Speaker’s Statement: New Zealand Terror Attacks Debate

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Department: Home Office

Speaker’s Statement: New Zealand Terror Attacks

Wes Streeting Excerpts
Friday 15th March 2019

(5 years ago)

Commons Chamber
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John Bercow Portrait Mr Speaker
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I thank the Minister for the clarity and passion with which he has addressed the House. Colleagues will not be surprised to know that I intend to write to my opposite number in New Zealand, and I know that I will be able to do so conveying the sympathies of the House and the collective outrage of the House at this bestial slaughter.

Wes Streeting Portrait Wes Streeting (Ilford North) (Lab)
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As the co-chair of the all-party parliamentary group on British Muslims, I thank you, Mr Speaker, for what you have just said. I also thank, most deeply and sincerely, the Security Minister for what he said about reassuring our own Muslim community in this country. Any of us who understand the Muslim community will understand why what has happened in Christchurch will be felt deeply by Muslims in this country and right across the world, but we do not have to be Muslim to understand their loss, and their sense of grief and fear; we just have to be fully paid-up members of the human race.

Mr Speaker, I warmly endorse what you and the Security Minister have said. Through you, may I express our solidarity with the Prime Minister of New Zealand, all the people of New Zealand and Muslims right across the world? In the wake of Islamophobia and anti-Muslim prejudice not just in this country but right across the world, let us say plainly and simply that we are not blind to what is going on; we have been here before on many different fronts and in the face of many different types of prejudice.

Let me also say, I think on behalf of the whole House, to the people of New Zealand: you are not alone in confronting hatred and prejudice. We understand what happens when people are bystanders to hatred and prejudice, so we walk alongside you and with you. Being a good ally is not just knowing when to stand with or beside you; sometimes it is knowing when to stand in front of you, when there is a battle to be fought.

It is time for all of us in this House, across the country and around the world to think about the hatred and prejudice facing not only Muslims but lots of minorities, and to understand what it genuinely means to be an ally and never to be a bystander. As we have seen painfully in Christchurch, this is where hatred and prejudice lead, but this is not necessarily how it needs to end.

John Bercow Portrait Mr Speaker
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This poisonous barbarity will not prevail; I think we are all clear about that. I deeply appreciate the words of the Minister and the hon. Member for Ilford North (Wes Streeting). In saying what they have said, and doing so in the way in which they have, they have spoken for millions—if not hundreds of millions—of people around the world. I think colleagues will understand that there is a particular piquancy about me calling the hon. Member for Christchurch (Sir Christopher Chope).