Telegraph Media Group Ltd: Acquisition

Rehman Chishti Excerpts

Tuesday 30th April 2024 Commons Chamber

[Lucy Frazer]

It is important that we always have freedom of the press and that external forces do not interfere with that freedom. I will be making a speech to the Society of Editors this afternoon that the hon. Gentleman might wish to read, after I have delivered it. I am happy to consider the points he has made.

[Rehman Chishti (Gillingham and Rainham) (Con)]

I welcome the statement and the decision by the Secretary of State. It is in our national interest to protect our free media. My question is about transparency and understanding the logic behind the decision. The Secretary of State said that she has taken into account the evidence. What key evidence did she take into account? What were the pertinent aspects of the evidence that led her to make that decision? Knowing that would give people outside the opportunity to look at the reasoning and rationale behind the decision.

[Lucy Frazer]

The first decision I took was that the threshold had been passed. I was concerned about interference with the accurate presentation of news and the freedom of the press. The evidence I saw enabled me to say that the threshold had been passed, and to ask Ofcom and the Competition and Markets Authority to look at the matter more broadly. They did that and they took some time to give me a very detailed report, which I further considered. In my letter sent in March, I set out the evidence from that report and my decision that I was minded to send the matter to phase 2 investigation. The letter in which I set out the evidence on which I relied has been published, I believe.

Football Governance Bill

Rehman Chishti Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 23rd April 2024 Commons Chamber

[Shaun Bailey]

My hon. Friend is almost asking for a replay of the replay—that is sort of where the question is. I get the point that he is trying to make about balance and the fine-line argument on Government interference. The point has been made quite strongly, as we have all seen—the FA’s own survey found that 70% of fans wanted to retain replays—and with that level of public pressure, there is a role for the Government in facilitating the pressure on the FA. I think that that is the point that he is hammering down on, although obviously the FA must ultimately be independent.

[Rehman Chishti (Gillingham and Rainham) (Con)]

I represent Gillingham, which has an amazing football club: the Gills. The club was in administration in 1995 and was bought for £1 by the then chairman, Paul Scally. Now it is doing exceptionally well and going up the league, but it is a small club and it relies on FA cup replays. If we are really passionate about supporting smaller clubs in the community, and about ensuring that the FA does the right thing by supporting them, we need the Government to work with the FA to ensure that we get this right.

--- Later in debate ---

[George Galloway]

If the hon. Gentleman will forgive me, as a supporter of a united Ireland I will not follow him down that path. I look forward to him thriving in an Irish football environment and asking the Taoiseach for the necessary support, rather than Mr Deputy Speaker.

I want to make a point about the gall of the Premier League lobbying us yesterday, saying that all these matters should be left to the free market. What kind of free market is it when at least three premiership teams are owned by foreign countries? Some are more thinly veiled than others, but there are three foreign countries in the premier league right now, and what countries! They are not countries that would be allowed to buy The Daily Telegraph, but they are allowed to buy top blue-chip football clubs in England. What is local about that? Why would we allow foreign states to buy pieces of our national treasure that are also of extraordinary importance to local communities?

I was just talking about the funereal atmosphere there was when it looked like Rochdale AFC, having fallen out of the league into the national league, might go out of business altogether. Hopefully, that problem has been at least partially resolved.

[Rehman Chishti]

I remember many great matches between the wonderful teams of Rochdale and Gillingham in the lower leagues. In 1999, Gillingham were playing Manchester City in the Wembley play-offs for the second division, and now Manchester City are in the premiership. The hon. Gentleman’s point is absolutely right: the success of football clubs should not be down to the investment of foreign countries. It should be about regulated investment in smaller clubs such as Gillingham and Rochdale, enabling them to go up, rather than relying on the investment of international sovereign wealth funds in our football league. He is absolutely right that the Premier League has a role and responsibility to support smaller clubs.

[George Galloway]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman, who has made a very important point. As Members can imagine, we in the Workers party want to save football for the workers: for the working class who gave it birth and were its mainstay for many, many decades—for a century—before the premiership even existed, and who are now priced out of the game. It now costs £60 to attend a premiership match. For a man and wife going, it costs £120. A woman and her son, with a burger and a cup of Bovril thrown in, are spending £100 to go to a football match—all to fund the fantastic profits that are being made in the premiership.

I declare an interest: I have three sons in youth football, all of whom I think have the capacity to make it. I will be their agent, so that is a future pecuniary interest. My sons are playing not on plastic pitches, which were disparagingly referred to earlier, but on grass that has not been cut all year, with humps and bumps and hills and hollows. By definition, a pyramid has a very, very large bottom, and that bottom is where we need to filter the money—not to agents, not to premiership players on half a million pounds a week. I am not making that number up. Some players get half a million pounds a week for playing—looking at Manchester United at the weekend—not very well or even very energetically at all. Football is in a terrible state.

The Workers party has a policy. I do not have time to discuss it, but I commend it to the House. Our policy on football is this: we believe not in fans having a golden share, though that would be a big step forward, but in fan ownership of football clubs—[Interruption.] I see some scoffing, and to those who scoff I say that German football is fan-owned. The great Bayern Munich, the next champions of Europe—who have won the championship of Europe 10 times, I think—are 51% supporter-owned. Borussia Dortmund, another power in Germany, are 78% fan-owned. Would not that solution end the problem of foreign states or these rum foreigners buying our top clubs? Johnny Foreigner has been mentioned several times. They live outside our borders, cannot be reached by sanctions and walk away from fines. Would not this solve that problem? Of course, we also have our own rum owners from our own land who own football clubs and run them into the ground. If the fans owned the team, would not that be a better solution?

Someone said that Parliament should not be regulating whether there are replays on a Wednesday. Why not? If it is the people’s game and we are the people’s representatives, we are absolutely entitled to have a view on the cheating of lower division supporters of the chance to take a big premiership club to a lucrative replay. We have every right to be outraged by that. If the Football Association is listening to this debate, we should tell it that it will be forced to reinstate replays. If not now, then soon.

My final points concern the two teams with which I am most closely associated: Glasgow Celtic in Scotland and Manchester United in England. Manchester United have foreign owners who have looted the club of billions of pounds. They did not even buy the club. They bought it, then borrowed against the club’s assets to cover the money that they paid to buy it, and they have paid themselves a king’s ransom in dividends. The Glazers must go—that is the feeling of 99.9% of Manchester United supporters—but how can we make them go? Well, we got rid of Celtic’s board. I was one of the proud members of the Sack the Board campaign and my good friend Brian Dempsey led it. We sacked the board by popular pressure, and popular pressure will have to be maintained on the robber barons from New York, the Glazers, before they destroy Manchester United altogether.

Online Safety Bill

Rehman Chishti Excerpts

Report stage
Monday 5th December 2022 Commons Chamber

[Paul Scully]

It is important that we tackle this in a number of ways. My right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis) and I spoke earlier, and I will come to some of what he will outline. It is important that Ofcom recognises the technologies that are available and—with the Children’s Commissioner as one of the statutory consultees—liaises with the social media platforms, and the agencies, to ensure that there are codes of practice that work, and that we get this absolutely right. It is about enforcing the terms and conditions of the companies and being able to produce the evidence and track the exchanges, as I will outline later, for the agency to use for enforcement.

With the rapid developments in technology, on occasions there will be no existing accredited technology available that will satisfactorily mitigate the risks. Similarly, tech companies might be able to better design solutions that integrate more easily with their services than those that are already accredited. The new regulatory framework must incentivise tech companies to ensure that their safety measures keep pace with the evolving threat, and that they design their services to be safe from the outset. It is for these reasons that the Government have tabled the amendments that we are discussing.

New clauses 11 and 12 establish options for Ofcom when deploying its powers under notices to deal with terrorism content and CSEA content. These notices will empower Ofcom to require companies to use accredited technology to identify and remove illegal terrorism and CSEA content or to prevent users from encountering that content or, crucially, to use their best endeavours to develop or to source technology to tackle CSEA. That strikes the right balance of supporting the adoption of new technology, while ensuring that it does not come at the expense of children’s physical safety.

[Rehman Chishti (Gillingham and Rainham) (Con)]

Terrorism is often linked to non-violent extremism, which feeds into violent extremism and terrorism. How does the Bill define extremism? Previous Governments failed to define it, although it is often linked to terrorism.

[Paul Scully]

This Bill links with other legislation, and obviously the agencies. We do not seek to redefine extremism where those definitions already exist. As we expand on the changes that we are making, we will first ensure that anything that is already illegal goes off the table. Anything that is against the terms and conditions of those platforms that are hosting that content must not be seen. I will come to the safety net and user protection later.

Oral Answers to Questions

Rehman Chishti Excerpts

Thursday 1st November 2018 Commons Chamber

[The Solicitor General]

The hon. Lady knows police funding is a question for an announcement in December and the forthcoming spending review next year. I reassure her that the number of flagged referrals on domestic abuse from the police is remaining steady at about 110,000 in the past two years. As I have said, the number and rate of prosecutions continues to rise. We have seen a rise of over 50% in domestic abuse prosecutions in the past 10 years.

[Rehman Chishti (Gillingham and Rainham) (Con)]

6. What steps the Crown Prosecution Service is taking to increase the rate of successful prosecutions for terrorism.

[The Attorney General (Mr Geoffrey Cox)]

The counter-terrorism division of the Crown Prosecution Service is one of the great successes of that organisation. It has an excellent reputation both at home and abroad. In its recent work, it has doubled in size and doubled the number of convictions. The CPS works closely with police and partners to help to implement the Government’s counter-terrorism strategy.

[Rehman Chishti]

I thank the Attorney General for that answer. As a member of the Home Affairs Committee, I understand that there are 500 live operations concerning 3,000 individuals of interest and a further 20,000 individuals who have been investigated under terrorism-related incidents. Can the Attorney General clarify and confirm that the CPS has adequate resources and the expertise to deal with these matters effectively?

[The Attorney General]

I meet the Director of Public Prosecutions regularly, and counter-terrorism is one of those things upon which we focus most closely. I have also met the head of the terrorism division, Deborah Walsh. This is a well-led, well-resourced division. Its prosecution and conviction rate is of the highest in the CPS. I am confident that it has the resources, and if it needs more, we will find them. This is a national priority.

Oral Answers to Questions

Rehman Chishti Excerpts

Thursday 16th November 2017 Commons Chamber

[Tracey Crouch]

It has been well reported that there has been a decline in the receipts of the national lottery, and it is something that we are looking at. However, we still expect returns to good causes of the national lottery to be in the region of £1.6 billion, much of which will be distributed across the nation, including the constituency of the hon. Gentleman.

[Rehman Chishti (Gillingham and Rainham) (Con)]

Following the statement by the Prime Minister on 17 June, the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport gave £1.5 million to Mind to support our emergency services. That was much appreciated. Will she look at increasing that funding going forward?

[Karen Bradley]

I will look closely at what my hon. Friend says. Perhaps we could have a discussion outside this Chamber.