EU Referendum: Race Hate Crime

Yasmin Qureshi Excerpts

Tuesday 5th July 2016 Commons Chamber

[Yasmin Qureshi (Bolton South East) (Lab)]

I want to make it clear that this Adjournment debate is not about people who voted to leave. Many good people voted to leave, as they believed we will be better off out of the European Union. Today’s debate is about the rhetoric and images used by some in the leave campaign.

Growing up as the child of Pakistani immigrants in the 1970s, I frequently received abuse such as “Go back to your country” or “You smell of curry.” Often, the words I heard were, “Go back home.” The words stung because they implied that I did not truly belong in this country. Growing up, this taunt haunted many of my generation and others as well. Words such as “Paki” and signs on doors saying, “No blacks, no Irish, no dogs” still haunt many of us.

If we fast-forward to 2016, it feels like nothing has changed. I still receive abuse, and it is not just racially motivated. I have frequently been subjected to rape and death threats online—often I am told I should be sent to Saudi Arabia to be raped and lynched—but I will not be frightened off, despite the fact that I am one of those MPs who regularly hold drop-in surgeries in my constituency and I have no idea who will come to see me. These people will not prevent me from carrying on connecting with my constituents and giving them the best service I can.

[Karl Turner (Kingston upon Hull East) (Lab)]

I have been contacted by my constituent Leroy Vickers, who describes four very serious incidents of racially aggravated offences. He says that in the past two days he has witnessed a man on a bus telling a passenger, “Get off the bus, Paki”, witnessed racially aggravated abuse in a takeaway, and heard a man of Jamaican descent say that for the first time since he was about five or six he is hearing the N word used regularly. What does my hon. Friend say to that?

[Yasmin Qureshi]

That is also the experience of so many of the constituents and other people who have written to me. That is why I am very grateful that I managed to get this Adjournment debate.

We have had words such as, “Go home, Polish vermin”, posted through the letterboxes of Polish residents in Cambridgeshire; heard of young Muslim school girls being cornered and intimidated, with people saying, “Get out, we voted leave” and “I can even give you a suitcase”; and seen signs in Newcastle urging the Government, “Stop immigration and start repatriation”, with words such as “This is England, we are white, get out of my country”.

[Stephen Doughty (Cardiff South and Penarth) (Lab/Co-op)]

My hon. Friend is making some strong, powerful and deeply disturbing points. Does she agree, though, that it is not just in the context of the referendum that we have seen hate crime increasing? I saw this horror in last year’s general election. In just one street in my constituency, somebody told me that that they would not vote Labour because all we did was support the N word, another person pointed to a black woman in the street and told her she should go home, another told me that gay people should be killed and sent to hell, there was a race hate attack in a fish and chip shop at the end of the road, and somebody said that we needed to stand up against the Jews. That was all in one street. Does she agree that this has been going on for some time? It has been a problem in the referendum, but it has been coming for a while.

[Yasmin Qureshi]

I absolutely agree. Later in my speech I will deal with fact that this has been going on for some time.

Since last week, I have been inundated with emails, tweets and messages detailing hundreds of horrific incidents that have taken place. I understand that since last Friday, True Vision, the Government website to combat hate crime, has recorded a fivefold increase in reports to the police from the public, with 331 incidents since the day the referendum was held. The weekly average used to be 63 reports. In my own region, Greater Manchester, there has been a 50% increase in the number of hate crimes reported in the past week. There has been a very famous incident on YouTube showing an American professor who was abused by people.

[Keith Vaz (Leicester East) (Lab)]

May I wish my hon. Friend a very happy birthday? She is obviously a very dedicated Member of this House to be spending this evening here with us discussing these events rather than celebrating her birthday.

May I also say how much I agree with what my hon. Friend has said? I have just received a letter from the Metropolitan Police Commissioner telling me that the number of hate crimes in London has gone up from 20 a day to 60—a huge increase. Does she agree that it is very important that there is consistency among all the police forces—in Lancashire, in the Met—in dealing with this problem?

[Yasmin Qureshi]

I absolutely agree. We need consistency throughout the country in how these cases are dealt with. I thank my right hon. Friend for remembering my birthday.

Many here will know or remember that on 15 February 1971 Enoch Powell stood up to speak at Carshalton and Barnstead Young Conservatives club in Surrey. It was three years since he had made his incendiary “rivers of blood” speech, and now he was returning to the subject of immigration. Mass immigration, Powell claimed, led to the native British seeing their towns

“changed, their native places turned into foreign lands, and themselves displaced as if by a systematic colonisation.”

Three members of the shadow Cabinet threatened to resign unless Mr Powell was sacked. Mr Heath dismissed him.

I, like many other Members, was horrified by the return of such language during the recent referendum. I felt revulsion—I am sure many others did too—on seeing the image of Mr Farage proudly unveiling his “breaking point” poster, featuring Syrian refugees, a week before the referendum. It was the visual equivalent of the “rivers of blood” speech. The poster shows a crowd flowing towards us—face after face, an apparently unending human tide. The nearest faces are in sharp focus, the furthest a blur of strangers. Even though they are human beings, they seem to be aliens.

Nigel Farage and the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Mr Duncan Smith) frequently made false claims that immigration, not austerity, is the reason that health, social care and schools are under pressure, fostering the myth that immigrants drain our resources rather than enhance them.

That is scaremongering in its most extreme and vile form. The leave campaign played on people’s genuine fears about poverty, unemployment and deprivation, especially in areas facing generational unemployment that have long been neglected for the past 20 to 30 years. Immigration is not the cause of social inequality, and such scaremongering does not and will not address the root causes of the problems faced by so many. It is successive Governments who have failed to deal with the issue of social and economic inequality. The gap between the rich and the poor is now even bigger, and five families in the United Kingdom own some 20% of the UK’s wealth. The issues that need to be addressed—such as eradicating poverty and providing equal opportunities—are not being tackled. Immigrants are accused of being the cause of all that and they are used as a natural target—that is what Vote Leave campaigners campaigned on.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

As one of the 17.4 million people who voted to leave, I totally and wholeheartedly condemn the attacks. Immigrants who come to my constituency of Strangford get employment and jobs, and they get married and buy houses. I acknowledge the valuable contribution they make. Whatever hate crimes have been carried out, they have not been carried out in my name or in those of the 17.4 million people who voted leave.

[Yasmin Qureshi]

I entirely agree with the hon. Gentleman. That is why I said when I started my speech that this is not about leaving or about people who voted to leave; as I said, many of them had very good reasons for doing so. I am talking about some of the people who led the campaign.

Mr Powell foresaw an unchecked inflow of black immigrants creating civil war. The UKIP poster told us absolutely the same thing about the people headed our way, it claimed, “across borderless Europe”. The tide of faces sums up exactly the same image as the swarms and rivers and hordes of otherness and racial difference that Powell spoke against in 1968 and that so many others—the National Front and the British National party among them—have tried to evoke over the years. I do not think that the creators of the UKIP poster would be insulted by that Enoch Powell comparison. They assume that we all share their unease with racial diversity. It was no wonder that the poster was reported to the police for inciting racial hatred.

The referendum was one of the ugliest political campaigns that I have witnessed in my life. Leave campaigners could have talked about the need for reform, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, economic considerations and a whole host of other things. Instead, they chose to make the debate about the mythical “other”—the immigrant who is stealing our jobs and resources and taking our homes. They seemed to cry, “If only we could close the door, then Britain will be great again and all our problems will be gone.” I am afraid to say that the tone taken on immigration by some of the leave campaigners has made racism socially acceptable again.

[Gerald Jones (Merthyr Tydfil and Rhymney) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this important debate and agree with all the points she has raised. I am sure she agrees with me that these actions against EU nationals, including the Polish people in my constituency who are having letters put through their letterboxes telling them to go home, are deeply deplorable and should be condemned.

[Yasmin Qureshi]

I absolutely condemn the vitriolic abuse that the Polish community has received over the years. I would add to that that a lot of European nationals in this country are now very concerned about their status and their citizenship rights. I will ask the Minister to ensure that the Government deal with this issue fairly urgently to bring reassurance to a lot of EU nationals living in the United Kingdom.

The hon. Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip (Boris Johnson) claimed that Brexit would stop “uncontrolled immigration”, suggesting images of hordes of people rushing to our shores. During a televised EU debate, a member of the audience asked Mr Farage to explain how he would reduce racial tensions in the light of such rhetoric. Not only did he ignore her question, but later her Twitter timeline was filled with horrific abuse from his supporters. We must acknowledge that the abusers now feel more confident in making these claims because of Mr Farage’s frequent racist comments and claims that he can restore Britain’s place in the world.

[Stephen Doughty]

I thank my hon. Friend for giving way again; she is being incredibly generous. She made a point about Twitter. Does she agree that social media companies and internet providers have a great deal of responsibility here? It is not easy enough to report or deal with hate crime, of all sorts, and the internet is currently filled with abuse, whether it is anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim, anti-gay or anti-women. Many Members of this Chamber have experienced that abuse in recent days, from the left and from the right, and the companies that are involved need to take a much firmer hand.

[Yasmin Qureshi]

I absolutely agree. It is so difficult to make a complaint. I am one of those people who can relate, on a personal level, the amount of abuse that I have received. When I tried to contact the organisations concerned, I got nowhere. It is important that we think about how we can regulate that and ensure that social media companies deal with these issues responsibly and monitor the posts that are being put on their sites. It seems that most of them completely fail to do that.

There have been constant calls that we are claiming our country back. After the Brexit campaign won, the first comment from Mr Farage was, “We have got our country back”, suggesting that it had been under the control of somebody else. These are the types of irresponsible comments that feed into people not liking immigrants—the “other”. Sadly, some senior politicians who perhaps should know better did the same, including the Prime Minister, when he talked last year about the “swarm” of migrants in Europe, and they have failed, time and time again, to stop the spread of such anti-immigrant feeling.

[Catherine West (Hornsey and Wood Green) (Lab)]

It seems that confusion is being deliberately stoked on the definition of a refugee versus somebody exercising their right, or their former right, to freedom of movement across Europe, and other categories of non-European migration. In general, this leads to a sense that there is a lack of education about what migration actually is.

[Yasmin Qureshi]

I absolutely agree with that. Very disturbingly, one of the arguments used by some leave campaigners was that the refugees who are fleeing war-torn countries such as Syria will come here as terrorists, and that, if we were to leave the European Union, they would not be able to come and somehow we would become safe. That feeds into the “anti-other”, or anti-immigrant, sentiment, and that is irresponsible.

Sadly, as of now, not a single prominent leave campaigner has uttered any condemnation of the rise of racial hatred or, better still, called for unity to heal the deeply dangerous divisions that have been created. Does the Minister agree that we now need a cross-party coalition to make sure that future campaigns on such issues are conducted according to some sort of code of conduct that ensures that we never again allow our political language to become so irresponsible?

The media have not exactly played a good role in this, either. We must consider the media and journalists who portray such politicians as colourful eccentric characters, whose outrageous comments are seen for their entertainment value and as being honest. How many times have we heard, “This person is saying it how people are saying it, and is not pretending to be something else—he is giving honest views”? That serves to legitimise their point of view.

We have heard about famous journalists who have continued with that kind of behaviour. Politicians here in the United Kingdom and in the US who encourage what I call “othering” quickly become big box office hits, especially if they are able to talk, not just unchallenged but endorsed by journalists, in a way that suggests that all Muslims are rapists, or that immigrants are sucking the NHS dry or are stealing our jobs while living on benefits. Imagine the effect on someone in an economically or socially vulnerable situation who is told on a daily basis that they are in that plight because of these immigrants who have taken everything. It is not surprising that some of those people think that the immigrants are to blame. That is why I talked about the need to eradicate poverty and provide good jobs, decent housing, education, schools and hospitals. That is so important. Can we really be surprised at some of the rhetoric and the things people have been saying when that kind of thing is perpetuated by our media?

The free hand of the print and online media to distort facts and blame entire groups of people for the troubles of our country, with almost no fear of contradiction, plays an important part in the spread of hatred, and is worrying. Certain parts of the media are complicit in the rise of bigotry and the consequent discrimination. Here, I touch on what my hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff South and Penarth (Stephen Doughty) referred to. It is not that suddenly one day everyone decided to become abusive. There has been a consistent level of immigrant bashing over a number of years. There was a time in this country when the Irish were bashed. Then it was the Afro-Caribbean community, then the Muslims. Now it seems like everyone is hated. That is very worrying.

This is a great country to live and work in. I am very passionate about my country, which is why I think it is so important that everyone, including all politicians across the United Kingdom get together and say, as the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) did, “Not in our name.” This is not what we are as a country. We are a tolerant and liberal country. I have travelled and worked in other countries, and as far as I am concerned this is the best country to live in in the world. When I see this kind of thing happening, it really disheartens me. I know that others feel the same.

Let me give as an example some of the front-page scare stories from the Daily Express, the Daily Mail and The Sun. Recently, a Daily Mail cartoon compared immigrants to vermin and conflated them with gun-wielding terrorists. Who can forget the well-known shock tactic journalist who referred to desperate and scared refugees as “cockroaches”? It is amazing that the newspapers and journalists who make an enormous amount of money from those kinds of things are able to say them again and again and get away with it completely. In fact, the journalists are paid even more by the radio stations, television companies and media to carry on peddling their hate. When did journalists forget that with freedom of speech comes responsibility? Does the Minister agree that it is now more pressing than ever that we proceed with the next stage of the Leveson inquiry, so that the press act responsibly in their treatment of minorities? A free press is great—we want that, and we want the press to cover stories, responsibilities, wrongdoing and investigative journalism, and to tell us what is going on, but some sections of our media seem to have a completely different agenda of their own.

We have a proud tradition of welcoming people from around the world, and our diversity makes us stronger. We are grateful to all those who have chosen and continue to live and work in this nation. Members of the House must pledge to stand together and unite against hatred and intolerance in our communities. We will not, and should not have to tolerate hate crime again.

[Colleen Fletcher (Coventry North East) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend is making important points about the responsibilities of different agencies. The Minister may have heard about the incident in Coventry, where my constituent, the Coventry and Warwickshire radio presenter Trish Adudu, was racially abused in the street last week. Trish said that an individual shouted at her and another Coventry resident, and said vile things, including the N word, which I have never used and cannot bring myself to use even when describing this incident tonight. She was told: “Get out of here. Go back home. Haven’t you heard the result of the vote?” Trish was visibly distressed when she reiterated that on the radio and on TV. Does my hon. Friend—and hopefully the Minister—agree that there is no place for such sickening and deplorable behaviour? We must work together to put a stop to it, bringing in all those agencies and working cross-party. Robust action must be taken—

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Natascha Engel)]

Order. I have been very generous with the intervention, but that was very long. There is plenty of time and if the hon. Lady wanted to make a speech, she could have done so, but I think that was it.

[Yasmin Qureshi]

I entirely agree with my hon. Friend.

We have processes in place to report hate crime, and swift action can be taken, as was demonstrated by Greater Manchester Police following the incident of hate on a tram towards an American lecturer. Importantly, many who voted to leave the EU did so as a protest vote to voice concerns against the Government and austerity measures, and the vast majority do not endorse any racist rhetoric. Many who voted to leave felt that they were doing the right thing for the economy, and they fell for the lies being peddled as promises, such as £350 million a week for funding the NHS. However, Brexit has legitimised and normalised racism. We must ensure that all incidents are reported and prosecuted, and we must hold the media and leaders—including political leaders—to account when hatred is propagated. We must act against social inequality, and provide and protect jobs, wages, workers’ rights, good schools and hospitals. In essence, social and economic equality often leads people to view the “other” through the prism of dislike, hatred or suspicion. Only together can we work to tackle that problem, and ensure that future generations can hope for a safe future in this country and regard it as their home.