Economic Activity of Public Bodies (Overseas Matters) Bill

Richard Burgon Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 3rd July 2023 Commons Chamber

[Richard Burgon (Leeds East) (Lab)]

Three decades ago, Margaret Thatcher said that the ANC was a “typical terrorist organisation”, adding

“Anyone who thinks it is going to run the government in South Africa is living in cloud-cuckoo land”.

History proved her wrong on that, but that history was shaped by the determined efforts of people worldwide, including millions in this country and many local governments, to boycott South Africa. The lesson is clear: Governments are not always right; Governments do not always make moral decisions; Governments do not always act in line with the wishes of the population, but through the democratic process, millions of people can effect change. This Bill ignores that lesson. It shuts down the freedom of people to exercise a key democratic right. It is just another example of this Government’s anti-democratic crackdown, with restrictions on the right to vote, the right to protest and the right to strike.

Labour’s reasoned amendment, which declines to give the Bill a Second Reading and which I will be supporting, makes the case clearly about the many deep flaws in the Bill, as did the shadow Secretary of State in her response. In summary, the Bill is a huge attack on the concept of ethical investment and procurement by preventing public bodies from being influenced by “political or moral disapproval” of the actions of any foreign state. The Government claim that boycott and divestment will still be possible, but just not where it

“relates specifically or mainly to a particular foreign territory”.

That simply does not wash.

Almost all cases of companies engaging in human, labour or environmental abuses have a territorial element. If we are talking about divesting in companies that cut down the rainforest, for example, that activity will obviously take place in areas with rainforests, and certain countries would be targeted by campaigns. This Bill even bans public bodies from saying they would support such boycotts were it legal to do so. It is a gagging Bill that breaches freedom of speech and would prevent a local councillor in hustings debates or other public forums from giving their political view.

This Bill also has chilling elements in how it will be enforced, including potentially huge fines and far-reaching information compliance notices. The aim is clear: to put so much fear into public bodies of ending up in court that they do not just act within the law, but go beyond it in an effort to reduce that risk. As legal advice provided to the Labour party makes clear, this Bill would be likely to place the UK

“in breach of international law obligations”

and

“effectively equates the Occupied Palestinian Territories with Israel itself and is very difficult to reconcile with the long-standing position of the United Kingdom which supports a ‘two-state solution’ based on ‘1967 lines’ in which the security and right to self-determination of both Israelis and Palestinians are protected.”

I am afraid that I do not have any faith in the exemptions listed in the Bill at schedule 3. Just as apartheid was legal in South Africa, much environmental destruction takes place entirely legally. The very fact that something is illegal is often the rationale for a boycott and divestments campaign in the first place. Many people in the discussion today and around this Bill have mentioned boycotts—not just those relating to illegal settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, where we have seen terrible scenes today in Jenin, but arms boycotts against Saudi Arabia over its war crimes in Yemen, boycotts in Colombia over its past treatment of trade unionists, and commercial boycotts of goods relating to the treatment of the Uyghurs in China or the Rohingya in Myanmar. It is not for us to decide which countries people are allowed to boycott—that is a huge curtailment of basic freedom. We need to maintain the democratic rights of people to challenge Government policy through boycotts and divestment, if that is their wish.

To conclude, the Bill has faced widespread civil society opposition, including from the Quakers and the Methodists, the Muslim Association of Britain, Friends of the Earth, the Union of Jewish Students, the TUC, Unite the union, Unison and the directors of 14 Israeli civil society and human rights organisations, as well as Human Rights Watch, Liberty and Amnesty, whose own legal ruling suggests that the Bill would be illegal. Not all those groups support boycotts, but they do support the right for people to boycott. That is what we are voting on today. We cannot allow the Government to scrap this cherished democratic right.