Rail Investment and Integrated Rail Plan
Debate between Naz Shah and Alex Sobel(3 years ago)
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Alex Sobel (Leeds North West) (Lab/Co-op)
My colleagues and I were extremely disappointed with the decision to scrap Northern Powerhouse Rail between Leeds and Manchester. Although the IRP, or, as I like to call it, the bus replacement service, has some things to like —we will be constructive about them where they meet our aims for Yorkshire—the impact of the loss of high-speed rail will have ripple effects through every community in our region.
A lot of people do not fully realise that high-speed rail infrastructure, on dedicated lines, is not solely about getting to London or the midlands more quickly. It is about releasing capacity so that local lines can run effective local services and we can ensure the future of our network, the growth of our region and the environment around us. Northern Powerhouse Rail promised three things: faster services on a dedicated line, new trains and new stations. It promised an all-electric dedicated line between Bradford and Manchester. My hon. Friend the Member for Bradford West (Naz Shah) has already made the point about the short-sightedness of not connecting the people of the UK’s youngest city with the opportunities that that would have brought. Instead, the Government have written in the IRP:
“We will also upgrade and electrify”—
I just want to say that many people here do not understand what “upgrade” means. It does not mean getting something new. If I put a new stereo in my car, it is not a new car; it is just a car with a new stereo in it—
“the line between Leeds and Bradford giving a non-stop journey time which could be as low as 12 minutes.”
That sounds good at first glance, but without the dedicated line, there are knock-on effects that are not printed on the tin.
There are currently two lines that run from Leeds to Bradford. One takes 20 minutes, stopping twice, and the other takes 24 minutes, stopping four times. Both those lines are at maximum frequency. There is no way, on the current line, to meet the 12-minute target to Bradford without sacrificing local services and local stops. I have constituents living between those stops who do not feel that the cancellation of NPR affects them, but when residents who commute to Leeds or Bradford by rail find that their service will be cut to meet the Leeds-Bradford target, what will they do? The answer is probably to increase car use. We have been promised new trains, but new trains are not a replacement for new services. More than that, they will work only on electrified lines, which do not extend beyond Bradford westbound through Huddersfield or northbound to Preston.
Alex Sobel
Absolutely. Only NPR will get people on those routes on to the train.
Most concerning is the broken promise of new stations in Leeds and in Bradford. Faster and more regular services require more platform space, and Leeds is already at capacity. Without extra capacity, will my constituents who use the Harrogate line have their services cut? I would like the rail Minister to answer that question. On the electrification of the Harrogate line, the recent Network Rail transport decarbonisation network strategy includes a recommendation for electrification between Leeds and Harrogate. Will that come forward?
On Northern Powerhouse Rail, we have been sold a pup, but I also want to address the problem of getting to a train station in the first place. Otley in my constituency was cut from the train line by Beeching. Our Mayor, Tracy Brabin, has an ambitious and achievable plan for a mass transit system to reach Otley, linking it to Leeds and Bradford, where we thought it would join NPR. The Government committed to that scheme in their manifesto in 2019. The Prime Minister said in this Chamber:
“We will remedy the scandal that Leeds is the largest city in western Europe without light rail or a metro.”—[Official Report, 19 December 2019; Vol. 669, c. 47.
However, trams are built not on the hopes and dreams of a whimsical Prime Minister, but on cold, hard cash.
The Prime Minister has failed to show us the money. All the Government have committed to is £200 million, of which they have said £100 million should be used to work out how to get HS2 trains from Sheffield to Leeds—something that the DFT, not the West Yorkshire metro Mayor, should be doing—and that falls well short of the £3 billion required for us to build the tram scheme. The people of West Yorkshire have been short-changed for far too long. What the Prime Minister has offered is not levelling up, but pushing us down a hill. He is indeed northern infrastructure’s grand old duke of York, marching us up to the top of the hill and right back down again.
Islamophobia Awareness Month
Debate between Naz Shah and Alex Sobel(3 years ago)
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Westminster Hall is an alternative Chamber for MPs to hold debates, named after the adjoining Westminster Hall.
Each debate is chaired by an MP from the Panel of Chairs, rather than the Speaker or Deputy Speaker. A Government Minister will give the final speech, and no votes may be called on the debate topic.
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Naz Shah (Bradford West) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Dowd. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Manchester, Gorton (Afzal Khan) for securing the debate. I thank all Members who contributed to the debate and the many others, such as my hon. Friend the Member for Coventry North West (Taiwo Owatemi), who could not make the debate but wanted to put on the record their commitment to tackling Islamophobia.
Islamophobia is a dark reality, with three Muslim grandfathers murdered here in the UK, while terrorist attacks in Christchurch, Quebec and multiple others around the world emphasise the serious nature of Islamophobia if left unchallenged. In the UK, Islamophobic hate crimes against Muslims and their places of worship have sadly become far too common. The latest data for 2020-21 show that 45% of all religious hate crimes recorded by police in England and Wales were against Muslims, although a large number of cases are simply not reported to the police. Data from the crime survey of England and Wales suggests the actual number is approximately six times the number of recorded offences. According to the same data, Muslims were the most likely to be victims of religiously motivated hate crimes in 2017-18 and 2019-20.
That is not Muslims complaining about Islamophobia. That is the police collecting data on Muslims being attacked. One would think, when Muslims are the most likely to be the victims of religiously motivated hate crimes, that Islamophobia would be a top Government priority but, tragically, it is not. Islamophobia does not manifest itself only in hate crime. Islamophobia is not always a visible attack on mosques or Muslims. Someone does not have to vigorously hate another person to discriminate against them. Discrimination comes in many forms, including conscious and unconscious bias. Let me explain how.
When 15-year-old Azeem Rafiq is forced in a car to drink alcohol, that is of course a hate crime and an assault. Later, when he feels he has to drink alcohol to fit in, to be the best that he can be, to have an opportunity to progress, where is the hate crime then? He is in an environment in which he cannot be the best or achieve his dreams while adhering to the faith that he chooses to follow. Listening to his evidence at the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee, it was evident how much trauma he faced later on in life through being forced to be someone he was not just to fit in.
Many Muslims face similar barriers daily. A sizeable percentage of British Muslim women do not wear the headscarf, not because they do not want to but because they fear that, by wearing one, they may be attacked, or due to prejudice, will have lower chances of succeeding and reaching the top. They, too, feel that they have to fit in to avoid abuse, discrimination or their chances being limited. Their fear is not misplaced. A 2016 Women and Equalities Committee report found that Muslim women face a triple penalty. Some of the vilest vitriol I have received online is coupled with a picture of me wearing the headscarf while being at a place of worship.
As Muslim women, we often recall praise such as, “I am impressed to see how empowered you are as a Muslim woman”—as if being a Muslim was a barrier to empowerment and we even beat it through our archaic faith to become a symbol of success. Although this is often done unknowingly, it is done through people accepting a trope about Islam being a faith that is deeply misogynistic. Contrary to that trope, I want to put on record that as a Muslim woman, my empowerment as a women comes from my faith and the life and teachings of the Prophet of Islam, peace be upon him.
A report by the Centre for Media Monitoring that analysed media output over a three-month period in 2018, which comprised analysis of over 10,000 published articles and broadcast clips, found 59% of all articles associated Muslims with negative behaviour and over a third misrepresented or generalised about Muslims, with terrorism being the most common theme.
When such perpetuated tropes and false conspiracies about Muslims are allowed to develop, it enables an environment where people are otherised and demonised. Not everything I have mentioned is a hate crime, but it all can have an impact. Islamophobes and those who consciously or unconsciously discriminate against Muslims often use anything and everything that links to a person’s Muslimness as a factor for their negativity, be that religious practices, ways of dressing or customs, or even sometimes something that is not part of Islam, but is perceived as Muslim, such as a Sikh man wearing a turban. The reality is that Islamophobia is rampant across society, and purely basing Islamophobia on hate crimes like this Government wish to do deprives us of the ability to tackle the full extent of Islamophobia.
We have to tackle the environment in which Islamophobia is normalised. Today, a former England captain, Michael Vaughan, can ludicrously suggest a Muslim England Cricket player like Moeen Ali should go around in between test matches asking random Muslims if they are terrorists—as if he too was somehow liable—and still continue to be a mainstream pundit. The former editor of The Sun, Kelvin MacKenzie, can openly brand Muslims as antisemites and say that it is a nice change from a Muslim making a bomb or trying to kill hospital visitors, and still get invited as a mainstream guest on media shows. In fact, people like Trevor Phillips can generalise an entire community by saying:
“Muslims are not like us”,
that they will never fit in and are
“becoming a nation within a nation”,
without an apology or remorse, and get a special programme in their name on Sky News.
Alex Sobel (Leeds North West) (Lab/Co-op)
My hon. Friend is making an excellent speech. On her point about institutionalised Islamophobia in certain parts of society—she mentioned cricket and the media—should we not be looking at the governing organisations, whether that is Ofcom in the media or the England and Wales Cricket Board, and seeing whether they are fit for purpose? I do not think they are in this regard.
Naz Shah
I absolutely agree and thank my hon. Friend, because that brings me nicely on to my next point. In 2011, the former chair of the Conservative party, Baroness Warsi, said that Islamophobia had “passed the dinner table test”. A decade later in 2021, Islamophobia has now passed the mainstream media test. It has become normalised. In fact, it has become fashionable to demonise Muslims and gain from the political capital of hate. That is why it is so important to adopt a definition of Islamophobia to enable us to at least understand and tackle Islamophobia in all its forms.
The Labour party was one of the first parties to accept the APPG definition of Islamophobia. Again, last week, the chair of the Labour party and my hon. Friend the Member for Manchester, Gorton wrote to the Government urging them to rethink and adopt the definition. I welcome the intervention by the hon. Member for Wycombe (Mr Baker) on trying to do that in a collegiate way.
The Government’s record on a definition of Islamophobia is horrific. The Government refused the Muslim community a definition of Islamophobia, they then refused to accept a cross-party definition, and now two and a half years after promising a definition, they have failed to produce one. While the Minister may try to regurgitate the same old falsehoods about the APPG definition, I ask her one simple question. The APPG officers, before publishing the definition and in good faith, gave sight of it to Ministers. Since the definition has been published, can she tell me if the Government have ever reached out to the APPG to address any questions or concerns with the definition and in good faith try to come to a solution together on the matter? Have they even reached out, even once? The dangerous message that it sends to British Muslims is that this Government simply do not care.
When it came to the covid pandemic, this Government played with people’s lives; when it came to levelling up, they played with people’s future; and, again, on the issue of Islamophobia, they are playing with people’s lives. Minister, I urge this Government to show some leadership and good faith. This issue is far too serious to be ignored. As the theme for this year’s Islamophobia month suggests, it is time for change.