Emergency Summit on Knife Crime

Mike Kane Excerpts

Friday 22nd March 2019 Commons Chamber

[Victoria Atkins]

We are providing up to £970 million next year in the policing settlement. We provided a further £500 million last year, and we are providing an extra £100 million through the spring statement to give the police the extra resources they need. I ask Opposition Members to do the right thing next week and support the Government’s efforts to introduce knife crime prevention orders. Those have been asked for by the police—the police want them. We have considered them carefully and introduced the legislation as quickly as we can. We just need the House to pass it.

[Mike Kane (Wythenshawe and Sale East) (Lab)]

The Minister rightly speaks about criminal child exploitation and tackling gang leaders—that point was made by my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central (Gareth Snell). As my hon. Friend the Member for Walthamstow (Stella Creasy) pointed out, last year 9,500 children were off-rolled from our schools, and the Department for Education has no earthly idea where they are. That has created a lost generation that can be exploited by the very people the Minister wants to tackle. That is combined with 20,000 fewer police officers, and the fact that half of youth services and clubs have gone—that point was made by my hon. Friend the Member for Lancaster and Fleetwood (Cat Smith). Will those causal facts be on the agenda for this summit?

[Victoria Atkins]

As I have said, education plays a vital role in our efforts to tackle serious violence, and I know that colleagues across the House are concerned about off-rolling. There are good examples of providers of alternative provision across the country, and my challenge to those in the education sector is that if those good examples and that best practice exists, we should share it and let every child have the same quality of standards from which some children seem to benefit.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Speaker]

Strictly speaking, Government make a judgment about whether they can provide an answer. It is not a matter of order on which the Chair can adjudicate. That said, if I understood the hon. Gentleman’s point of order and he has previously been given an indication in a Committee sitting of average waiting times, it seems not unreasonable that he should then put down a question seeking to ascertain the facts on that matter. Therefore, my advice to him is really twofold. First, at the risk of irritating the House, I would repeat my general advice in matters of this kind: persist, man. Persist. Persist. Keep asking the question. The hon. Gentleman might wish to put it in a different way—or possibly even to a different Department, although I doubt it—and to try to persuade the Minister, perhaps privately, of the reasonableness of the inquiry. Beyond that, it is open to the hon. Gentleman to seek to use freedom of information legislation to secure the response that hitherto has been denied to him. I hope that he will profit from my counsels and that it will not be necessary for him to raise the matter again, but if it is, I am sure that he will.

[Mike Kane (Wythenshawe and Sale East) (Lab)]

On a point of order, Mr Speaker. I seek your advice. This morning my Manchester staff had to be escorted into their office by a representative of Greater Manchester police. In the last few days, they have had to meet in a local coffee shop in Wythenshawe town centre to be escorted to the office by the town centre security guards. Is this not a time to make it clear that violence and threats to MPs and their staff are completely unacceptable in a parliamentary democracy?

[Mr Speaker]

It certainly is a time to make that clear, and I imagine that the proposition that the hon. Gentleman has just put to me in the Chair would be endorsed by every single Member of this House. We should try to remember, in this matter as in others, the precepts of “Erskine May”. Moderation and good humour in the use of parliamentary language conduce to the best possible debate.

Parliamentary democracy is of the essence, and even though our system here in this country is not always enormously admired by those who write about it, the reality, as I know from travelling around the world and as other colleagues can testify, is that it is enormously admired by people in countries across the globe. The British parliamentary system is constantly imitated—great attempts are made to emulate the best practice that we apply—and it has been sustained for the very good reason that, as Churchill put it in a slightly different context, democracy might be a lousy form of government, except for all the others. It is superior to any of the alternatives, and at the heart of it is the notion that the Member of Parliament is a representative, sent here to do his or her duty, including to exercise judgment as to what to say and how to vote.

The notion that anyone should be threatened with violence because of his or her beliefs or parliamentary conduct is anathema. It cannot stand, because if such an attitude were to stand, that would sound the death knell for democracy, so every effort must be made, and it is made by those who look after us on the estate, and in some cases provide us with assistance—in security terms—in our constituencies. We must all be prudent in the way that we go about our business, but democracy will persist, and it should persist, because it is the best.