Oral Answers to Questions

Steve McCabe Excerpts

Thursday 14th January 2016 Commons Chamber

[Liz McInnes (Heywood and Middleton) (Lab)]

7. What steps she is taking to tackle misogynist bullying on social media.

[Steve McCabe (Birmingham, Selly Oak) (Lab)]

14. What steps she is taking to tackle misogynist bullying on social media.

[The Minister for Women and Equalities (Nicky Morgan)]

Bullying of any kind, whether online or offline, is absolutely unacceptable. There is also no place for misogyny or trolling in our society. My Department has set up the Stop Online Abuse website to provide women and LGBT adults with practical advice on how to recognise abuse, including on social media. I also want to echo the welcome for the report from the Women and Equalities Select Committee on transgender equality, which was published today. It makes specific recommendations for addressing online safety and the treatment of transgender people, which we will take very seriously.

[Nicky Morgan]

I and other Ministers, including my hon. Friend the Minister for Culture and the Digital Economy speak to social media providers all the time about these issues. I welcome the recent statement from a Twitter director saying that it thought it was doing better on dealing with trolls, but I think it recognised that it needed to do more.

I hope that the hon. Lady will also recognise that there are issues closer to home. She will remember the statement made by her own party leader at her party’s conference last autumn, when he had to appeal to activists. He said:

“I say to all activists, whether Labour or not, cut out the personal attacks, the cyber bullying and especially the misogynistic abuse online”.

I hope that the hon. Lady will tackle her own party in regard to this issue.

[Steve McCabe]

Will the Secretary of State tell us what evidence there is of improved data collection to give us the true scale of this abuse? What evidence is there that police officers up and down the country are receiving appropriate training to enable them to identify and deal with the perpetrators of the abuse?

[Nicky Morgan]

I will have to come back to the hon. Gentleman on the question of data collection, which I am happy to do. I suspect that some organisations are better than others. I mentioned the revenge porn helpline earlier, which clearly is monitoring and keeping data. We want to evaluate such data one year on, in February or March of this year. I have already said that what is illegal offline is also illegal online, and that has been made very clear to all police forces up and down the country. We continue to make that case to them.

Serious Crime Bill [Lords]

Steve McCabe Excerpts

Monday 23rd February 2015 Commons Chamber

[Sir Paul Beresford (Mole Valley) (Con)]

The Sexual Offences Act 2003 greatly strengthened the legislation that deals with paedophiles. Year by year, some of us have used various Home Office Bills to put little baubles and bangles on it and there has been a huge number of changes. One result has been that persistent predatory paedophiles in this country have often moved overseas. Many of them moved to south-east Asia until the south-east Asian nations tightened up and now many of them are moving to Brazil. I have a particular interest in the situation in Brazil.

Some of the ammunition has come from the fact that much of our paedophile legislation is extraterritorial, so when individuals from this country go to other countries, do their dastardly deeds and come back, we are able to deal with them under our legislation when we have the evidence, perhaps provided directly by the security or police forces in the other countries. The effect of that has been a move away from south-east Asia, mainly to places such as Brazil. People are picking on Brazil because of the big sports events. We saw that recently with the World cup. A group in my constituency has been fighting for street children and it had a big campaign called “It’s a penalty”. It explained to people from this country who were flying to Brazil that if they had sex with children out there, they could be prosecuted here.

In Committee, Members on both sides were congratulating ourselves on getting two new offences on contact with a child and on predatory paedophile manuals. In the middle of all that, one of us suddenly noticed that we were taking away the extraterritorial aspect of both offences. Not too surprisingly, there was a faint squawk.

We have had a decent response on one issue. Amendment 10 will bring back the extraterritorial aspect for contact with a child, but not for predatory paedophile manuals, as I brought to the attention of Front Benchers. If we are going to prosecute individuals in this country because they have predatory paedophile manuals, why should we not penetrate overseas to catch them doing exactly the same thing? Logic tells me that if it is good enough to do it here, it is good enough to apply it to predatory paedophiles in other countries. That has been very successful with other bits of legislation. However, it was indicated clearly in the opening speech that it will not apply to this provision.

It is probably pointless to push the Solicitor-General on that issue at this point. [Interruption.] He is nodding with a smile on his face, which is not particularly helpful. I would love to push the issue, but I will not. However, I will reflect on where I have made mistakes between Committee stage and this stage, gather my ammunition and knock on his door as I move on to ten-minute rule Bills and the next Home Office Bill to try to add it. For tonight, I am sitting tight, but the warning is there: I will be back.

[Steve McCabe (Birmingham, Selly Oak) (Lab)]

I will concentrate on new clause 17. I assume that the Solicitor-General will not accept the proposal, but I hope he will tell the House where he is with the 12-week consultation. I join the right hon. Member for Chesham and Amersham (Mrs Gillan) in asking that we try to hammer out a sensible agreement on the issue—preferably between all parties and before the election—so that we get something done in the interests of children.

I assume that most of us here want children to be protected and that the vast majority of decent people who choose to work with children want to protect them. However, I do not want people to be driven into some kind of defensive posture whereby they are more concerned about protecting themselves than using their professional judgment because of a badly framed mandatory reporting rule. No one who has looked at Rotherham or at any of the other scandals can fail to have a sense of revulsion at those senior staff who turned a blind eye, those who did not want to know when they should have been asking serious questions of the more junior staff, and those who blamed the victims whom they should have been protecting.

We need a measure of mandatory reporting that prevents people from evading their responsibilities, and ensures that there is no, “I didn’t know; they didn’t tell me” get-out clause, and no opportunity for institutions or individuals to view reputational damage as an excuse to sweep things under the carpet. That kind of mandatory reporting could be useful in helping the rest of us to protect children. I therefore hope that the Minister will tell the House what his intentions are and where he is with the consultation and that, in the spirit of cross-party support, he will consider the offer from me and the right hon. Member for Chesham and Amersham.

[Mr Speaker]

The hon. Gentleman finished just before I expected him to and the Minister will now wind up this group of amendments. There has been considerable demand to contribute to the separate groupings, so perhaps I can say publicly what I would otherwise have said privately, namely that if the Minister is able to wind up on behalf of the Government so that it is possible for us to move on by 7 o’clock—perhaps even earlier—we will dance round the mulberry bush in joyous appreciation of his efforts.

Voting by Prisoners

Steve McCabe Excerpts

Thursday 10th February 2011 Commons Chamber

[Steve McCabe (Birmingham, Selly Oak) (Lab)]

May I first apologise for missing the start of the debate? I was serving on a Public Bill Committee upstairs.

I am not a lawyer. I am just a humble Back Bencher doing his best to represent his constituents in the place where, as I understood it, our laws are determined. I should say at the outset that I am not opposed the human rights agenda or against the Human Rights Act 1998, and I have no desire for us to withdraw from the European convention on human rights. However, I am not at all convinced that the Court in Strasbourg has the authority to intervene in the way that it is seeking to intervene in this matter. I doubt very much that that is what people intended, or thought we were signing up to, when we originally associated ourselves with the convention.

The convention was born as a result of terrible events in Europe in which real human rights issues came to the fore, and we were trying to create fundamental safeguards, such as the right to life, freedom from torture and the right to express one’s opinions. Those are different rights from prisoners’ right to vote, and it does the former a disservice to associate the two things and to talk about them as if they are the same.

Like one or two other hon. Members, I received a communication from the director of the Prison Reform Trust, who is quite rightly seeking to advance her view. She said in that communication that quite a lot of people who are in favour of rights for prisoners had contacted her, including a number of prison governors. Not a lot of people contacted me to argue for rights for prisoners, but I undertook a consultation in my constituency. Most of those who responded opposed the proposal to give prisoners such rights.

[Mr Dodds]

rose—

[Heather Wheeler (South Derbyshire) (Con)]

rose—

[Steve McCabe]

I am spoilt for choice. I give way to the hon. Lady.

[Heather Wheeler]

I am sure that in his many years in the House, the hon. Gentleman has visited prisons, so is he surprised to hear that when I visited a prison in South Derbyshire, I was asked by not one inmate whether I could please give them the vote?

--- Later in debate ---

[Steve McCabe]

No, I am not surprised to hear that. I do not think that a prisoner has ever contacted me to ask for the right to vote. Like others have said, I think that prison should be there to safeguard the public, that those who go to prison should lose freedoms as a punishment, and that there should be an opportunity for reform.

I want to talk about the people who work in prisons. I do not know whether it is true that prison governors have been contacting the director of the Prison Reform Trust and urging this on her. However, we all need to recognise that there is a problem in our prisons. For me, the people who work in prisons would be better off concentrating on some of the basics. When they have the chance, they should do something about the number of prisoners who cannot read and write, and they should work with people who need help with personal and social skills, and those who could develop some training or work skills. Furthermore, it is utterly absurd that someone can enter prison and have easier access to drugs than on the outside. My advice to people who work in prisons is to associate themselves with those issues and get them right, and if, while doing that, they want to put in place citizenship courses that might include helping people to understand how to vote and participate, I would be in favour of that as well.

As the hon. Member for Bury St Edmunds (Mr Ruffley) indicated, the problem is that the public believe that people such as Mr Hirst are having a laugh at us, which is why they are opposed to this. I do not know where the evidence is—I have not seen any, although I am not saying that it exists—that these prisoners, when they were on the outside and had the opportunity to vote actually exercised that right. I am not clear, therefore, that in the majority of cases it is a right of which they are being deprived. I am one of those who struggle with the idea of police and crime commissioners being elected. I find that slightly absurd.

Someone said earlier that prisoners would be registered at their home addresses. That may be the case, and I hope that it is true, because I think that there is research showing that at least six seats in this Parliament could have changed hands if prisoners had been registered at a prison address. What would happen if they were not on the electoral register at their home address before they went into prison? Again, I have doubts about whether that is the right way forward.

Finally, I want to touch on the issue of compensation. I am sorry that we are not going to vote on the amendment tabled by the hon. Member for St Albans (Mrs Main).

[Mr Tom Harris (Glasgow South) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend might like to know about the revelation in this morning’s papers that the odious individual referred to in the debate—Mr Hirst—has seen the light and become a member of the Liberal Democrats.

[Steve McCabe]

Well, it is Liberal Democrat policy to give votes to prisoners, so I suppose that that makes a certain sort of sense.

We have to make it clear that we are not prepared to allow compensation. However, if these people do manage, with the help of all these wonderful lawyers, to claim compensation, would it be beyond the wit of the House to help their victims and families to claim part of that new-found wealth as part of the compensation for the distress that they have suffered? That would be a much better use of our time, the courts’ time and taxpayers’ money.

Ian Tomlinson

Steve McCabe Excerpts

Monday 26th July 2010 Commons Chamber

[The Attorney-General]

So far as affray is concerned, I am not aware of whether it was considered, and it does not immediately spring to mind as appropriately reflecting what happened in the case. So far as misconduct in public office is concerned, the matter can be looked at, but the test for misconduct in public office is quite clear: it should not be used as a substitute to get around a substantive offence being brought. For those reasons, the CPS took the view that misconduct in public office was not an appropriate charge to bring, and in that it is certainly backed by all precedent.

[Steve McCabe (Birmingham, Selly Oak) (Lab)]

Is it true that the coroner, Professor Paul Matthews, refused to allow two IPCC investigators to attend the first post-mortem and failed to advise Mr Tomlinson’s family about their rights in relation to the second post-mortem? If so, how can any of us have any confidence in his ability to conduct an inquest that will have such a crucial bearing on any future decision by the CPS?

[The Attorney-General]

As to the latter point about the family, I am not in a position to comment. As to the first, on whether the coroner insisted that a post- mortem go ahead with Dr Patel only, I think that I am in a position to confirm that that is what he did.