Safe Streets for All

Stuart C McDonald Excerpts

Monday 17th May 2021 Commons Chamber

[Stuart C. McDonald (Cumbernauld, Kilsyth and Kirkintilloch East) (SNP) [V]]

It is a pleasure to take part in this debate, albeit remotely. However, much of what is proposed in the Queen’s Speech is more about protecting this Government and their Ministers than about protecting the public. It includes rolling back the power of our courts to halt unlawful Government action, a clampdown on protest, ripping up the refugee convention and measures tantamount to voter suppression.

Yet when it comes to the big problems that we need to address to keep people safe, key questions are completely ducked. In particular, as we approach its 50th anniversary, there was not so much as a glimmer of hope that the Government might look again at the hopelessly dated Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 and the utterly failed war on drugs. In reality, if we want safe streets, the Conservative party is the last place we should turn. Its relentless austerity obsession has hit policing, courts and prisons hard, and its Brexit obsession has excluded us from vital European justice and security measures, such as the Schengen information system II. On the contrary, it is this Government that we need to be kept safe from, as they seek to strip us of our rights and civil liberties. This is not a party of law and order, but a party that undermines the rule of law.

On Thursday, the Home Office was endangering the citizens of Glasgow with its stubborn, totally disproportionate and utterly intransigent attempt to dawn-raid two neighbours from Kenmure Street, despite it being absolutely apparent that it was never going to be able to effect that, thanks to the determined and peaceful community resistance. The timing and location of the raid, as well as the secrecy around it, were at best staggeringly insensitive and at worst deliberately provocative. It was a striking, but far from isolated, example of the Home Office at its aggressive worst, and light years away from the reformed institution that we have repeatedly been promised since Windrush. If the Home Office has listened and learned from those events, it will undertake no immigration enforcement activity in Glasgow without the express and advance knowledge of Police Scotland. Critically, such activity must be contemplated only if strictly and genuinely necessary for reasons of public safety, and if all alternatives have been exhausted.

The whole direction of travel indicated by this Queen’s Speech is deeply troubling, but it continues the trend of the past decade. Charities have been gagged from criticising the Government. The grave restrictions to legal aid introduced in 2012 continue to threaten access to justice and undermine the rule of law in England and Wales. We have lost the valuable rights and protections that we had as EU citizens. Human rights remain in the Government’s crosshairs, and now even the right to vote is to be undermined in moves that soon-to-be Baroness Ruth Davidson recently described as

“a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist”

and “for the birds”—indeed, she used some stronger terminology that I suspect is not parliamentary.

The policing Bill will see protest clamped down on, based on an obscure Law Commission consultation that barely achieved a double-digit response and did not make reference to protest a single time. Whereas previously we could look to the courts to protect Parliament against Prorogation and people against the Government overreaching legality—something the Home Office has a particularly bad track record on—the Government are now going after the courts and judges too, with their attack on judicial review.

This Queen’s Speech is spectacularly troubling and illustrates everything that is wrong with the broken British constitution, in which outdated notions of parliamentary supremacy mean that there is no such thing as protected rights, and an archaic Westminster system in which nothing is safe from a Government-stacked Parliament interested only in entrenching Government power.

In 2021, there are two incredibly significant anniversaries in the sphere of home affairs, which highlight everything that is wrong with what the Home Office is doing and failing to do. I refer to the refugee convention, which is approaching its 70th birthday, and the Misuse of Drugs Act, which is approach its 50th. First, on the Bill that will trash the refugee convention—what a contrast with the cross-party legislation that saw refugees voting in the Scottish Parliament election a little over a week ago—the Home Secretary seems determined to ride a coach and horses through long-established principles of international refugee law that have stood the test of time. She wants to raise the standard of proof required of asylum seekers above that set out in the convention, despite the incredible challenges of evidencing persecution in the country the asylum seeker has had to flee.

Instead of being granted refugee status, those accepted as being at risk of persecution will face a life in limbo for up to 10 years, with family reunion rights restricted, and will be left to languish without recourse to public funds. The less fortunate will already have been removed to an apparently unrestricted list of countries to have their claim assessed there, with no consideration of the risk of onward removal to a country of persecution. Many more will have to await decisions not in dispersed community accommodation but in horrendous institutional venues along the lines of Penally and Napier barracks. Surely the Home Secretary will have thought twice about that, given the shocking outcome of her deliberate decision to cram people into dormitory accommodation at the height of the pandemic, totally against the public health advice she was offered. She put people at risk and hundreds fell ill, but far from being apologetic, she appears to be doubling down.

The Home Secretary talks about clamping down on people smugglers, but the proposals have nothing to do with people smugglers. This is clamping down on refugees themselves and punishing victims of persecution because of how they arrived in the UK, making an example of them, making them miserable and ruining their life chances in an attempt to discourage others from following. It will not work, it will put the system under greater strain and it is utterly immoral. If every Government took the same pass-the-buck approach as this one, the international system of refugee protection would break down entirely. So I plead with Conservative MPs—sensible Conservative MPs—to persuade the Home Secretary to think again. If not, please stop talking about Britain’s proud history of welcoming refugees, because she will have trashed that history, along with the refugee convention.

If that is a disastrous proposal in this speech, the disastrous error of omission is the failure to reform the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 or even just acknowledge that review of it is urgent and essential. We are less than a fortnight away from that piece of legislation reaching its 50th birthday. The nature of the drugs trade and drug use has changed dramatically over that time, as has our understanding of it, but our legislative approach is stuck in the past. Across the UK more than 3 million people have taken drugs in the past year, and almost 30,000 young people have been drawn into drug-related gangs. Drug-related deaths are at record levels. Our most deprived communities are suffering most. The Government know all that but resist the required fundamental change in approach. Yes, there is important work to be done through investing in treatment and addressing the underlying issues that have led to drug use in the first place, but it can never be the complete answer while that out-of-date legislation remains in place. International best practice shows that there is a better way.

That international best practice has informed cross-party Committees, including the Select Committee on Health and Social Care and the Select Committee on Scottish Affairs, calling for the Act to be reviewed and reformed. Both are clear: responsibility and policy should lie with the Department of Health and Social Care, not the Home Office. This needs a singular, focused, public health approach. Both say that safe drug consumption rooms should be implemented or at least piloted. They save lives and reduce harm; they assist in ensuring that those who need it most can access support and treatment; and they protect the public from antisocial and dangerous public injection and drug-related litter. Both Committees also say that there should at least be consultation about the decriminalisation of possession, because the international evidence shows that it leads to less problematic drug use and less harm as a result. These reductions flow from not just international best practice, but the experiences and insights of those working on the frontline here in the UK and it is a tragedy that the Government will not even debate this. Sensible voices from all parts of the House must push the Government to think again.

In conclusion, the Government’s failure to think again is all too typical of Home Office policymaking under the Conservatives, as exemplified by the Queen’s Speech. This is not policy based on evidence or best practice; it is a rehash of failed policies from the past. Nor is it policy that reflects the values or interests of this country; it is head-in-the-sand policy that helps only the drugs pushers and people smugglers. Nor is it policy in the long-term interests of the UK, never mind Scotland; rather, it serves the perceived short-term political interests of the Home Secretary and her Government. That is why we regret very much what is in the Queen’s Speech and what is strikingly absent from it.