Council of Europe (UK Chairmanship)

Debate between Michael Connarty and Brian Binley

Thursday 27th October 2011 Commons Chamber

[Michael Connarty]

That is a very important question. If the Government should bring back a proposal on, for example, whether prisoners in custody should have voting rights, and we decided that we did not wish to accept it, we could reject it. They would have to come back again to try to put another proposal, and I presume negotiations would go on between the Committee of Ministers, particularly with our chairmanship in the next six months, to find something that would be suitable, and that would be correct. However, I believe—this is my own judgment—that if we got to the point where we said, “No, we refuse to implement this”, then there must be some question about whether we want to remain in the Council of Europe at all.

[Mr Binley]

The hon. Gentleman is a very dedicated member of the Parliamentary Assembly, and it is a pleasure to work with him. Does he recognise that at the end of the day the judgment goes to the Committee of Ministers, and that equally at the end of the day it has no powers of enforcement? I relate that to the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for North Thanet (Mr Gale): nothing can be done, and therein lies one of the problems.

[Michael Connarty]

I think that is correct in what I have seen of the Council of Europe. It can make judgments, it can put down statements, people can support those statements, and they can be transmitted through the Committee of Ministers to the representatives of all the countries who send a representative to that Committee. One of the reasons I am quite a strong supporter of the European Union is that it can bring in directives, and has done so, as I shall mention later, in areas which are close to my heart and to the logic of why I am here as a representative of the people of my constituency. It has an enforceable power, mainly tied up with the economic power that lies in the EU rather than just the Court of Justice. But yes, I think that there is a need for a much more diligent pursuit of the matters raised by the hon. Member for North Thanet.

The third part of what I say will be on the way in which the Council of Europe operates. The debate on the scope and effect of proposals, papers or conventions has to be had vigorously in the committees. That was done by the hon. Member for North Thanet, and I will give examples of where, even in the year that I have been there, I have taken that route and had changes made. Hopefully I will bring about other changes, because that is what we are there to do: we are not there just to go to the plenaries and get our card ticked for being present; we are, I hope, there to go to the committees, participate in the debates and form and reform the papers, the proposals and the conventions that eventually come out of the Council of Europe. If we do that, it is our duty to come here and argue for them to be implemented in our country in the fullest way declared in those conventions. If we cannot do that, I question whether we are fully participating in the process.

I thank the hon. Member for Mansfield (Sir Alan Meale), because he organises the Labour side of the delegation. He was the person who suggested that, having been Chair of the European Scrutiny Committee and been a member for the past 13 years, I might see going to the Council of Europe as a natural progression, because I could see more of the debates at the fundamental level, which I did not see in the minutiae of the implementation of European directives. I thank him for inviting me to attend.

It was suggested that I should go into the committee on culture, science and education. I will speak a little about the processes that I found there, because it is important to put on the record, for those who do not know what this is all about and who read the debates, what happens there. When I went along, one of the large papers that was debated was on “the religious dimension of intercultural dialogue.” When I read it, I realised, as a humanist, that the Council of Europe’s fundamental principle of the right to belief as well as faith, was missing from the paper. When the committee invited people from all the main religions to discuss the paper, it also invited the secretary of the European Federation of Humanists to present a paper and to be heard in Paris. We then tabled amendments, which were debated and added to the paper. The paper was eventually discussed again in the committee, of which the hon. Member for North Thanet is also a member, and went to the full plenary, where it was passed by a 95% vote of the Parliamentary Assembly.

There are some things in that paper that I believe are priorities for our sixth-month presidency and that will be very helpful in a world where we know there is still anti-Semitism, sectarianism and in many countries an anti-Christian movement that threatens people’s rights, but also persecution and a denial of the rights of people who are not affiliated to religious organisations. I found those issues fundamental to why I am here, what I believe in and what I believe are the rights of the people whom I represent, and there they were being discussed in that committee. Hopefully, my participation in that debate changed the document.

There was opposition from one or two fundamentalist born again Christians who tried to take all the references to humanism out of the paper. I am glad to say that it was defended by people of all faiths in the committee and in the Assembly, because it is not about being against something, but about including people and diversity in the real sense, not just in a small way. That was an important lesson for me that when I was placed on a committee, if I took it seriously, I could do something; I would not necessarily have carried the day, but I could at least express those views.

The other committee that I sit on is the social, health and family affairs committee. The discussions of that committee chimed very much with the interests that I have always thought that we are there to pursue, such as the discussions about human trafficking. Some hon. Members may know that I am now vice-chair of the all-party human trafficking group in this House. I have pressed—even harried—the Government to sign up to the European directives on human trafficking and the new, extended European directive against the sexual exploitation and abuse of children. I found that there was very much a campaign running on that in the Council of Europe—the “One in Five” campaign. Again, I am grateful to the leader of the delegation, who nominated me to be the UK representative on that organisation. It is in fact a network of contact parliamentarians to stop sexual violence against children.

When we talk about these things, particularly at a European level about cross-border action, some people think it is not to do with them, but I have to say that in my own constituency, in the town of Grangemouth, an industrial town, there have been two unbelievably horrendous cases—many cases, but two horrendous cases of sexual abuse of female children aged 13 and 14 months by two different people, put on the internet and spread around the massive paedophile rings throughout the world. It is in every street and every town. In fact the deputy commissioner for children in England is going to have a two-year investigation running into sexual abuse of children. On one day, she took a snapshot throughout England of local authorities and care organisations; in one day, on the same day in England, 1,000 cases of sexual abuse of children were reported in England—in one day at that snapshot. That is how frightening this is.

When we had our first meeting we were addressed by Mr John Carr, who is from the UK and is the expert adviser to the International Telecommunications Union on online protection of children. The figures he gave were horrendous: there are 1 million images on paedophile internet sites at any time in the world; there are 15 million transactions a year in the country. The one thing that is a problem is that a site can be shut down or blocked in this country within 24 hours, but there are sites running in Russia and in the USA that were reported and identified over a year ago but are still running, in Russia because of gangsterism and it is hidden and hard to get at, and in the USA because it is protected by state laws and local laws. The providers of these things can still keep running a year after they are found to be trading. It is a massive, criminal, monetary-driven enterprise—paedophile activity and the abuse of children. That was a salutary lesson for me that there was something going on there that wanted to join all 47 countries—and wider than that, but all 47 countries as a start—in a campaign against one of the most heinous crimes and most heinous possible abuses of human rights and the rights of the child.

As an adjunct, we debated in the social, health and family affairs committee—I was asked to speak, and I think the hon. Member for North East Hertfordshire (Oliver Heald) spoke in the same debate—the rights of undocumented migrant children. I think the most succinct statement of what the Council of Europe is about is the amendment from that committee that was spoken to by Madam Strik from the Netherlands. It said that a child is first and always a child, and then after may be a migrant. If that is what the Council of Europe is about, that is so powerful for the people we represent, because they want that to be a right for everyone in all their towns and all their communities, and the Council of Europe allows us to do that.

We have also been addressed by the UN special rapporteur on the sale of children, child prostitution and child pornography, Najat Maalla M’jid, a woman who does this work throughout the world. It was in fact connecting the Council of Europe countries to what is happening in a much wider portfolio.

In this process of holding the presidency or the chairmanship of the Council of Ministers, I have an extra priority. It is embarrassing, and it relates to the question that I asked the hon. Member for North Thanet about having ratified a convention. The United Kingdom signed up to the convention on the protection of children against sexual exploitation and sexual abuse, which was laid on 25 October 2007—almost exactly four years ago—on 5 May 2008. We have yet to ratify it, and if we do not ratify it, it is not brought into force. Let us look at the countries that have. Spain, which was referred to earlier, signed it in 2009 and ratified it in December 2010, and has put it into force. It is no use signing something that is not put into force. I have been trying to get in to ask the Prime Minister for a number of weeks now—but have not been called—when we are going to ratify it. In our chairmanship six months, that is the time we should do this. We should ratify that convention.

It is amazing how many people have actually been involved, and I pay compliment to a lady who I am told is called Martine McCutcheon, who starred in “Love Actually”—I think she played the Prime Minister’s girlfriend, if I recall correctly. She presented, with people from the UK, a petition, gathered with the help of the Body Shop, of 735,889 signatures, exactly at the time it was presented, calling for the UK to ratify that convention. That was 12 May 2011. The message does not seem to have got through to our Prime Minister and Government yet, but the people of this country want us to do that.

I pay a compliment to them and to the hon. Member, who is a Member of the Government party, who is the chair of the UK Parliament’s all-party human trafficking group, and to Anthony Steen, a former Member of this House who set up an institute, the Human Trafficking Foundation. He is being supported to get campaigning organisations in all of the EU countries, but we still have a long way to go, and I hope it will be led by our chairmanship.

I have one other small point, but it is an important point. The committee on culture, science and education had a proposal before it for a recommendation towards a European framework convention on youth rights. Disappointingly, the response of the permanent member representing the UK, who will become the chair of the Committee of Ministers, was that they did not really think we needed youth rights. Unfortunately, it is a fact that now, in most of the countries of Europe, there is a long period between being a child and being put out to work. Sometimes people study; sometimes they try to make a life for themselves; and sometimes they go into work. In that period, a lot of young people fall between the two stools. They are not treated as children and they are not adults. They are not people who are making the rules; they are the people who are having to suffer the badly made rules.

Why I want to raise this is that it gives us an example of what we can do in the Council of Europe. I was on that committee and was involved in the draft. I took the draft away with me and I took it to people in the West Lothian youth forum, which is a forum set up by the local authority. I gave them copies and asked them to go away and use the youth forum to discuss this matter. What did they think of it? What did they think should be done with it? What ideas were missing from it? The forum came back with three very simple amendments. One was on housing rights and the right to housing. The forum members pointed out that you can get housing—you can get housing in the worst dumps and slums of the cities—if you are a young person, because you are basically an insecure tenant and you have difficulties. They wanted rights to housing that is actually of a standard that is acceptable at a European level.

The second one was on employment. They wanted in employment the right to training with in-work accreditation, because they knew so many young people who had got jobs and were used, basically. They were told they were getting an apprenticeship, spent two years as a grease monkey, and then when they asked to go to college to get certification, they were sacked and some other young person got taken on to go through the same process again and again.

Those are two very important matters. The third one I think is very important as well, particularly since we allow the UK Youth Parliament to meet here in this House, in this Chamber. People in the forum said they want these matters, if we ever have a convention, to be monitored by the Youth Parliament or their equivalent in Europe, so that they can have a say on whether the Governments who sign up to these things are doing anything about it.

[Mr Binley]

I am again most grateful to the hon. Gentleman, who is being very generous with his time. Does he think there ought to be a balancing factor to rights? I am not denying the importance of rights, but I wonder whether we ought to give equal importance to the responsibilities of the individual. Perhaps he has an opportunity to make that point and to ask the Minister whether he might consider it as well.

[Michael Connarty]

I think that we have quite a developed idea among those who take it seriously that with rights come responsibilities. I explain to everyone who comes around Parliament that it is a nice building, fine, but buildings are buildings; Parliament is about what goes on in here—the concept of democracy, the demos, the people who had the right in Athens and the responsibility to run the country. They had the power but also the responsibility. That, basically, is how society should be run. We get rights, but we have responsibilities at the same time. I think that our Government in the past tried to echo that again and again. I think that there are questions about whether people think that they have only rights. In Scotland at the moment, everyone thinks that everything is free: they do not pay council tax increases, they do not pay for their education, they do not pay for their prescriptions—it is all free. I am afraid that that is not a world in which people can live for very long, because they soon become bankrupted financially but also bankrupted in terms of principle. I think that the hon. Gentleman is right: there needs to be a balance.

Those young people were amazing. They took it seriously. A Member of Parliament said, “Here is a convention or a document that will affect your lives if it is ever passed. What do you think?” They went off and treated it seriously. I know that one of the people who helped to draft it, a young David Begg, sits in the Scottish Youth Parliament, and some of them come down here and participate in the UK Youth Parliament. That is giving them rights and responsibilities in the right way, and I hope that we will take that seriously and perhaps change our position and encourage the development of something that will speak to the youth and that has to contain responsibilities. However, the debate in the culture, science and education committee was the opposite: people said, “We don’t want to talk about responsibilities because we want to talk about young people having rights without saying they have to pay for them.” I do not necessarily agree with the balance, but that was how it was drafted.

I will finish with one last reference to a document, Madam Deputy Speaker, because a lot of the debate going on is as though the Council of Europe is out there, the Court of Human Rights is out there, and they come and fly in and drop things on top of us that we have to implement. There is a paper from 6 June Parliamentary Assembly that I hope that every Member of the House will read. Perhaps members of the public would like to read it. It is called “National parliaments: guarantors of human rights in Europe”. It states:

“The report examines ways to better exploit parliaments’ potential in this respect and proposes basic principles to be respected by the parliaments of the Council of Europe member states.”

It then lists a lot of very, very sensible suggestions for how Parliaments might do this. I think that is what it is about. It is not about saying, “Europe will make the decision for you. The Council of Europe will make the decision for you. You just have to implement it.” It is about thinking about how we, as parliamentarians in our Parliaments, can take those guarantees correctly.

In my first year as a member of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, I realised that it was the one place where I could find the things that brought me into Parliament, the things that brought me into public life as a community activist, from where I went on to be a councillor and to give up so much of my life and time to this process of democratic representation. It is about human rights. The Council of Europe sets a benchmark against which it says to all the countries in the Council of Europe area, “You will be judged by the Council of Europe.” Enforceability is very important, and I would like to see more of it, but it says, “You will be judged by it. You will be held up to scrutiny by it. The more important thing is that you will have to ask yourselves, in your Parliament, how do you measure up to these human rights that should be available to everyone?” When I hear debates in here with people throwing out phrases that clearly say, “I want this human right, but that person from that country should not have it because we do not want them to have it. Send them back to their country, but they might be tortured. Send them back to their country, but they might face capital punishment,” I am ashamed, because that should not be talked about in this mother of Parliaments. Human rights are fundamental and the Council of Europe is their guardian. I am very pleased to be there, and I am sure that our time as the chair, with the leadership of the Minister and the Labour Benches, will be a good six months.

Postal Services Bill

Debate between Michael Connarty and Brian Binley

Wednesday 12th January 2011 Commons Chamber

[Michael Connarty]

Tomorrow, the Liberal Democrats will find out the value of making various pledges to the public and then breaking them. Even the proposal to privatise 50% of the Post Office, which was very similar to the proposal that a certain Minister in the Lords made on behalf of the previous Government, has been betrayed by the Liberal Democrats. I shall support the new clause, because it is a cross-party proposal that would ameliorate some damage for a short term. The most important thing, however, is to vote against the Bill and to let people know that what is being done is a dirty deal by the Liberals to let the Conservatives privatise and smash the post office network.

[Mr Binley]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Linlithgow and East Falkirk (Michael Connarty)—he must have trouble pronouncing that; I have trouble with Northampton South—on a robust speech, and I pay tribute to his defence of the Post Office over a very long period. His colours have been clearly nailed to the mast, and that we must accept.

I say to the Minister that I support the general thrust of the Bill, with which I have no problems. I have been a critic of Post Office management for a sizeable time and believe that the organisation’s senior staff should be ashamed of the results of their management. It is true that they produced a bottom line that looks slightly healthier, but they left an immensely demoralised work force whom they bullied most unacceptably for years. I might tell those managers that if they had worked for the company of which I am chairman, I would have sought their dismissal.

Let us be absolutely clear that the Post Office and the Royal Mail have not been well served by senior management over recent years, and that makes the difficulty that the Government face even greater. I understand that point, and it is one reason why I have argued consistently for a massive injection of good-quality, creative management in the upper levels of the Post Office’s management structure. We have not seen that; we have seen City hatchet men, just at the time when it was necessary to bring in creative, technological management. But this House shares a sizeable amount of the blame for that outcome. I would have wanted things to be done differently, as indeed would the hon. Member for Linlithgow and East Falkirk. We have argued for that jointly. We might disagree on a number of things, but on that we have been as one.

I genuinely share the Government’s ambition to create in the Post Office a new management structure that can come to terms with a quickly and massively changing technological marketplace. That particular attempt is absolutely vital, and it means a sizeable commercial injection from the private sector. I have no doubt about that, or that the Post Office was one of those organisations that had almost immured itself from the necessary quality of management. I have equally no doubt, however, and I shall say it again, that bringing in City hatchet men was not the way to deal with the problem.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Binley]

I, of course, welcome the Minister’s intervention in that respect. I have no wish to vilify the current management; I just make a statement about why we are in our current position with the Post Office. We have to be realistic if this debate is to have any meaning at all. I have outlined an important reason for being in the position we are in, and I have no fear in doing so.

[Michael Connarty]

Will my hon. Friend—on this issue—take from me a factual statement? In front of witnesses, we met the previous Minister with responsibility for the matter, Lord Mandelson, and put it to him that the manager, Crozier, who by the way comes from Falkirk, had been an absolute disaster and failed. One of my party’s Whips asked why he was still in post, and Lord Mandelson’s civil service leader said, “He was the best we could get at the time.”

[Mr Binley]

I am grateful for the interjection. What an awful statement for somebody concerned with a business to make, but then I have never been very keen on the gentleman’s boss: I would not have appointed Lord Mandelson, either.

Post Office Network

Debate between Michael Connarty and Brian Binley

Tuesday 2nd November 2010 Westminster Hall

[Michael Connarty]

My hon. Friend has made a factual statement and it will be recorded in Hansard. There is, in fact, a duty on the Post Office in Germany to provide post offices for towns and communities of a certain size; it has to do that as part of its duty. Under the Postal Services Act 2000, that should have been part of our duty. That legislation said that we could have freedom, but the freedom should have been constrained by discipline, which would have saved post offices in small communities. We should have looked at the business case in such communities and guaranteed that the subsidy would go in.

[Mr Brian Binley (Northampton South) (Con)]

Of course, the hon. Gentleman is right. Nothing stands still in business. There is a cleansing effect and businesses going to the wall are part of that. However, does he recognise that the stage before that, which is within management control, is to help people in small businesses run their business better? That has not been done effectively by the Post Office to date.

[Michael Connarty]

The hon. Gentleman is slightly over-egging the pudding. I think that the National Federation of SubPostmasters has tried such an approach. It is not as though that organisation has been standing still; it has been talking to its members about innovation and getting more footfall, as the footfall declines. Let us be frank. Many of us are now semi-urban dwellers who travel to large centres to do our shopping—we drive past our post office, regardless of the service it provides. I am and always have been a post office user, but my local postmasters and postmistresses tell me that very few people from the big estates in my village use the post office there; they drive to the centre of the town, where there is a big supermarket and post office.

Postal Services Bill

Debate between Michael Connarty and Brian Binley

Wednesday 27th October 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Brian Binley (Northampton South) (Con)]

The House needs to recognise that the Post Office is a bust flush—

[Michael Connarty]

Rubbish!

[Mr Binley]

It is absolutely bust! In fact, the previous Government recognised that and tried to enact a Bill, but they did not have the courage to carry it through. So we want no lessons from Labour Members. The Post Office is a bust flush. Its management needs rejuvenating, its work force are demoralised and its pension fund is in massive deficit. If that does not add up to a company that is totally off the rails, then I do not know what does. It would do the Opposition good to recognise that fact, rather than pontificating about a matter that they dared not deal with.

The Post Office faces a massive challenge. Volumes have declined enormously since 2005, and they are now down by 13 million units per day. Good God! If any other business faced that kind of decline, it would instantly recognise that it was bust; it would not need me to tell it. The Post Office is now 40% less efficient than its European competitors, and its modernisation programme is proceeding exceptionally slowly.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Binley]

My hon. Friend was a wise prophet in a House that failed to listen to him, and that is a great pity. I accept his point totally.

The truth is that something needs to be done, and that was accepted by the previous Government. I first came across this matter when it was presented to the then Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Select Committee in 2008. That Committee’s report highlighted the importance of the organisation to our local communities. It recognised that the poor, the elderly and the disadvantaged relied heavily on the Post Office, but it was not only disadvantaged people who felt that way. Small and medium-sized businesses also felt that the Post Office played an important part in the way they ran their businesses. Research by Postcomm estimates that the social value of the post offices up and down the country runs to about £10 billion. The case for the network is clear, well made and, I believe, totally understood by the Opposition. Sadly, however, they ran away from the issue.

There is a great need to heighten, increase and force through technical development. Of course, that could not happen in the past. Hooper said that the Royal Mail needed to modernise, improve its management and expand its range of services. I believe that the Bill will achieve all those objectives.

The relationship between management and work force needs to be improved—and the problem is not all the fault of the unions by a long chalk. Previous management, I believe, acted in a bullying way that did nothing for good industrial relations—and I said so at the time, as did my colleagues on the Select Committee. This is one reason why I came to the conclusion that there was a massive need for a real injection of good-quality management into the Post Office.

[Michael Connarty]

I just wonder where the hon. Gentleman has been. I happen to be secretary of the communication workers group in this Parliament, although unlike my predecessor I have never been a communications worker. Massive changes to the agreement took place in March. Where else in Europe can we find a management that is willing to work with the trade unions? In all other places, they have banned trade unions from their premises. These firms are absolutely out of order in their treatment of their workers.

[Mr Binley]

I understand the hon. Gentleman’s concerns. When I talked about senior management, I meant very senior management indeed. The lesson should go out to the whole House that bringing in from the private sector people who are sometimes seen as bully boys is not the best way to produce good industrial relations. That is, in fact, what happened. I see the hon. Gentleman nodding; I am glad he agrees with me.