Polish Anti-defamation Law

Debate between Peter Grant and Stephen Pound

Tuesday 5th June 2018 Westminster Hall

[Peter Grant]

I am grateful for that intervention. Clearly, I cannot speak with the hon. Gentleman’s authority about the detailed history of Poland, but I certainly look at it from a common-sense point of view. Surely the Jewish population in Poland was so big because Jews were comfortable there and felt that they would be treated better than in many other countries in Europe.

I find offensive any suggestion that the Polish Government, either directly or indirectly, collaborated with the Nazis, and I well understand why the people of Poland today find such suggestions greatly offensive. However, I am not convinced that criminalising the actions of a newspaper or a television programme is the right way to deal with that offence. That is where the nub lies. I think we must accept that Polish citizens will have collaborated in crimes against humanity—a tiny minority of the Polish population—as, if the full facts were known, there would no doubt have been Scots who collaborated, just as there were Scots who risked their lives to help. People of all nationalities committed acts of great courage, and people of all nationalities will have collaborated in acts of great evil. If we lose sight of that, we do a disservice to all those who risked and lost their lives.

[Stephen Pound]

I apologise for interrupting the hon. Gentleman’s flow. Holocaust denial is a crime in many parts of the world. Does he suggest that we should repeal all legislation on holocaust denial?

[Peter Grant]

Absolutely not. I was coming on to that. One of the first steps towards being prepared to allow a repeat of the holocaust is to deny that it ever happened. We also must be careful about denying that it could have happened in other places. I take issue with the hon. Member for Shrewsbury and Atcham on one point. He repeatedly referred to the crimes and actions of Germany. It is a fact that Nazism was born and developed in Germany, but the holocaust was not a battle of nationalities; it was about an ideology of sheer evil that was able to spread across Europe so quickly because it had its proponents in many more countries than we might like to think. It was certainly born and brought up in Germany, but it could have been a child of almost any nation in Europe and, it must be said, it could have happened in the United Kingdom. There were periods in the United Kingdom’s past when anti-Semitism had become so virulent that it would have been possible, if the right group of people had got together, for Nazism or something very like it to take hold. When I talk about the dangers of holocaust denial, I am talking not simply about the denial of a clear historical fact but about the denial of a clear acceptance that it could have happened in other places as well. That is why it can happen again—it has already happened again on a smaller scale—and it will continue to happen if we are not prepared to speak out and act against it.

I am aware of the time pressure and I want to leave time for the winding up. The hon. Member for Leeds North West also deserves a bit of time. I get the point that academics cannot be prosecuted but, as has been pointed out, a law of this nature not only opens a door to legal action in the courts but can sometimes be seen to legitimise actions that no one would want to see legitimised. I do not see where the line could be drawn between an academic publishing something in a journal and a newspaper reporting on that publication. At what point would the law come into play?

However difficult some parts of any nation’s history might be, we must be prepared to face up to the bad parts as well as the good. I have to accept that Glasgow—the city close to which I grew up and which I consider almost a second home—was built on the slave trade. I am not proud of that. I am proud of Glasgow, but I cannot be proud of the part that the city, and Scotland, played in the slave trade. I cannot be proud that the great ancient university town of St Andrews has monuments built into the pavements to show where devout Scottish Christians burned other devout Scottish Christians to death because they were the wrong kind of devout Christian for the time. Those things are parts of our history that we have to face up to, and the more we are willing to face up to the evils that have been done in all our countries and communities, the more we can hopefully ensure that they become much less likely to be repeated.

I have spoken before about Fife’s enormous debt of gratitude to our Polish community. Scotland and the United Kingdom owe an enormous debt of gratitude to the people of Poland not only for what they did during the war, but for what they have done since. We owe Poland an enormous debt of remorse for what we did to them after the war, when we handed Poland over to Stalin, and we should never forget that either.

There is a serious issue that has to be addressed. I simply do not think it is right to clamp down on one of the most precious freedoms we have—the freedom of the press to report things as they see them, and sometimes the freedom of the press to print things that we find offensive. That freedom needs to be protected. It can never be correct or acceptable to accuse Poland of collaboration with the holocaust, but I do not think the law as it is currently framed in Poland or in other European countries is the correct way to go about it. I hope that the Polish Government can be persuaded that there are other ways to prevent their new good name from being besmirched. At the end of the day, if idiots accuse someone of ridiculous things that did not happen, that someone should ignore the idiots and listen to the vast majority.

Anglo-Polish Relations

Debate between Peter Grant and Stephen Pound

Tuesday 18th July 2017 Westminster Hall

[Peter Grant (Glenrothes) (SNP)]

I am pleased to begin the winding-up speeches in this debate. To pick up on an earlier comment from the hon. Member for Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk (John Lamont), I wondered whether I would be allowed to take part in a debate on Angles and Poles. However, tracing the migration routes on a map apparently proves that when the Angles came over from northern Europe, those who turned north were known as the acute ones, while those who turned south were known as the obtuse ones. That may explain quite a lot.

I want to highlight two aspects of the debate. First, it reminds us of the critical and decisive role that Polish servicemen and women played in ensuring that the United Kingdom did not fall under Nazi rule in the 1940s. Second, it gives us the opportunity to celebrate the contribution of just a small number of Polish nationals and people of Polish descent in and around my constituency. We have heard a lot of reminders today about the part that Poland played during the second world war. I have to say that I think there has been a massive failing in how we have taught not only our children, but ourselves, the history of these islands.

During my relatively short time here in Parliament, I have heard MPs in the main Chamber talking about how Britain—or, sometimes, England—stood alone against the Nazi menace. The simple fact is that if Britain had stood alone, Britain would have fallen. The United Kingdom would not have stood up permanently against the force of the Nazis without the support of service people from Poland and many other countries.

[Stephen Pound]

The hon. Gentleman is making an extremely important point. It seems that the links between Poland and this country, which were forged in blood—those links of fraternity and shared struggle—are so powerful that they can never be broken. Was he in the House when his hon. Friend, the hon. Member for West Dunbartonshire (Martin Docherty-Hughes), spoke about the Clydebank blitz, when an entire section of a great city was flattened and the most potent response to the blitzkrieg was from Polish destroyers in the Clyde at the time, which were similar to the Błyskawiza, the destroyer that sunk the Bismarck? This connection between us and the Poles is far too strong ever to be threatened. Does he agree that we need to tell more people about this glorious, joyful, courageous, magnificent history of Poles in the UK?

[Peter Grant]

I am very grateful for that intervention; it means I can now take out several parts of my own speech.

[Stephen Pound]

Forgive me.

[Peter Grant]

I am sure that the hon. Gentleman made those comments more eloquently and probably more briefly than I would have done, so I am grateful to him.

We have already heard that it was a Polish squadron that was the best in the entire RAF at doing what the fighter squadrons were there to do, which was to shoot down Nazi aircraft. In the early 1940s, one in every six bomber crews in Bomber Command was Polish. In total, 19,000 Poles served in the RAF. The contribution that Poles made in helping to crack the Enigma code has already been highlighted. Poles also played a crucial role in taking Monte Cassino, it was the Poles who eventually sank the Bismarck, and the Poles were the only people to shoot down Luftwaffe bombers during the worst night of the blitz of Clydebank.

The list goes on and on, and those are only the parts of the history that we are allowed to know, because we can be certain that there were things done behind enemy lines that will never be made public—not even today—and there were also things done on the eastern side of Poland that the Soviets, who conquered the country after 1945, made sure were never, ever going to be told.

Perhaps the darkest of those stories, which has not been mentioned yet, is the deliberate massacre of 22,000 Polish soldiers—prisoners of war—under the direct orders of Stalin. It was an attempted genocide. The motive was to rid Poland of any potential leader, so that even after the war Poland would not be in a position to stand up to military conquest from the east. One of the great tragic ironies of the second world war is that we went into it to defend Poland from a military invader, but at the end Britain and the United States handed Poland back to an even worse dictator than the one who originally invaded on 1 September 1939.

It has not been mentioned today but it must be put on the record again that there are more Polish nationals recorded in the Righteous Among the Nations than those of any other nationality anywhere on Earth. More than 6,000 Polish citizens risked arrest, torture and death for themselves or their families to save Jews from the holocaust. That should also be remembered.

I want to talk about the Silent Unseen, the Polish secret resistance, who have very strong connections with Fife. Many of them lived just across the constituency border at Silverburn House in Leven and in Largo House. General Sikorski was headquartered for part of the war at Tulliallan, in the far west of Fife. I am delighted that thanks to my good friend and constituent Maciej Dokurno, working alongside the Polish consulate, the Polish Embassy and others, the contribution that the Silent Unseen made to the war effort is now—only now—beginning to be recognised.

One of the great heroes or heroines of the Polish resistance was Elżbieta Zawacka—her name is often anglicised as Elizabeth Watson—who was the only female member of the Silent Unseen. She was arrested and imprisoned by the Soviet authorities as a British agent and spent a significant part of her life in prison. After she was released, she continued to work for the liberation of Poland and was an active member of the Solidarity movement. Thanks to her, Poland was eventually liberated, not in 1945 but almost 50 years later, when the people of Poland were finally given the right to choose their own Government and their own future.

That act of handing Poland over to the Soviets at the end of the war is something that we can never allow ourselves to forget. We have heard a lot today about the enormous debt of gratitude that we all owe to Poland for what Poles did for us for during the war, but we should never forget our debt of remorse for what we did to them and their country afterwards. I believe it was one of the darkest days in the 20th-century history of the United Kingdom.

As I have said, a lot of the history of the Poles during the war was never really given its proper place, sometimes for genuine reasons of national security, and sometimes because the Soviet Union did not want to recognise anything that had happened, and certainly not the massacre at Katyn, for example. The Soviet Union did not want to recognise that those who fought for Poland under the command of British forces were not enemy agents but troops fighting against the Nazis as well.

A lot of people—some of whom are in the Chamber today—are trying to make sure that this story is told and continues to be told, as it deserves to be. When I learned that I was going to speak in this debate, I put a wee post on my Facebook page, saying that if there was anything that people wanted me to raise, they should please let me know. I have had any number of comments on the page and by email giving the names of Polish people who my constituents have lived beside, worked beside, been treated by in hospitals, been served by in shops, and so on. That makes it very clear that the Polish nationals in Fife are welcome, and I hope they will always be made welcome.

I received a message from someone I did not know called Slawek Fejfer. When I saw the Polish spelling, I wondered whether it was a pseudonym, because I thought it was somebody who lived in Fife. He asked me particularly to raise the fact that Polish nationals do not have the right to vote in most UK elections. I was pleased to be able to remind him that EU nationals can vote in elections that are under the control of the Scottish Government, and I sincerely hope that all the elections in the United Kingdom will soon follow suit, because it seems to me that we do not vote for what or where we have been, but for where we want to go together. It is only right that those who have chosen to make their future part of our future should have a full say in that future.

I checked up to find out whether Slawek’s was a genuine name. Not only did I find that it is genuine; apparently he lives in a place called Shrewsbury—I have never heard of that place before. I hope his constituency MP, the hon. Member for Shrewsbury and Atcham (Daniel Kawczynski), is listening to his concerns and will support his demand that he and his family should have the right to vote—possibly for the sitting MP—next time the opportunity comes along.

To finish, the greatest recognition that we can give to our Polish colleagues and friends now is to allow them to continue to play a full part in the nations that they have chosen to call home. It is almost exactly a year to the day since we had a similar debate here in Westminster Hall. At that time, the denial or the delaying of the granting of the right of Polish nationals to live here permanently took up a great part of that debate. Despite that being one of the top priorities for the Brexit negotiating team, it has still not happened, and I cannot understand why. We have had comforting and reassuring words; we do not yet have a legally binding guarantee. I would like the Minister to tell us today that that legally binding guarantee will come and will be unconditional.

I do not understand why the leader of the United Kingdom Government cannot say today what the leader of the Scottish Government said over a year ago to our Polish nationals and nationals of other European countries who live here among us. What I want the UK Government to say to them is what the Scottish Government have already said to them: “This is your home. This is where you belong. We want you to stay for as long as you and your family want to stay here with us.”