European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Bill

Debate between Paul Farrelly and David Lammy

Tuesday 31st January 2017 Commons Chamber

[Mr David Lammy (Tottenham) (Lab)]

Many hon. Members have long believed that the United Kingdom’s interests would be best served outside the European Union. They campaigned passionately for what they believed in, and their view is that we must now leave the European Union. The Prime Minister says that she wants to deliver a Brexit that works for all and that unites our divided country. I, too, want to bring the country back together. Members right across the House will have experienced just how divided the country became in the months leading up to last June and how divided it has become since, but we cannot bring the country back together if we pretend that it has spoken with one united voice.

People who voted to leave did so for all sorts of reasons, many of which have absolutely nothing to do with the European Union, so when the Prime Minister speaks of the will of the people, her interpretation is frankly no clearer or more precise than anyone else’s. Let us not pretend that the people have spoken, because not all of them have. In fact, only 27% of people of the country voted to leave. Some 13 million did not vote, another 7 million eligible voters were not registered and 1 million British ex-pats were not allowed to vote. Even though the futures of 16-year-olds were on the ballot paper, they were denied a say. Only two of the four nations that make up the United Kingdom voted to leave, and there was no quadruple lock. There was no two-thirds supermajority, which is common in all other countries making major constitutional change. Even so, we are told that the people have spoken.

Look at what we have been allowed to become. In a matter of months, our public discourse has been consumed by vitriol and abuse. Hate crimes rose by 40% in the aftermath of the referendum, and we do not yet know what forces will be unleashed on our departure.

[Paul Farrelly (Newcastle-under-Lyme) (Lab)]

Like a number of colleagues including, I am sure, my right hon. Friend, I have been subject to the most orchestrated abuse that I have seen in the past 16 years in this House. Does he agree that there is a danger that the debate is corrupted by a small minority who feel that they are the masters now and that, therefore, any dissent is unacceptable?

[Mr Lammy]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. It is easy to dismiss views with which you disagree if you never listen to them and just dismiss the people who hold them as villains or enemies of the people.

Yet it is on these terms that we are being asked to rubber-stamp a blank cheque for the Government to deliver the most extreme version of Brexit imaginable. We are being asked to ignore the fact that leaving the European Union will saddle us with a £60 billion divorce bill. We are not going to get tariff-free access to EU customers while rejecting free movement; that is not on the table. We are not going to get a more favourable trading agreement with Europe from outside the single market; that is a paradox. We are not going to come to a full agreement with Europe within two years; believing otherwise completely flies in the face of precedent and all evidence.

Exiting without a deal and falling back on the World Trade Organisation rules is being talked about as though that is a good option. That is totally wrong—it would be an absolute disaster for this country. Even on the optimistic assumption that we can sign trade agreements all over the world, this does not even come close to making up for the loss of the single market. We are facing a return to a hard border in Northern Ireland and a breakdown of the Union with Scotland. We are not reclaiming sovereignty, another promise that falls apart under any scrutiny: we are transferring it to a negotiation behind closed doors.

Doctors are against it, scientists are against it, the financial services sector is against it, and manufacturers are against it because of their exports, but these people are dismissed—and why? Because these days we do not listen to experts. Yes, we are leaving, but it is the EU nations that decide how we leave and what we end up with. Where will this end in 2019? We do not know. Outside the single market, for sure, and outside the customs union, with no trade deal with Europe or anywhere else, our only friend President Trump—a man who has demonstrated why we should worry greatly about a free trade agreement that will probably lead to Kaiser Permanente running the NHS.

We should not fool ourselves. This is not, and never has been, a debate about the economy; it has always been about immigration. We are staring down the barrel of a hard Brexit because immigration has been prioritised over everything else: the economy, jobs, and living standards.

Defamation Bill

Debate between Paul Farrelly and David Lammy

Tuesday 12th June 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr David Lammy (Tottenham) (Lab)]

I am grateful for the opportunity to speak in this debate, following the small role that I played on the Joint Committee of both Houses that looked into this issue. I begin by paying tribute to the noble Lord Lester, who made a considerable contribution to this debate, and the noble Lord Mawhinney, who chaired the Committee successfully and kept our views together. We were able to produce a good report.

I want to return to some of the issues that have been left out of the Bill that is before the House, but I should begin by saying that we had a lot of debate on whether there was a need to codify the common law as it has existed on defamation. That was right and appropriate, because we should not pretend that somehow, just because we have a Bill—a Bill that looks like it has the broad support of the House, and most likely the other place too—the job will be done once it has passed through both places and the process is complete. Of course, the job will not be done. Putting the common law on a statutory footing will make it subject to much interpretation by the courts. Certain areas—in particular, serious harm and justification—will need a lot of teasing out over the months and years ahead. Therefore, the degree of certainty that we might think is contained in the legislation will probably not be in place for some time.

Nevertheless, it is right to codify this area of law at this time, if only so that ordinary citizens who are not in public life—those who are not celebrities and are not famous—who find their reputations tarnished or damaged can, as a result of what we are doing today, at least go to a piece of paper and determine for themselves what the law looks like in Britain, without having to rely on costly lawyers to interpret several different cases in order to determine whether they have any kind of claim. That must be a good thing for the general public as a whole.

This is a careful balance, and it is important absolutely to underline the freedom of expression that must cut to the heart of a democratic and civilised country. However, it is also right to say that we are living in an age in which our liberalisms need to be fully scrutinised—an age in which it is possible to be very conscious of our rights to say what we want, but not terribly conscious of our responsibility in exercising those rights. It is into that juncture that this Bill falls. We are also, I might add, living in age in which we see the results of excessive economic liberalism. We have therefore also seen companies, corporations and oligarchs use this area of law to exercise a lot of control, it seems to me, in the other direction. I want to come to that later.

We should scrutinise very carefully—and put that scrutiny on the record in Hansard—the serious harm test. It is probably more straightforward for someone in public life or a celebrity to demonstrate and explain what serious harm is to their reputation, which will have been built up and is in the public domain. However, I am concerned that the hurdle should not be so high for the average, ordinary member of the public that they have to establish the same calibre of serious harm. We ought to remember that most cases concern ordinary folk who feel defamed by, for instance, their local newspaper or a website whose focus is confined to a local area. We are talking about someone who runs a small business whose products are tarnished in public. We are talking about two partners—about an older woman, for instance, who falls in love with a younger man and lives in a village, and where things are said about the extent of that relationship. Such cases may feel parochial, but to the individuals involved they can feel major. In that sense, we need to ensure that the serious harm test is not set so high that the ordinary person trying to overcome the damage that has been done to them cannot get access to the justice they feel they deserve. I therefore hope that we see some debate in Committee, as well as on Report and in the other place, about what constitutes serious harm.

There has been a rush to push jury trial out of the door to save us money, but it is important to put on the record the fact that the public who serve on juries, and who rely on this important area of our law, are not responsible, on the whole, for those costs. They have largely been driven up by law firms, lawyers and barristers. We are now embarking on a process of no longer having a presumption of jury trial in this area of law, which is a major departure. Broadly, the decision was debated a lot in the Joint Committee, and I will go along with it. However, in an age of austerity, when we are all concerned about finances, I do not want the departure of jury trials to start creeping into the criminal law or for the argument to be extended to what must be the bedrock of our democracy. We must bear in mind that it is not the public who have driven up the costs. We should have heard more on this matter from the Secretary of State, and I hope that we will hear more at the end of the debate or in Committee about the circumstances in which jury trials will be retained. For example, if a High court judge were defamed, would we expect a jury to be retained in that case, given the presumption that it might be inappropriate to ask another judge to adjudicate in those circumstances? The Government need to set out the circumstances in which they think it appropriate to retain juries in these cases, given that reputation is a matter of public interest.

The gaping hole in the Bill, which Lord Lester examined thoroughly and which the Joint Committee debated, is the way in which it relates to corporations and companies. I am convinced that the Bill should act to limit some of the excessive powers of companies and corporations that often use these means to terrorise publications into not getting underneath the truth of what is going on in those companies. I am not convinced that a corporation or big business company is the same as an individual, or that the reputation of such institutions is the same as that of an individual. I certainly believe that, if we are to allow companies and corporations to use defamation law in this way, we ought at least to ask them to establish that they have suffered substantial financial loss, as was set out in the original Bill proposed by Lord Lester.

[Paul Farrelly]

I agree with my right hon. Friend on that point. Does he agree that equality of arms is one of the main issues in regard to the law of libel, and that there are remedies available to judges in the Defamation Act 1996 that have not been used effectively to achieve the early resolution of libel cases in order to avoid the inequality of arms being fully brought to bear in such cases, particularly those against investigative newspapers?

[Mr Lammy]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right to mention alternative dispute resolution in this regard. He will be aware that the Bill as it stands would not alter the situation that Dr Simon Singh found himself in, in the case involving the British Chiropractic Association. That should be a matter of concern to the House, and it demands debate and discussion in Committee. He will also be aware of the case of Ben Goldacre, a doctor and health writer, that of the cardiologist, Peter Wilmshurst, and that of Hardeep Singh, a journalist writing on Sikh issues. It is not entirely clear from those cases—although we have codified this area of the law, tidied up the justifications and raised the bar quite appropriately—that the position of the oligarch or corporation to challenge the idea of a balance of equity has been dealt with. The matter has been sidelined in the Bill; it has been forgotten about and we will probably not get the opportunity to return to it for some time. That is the biggest area of concern.

[Paul Farrelly]

The case of Simon Singh is a poignant one. Does my right hon. Friend agree that, in relation to that case, it was a quirk of the British legal system that allowed the British Chiropractic Association to sue in the first place? It could do so because it was an incorporated body, yet unincorporated bodies could not sue in their own name and would have had to leave it to individual members to bring a defamation case if they felt that they had been defamed individually.

[Mr Lammy]

That is a good point. It makes me think that, if we are unable to deal with the issue in this Bill, we might be able to return to it in the form of amendments to another Bill that is passing through the House. This is an important area, and it requires further scrutiny.

It is unfortunate that the Bill does not make a greater attempt to enable more alternative dispute resolution. Such practices are essential in relation to costs. What do most people want, when it has been established that they have been defamed? Most of them are not after lots of money; they simply want an apology that is visible and can be well seen. They want to establish negotiations, early on, and to come to an agreement through co-operation. It is a missed opportunity not to do more in the Bill to force people down that road, so that they can come together far earlier and avoid the costs that build up later. That is why I am concerned that everything is blamed on the jury; actually, there are other mechanisms available to reduce costs.

In the Joint Committee, we talked extensively about the level of exposure, in a civilised country, that we should expect the defamer—often a newspaper—to give to the apology that it makes, once it has been established that someone has been defamed. I am concerned that, when such apologies are published, particularly to members of the public, they occupy only the tiniest column space, lost in a wealth of other words. They are given nothing like the prominence of the original story that caused the harm.

Higher Education

Debate between Paul Farrelly and David Lammy

Wednesday 3rd November 2010 Westminster Hall

[Mr Lammy]

I have no recollection of the proportion of funding for Aimhigher being reduced. The Aimhigher programme sat alongside the funding that we gave universities to both widen participation and increase retention. As I said, that overall pot was about £580 million. That is a significant amount of money, and it made a huge difference. I do not recognise what the hon. Gentleman said.

[Paul Farrelly (Newcastle-under-Lyme) (Lab)]

Does my right hon. Friend agree that the student support that we put in place was important as well? As the Browne report said:

“The evidence suggests that improvements to the support for living costs helped to ensure that the changes in fees in 2006 did not have a negative impact on participation.”

Some progress has been made, but not enough. However, does the shadow Minister agree that we are now in unknown territory? The balance is getting out of hand, and the tripling of fees will have a deterrent effect on people from poorer backgrounds, who will feel obliged to choose cheaper courses at different universities.

[Mr Lammy]

That is, indeed, the fact. I want to emphasise that the increase in young people going into higher education in my constituency in the past 10 years is not just 5% or 10%; there has been a 100% increase in participation in higher education. That is, of course, to do with the support and the grants that were available, but it is also because of programmes such as Aimhigher Associates. Through such programmes, we encouraged young people, who were often from poorer backgrounds, to leave university for half a day a week and go back into schools to encourage others to go to university. That takes money, funding and priority. Making this issue a priority is in the national interest because of what has been said about growth.