Voting by Proxy (Amendment and Extension)
Debate between Patrick Grady and Peter Grant(2 years, 2 months ago)
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Patrick Grady (Glasgow North) (Ind)
I think that there is only one Amy Callaghan, and the hon. Member for East Dunbartonshire has just proven that with one of the most eloquent speeches that many of us will have heard in this House. I congratulate her immensely on everything that she has achieved.
I think the hon. Member alluded to the point that, if we started from scratch, we would not invent the current system for voting in Divisions in this House. Crowding into Lobbies to queue up for an individual headcount is a colossal waste of time and resources.
The card reader system has marginally improved things, but we still waste hours, if not days, each year simply queuing up to vote. Anything that improves the experience and accessibility of voting in Divisions, however marginal, is to be welcomed.
During the pandemic, the then Leader of the House—now, quite remarkably, the Business Secretary—made great play of the historic and
“absolute, unequivocal constitutional right of Members to attend Parliament”,—[Official Report, 16 December 2021; Vol. 705, c. 1172.]
which, he repeatedly reminded us, dates back to at least 1340. Of course he was correct: we are privileged to have an absolute right to attend Parliament.
I completely agree with the hon. Member for Bracknell (James Sunderland) that, ultimately, the purpose of attending is first and foremost to vote. We have an absolute right to vote in this House, but we do not have an absolute right to speak. We can do our best to get on the Order Paper or to catch the Speaker’s eye, but there is rarely, if ever, an absolute guarantee of being called to speak, so ultimately it is through voting that we can be certain of exercising our mandates to represent our constituents.
However, there are times when attending Parliament is difficult, if not impossible. The House eventually recognised that, with a system of proxy votes for baby leave. Even in a few short years, that experience has been overwhelmingly positive and has evolved and developed. Anyone who would suggest rolling it back would find very little appetite at all for doing so.
Extending proxy votes to Members in other unavoidable situations that make attendance difficult is the natural next step. The Procedure Committee heard many important personal examples, and we have just heard one, incredibly powerfully, on the Floor of the Chamber. The broad consensus for today’s motion is to be welcomed, as is everything in the Procedure Committee’s report. I echo other Members of the Committee in thanking the Clerks for their outstanding work, as always, in assisting with its production.
Having served on the Committee from 2015 to 2017, it has been a fascinating experience to return to it in this Parliament. I agree with the Chair that perhaps there will be a little flexibility to let the pilot scheme breathe, given the delays in getting this motion to the Floor of the House in the first place, but I slightly disagree with her when I say that, in reviewing the operation of the scheme, I hope we can consider whether there is room to go further or do things a little bit differently.
The “proxies for all” system that existed during the pandemic operated incredibly successfully and removed any question of what the reason was, what the qualifications were or why people had to be absent at any given time. It also remained voluntary throughout the pandemic. Members did not have to sign up for a proxy vote; they could attend if they wanted to, or make an arrangement for pairing, or to have a slip or to be nodded through, using the other mechanisms that exist.
It is worth exploring how the system might evolve, and that includes looking again at remote voting, because it worked extremely well and ultimately that is where the future of a modern, 21st-century Parliament should lie.
Peter Grant (Glenrothes) (SNP)
Does my hon. Friend share my surprise and puzzlement that most people are not allowed to have a vote counted if they do not physically go through the Lobby, but there is absolutely no requirement on us to have listened to a single word of the debate? We do not need to know what it is we are voting on, as long as we turn up. Does he understand why my constituents, and possibly his, think that that in itself is something strange?
Patrick Grady
Yes, my hon. Friend makes a good point. The Chamber is maybe not quite as full as it ought to be for a debate of this importance, but I am sure that other hon. Members, wherever they might be, are following our proceedings live—as no doubt are the many thousands of people tuning in to the live stream and to BBC coverage and so on. There are a lot of different ways now to engage with parliamentary proceedings, both for members of the public and for those of us who, for whatever length of time, are Members of Parliament.
We only have to look at the Scottish Parliament to see how, when it was first set up 20 years ago, it went out of its way to become that kind of modern exemplar, adopting fixed decision times and electronic voting. Similar systems are in place in devolved legislatures and, indeed, local council chambers across these islands. In Holyrood they have continued to use remote voting since the pandemic, which is of huge assistance to Members of the Scottish Parliament who have remote constituencies, caring responsibilities or other kinds of accessibility requirements.
If Parliament—any Parliament, including the future independent Parliament of Scotland—is to be inclusive and truly representative of our modern and diverse society, then participation for its elected Members must be as straightforward and as intelligible to the outside observer as possible. Proxy voting means that Members are not forced into an opaque pairing system or the nonsense of nodding through, which is essentially a proxy voting system but means that Members—I have experienced this as I have had to nod people through in the past—have to stay somewhere else on the estate but are excused from having to go through the Lobbies. That does not help people who have difficult conditions for which they should really be at home recuperating and regaining their strength. The extension of the scheme will allow constituents to be represented even when a Member is indisposed through no fault of their own.
Cost of Living and Food Insecurity
Debate between Patrick Grady and Peter Grant(2 years, 10 months ago)
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Peter Grant (Glenrothes) (SNP)
I commend the Labour Front-Bench team for tabling this motion, and I commend the hon. Member for Oldham West and Royton (Jim McMahon) for setting out succinctly and forcefully the impact on real human beings of the failures of this Conservative Government. It was so farcical as to be really comical, if it was not so tragic, that the right hon. Member for Wokingham (John Redwood), who is no longer in his place, asked the Minister to agree that cutting food miles was a good idea, yet a Minster from the same Department a couple of weeks ago thought it was brilliant that we had arrived at a new trade deal with Australia and that we should be trying to cut food deals. What better vignette could there be to illustrate the inconsistency and chaos of this Government? They have torn up the best trade deal we will ever have with our nearest neighbours and replaced it with a deal with people who are literally on the other side the world, yet they have the cheek to tell us that the way to deal with food shortages in Britain is to cut food miles.
Just to put into context the scale of what we are facing here, the Bank of England has increased interest rates to try to control increasing inflation, but it is warning that it could reach 7.25% in April. Very few of our constituents will get a pay rise that comes within a mile of 7.25%, and most will be lucky to get anything. Data released by the Food Foundation charity shows that, in January this year, 4.7 million adults had experienced food insecurity, and National Energy Action estimates that 6 million households in these islands will be living in fuel poverty: that is not having to cut back slightly, but being unable to keep themselves warm enough to be safe and healthy, or to feed themselves and their families enough to keep healthy.
New analysis by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation warns that the energy price cap will have the harshest impact on the poorest families. We knew that anyway, but JRF has given the evidential backing to it. The poorest families will spend 18% of their income on energy bills after April. Can hon. Members imagine spending 18% of their £80,000-a-year salary on fuel bills? This place would be in uproar if that happened. Why is it acceptable for low-paid folk to pay a bigger chunk of their income when it would not be acceptable for Members of Parliament? The Office for Budget Responsibility forecasts that average real wages will still be lower in 2026 than they were at the start of the financial crisis in 2008.
If all that was being said about a poor economy, a poor country or a poor collection of countries, we would think it was shameful, but it is being said about one of the richest places on the planet, as the right hon. Member for Leeds Central (Hilary Benn) mentioned earlier. Fuel poverty and food poverty—people literally living on the edge of starvation and hypothermia—are happening not because of necessity but because of a deliberate sustained political choice. It has certainly been the political choice of Conservative Governments since they were elected under the former Prime Minister David Cameron.
Patrick Grady (Glasgow North) (SNP)
Does my hon. Friend, like me, remember that, in 2014, the Labour party and the Conservative party said to Scotland that, if we voted for independence, freedom of movement to Europe would end, supermarket shelves would be empty of food and energy prices would go through the roof? Does he agree that they have quite a bit of explaining to do?
Peter Grant
It is a valid point. Every so often, I go back through all the scare stories that have been pushed through my letterbox—mainly from the Labour party, because we do not really have a Tory presence in my constituency, or certainly not in my part of it. When we go through all the horrible things that they say will happen if Scotland becomes independent and leave them for two or three years, we find them happening anyway. It started with the closure of the naval base in Rosyth and it is still happening today with the end of freedom of movement and increasing food prices.
It is estimated that 1 million adults, equivalent to more than 3.5% of the UK population, are having to go without food at least once a month because they cannot afford to eat. About 640,000 people in Scotland cannot afford their energy bills, and that is before they got put up by 50%. That is in a country that has more energy than it needs and that, most years, exports energy to England and other countries because it cannot use all the energy it produces.
Where else in the world would we find any commodity in surplus that is, at the same time, priced beyond the affordability of its own citizens? What on earth is wrong with the way that Scotland is run that means that the people who produce almost more energy per head of population than anywhere else in the world cannot afford to pay their bills, keep their homes heated and keep their families healthy?
The Chancellor’s response is better than nothing but it is woefully inadequate. He is basically offering a payday loan: “We’ll give you the money just now to pay off your fuel bills and we’re going to hope and pray that they come back down again in the next few years.” If they do not, what on earth happens? The Scottish TUC has said that the Treasury’s buy now, pay later loan
“comes nowhere near tackling the problem…It is nothing short of shameful that people are being forced to choose between food and heat.”
If emergency loans are such a good idea to tackle the problem of increasing energy prices, why not go to the source of the problem and give them to the energy companies? They are struggling because of many global factors that have been covered in other debates. At least that way, the Government would be giving the loans to people whose shareholders should be able to meet the cost. Why give the loan to somebody who will not be able to afford to pay it back next year, the year after or the year after that?
Given that the decision has been made to give that money directly to citizens, the SNP says that it should be turned into a grant. People should not be made to choose between taking the money now and not being able to pay it back later. The Chancellor must also cut VAT on energy bills, which is within his gift. Why has he not done it?
As well as giving emergency loans to the energy companies, the Chancellor should have ruled out a rise to the energy price cap—he simply should not have allowed it, or Ofgem should not have allowed it. He could also reintroduce the £20-a-week universal credit uplift that the Tories cancelled recently. None of that by itself will solve the problem completely, but at least it would give an indication that we are dealing with a Government who care, whereas, quite clearly, we are dealing with a Government who could hardly care less.
Peter Grant
Absolutely. My hon. Friend—I hope that I can continue to call her a good friend and colleague—has, as always, made a very valid point.
One of the most iniquitous and downright evil things about the crisis that we are now facing is that the people who get the hardest hit will be those who are least able to afford it. If we all had to take a 20% hit to our living standards, none of us would enjoy it, but all of us would manage. Most of my constituents cannot afford to take that scale of hit to their standards of living and they are the ones who are being hit the worst.
I want to look briefly at some of the things that have been done by the Scottish Government, using their limited powers to mitigate this crisis. The Scottish Government have a much more progressive income tax system than the rest of the UK. It is often attacked by Tory Back Benchers who are interested only in the wellbeing of high earners, but the fact is that, in 2021-22, 54% of people in Scotland—the lower paid 54% of people in Scotland—are paying less income tax than they would if they lived in England. There is also fact that Members of Parliament for Scotland pay a bit more income tax than our colleagues in England. I do not mind that if the money is going into essential services.
Last year, the Scottish Government invested around £2.5 billion to support low-income households, nearly £1 billion of which went directly to children living in low-income households. They have committed more than £3.9 billion to benefit expenditure in 2022-23, providing support to more than 1 million people. That figure of £3.9 billion is £361 million above the level of funding that we get from the UK Government, so while again the Tories will demand guarantees that all of the money that comes to Scotland be used for its intended purpose, the Scottish Government are spending almost 10% more than they are receiving for that purpose.
The reaction of the Child Poverty Action Group was that this was
“a hugely welcome development on the path to meeting Scotland’s child poverty targets... a real lifeline for the families across Scotland who are facing a perfect storm of financial insecurity as the UK cut to universal credit bites, energy prices soar and the wider costs of living rise.”
It said that on 29 November 2021. The British Government did not seem to wake up to the problem until about 29 January 2022.
My hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow—
Peter Grant
Glasgow North. I do beg my hon. Friend’s pardon. I love the city of Glasgow, but I can never remember the constituency boundaries.
My hon. Friend has raised the impact that Brexit is having. Brexit has had a disastrous effect on our economy, and it has not finished. The OBR estimates that we still have three fifths of the way to go. Most of the damage from Brexit has still to be done. Every single person on these islands faces a cost of around £1,200 as a result of Brexit, and we know who will be hit the hardest. Make UK, the organisation that represents 20,000 manufacturers, has said that Brexit changes will undoubtedly add to soaring consumer costs in 2022.
Income tax (charge)
Debate between Patrick Grady and Peter Grant(4 years, 9 months ago)
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Peter Grant (Glenrothes) (SNP)
I commend the right hon. Member for Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale (David Mundell) for his comments, and thank him for the measured tone in which he delivered them. It has been noticeable over the last few days that things have been a bit more calm and sensible here even when we have disagreed politically; perhaps we could keep that going after the public health crisis has passed.
I noted that the right hon. Gentleman could not resist having a wee dig at the Scottish National party Government for not having done up his bit of trunk road yet. Obviously I cannot speak for the Scottish Government, whose spending decisions are made in the Scottish Parliament, but I have had a quick look at the Scottish Parliament’s website, and I have the contact details of the MSP for Dumfriesshire, which I can pass on to the right hon. Gentleman later. He is some chap by the name of Oliver Mundell. [Laughter.] I do not know whether he is still holding surgeries, but I can probably find his phone number for the right hon. Gentleman.
I am pleased to be able to speak on behalf of the SNP today. Our position is a bit different from those of many other parties, in that we will be keeping out of many of the detailed discussions about which health trusts and local authorities receive funding, because we have a devolved national Parliament to make those decisions on our behalf. As the previous three speakers made clear, although today’s debate is about the funding of public services, we cannot ignore the rapidly changing public health challenge that faces all four nations in the United Kingdom—and, now, the majority of nations in the world.
The statement that will be made later by the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care will be the right occasion for detailed questioning about the Government’s approach to those health challenges, but I want to consider some of the significant, and even potentially fundamental, changes that the economy will undergo as a result of them. The right hon. Member for Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale—the former Secretary of State for Scotland—commented on the permanent change that the foot and mouth outbreak made to the economy of rural Scotland 20 years ago. This is much bigger, and its impact on the economy throughout these islands will be much bigger, and will probably be permanent.
My hon. Friends who spoke in last week’s debates will have specified which of the Government’s emergency actions we fully support—and there are a great many of them—as well as some instances in which we would like to see more being done, and a few in which we think that the action is simply going in the wrong direction. I hope that, at all times, the discussion of those matters can be kept as civilised and as temperate as it has been over the last few days. The situation has changed significantly since my colleagues made those comments on Wednesday and Thursday last week, and it has changed significantly since the Chancellor’s Budget speech. It is vital for the Government’s response to those changes to be not only sufficiently robust, but sufficiently flexible.
I am encouraged by the degree of co-operation on the part of the UK Government—through Cobra, for example—in agreeing on our combined and shared response to the public health issues, and I hope that we can see a similar degree of proper engagement when it comes to how to deal with the economic challenges. It must be said that, on those matters, the UK Government have not always engaged positively and constructively with the devolved nations in the past.
Let me give just one apparently small example of the way in which the coronavirus outbreak is already affecting my constituency. Like many other constituencies—perhaps most—we are blessed with a huge number of brilliant, independently owned cafés and restaurants. “Restaurants” sounds quite grand, but I am talking about places that can hold, at the most, 20 or 30 people who come in for a plate of soup and a bacon roll for their lunch. Their collective contribution to my communities and to all our communities, not just economically but socially, is impossible to measure. Several of them have changed hands recently or have been established for less than a year, while others have been on the go for decades. Obviously, I am not privy to any of their individual financial affairs, but I doubt that any of them would survive for two, three or four months without any customers—if that is how some people are interpreting Government advice, that is what those businesses would have to put up with. Clearly, it is not as bad as that, but it is an indication of the fact that those small businesses will need some severe Government intervention, and some of them will need it very soon indeed. I am happy to support them as much as I can.
Patrick Grady (Glasgow North) (SNP)
There are various examples of that happening. The Hug and Pint, a fantastic little venue on Great Western Road in Glasgow North, has had to announce that it is going to close tomorrow. It has set up a crowdfunding campaign, as have various enterprises on the folk music scene in Scotland. Will my hon. Friend commend those initiatives to try to encourage business? People would have been going there in other circumstances for a pint anyway, so perhaps they can spare that money to help some of those small businesses through the most difficult period.
Peter Grant
My hon. Friend makes a valid point. That is sometimes an indication of how important many of these businesses are in their local communities. Neighbours do not just see them as a business and they will support them. The difficulty is that, if neighbours, customers and clients lose their jobs and suddenly find that they have to get by on a wholly inadequate social security system, they will not be able to afford to put £4 or £5 over the bar in the local community-owned pub, whether or not they get a couple of pints in return.
I support many of these businesses as best I can—some of them are very co-operative, allowing me to hold advice surgeries on their premises—but if I do what a lot of colleagues are doing and begin to cancel surgeries, and if I do not go to the local coffee shop and sit for an hour or so talking to people, no one else will do that. By making that decision—I understand why people want me to make it—I might well be hastening the time when many of these valuable businesses can no longer continue. If they close temporarily now, some of them will not reopen.
It is not just cafés, catering and hospitality businesses—the same goes for locally owned hairdressers, bakers, craft shops, one or two-person printers and many other businesses. Independent retail businesses may be small individually, but cumulatively, they represent the financial wellbeing of a vast number of people on these islands, many of whom stand to lose not just their job and livelihood but the very home in which they live. For many of these establishments—I am thinking especially of small bed-and-breakfast businesses and guesthouses—their business is their house. Many others have mortgaged their house to finance the business. They stand to lose everything apart from the clothes they stand up in if things go wrong, and they will need help quickly.
I welcome the emergency measures that the Chancellor announced last week, but I do not think that they go far enough. I fear that a great many small and valued businesses in my constituency, and in all our constituencies, will close and never reopen. At the other end of the scale, we have heard severe warnings from some of the biggest and most iconic transport operators in the UK and elsewhere. British Airways, for example, has warned that its survival is not guaranteed if it gets it wrong.
This morning, my journey to Edinburgh airport was the quietest that I can remember in five years as an MP; I do not come down on the train all the time. The car park where I usually struggle to find a space was deserted—you could have played five-a-side football without bumping into a car. The flight on which I often struggle to get a seat was 30% full. That is not sustainable. What I prefer to do when it is realistic is come down on the train. If I had done that, I would have seen another drop in business, although I do not know whether it is as big. Train operators are struggling as well.
Hotel bookings in London and many other places have crashed. Comparing prices on hotel websites with what they were three or four weeks ago, I see they are a half or a quarter the price, or even less. Those businesses cannot survive that, and there are tens of thousands—perhaps hundreds of thousands—of jobs at stake. It is not about bailing out the billionaires who own those high-profile businesses. It is about protecting the rights of tens of thousands of workers whose livelihoods are on the line.
Despite the torrent of platitudes from the Government, and despite the welcome measures announced last week, many of those hundreds of thousands of people face being thrown on to the mercy of a social security system that was utterly unfit for purpose before this crisis, and will be even more unfit to deal with the challenges that it will face. While the changes that have been announced are welcome, we need a lot more, and we are going to need them an awful lot quicker.
Detailed spending plans for Government Departments are going to be published, but there are worrying indications that the Budget is stretching public finances to the absolute limit. Page 5 of the report from the Office for Budget Responsibility says that public sector debt is likely to increase by £125 billion in four years’ time. That is assuming 20% of the promised capital spend does not happen. We cannot rely on economic growth to make the debt less painful to repay in five or 10 years’ time than it would be now, because Brexit is going to slow our economic growth by at least 4%, even if we get a good deal. The OBR commented that
“Public finances are more vulnerable to adverse inflation and interest rate surprises than they were”.
It strikes me that the fundamental problem of the Blair-Brown Government was that, in effect, we had a Chancellor of the Exchequer who by instinct was a Keynesian but who tried to do Thatcherite economics, and it failed. Now we have a Government packed full of Thatcherites and they are having a wee shot at Keynesianism, and I do not think that will work either.
As my hon. Friends have highlighted, the OBR also warns us that its
“forecast assumes an orderly move to a new trading arrangement”,
first with the European Union and then with the rest of the world. Given that the minds of the UK Government and of all our current and potential trading partners are, quite understandably, fully occupied by covid-19 and will be until after the June 2020 deadline by which the Government say they need to have at least the basics of a trade agreement in place, surely the Government will now finally admit that enshrining the end of the transition period—December 2020—in law was an act of criminal recklessness. They might not have known what crisis was going to happen in the intervening period, but it did not take a genius to work out that something might go wrong.
Although the Government announcements on public spending have been welcomed in many quarters, and rightly so, if we look at the hard facts behind those announcements, we find that the long-term sustainability of our public services is, if anything, less secure after the Budget than it was before. That is not helped by an illogical and immoral approach to immigration, which will contribute to a 0.3% drop in GDP over four years. Ludicrously, that immigration, or rather anti-immigration, policy takes more money out of the public purse, because even the lower-paid migrant workers—the ones the current Secretary of State for Scotland was so shamefully contemptuous of last week, accusing them of coming here to work on low wages just to take advantage of our benefits and our services—pay three times as much in taxes as they take in benefits. So by deliberately stopping them coming here, by deliberately stopping them earning and paying their taxes, the UK Government are deliberately creating an additional black hole of £1 billion to £1.5 billion in our public finances.
Today, I heard the head of Scottish Care, who represents Scotland’s private sector care providers—and yes, I have issues relating to some of the private care providers in Scotland—say how moved he was by so many workers in the sector offering to move away from their families and become residents in care homes or hospitals for several weeks, just to make sure that the people they care for do not lose out if several members of staff have to phone in sick. They are the very workers whom the Government regard as burdens on our public services. As for the idea that hard-working, low-paid NHS workers should have to pay an extra flat-rate tax of £624 a head just for the privilege of continuing to work in our NHS, I cannot describe it in language that you would allow, Mr Deputy Speaker, because there is no parliamentary language robust enough to properly describe the sheer immorality of that proposal.
The Government will want to make a big noise about the new capital spending they announced—as I said, we will see when it actually happens—but we need to remember the very low baseline they are starting from. The National Education Union has pointed out that, in England, 3,731 schools need immediate repair and a further 9,972 will need significant work within two years at most, but the Treasury figures in the Red Book show that the Department for Education’s capital budget next year will be £100 million less than it is this year. How is that going to help? In contrast, the Scottish Government have replaced or substantially upgraded 928 schools since the Scottish National party came to power, and I am delighted that two thirds of all pupils attending secondary school in my constituency do so in schools that are less than seven years old. In Scotland, teacher numbers have increased for the fourth year in a row—[Interruption.] I hear muttering from the usual suspects on the Tory Benches. In Scotland, there are 7,485 teachers per 100,000 pupils; in England, the equivalent figure is 5,545.
I want to look at what the Government’s priorities appear to be. Working-age benefits are going up by 1.7%. If that was 1.7% on top of a similar increase every year for the past five or six years, it would not be too bad, but it is 1.7% on top of nothing for far too long. How can we defend a 1.7% increase in working-age benefits when MPs are getting 3%? I will not defend that to my constituents and I defy anyone in here to try to defend it to theirs. Perhaps one emergency step the Government need to take is temporarily to put Parliament back in charge of MPs’ pay rises and have this place unanimously agree that we are not taking a pay rise this year unless it is going to be at least matched by that for the lowest-paid workers in our society.
The new financial year starts in 16 days’ time. The Scottish Government, if they are lucky perhaps, have only just had confirmation of the full Barnett consequentials of this Budget—I am not convinced they have even got that yet. When we look at the potential impacts on the devolved finances of the covid-19 emergency, and we try to disentangle what additional funding is coming to the Scottish Government and what additional funding is not additional at all, as it has already been announced, it becomes quite difficult. I suggest to the Minister that this indicates that the current financial settlement—the fiscal settlement between the UK Government and the devolved Governments—needs to be completely revised, because it simply does not give the Scottish Government the flexibility they need to respond to this crisis in the same way as the UK Government need to be able to respond.
I saw a comment recently that pointed out that it is sad that it has taken a public emergency and a public crisis to force the Government to do some of the things they should have been doing previously. Even now, in responding to a public crisis, they have not acknowledged the tens of millions of private crises that have been going on in these islands in the past few years under this Administration. Far too many people are still living in poverty and that number will increase significantly as a result of the coronavirus crisis. It is essential that the Government look at their spending and taxation plans, initially to make sure that as many as possible of those whose domestic finances are severely disrupted by this crisis are back on their feet financially as soon as possible. The Government then have to acknowledge that we are starting from a position where far too many people on these islands are living in poverty or close to it, and that for that to happen in the fifth, sixth or seventh biggest economy in the world, depending who you believe, is utterly shameful. For any Government to be presiding over those levels of poverty 10 years after coming into office is something they cannot be proud about.
Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Patrick Grady and Peter Grant(6 years, 2 months ago)
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Peter Grant (Glenrothes) (SNP)
Patrick Grady (Glasgow North) (SNP)
Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Patrick Grady and Peter Grant(6 years, 4 months ago)
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Peter Grant (Glenrothes) (SNP)
Patrick Grady (Glasgow North) (SNP)
Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Patrick Grady and Peter Grant(7 years, 10 months ago)
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Patrick Grady (Glasgow North) (SNP)
Peter Grant (Glenrothes) (SNP)
Persecution of Religious Minorities: Middle East
Debate between Patrick Grady and Peter Grant(8 years, 5 months ago)
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Peter Grant (Glenrothes) (SNP)
Thank you very much, Mr Stringer. I am pleased to be able to take part in the debate. Not for the first time, particularly in Westminster Hall debates, I am struck by the agreement and unanimity around the Chamber. I think that we have heard speeches or interventions from Members of six different parties—apologies if there have been more and I have missed any.
We are agreed that the world is facing genocide. That should strike at the hearts of us all. It does not matter whether it is happening on the borders of Europe, the borders of Asia or the borders of London; when our fellow human beings are being persecuted as mercilessly and brutally as the Yazidis, Christians and other minorities are, we should all feel the pain and we should all resolve to give them whatever help we can and not to allow the climate in other parts of the world to continue to evolve so such persecution happens again. Earlier this year, as we always do in January, we commemorated the holocaust with the words, “Never again,” but what are we doing to prevent the climate of hate, fear and ignorance that allows holocausts and genocide to be perpetrated again and again from being allowed to develop in the first place?
I commend the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) not only for securing the debate but for the work that he and others have done to remind us that persecution, which in fact used to be described as martyrdom, is happening in several parts of the world. We are talking today primarily about the middle east, but the majority of cases in which it is established that Christians were murdered because of their faith are actually happening in parts of Africa. However bad persecution in the middle east is in numerical terms, there are other parts of the world in which it is as bad or worse.
I think that history will show that what Daesh is doing is on a par with what the Nazis did in occupied Europe. The numbers may not get quite as horrifically high, but I think that Daesh’s brutality and dehumanisation of human beings will be proven to be every bit as horrific and evil. That is why the United Kingdom Government and other Governments should not hesitate to say, “This is a genocide, it will be treated as a genocide, and the perpetrators will be pursued to the ends of the earth and brought to justice”—not by a court that owes its legitimacy or sovereignty to an individual nation state but by the court of the world: the International Criminal Court. These are crimes against humanity, and it is both the right and the responsibility of all humanity to ensure that the perpetrators are brought to justice.
As was mentioned earlier, where a climate of persecution is allowed to arise, religion is often used as an excuse, and it always has been. The massive upheaval that these nations saw in the 17th and 18th centuries was supposedly about religion, but it was not. It was about different tribes—essentially, different dynasties or political parties—fighting over power, but it was always presented as a war about which kind of Christian should sit on the throne. That is not a new phenomenon.
I do not know of any major world religion that instructs or even permits its followers to kill innocent human beings simply for being different, and if anyone can contradict me, I would be interested to know. I am a Christian, and there is nothing in the Christian faith that allows anyone to commit the crime of murder against an innocent person. If anything, Islam is even clearer: the taking of innocent life is not permitted under any circumstances. As well as being crimes against humanity, the atrocities that Daesh is committing are among the worst crimes that can be committed against the Islamic faith.
Patrick Grady
Just about all the religions that have been mentioned have in their scripture or teaching the golden rule, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto yourself.” That is not trite; it should be fundamental to the way we all live our lives. Perhaps if that rule were respected a bit more, there would be less need for such debates.
Peter Grant
My hon. Friend makes a valuable point. It is important that as part of the healing process, victims are helped to understand that the people who persecuted them—those who raped them or murdered their families—were not acting in the name of Islam, Christianity or any other faith. If they were acting in the name of any ideology at all, it was the ideology of Satanism—the ideology of pure evil. For victims to understand that helps the healing process, and it also helps in the very difficult task of ensuring that victims are not left with a lifelong feeling of anger or hatred towards others from the religious community that they hold responsible for their ill treatment.