Palestine Action: Proscription and Protests

Debate between Rachael Maskell and Dan Jarvis

Monday 8th September 2025 Commons Chamber

[Dan Jarvis]

First, the Home Secretary is meeting our Five Eyes allies who are here for the five-country ministerial. That is incredibly important work in securing our alliances with our United States, Canadian, Australian and New Zealand allies. These are important partnerships that this Government value and that this Home Secretary is investing in on almost her first full day in office.

On the other points the hon. Lady seeks to raise, she has an absolute right, as everybody does, to protest in a lawful way. There is nothing that this Government have done to prevent her or anybody else from doing that. What this Government have done is ensure that we are best placed to protect the public. I am sorry that she does not agree with that—that is her absolute right—but I maintain that support for freedom of speech is a cornerstone of our democracy, and this Government will always enable people to have their say.

[Rachael Maskell (York Central) (Ind)]

I absolutely condemn any action or violence taken against the public or, indeed, the police. However, I wrote to the former Home Secretary twice on this matter, because many legislators here have yet to see evidence that satisfies us about the proportionality of the proscription of Palestine Action and how the Government balance that with the public’s right to protest and freedom of speech. Could I encourage the Minister to review this law, not least because it has an impact contrary to what the Government want, in that the more arrests there are, the more it draws attention to Palestine Action?

[Dan Jarvis]

I entirely understand why the hon. Lady may wish to raise concerns in the way she has. She made an important point about evidence, and I give her an assurance that we have put into the public domain all the evidence we have been able to. I hope she will understand that there are strict limitations on some things we are able to say for a variety of reasons, not least that there are ongoing police investigations and ongoing criminal proceedings. That limits the ability of Ministers to talk about this issue, but within those constraints we have tried to be as clear as we possibly can about the reasons for this decision. On a number of occasions, the previous Home Secretary and I have laid out the reasons why we took this decision.

Flooding Preparedness: Yorkshire

Debate between Rachael Maskell and Dan Jarvis

Wednesday 30th September 2020 Commons Chamber

[Rachael Maskell (York Central) (Lab/Co-op)]

My hon. Friend is making a chilling speech. It is a reminder of Storms Desmond and Eva, in which my constituency experienced significant flooding, as it did in February this year. Five years on, those residents are still waiting for their property level resilience to be put in place. Does he agree that that is completely unacceptable and that we need a better system in place to support residents ahead of floods arriving again?

[Dan Jarvis]

I absolutely agree. My hon. Friend is right to make that point, which will form the basis of the remarks I am about to make.

We need to acknowledge the scale of the problem. About 1,000 homes in South Yorkshire and 565 businesses were directly affected by November’s floods, but the impact of flooding goes far beyond the material and economic damage. It carries a human cost—lives disrupted, homes abandoned, futures made uncertain and full of hardship. This is a growing threat: a once-in-a-lifetime disaster in South Yorkshire was followed weeks later by further flooding in West Yorkshire. Calderdale, for example, has suffered three major floods in the last eight years. Hull was badly hit in 2007, and York—my hon. Friend’s constituency—was hit in 2000, 2015 and again earlier this year, as she just described. Other parts of the UK from Scotland to Cornwall have suffered from flooding.

We are lucky to be a rich country with the means to help people and to respond to this danger, but that requires us to recognise the challenges we face, to deploy our resources as we need to, and to confront the longer-term causes of the crisis. I deeply regret that this Government have so far failed to do that. It is not that they have done nothing—indeed, I acknowledge and appreciate the efforts the Minister and her Department have made; the Environment Agency in particular has done sterling work in Yorkshire—but it was only yesterday that the Government gave a date for the flooding summit we discussed with them back in November last year.

Local Authority Budget Reductions

Debate between Rachael Maskell and Dan Jarvis

Tuesday 30th October 2018 Commons Chamber

[Dan Jarvis]

I am grateful for the hon. Gentleman’s intervention; he makes a very important point. I think back to many of the conversations I had with members of the public during the referendum campaign, many of whom used it as an opportunity to vent their frustration against a political system that they felt had not served them well. If we are going to address those feelings of disenfranchisement and alienation, the closer that we can place political decision making to the people who will be affected by those decisions, the better. That is why devolution provides a really important opportunity for the Government to engage with those communities and place not just political power but resources closer to the communities who will be affected by the decisions that are taken.

[Rachael Maskell (York Central) (Lab/Co-op)]

My hon. Friend is making an excellent speech. Does he agree that we are also seeing greater inequality as a result of the way in which devolution is being dished out? Some places are advancing with a devolution deal, yet for Yorkshire, where the local authorities desperately want to advance into devolution, it is apparently being denied.

[Dan Jarvis]

My hon. Friend makes a really important point to which I will return in a moment. I am very grateful for her intervention.

I was talking about the redistribution of power and how, together with investment, this will lead both to better public services and to the re-engagement of people in a common sense of community purpose. I believe that devolution does offer the opportunity to do this. Whether it is a mayoral or an assembly model, when we get devolution right, it offers a fairer and more democratic means of governing and delivering—one where working people have a greater say in the choices that affect their lives and a greater stake in the services on which they rely. We can seek to achieve radical transformative change in the communities that we serve only if those communities control their own destinies. That means this Government listening to those communities, and to the leaders they have elected to represent them.

My hon. Friend the Member for York Central (Rachael Maskell) referred to devolution. Will the Minister say when the local authorities of Yorkshire—I know that he will take a very close interest in these matters, for obvious reasons—will get a response to the recent Yorkshire devolution proposal submitted by me and the council leaders? It is not just a matter of basic courtesy that this happens soon; it is in everybody’s interests—the Government’s and all our local authorities across Yorkshire—to move it forward as quickly as possible.

I said that it was important for the Government to listen to the communities that they are there to serve. Well, I have been listening to what the Government have been saying. I know from ministerial responses to parliamentary questions that I have recently tabled that the Minister’s Department intends to publish what is being referred to as a devolution framework. When will this be published, and what consultation has taken place to underpin it? The Minister is obviously very welcome to say what is going to be in it, although I suspect that he may not wish to take up that opportunity. Whatever is in it, I very much hope that it will be driven by what communities actually want. “One size fits all” will not work in this regard.

If we are to enable the right level of devolution to take place, we need to abandon an economic and political model in which the only hope is for wealth to trickle down and prosperity to ripple out. We must replace it with a three-tier system of government—local, regional and national—giving each tier the powers and resources it needs to make a difference in the communities for which it is responsible. Only if we do this correctly will we put the right people at the heart of decision making, end the status quo whereby so many people have become disenfranchised, and allow communities to overcome the challenges they face and to thrive. Greater funding and stronger powers for our local authorities should be the first stage of that journey—but yesterday’s Budget represented, I am afraid, another missed opportunity.