Windrush: 70th Anniversary

Debate between Peter Grant and John Hayes

Thursday 14th June 2018 Commons Chamber

[Peter Grant]

I knew there was something special about the right hon. Gentleman that I just could not put my finger on; all is now revealed. He might well find that he has more Scots blood in him than I have, because the more I look back at my ancestry the more I discover that a lot of it is actually from Ireland—Northern Ireland, rather than the Republic.

I am of immigrant descent. We all are. My ancestors may have come to mainland UK a few years before the ancestors of some hon. Members, but we are all immigrants. There is nobody left in the UK who can claim to be 100% indigenous English, Welsh, Scots or Irish. We would do well to remember that, because the question is not about who is an immigrant, it is just about how long we have been an immigrant for.

[Mr John Hayes (South Holland and The Deepings) (Con)]

The last point that the hon. Gentleman made is, in a sense, the most profound. It is about not where we come from, but the shared identity that we enjoy when we are here. The Windrush generation in particular were deeply patriotic, and remain so. These were people who were actually proud of Britain’s history. Of course, they understood that it was a mixed history, but they were proud of it. As the right hon. Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy) knows very well, I chair the British Caribbean Association and I have formed close friendships with those people—people who called their children Milton, Nelson and so on. How many white British people have ever done that? That was a measure of their patriotism.

[Peter Grant]

I am grateful for that intervention. My name is actually French—Norman—so my ancestors came over at some time along with the Norman conquerors and I have been trying to keep up with the tradition of upsetting the English ever since. That is not completely true, of course.

The right hon. Member for Tottenham makes an interesting point. It is possible to tell a lot about somebody’s background from their name, but sometimes that background has been broken. Sometimes the link has been deliberately broken to try to turn somebody into something that they are really not.

The important point about identifying with and celebrating a culture—being proud of who we are and where we are from—is that it does not all need to be one place and one time. It is perfectly possible to be proudly Jamaican and proudly English at the same time; it is perfectly possible to be proudly Scots and proudly Canadian at the same; and it is perfectly possible to be proudly Scots and proudly English at the same time.

Although it is vital that the contribution of black culture—however we define it—to the life of these islands is remembered, celebrated and taught in all our schools, we also need to understand that how we define black culture is no more static or set in stone than how we define any other kind of culture. When people are celebrating black culture in 50 years’ time, they will be doing it in a way that none of us would recognise. When they look back at celebrations of black culture today, they will not recognise it any more than they would recognise Italian culture, German culture or any other kind of culture.



The identity that people hold is up to each person to define for themselves. If we try to put people into boxes by making them exclusively black, white, brown, yellow, European or American, we are not doing them any favours. In fact, we are not doing anybody any favours, because the great benefit of the diversity that exists in humanity is the fact that each and every one of us is unique. None of us is 100% pure-bred anything. That is just as well because, as any dog breeder or horse breeder will say, pure breeds do not live very long. Pedigree dogs tend to be very unhealthy. Give me a good mongrel that is a mix of so many breeds that they can never be disentangled; that dog will probably outlive its master by quite a few years.

Although not many in the Windrush generation eventually found their way to Scotland, parts of the country do have some significant groups of people who are of West Indian and Afro-Caribbean descent. Scotland has had large waves of immigrants throughout its history. It is interesting to look at the ways in which the experiences of other immigrant movements into Scotland have been similar to the experiences of the Windrush generation, and the ways in which they have been different. Sadly, one way in which these experiences have been all too often similar is in the racism and discrimination that immigrants have faced.

As I mentioned, a lot of my ancestors came over from Ireland, as did a lot of the population in the west of Scotland. It is one of the things that Glasgow very much has in common with Liverpool. The racism that they experienced was turned into sectarianism because they identified as being Irish and therefore Catholic, even though they were not necessarily Catholic. That kind of racism in the guise of sectarianism still poisons too much of our society in central Scotland today. We could do with being rid of that, just as we could do with being rid of other forms of racism.

We have also experienced immigration from the other side. By far the biggest export that Scotland has had in the last 200 years has been our people. I remember going to the railway station on a number of occasions when I was a wee boy to see off another of my mum’s wee sisters with her family, as they took the £10 journey to Australia and became Australian citizens. I am delighted to say that the traffic was not all one-way and that my hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh North and Leith (Deidre Brock) made the journey in the opposite direction.

That is the way things are, and it is the way they should always be. When we celebrate the huge benefits that were brought to these lands by one single big—in fact, not particularly big—migration of people, we should perhaps stop to think about the fact that migration benefits the places that people move to. I cannot think of any instance where migration has not benefited the place that people moved to. That is why I have some concerns about not only the view that the Government are taking towards migration but the direction of travel in which they are taking us in relation to the free movement of people.

[Mr John Hayes]

I think the hon. Gentleman needs to be clear that the people I described earlier—those patriots who called their children Milton, Winston, Gladstone and so on—take a very similar view of illegal migration, because they took the trouble to come here on an entirely proper basis. Outrage is felt by people in this House and others on behalf of the Windrush generation because they were legal migrants who should never have been treated in that way. They are Britons in the same way that all the rest of us are. We should not assume for a moment—I know you would not, Madam Deputy Speaker, and I hope the hon. Gentleman will not either—that those people do not take a robust view on illegal migration and understand the need for controls on migration as a whole.

[Peter Grant]

The great shame of the experience of the Windrush generation is that for far too many of them, assumptions were made about their legality or illegality based on nothing better than the colour of their skin or the accent with which they spoke, just as that ticket collector on the train made assumptions about the likelihood that the black guys were more likely to be dodging tickets than the white guys.

I cannot imagine my country without waves of immigration. I am delighted that in any school in my constituency that I go to, there are welcome signs up in 10, 15 or 20 languages, each one of which is the home language of one of its pupils or staff. I am delighted to live in a country whose national colour only exists if we take lots of different colours and mix them together. A tartan scarf made of a single colour is not tartan, and for me, a Scotland, an England and a United Kingdom where everybody was the same simply would not be the great countries that they are.

To those from the Windrush generation who are still alive, I say thank you, and I also say sorry, because the Parliament that I am part of and the Government that I am supposed to hold to account have done you an injustice that would be shameful in any circumstances, but when set against the contribution that you have made to so many cities and regions of these islands, to have treated you and your descendants in that way is a stain on the reputation of these nations that will take a long, long time to clear.

Rural Crime and Public Services

Debate between Peter Grant and John Hayes

Wednesday 6th June 2018 Commons Chamber

[Peter Grant]

What I am grateful for is the fact that the hon. Gentleman has completely contradicted his Scottish Tory pals, who seem to be away enjoying the sunshine at the moment, but who tell us almost every day of the week that the Scottish Government’s performance on broadband is useless and the UK Government’s is great. One of the things I have learnt today is that even Tory Back Benchers think that the Government are making a complete hash of providing broadband in rural areas. I look forward to hearing the hon. Gentleman contradict his Scottish pals the next time they raise that particular myth, both when it is relevant to the debate and, more often, when it is completely irrelevant.

Let me return to the comment made by the hon. Member for Barnsley East (Stephanie Peacock). According to the latest figures from NFU Mutual, in some parts of the United Kingdom, there have been staggering increases in rural crime levels over a fairly short period. I take that to mean that organised gangs have been targeting an area until it gets too hot for them, and then moving on. That is why co-operation and the sharing of intelligence between police forces, and between the police and other agencies, are so vital.

In 2015 the Scottish Government helped to set up the Scottish Partnership Against Rural Crime—a partnership between the Government, Police Scotland, NFU Scotland, NFU Mutual, which, obviously, provides much of the insurance cover for rural businesses, and other key stakeholders. In its first full year of operation, recorded rural crime in Scotland fell by 21%. I said earlier that recorded crime figures came with a lot of caveats, but during roughly the same period, NFU Mutual reported a 32% reduction in a single year. This is perhaps not the place to go into detail about what might be done well in Scotland that could be copied or examined in other parts of the United Kingdom, but I simply read those figures to indicate that although people living in rural areas and rural businesses, as the Minister referred to—

[Mr John Hayes (South Holland and The Deepings) (Con)]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Peter Grant]

I will just finish this point. There is no doubt that, when a rural business has a piece of plant stolen that cost it a quarter of a million pounds, it is a massive blow to it, but there are ways—by sharing information and working across constabulary borders and national borders, if possible—in which, if everybody who wants to stop crime co-ordinates themselves as effectively as the criminals sometimes do, we can start to see an end to this, or at least a significant improvement in crime figures, both rural and urban.

[Mr John Hayes]

I am enjoying the hon. Gentleman’s speech—it is like a poorly signposted ramble through the Trossachs—but if he is right that much crime is under-reported, does he acknowledge that what may be happening in rural areas is this? Because tolerance of petty disorder and petty crime has risen, many crimes take place irrespective of the effect on their victims, because the victims know that nothing will be done about them so they do not bother to report them.

[Peter Grant]

I cannot comment on that. Scotland is regularly surveyed on public attitudes to policing, and generally speaking, the public have a high degree of confidence in the police and their ability to deal with crime and clear it up. It is not enough—there is not 100% confidence yet, and that has to be the target. From my first days as a councillor 25 years ago, what I have always recommended to my constituents is that there is no such thing as a crime that is too minor to report, because a lot of policing is intelligence-based and trend-based. In the policing model that is used in Scotland, it may be that a similar incident that is reported five or six times will not get a heavy response, but it will eventually trigger a very significant response of the kind that puts a large police presence into the area very quickly. It would be nice if we could get a blue-light response every time somebody phones the police, but that is simply not realistic.

I want to make a few comments on some of the exchanges that I listened to with great interest about the way in which the police service in England and Wales is set up, the way it is managed nationally and locally and the way it is funded. With all due respect, it seems to me that it is a complete and utter mess. I am not convinced that people in any part of England or Wales understand what they are paying for the police force, why they are paying that amount and not a wee bit more or a wee bit less, what they do if they want to pay a bit more to get a better service, or how they can influence the provision of their service.

I cannot understand why people who are sitting in here should take the majority of decisions about how much police funding is needed in Lincolnshire, Cornwall or Lancashire. Surely the people there know their needs better than any of us down here, with the possible exceptions of the hon. Members who represent those particular counties. Since I was elected, I have been struck by the fact that, for its size and diversity, England is a ridiculously centralised place as far as government is concerned. I do not say that meaning to be offensive or to insult anybody. I simply cannot see how local services can be effectively delivered across such a big and diverse country as England when decisions are so centralised in one place. It is bound to mean that a lot of time is spent by MPs from different parts of the country fighting about who gets a bigger share of the cake, when the problem is that the cake is far too wee to begin with.

At the end of the day, it does not benefit any of us if we move some resources from one county to another and a reduction in crime in one part of England is matched by an increase in crime in another. It is much better if we can find ways to resource the police properly, if it is quite clear that they are not properly resourced, and to make sure that crime levels can be driven down across the whole country.

I found the early part of the debate very interesting. It has been an eye-opener to me to hear about the way that local services—particularly the police service—are being delivered in a country that, in so many ways, is an example to the rest of the world. Is it fit for purpose? That is not for me to say, and not because I do not believe in politicians from one country telling other people how to run their country. But I invite Members who represent constituencies in England and Wales to ask themselves the hard question: is the way the police service is set up fit for the 21st century? If not, potentially, there are difficult decisions to be taken.

I will be happy after the debate to give more details about how the police service is set up in Scotland. It is not perfect. There are problems. The new national service has some teething problems and there are things people do not like as much as what they had before, but the fact is that, by almost any measure, public confidence in the police remains high. People’s feeling of being safe is as high as it has been for a great number of years. Three quarters of people in Scotland feel safe walking home alone after dark. It would be nicer if it were 100%, but I was surprised that it is as high as 75%.

There are ways that our respective national Governments can learn from each other about the way we manage and provide public services. I sincerely suggest that Members here with responsibility for policing look at some of the changes that have happened north of the border over the last few years. They were not always easy or popular, but some of what has happened there might give an indication as to changes that could be implemented for the benefit of the 50 million-plus people—there are another 3 million or 4 million people in Wales—who deserve the best police service that can possibly be provided for them.