, but had that fire taken place at night, I think people would have died. Literally the whole building was engulfed in flames within six minutes. The residents I met have lost their homes, their possessions, children’s toys, family photos and personal mementoes, and what I came across in my meetings this morning was trauma, grief and anger.

These are early days and it is appropriate that a proper investigation takes place, but let me raise three issues with the Secretary of State that arose out of my visit this morning. First, it absolutely shocked me that the fire alarms that should have been in place and operating were not working and that there were no sprinklers in this block of flats, because they were not considered necessary. This is a block of flats that was built only seven years ago.

Secondly, timber was used, and it was used really in a decorative way. Allegedly—and this is so shocking—that timber had not been treated. What I have been told is that the regulations are such that, because the building was only a six-storey building and therefore not 18 metres or higher, there was no necessity to have that sort of regulation. That is shocking. How on earth can that be possible in this day and age?

Thirdly, I want to talk about who is responsible. When we walk on to an estate like that, there is a freeholder, a developer, a builder and subcontractors, while the developer sells on to other people and there are then leaseholders and people in buy-to-let. There are myriad people who have a role to play there, and nobody is accountable. Everybody I talked to today on that side of the fence wanted to pass the buck and pass on responsibility.

I have to say to the Secretary of State that, at the end of the day, when lives are at risk he has to be responsible, and he has to empower local authorities, through him, to take responsibility. We are talking about protecting our people—the most important duty we have as elected representatives. It is no good passing the buck to other authorities. I hear what the Secretary of State says, and he does talk a lot of words. I urge him to recognise that now is the time for action. Two years on from Grenfell, we should not have had another fire.

[James Brokenshire]

I thank the right hon. Lady for what she has said and the points that she has made on behalf of her constituents. I do not know whether she heard it, but I indicated at the start of my statement that I would be visiting Barking later this evening. Certainly, I would like to speak to her after the formalities here today, to co-ordinate and to hear some of the feedback that she has represented on the Floor of the House this afternoon.

There are two elements that the right hon. Lady highlighted to do with fire alarms and the nature of the timber used on the balconies. This is still subject to investigation and review of precisely what went on, but I can assure her that I have asked the Building Research Establishment to provide technical expertise on investigating the reasons for the speed of the fire’s spread. The expert panel will be asked to issue further guidance urgently, and the wider circumstances will be looked at in our review of wider building safety. She makes the point powerfully about responsibility—having one person clearly responsible for the management and safety of a building—which is at the heart of Judith Hackitt’s review. That is precisely what is at the heart of the reforms, and I look forward to continuing the discussion with the right hon. Lady.

Antisemitism in Modern Society

Baroness Hodge of Barking Excerpts

Wednesday 20th February 2019 Commons Chamber

[Dame Margaret Hodge (Barking) (Lab)]

I rise to speak feeling a mixture of anger and anguish: anger at the shocking increase in antisemitic incidents in our country, and anger at the abject failure of the Labour leadership to root out the cancer of antisemitism within our party; anguish because of the stuff of antisemitism, whether online, verbal or physical, constitutes an unspeakably dreadful stain on our society, and anguish because my colleagues, the hon. Member for Liverpool, Wavertree (Luciana Berger) and the right hon. Member for Enfield North (Joan Ryan), both of whom have dedicated themselves to fighting antisemitism, feel that they can no longer stay in the Labour party and work with Labour MPs, both Jews and non-Jews, to eradicate antisemitism from our party.

It just beggars belief that on the very day the hon. Member for Liverpool, Wavertree chose to leave the Labour party Derek Hatton was readmitted. This is a slight deviation, but I knew Derek Hatton in the 1980s. A leading member of Militant, he holds bigoted views and never believed in consistency between what he said and what he did. I remember a meeting of rate-capped councils when he harangued the leader of one council who had told us his council was going to set a rate that night. Hatton accused the man of betraying the working classes by complying with the law. I was fed up with his hypocrisy, because that was precisely what Hatton had done the previous year. When I told him to be quiet, he turned on me and shouted, “If it’s too hot for you Margaret, get back in the kitchen.”

To return to the debate, I never ever thought that my Jewish identity would be central to my political work. I have always been secular. I arrived as an immigrant with my family at the age of four. We were not active in the Jewish community, although all our family friends were also Jewish refugees. But like so many other Jews, I lost family in the holocaust. In recent years, as my sisters trawled through family letters and diaries, that family history became more vivid and poignant for me. I read a letter from my aunt—after fleeing, she found herself in France—that she sent to Marshal Pétain, pleading with him to release her husband who had been taken from their home in the Ardèche:

“He is only a number to you. He is everything to me.”

Her husband, my uncle, was later murdered in Auschwitz.

At Auschwitz, years later, I walked into a room filled with luggage and was confronted with a battered suitcase bearing his initials. I read my grandfather’s diaries and heard the despair he expressed as he visited his parents’ graves in Vienna for the last time before fleeing the Nazis. And most painful of all, I read my grandmother’s last letter, written to her son, my uncle, nine days before she was shot in a trench outside a concentration camp, in which she twice says, “Don’t forget me completely.”

Stamping out antisemitism matters. We must never shirk our shared responsibility to prevent such horrors from happening again. We ignore the present increase in antisemitism incidents at our peril: a 16% rise, as others have said; the third year in a row that figures have reached an all-time high; a 54% increase in just one year in antisemitic abuse on social media. Complacency, denial, the shifting of blame on to others—all that is unacceptable.

This is not about weaponising racism for political advantage, an accusation that makes me profoundly angry. Likewise, for some people to claim that those fighting antisemitism are simply protecting the Netanyahu regime in Israel is deeply insulting and utterly wrong. I often criticise the actions of successive Israeli Governments where I feel that is justified, but legitimate criticism of a foreign Government should never morph into racist abuse against all Jews, as it too often does.

The increase in antisemitism comes from both the left and the right. On the right, CST analysis tells us that one in four of the incidents of recorded abuse involved language used by the far right, but under the leadership of my right hon. Friend the Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn), a platform has also been given for antisemitism, which was always present on the hard-left fringes, but has now moved into the mainstream of my party. That is why we have experienced a surge in abuse against us—abuse particularly targeted against female Jewish MPs.

I have seen the internal Labour party documents leaked to LBC that formed the agenda for one single meeting of the group tasked with investigating allegations of antisemitic abuse, and I congratulate LBC on doggedly pursuing this story. There are 47 antisemitic allegations in these documents against Labour party members. The evidence of abuse is shocking. I quote:

“He needs to check out the love fest between the Zionists and the Nazis.

People are finding out how much power Jews have. They seem to have a lot of power over the main opposition party. Might they rebel if…the reason they didn’t get a job or a home was because a Jew got it.

You are paid by Israel to destabilise UK Labour.

A Zionist plot to oust Jeremy Corbyn.

A swastika is appropriate as Israel is a fascist state.”

Some of the abuse is directed at Members of this House. LBC gave the file to Mak Chishty, who ran the hate crime unit for the Metropolitan police until 2017. He identified 17 cases that he judged were “race hate incidents” and four cases that crossed the threshold for criminal investigation. It took three months for the Crown Prosecution Service to give the police the go-ahead just for a criminal investigation. Will the Government urgently inquire into why this delay occurred and will they also provide me with written assurance that the delay will not result in cases being dropped because they run out of time?

The documents leaked to LBC covered less than 50 cases. The Labour party has received hundreds and hundreds of complaints, yet only 12 individuals have been expelled from the party since April. I could have identified more than that from the one set of papers I saw. This tells me that the leader of the Labour party is not demanding zero tolerance of antisemitism in our ranks. Until he does, I and other members of the party will continue to call it out fearlessly, loudly and persistently.

Trust between the leader, his staff, Labour headquarters and Back-Bench Labour MPs has now broken down completely. I have absolutely no confidence in the integrity of the data that the party has provided concerning its progress. I submitted a dossier of abusive communications. The only communication that I have received back is a letter from a party member—about whom I had complained —in which he says of my complaint:

“I can’t tell you how pathetic I think this is of you, going crying to the complaints department when someone says they don’t like you.”

He had accused me of “hysterically abusing Corbyn” to advance my own agenda and had said that Jewish people in this country are not victims of anything and that I was a nasty, dishonest person. The level of care provided to MPs by the party is so pathetic that the only response one gets to complaining about antisemitic abuse is further abuse from the culprit.

This week, two Labour MPs quit the Labour party, mainly because they think the party is institutionally antisemitic. I understand and respect their decision and mourn their departure. I joined the Labour party 56 years ago because it was the natural home for Jews, with its proud tradition of fighting racism, promoting equality and fostering tolerance. I do not yet want to give up the fight for the heart and soul of a party I have worked for and with throughout my adult life. The leader of the Labour party must really listen, must really understand and must really change. If he does not do so, he will be culpable for sabotaging the values that led to the creation of the Labour party and responsible for the withering away of a once great political force.

[Several hon. Members rose—]

Budget Resolutions

Baroness Hodge of Barking Excerpts

1st reading: House of Commons
Thursday 1st November 2018 Commons Chamber

[Dame Margaret Hodge (Barking) (Lab)]

This Budget reflects traditional Tory values that will deepen poverty and inequality and do nothing for struggling families. I will provide three examples: the Government chose to put more money into mending potholes than they granted to our cash-starved schools; they chose to prioritise the motorist over a sustainable future for our planet; and they chose to give away more in tax to those who need it least and ignored those who need most support. Labour should have no truck with that approach. We should pledge to reverse the tax and benefit changes.

Regrettably, most politicians shy away from an honest conversation about the need to raise enough money through tax to fund good-quality public services. We cannot keep promising excellent schools, effective policing and compassionate care if we refuse to raise the necessary money through taxation. We cannot keep pretending that punishing the wealthy is the solution to underfunding. We need to demonstrate value for money. We need a fair system in which big corporations do not get away with paying minimal tax on their profits. We also need a truthful conversation with voters about how much we need to raise in tax to fund public services.

I regret that the Government have not used the Budget to build on Parliament’s determination to have greater transparency in British tax havens, so that we know who owns what and where. Following the money is an essential tool to help ensure that everybody pays their fair share. MPs welcomed the Government’s concession on British overseas territories. However, we must now deal with the anomaly of Britain’s Crown dependencies. The right hon. Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr Mitchell) and I visited Guernsey and the Isle of Man and held positive discussions with elected politicians, and we will soon visit Jersey. Our purpose is persuade the Crown dependencies to co-operate with the UK and agree to publish public registers. Should they not co-operate, however, Parliament must use its powers to insist that they do so. Parliament expressed its views on this issue clearly. We must now ensure consistency and transparency in all UK jurisdictions.

Finally, I had hoped to welcome the digital services tax, but the Government’s proposal is little more than a public relations stunt. The Red Book projects that it will be 2022-23 before we raise just £400 million from this tax. A recent Tax Watch report calculated that in 2017, Google, which paid only £49 million in corporation tax, should have contributed £356 million, and that Facebook, which paid only £16 million, should have paid £127.5 million. Just two companies, Google and Facebook, should have paid £480 million in 2017, far exceeding the £400 million the Government estimate they will get some five years down the line from all large digital corporations. Hardware companies such as Apple and Microsoft will not be covered by the tax. Video and audio platforms, such as Netflix and Spotify, will not be caught either. Airbnb and Uber will argue that their marketplaces are not online. Even Google and Facebook will be able to exclude some of their profits.

The tax gives us far too little, far too late. It is an exercise in media management designed to persuade taxpayers that we are all treated equally. It leaves undisturbed the continuing scandal of billions lost to the public purse by the deliberate actions of giant global digital companies. This behaviour is an enduring outrage, and we on the Labour Benches will continue to argue for fair taxation.

Anti-Semitism

Baroness Hodge of Barking Excerpts

Tuesday 17th April 2018 Commons Chamber

[Dame Margaret Hodge (Barking) (Lab)]

I was born in Egypt in the last year of the second world war as Jews were being exterminated in Hitler’s gas chambers. I grew up thinking that we would never forget, yet more than 70 years later here we are debating the issue. Anti-Semitism exists across Europe and across the political spectrum, but I never ever thought that I would experience significant anti-Semitism as a member of the Labour party. I have and it has left me feeling an outsider in the party of which I have been a member for more than 50 years.

I am a Jew. My upbringing has been entirely secular. I have never practised Jewish religious traditions. Neither of my two husbands were Jews. I am a consistent critic of the Governments of Israel. None the less, my Jewish heritage is central to my being.

Recently, my sisters trawled through the correspondence and diaries of my family who came from Germany and Austria. My grandmother, in her early fifties, thought that she was too old to be harmed by the Nazis, but we have the last letter that she wrote to her son, my uncle, in 1941, nine days before she was forcibly taken to a concentration camp in Lithuania and shot and killed in a trench outside the gates. In her letter she said twice, “Don’t completely forget me.” In a postscript she wrote:

“Thinking about you will help me to endure what is coming...I am sceptical that we shall ever meet again. Who knows when I can even write to you again.”

My uncle on my father’s side spent much of the war in the Ardèche before he was finally deported and killed in Auschwitz. When I visited Auschwitz, I saw the suitcases of those murdered in the gas chambers and was confronted by a battered brown suitcase with my uncle’s initials on it. That moment was utterly chilling for me. All of that is my heritage. It is what I am today. I cannot forget. It is one reason why I joined the Labour party in the 1960s. Labour was the party that fought racism and intolerance. It was the party that defended minorities. It was the natural home for Jews who had been subject to inhumane acts for no other reason than their race, their ethnicity and their religion.

It has been truly shocking to receive vicious anti-Semitic tweets from right-wing extremists, but also from the left. My inbox is nothing compared to those of some of my hon. Friends, but there is a surge of anti-Semitism on the left. In part, it has always been there. There are those who see every Jew as a paid-up member of the Netanyahu fan club, who cannot make a distinction between being a Jew and voicing support for Israel as a place for Jews to live safely, who consider “Zionist” a term of abuse, who deny the holocaust and who hate Jews.

I have never felt as nervous and frightened at being a Jew as I feel today. It feels as if my party has given permission for anti-Semitism to go unchallenged. Anti-Semitism is making me an outsider in my Labour party. To that I simply say, enough is enough.