Sir Iain Duncan Smith
MP for Chingford and Woodford Green · Conservative · United Kingdom
“I raise the cases of Ryan Cornelius and Jimmy Lai—both United Kingdom citizens—to the attention of the Foreign Secretary, who I welcome to his position. Ryan Cornelius has been incarcerated for 19 years—trumped-up charges by a corrupt regime that is supporting a war in Sudan at the moment.”
“Has the Secretary of State been made aware of the case of Joshua Wong, a Hong Kong resident who is being prosecuted by the Administration in Hong Kong using the national security law?”
“A particular memory is that during the Maastricht debates, when, I have to confess, I and one or two others here were deeply rebellious, Ann lectured me from the Dispatch Box—she was in government—about how I should support the Maastricht treaty and the European Union, which rather worried me.”
“It was phenomenal, because she was so certain about the way that she was. Ann embodied something else: the passion that is necessary for us in this Chamber to make our arguments without the fear of any other person doing something to us.”
“We need to reiterate, and the Government and the Home Secretary need to specify, to all the social media companies that they must do something to close down the visceral, violent language that some people use in attacking others personally, as they did over Ann’s murder, which shocked me.”
“Friday was a funny day. I heard the news very early in the morning that Ann had died, and I was utterly surprised about that because she had seemed perfectly fit the last time I saw her, so I gave my condolences and spoke about it on the radio.”
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“The other two organisations, in Australia and in the United States, have the ability to say that everybody on the panel makes a group decision on the evidence. I know he will argue that that process takes longer—yes, he may be right about that—but I feel that the pressure is on him. I was in government for six years and I know what Downing Street does. It gives you a call and says, “I don’t think you have to go very far with this sort of stuff, do you? After all, this is worth a lot of money to us. Come on.” Others will say that and the Secretary of State will be sitting there thinking, “This is a balanced judgment. Where do I go on this?” I just wonder whether that pressure is fair on the Secretary of State. He would be questioned later on why certain decisions were made.”
“The Bill also falls short of similar legislation by Five Eyes partners. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State is absolutely right to say that they have looked across the scope of what others have done, but other Five Eyes partners have gone further on this. They are competitor countries to us, so it is not as though they have any kind of dictatorial regimes. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States and the Australian Foreign Investment Review Board are external bodies. This is the point that I wanted to make to my right hon. Friend. I just wonder whether he might want to reflect on the nature of the pressure on somebody such as him, who, under the Bill, will have to sum up and make final decisions on the advice peculiarly to him.”
“They needed to intervene because the asset, given what has happened with covid and so on, had lowered in value unusually and unnecessarily, and that had opened it up to a takeover which they felt would have been very unhelpful. The other point I want to raise in passing is that we need to look at things like the Confucius Institute, which is here investing in universities with offers but is actually acting on behalf of the Chinese Government to follow lots of Chinese students around. Other Members wish to speak, so I will finish my remarks. My main point is that without that national security test the Bill will lack clarity and definition, and fail to understand sometimes where it is actually looking. It could be open to pressures to turn this more into an industrial policy statement, rather than a national security issue.”
“I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention. I know he has been a big champion of that relationship. We do not agree with each other on this matter because I think that China, with its dictatorial Government, poses a very significant threat. But I did speak about other countries—I did say that Russia also poses a threat—so I recognise his defence. I want to move on to the national interest test. This year, the Australian Government invoked the national interest in looking at tests and they used it in similar legislation to block the acquisition of a minor stake—this might deal with the issue that my hon. Friend was talking about—in AVZ Minerals by a Chinese firm.”
“I congratulate the hon. Member for Oxford West and Abingdon (Layla Moran) on her position. She is a friend, because she is part of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, and of alliances on many other countries around the world. I fully understand the issues for my hon. Friend the Minister and the Government, but the reality is that we face an arrogant country, led by an arrogant leadership that has trashed the Sino-British agreement and is guilty of huge human rights abuses and dangerous confrontations with its neighbours. The British Government must lead in this matter, not wait. It is time for us to let the Chinese Government know that these actions come with serious repercussions. Does he accept that we need to sanction individuals responsible for any of these actions? Let us start with Carrie Lam in Hong Kong.”
“Given that the chain of command at headquarters level is vital, and that a three or four-star general would be required in a military operation, will the Minister please tell me whether the Government have at any stage asked the MOD to implement a chain of command and headquarters command and control for the whole of test and trace, to make sure that it is now co-ordinated and active? If not, why not?”
“It is a long time since I served in the armed forces, but one lesson I took from my service was that headquarters command and control is absolutely vital during an operation. I note, when I look at what is happening on test and trace, that there are now four centres—the Joint Biosecurity Centre in the DHSC, the National Covid Response Centre, the covid taskforce in the Cabinet Office and the covid data analysis directorate—each with its own director general and none under a single enforceable chain of command.”
“The Government could use the tier system to ensure that we press down on covid, and evidence from all the areas we have looked at in Liverpool and the north-west shows that levels of the disease are beginning to come down. I believe that further such pressure would work. All the data that are now unravelling do so on the basis that, as we move into a full lockdown, the damage to the economy will be enormous. I ask my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister whether we may now urgently have an economic impact assessment to show what the damage will be to our economy, livelihoods, lives and people’s wellbeing and mental status, and I will oppose these measures tonight.”
“It is a euphemism that is appalling. It is not a circuit breaker, it is a business breaker and, as the Prime Minister said himself, it is a very big decision. It is a decision that damages lives, and the people who will be damaged by it will be the poorest in society, because they will lose their jobs. The loss of a job is not just an income problem. It is about self-respect; it is about status; it is what someone does. It is about how someone stands up in front of their family and shows them that they are bringing money back to the house and improving their lot. All these measures are damaging, and I believe that this decision was not necessary now.”
“The reality is that that figure has turned out to be incorrect. Professor Tim Spector of King’s College London has said that he believes that the rate is now at 1, and is falling after some plateauing. There is good evidence that, across the board, the tier system is beginning to work. I am sorry that my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister was not able to stay for the speech of my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May)—he must have been busy—but she made the point that I want to make now. As she has said previously, many of the tests were looked at before the tier system had a chance to bite. I thought that what the Prime Minister did back in October, when he chose to go for a tier system, was brave because SAGE was arguing for a circuit breaker. By the way, I hate the term “circuit breaker”.”
“Whoever did it should it be sacked, hung out to dry, made to come here to apologise and grovel out of the door on their hands and knees, and be beaten on the way out. What they did was appalling because they bounced the Government. I would like to think that the Government would have spent their time investigating the data that was presented to them, which has subsequently unravelled in the past few days. I would love them to have looked at it carefully and understood it. For example, SAGE talks about reaching 4,000 deaths by December, but even Professor Whitty said yesterday: “I think all of us would say that the rates will probably be lower than that top peak…I think there has been some rather overblown rhetoric on this.” Well, it was SAGE’s overblown rhetoric, in case he missed the point.”
“I rise in sadness, because I simply have to say to the Government that I cannot support them today, and I want to set out the reasons why. I say to my right hon. Friend the Health Secretary—I have supported him enormously in every task he has had, and I stand behind him on most of these charges—that this is difficult; the Government face the most terrible compromise and consequences. I obviously feel for them and I want them to succeed, but we are taking arguably the second largest decision that any Government have taken since the second world war. The first was back in March. Locking down an economy plunges individuals and businesses into a terrible state of lost jobs. We are doing this on the basis of SAGE’s advice on Saturday—it was leaked on Friday night. I thought that the leak was appalling.”
“It is also causing problems for children, more of whom need intervention and are now under protected schemes. We need to think again about what in heaven’s name we are doing with our schools in relation to covid. The children are losing out massively, the parents are suffering dramatically, and if we do not get proper advice to schools, we will be buying ourselves a heap of problems down the road, in 10 years’ time. Schools are operating without clear advice on what they should do when children get covid, and they immediately send everybody home. That has to stop. We need to get a balanced view. I end by saying that I welcome my hon. Friend the Member for Devizes’ speech. It was absolutely right; it is on the money. I will not repeat what he said, but I back every bit of it; I just wish we had longer to speak.”
“Universal support, alongside universal credit, is critical in getting people help and assistance along the lines that the hon. Member for Walthamstow talked about. We should all be on the side of getting that rolled out. Finally, on schools, we have a real problem at the moment. There is pressure on parents as a result of what is happening in our schools. Whole year groups are suddenly being sent home because one child is infected. That goes against all the evidence that children are not vectors to adults, but that it is the other way round. This situation is causing chaos in families up and down the land. There is a good organisation called UsforThem, which is made up of parents who are worried because they have had to leave work and go back home. That has caused real stress in families, and had a real effect on family break-up.”
“It is not a case of siding with one side or the other. If we get family life and the involvement of Government balanced, people will make their own choices; that is all I ever ask for. I know those choices will be, in the vast majority of cases, balanced, positive and constructive. Everyone out there, except for the exceptional minority, wants their family to be stable, and would prefer their children brought up with both parents looking after them all the way through their childhood. Government intervene in the wrong way and distort the nature of that decision, and then accuse everybody of asking them to intervene and take sides, but that is not the case. I appreciate the comments about universal credit and, definitely, about universal support.”
“In Germany, they have income-splitting which gives families an immediate balance, which is more expensive to be fair. But in France they have a marriage tax allowance form as well. We in the UK are alone in having not had one for a period, the Labour Government having taken it away. When I was in government, I sat arguing with the Chancellor—I did a lot of that when I was in government—about that very point. Finally, with the Prime Minister’s intervention, we reinstated the marriage tax allowance. However, it was done at such a measly and miserly level, and then hidden so deep in the documents, that nobody claimed it because they did not know it existed. The Government refused to let anybody know about it, until finally they told them about it. That is one of the problems we face with Government.”
“Too often, at the heart of these debates is not the question of left or right, but a big difference about whether people think we should intervene with Government or not. To those assembled here, I make the point that we face real issues. My hon. Friend the Member for Devizes mentioned the tax system. A good example of what happens when people get into government is that they immediately use the argument that we should not intervene because we show a bias towards one side. The UK has the worse tax system for families that wish to stay together. We have the worse system in Europe, particularly where a person in that family wishes to look after their children for a while. Every other major country in Europe has an allowance, and people can move their allowances across.”
“It is a privilege to serve under your tutelage, Sir Christopher. It is always a privilege. I also welcome my hon. Friend the Member for Devizes (Danny Kruger). Sometimes when I listen to what he says in his speeches, I often think that I could have written them. Perhaps I did, I do not know, but then I realise that he used to write speeches for me as well. In a sense, we are a little too heavily joined at the hip. I promise that I will not embarrass him any more on that basis. I fundamentally agree with everything he said, particularly with regards to the challenges. In a sense, much of what the hon. Member for Walthamstow (Stella Creasy), literally a neighbour of mine, says can be meshed together internally. There are ways through this, and I wish we could form some kind of common purpose in all of it rather than attacking each other.”
“I thank my right hon. Friend for his statement. I think he is right, because it was clear in the whole agreement that both sides needed to negotiate in good faith with a view to reaching an agreement. Yet it has been quite clear throughout that, for example, the refusal of those on the EU side to engage on financial services, which are 80% of our economy, but their determination to get a deal on the majority of theirs, which is trade in agri-products, is not good faith. How exactly does he intend to go forward with regard to the problems in the withdrawal agreement that will now be outstanding even if we make no trade deal?”
“My hon. Friend knows that I spoke overnight to the Home Secretary and we agreed that this was an anomaly and needed to be sorted, so I am pleased that he now commits to doing it. Will he also, however, commit to having a full and proper set of discussions with Lord McColl, me and others about the possibility of introducing modern slavery victims support legislation to iron out many of these anomalies?”
“I recognise that the Government are worried about people using modern-day slavery provisions as a route in, but the numbers coming in and getting a claim are so tiny that we can surely manage this. I understand the position in respect of failed immigration and people on asylum, but this is a very peculiar group that needs our care. If the Minister can commit to a discussion about future legislation with myself, Lord McColl and others in this place who would wish to be part of that, we may be able to make some progress on that.”
“We need to think about this very carefully, so I have an ask of the Government—I said this when I intervened on the Minister. He needs to make sure that the change to the guidance is included and seen in the other place and that, critically, Lord McColl and others recognise that this has been done and that it is not just a gesture. Secondly, I ask the Minister seriously—he said he was prepared to do this—to bring all this together in a new Bill that deals with the problems that we have now found. This is a good Bill, but we now find problems coming through relating to the abuse of people who are confirmed as having been brought in under modern-day slavery conditions and who we need to support.”
“It is expensive for us to take someone through the national referral mechanism, conclude that they are genuine victims of modern slavery, but not provide adequate care. Those people remain very vulnerable and are quickly re-trafficked. As I said earlier, Leicester is a very good example of that, but there are other cities in the UK where people are drifting into these terrible conditions because they have nowhere else to go, or, for that matter, going into the national referral mechanism but facing uncertainty over ongoing care. They do not have the capacity to give evidence in court against their traffickers and that is the one thing that we want them to do. We need to be able to prosecute the traffickers to make sure that they never do it again.”
“That is why we need to look further than just at what the Government are doing here. I recognise that, perhaps today, this Bill is not the right way to try to press this matter forward, but I do say to the Government that there is another way. I recognise also that the problem on that score is that a confirmed refugee can get five years’ leave to remain, but a confirmed—I repeat “confirmed”—victim of modern slavery gets no leave to remain at all. It seems to me that we have got ourselves in a twisted position, not because the Government—or any Government—want to be there, but because we have an anomaly, which we now need to rectify. That is the point that I really want to make in the short time available.”
“That is a really important move. Having spoken to the Home Secretary and got that guarantee from her, it is a great pleasure to hear it from the Dispatch Box. There has always been a problem with discretionary leave to remain and it was made worse by a Minister back in 2017 saying that there must be exceptional or compelling reasons to justify granting it. The bar has been set too high, and it is really important for us to recognise that people who come here having suffered the real persecution of slavery need to have a little more consideration shown for their position. They are not in the same boat as pure asylum seekers. In fact, those people can get a much longer period of time; whereas somebody who has genuine problems and who has been abused finds their time curtailed.”
“We need to make that case in legislation. I am pleased that the Government have moved on the issue of European economic area nationals and recognised that there was some contradiction in what they were proposing in their guidance. I notice that a paragraph was inserted into the guidance after Lord McColl’s amendment had been passed, which, had it been there originally, might have meant that there would have been no need for this particular amendment. Two contradictions were made but I do not have the time to go through them now, so Members will have to read about them themselves. None the less, I am pleased that the Minister said from the Dispatch Box that the Government have now rectified that matter and that non-EEA and EEA nationals will now be treated the same when it comes to discretionary leave to remain.”
“The recent report “It still happens here: Fighting UK Slavery in the 2020s” states: “For many, having no recourse to public funds poses further barriers to moving people on safely, putting victims at risk of homelessness and destitution, and making it more likely that they will fall back into exploitation and trafficking.” The one thing that we can learn from recent events in places such as Leicester, where we have uncovered the most appalling abuse of individuals who have been victims of slavery, working for a pittance and living in terrible accommodation, is that we really do not want to see that repeated in the UK. That is the point that I want to make in my speech today. There must be some kind of recourse to public funds for victims of modern slavery, which will make them more secure than they are at the moment.”
“I am grateful to be called to speak at this particular point, Madam Deputy Speaker. It was the Centre for Social Justice, which I set up and had the fortune to chair, that published the original document that pushed the Government into passing the first modern-day slavery legislation, a matter of which they are rightly very proud, and that made the UK the first country in the world to bring forward such legislation. That legislation now needs overhauling. That has been the case for some time.”
“Otherwise people will say, like one constituent who rang me today, “Is this in fact a London-wide tier 2 to stop the north-south divide argument running?””
“Thank you, Mr Speaker, for allowing me to get in at the last minute, because this is a London statement. When a Minister gets a collection of London MPs together, it would be great if they could actually be allowed in to ask a question for a long enough time to save them having to scrabble into the House of Commons. I want to follow on from the comments of my hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Sir Robert Neill). London is huge. Whether people like it or not, it is very diverse, and many of the boroughs are bigger than most of the towns in the rest of the UK. Surely we need to look again at the London-wide nature of this tier 2 position. Even regional areas could be taken out. There are big disparities. I ask that we please think again.”
“Our purpose, I believe, is to call this out and no longer accept it. As the hon. Member for Islwyn said, no matter how much trade is worth to us, it is not worth that for the loss of those lives.”
“We will no longer have to worry about going to the UN to watch the Chinese and their allies block that; that will allow us to do it independently. Under the charter we have a responsibility to act as a nation. Mr Gray, I will stop now as I know that other Members wish to speak. There are a huge number of areas in which we can act, not just in Magnitsky. We can implement sanctions and mount evidence suggesting violations specified by the global human rights sanctions regulations. We can ensure that we implement sanctions against officials who are responsible in other areas, such as Tibet and even Hong Kong. We need to act in line with the petition, which has given us clear evidence that the British public have formed their own opinion. If we are not careful, we will be running behind them, rather than leading them.”
“The Minister knows that I think there is now enough evidence from Xinjiang and the official documents to move on many of those officials. I accept that they are not the top people, but that will send a strong signal to the Government that we, and the rest of the free world, will no longer tolerate it. That gives us all that we need to start. The House of Lords has added new clause 68 to the Trade Bill. I publicise that here because it is important. I hope and believe that we will support the new clause when the Bill returns to the Commons. The clause makes it clear that we cannot trade with counties that are guilty of genocide. Our High Court will make the decision about whether there is enough evidence.”
“If one adds those factors to the way that China is behaving in Hong Kong—with the arrest of peaceful protestors, their movement back to China for an unfair hearing and the likelihood of their never being seen again—its threats towards Taiwan, its involvement in taking over the South China sea, against the UN’s own statements about its lack of any historic presence in the area, and its clashes with the Indian army on the border with India, then we are beginning to see a pattern of arrogant and determined behaviour by a Government who care nothing about the reaction of the international community. What can we do? The hon. Member for Islwyn touched on the Magnitsky amendments that we have made that apply to officials.”
“During that debate, the right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr Carmichael) told me that in Inner Mongolia we are beginning to see the start of exactly the same process. This is not a one-off; it is policy that comes straight down from the Chinese Communist party and the Government. It is their way of supressing any potential angry rows, debates or pressure, and it is appalling. We know about all this stuff. I mentioned the birth suppression and the way in which population growth rates have fallen by 84% in the two largest Uyghur prefectures between 2015 and 2018, and it declined further in 2019. Such activities could meet the term genocide—I believe that they do. We accept religious freedoms and freedom of speech, which are normal here, but now alien in China.”
“One Uyghur received a message from the Chinese Ministry of Public Security after attending a Tiananmen Square memorial, warning that his actions would have an impact on his family. The wife of the president of the Uyghur Association of Victoria said: “I have left my homeland but I continue to live in fear. If I speak out for my people inside my homeland, I am afraid of retaliation on my family left behind. If I don’t speak out, I feel guilty of keeping the freedom and democracy all just for myself in a free country.” That is shocking. We know beyond doubt that what is being done to the Uyghur population in Xinjiang province is, in my view, a form of genocide. It is a deliberate attempt to eradicate a whole ethnic group. They are not alone. Only a week ago I held a debate about similar things that are happening to Tibetans.”
“Member for Islwyn made all those points about the treatment of the Uyghurs, the torture, and the forced sterilisation of Uyghur women, which was exposed in those documents and is a shocking tale, and the preferment of non-ethnically Uyghur in the Uyghur territories. All are a terrible indictment. I want to raise something else, because the long hand of those involved in such repression reaches out way beyond China now. About 5,000 Uyghurs live in Australia, most of them former refugees and their families. They told a parliamentary inquiry about frequent intimidation and harassment, such as WeChat calls from family members back in China that were held in the presence of Chinese law-enforcement people, warning Uyghurs in Australia not to speak unfavourably about the Chinese Government lest something happen to those family members.”
“I will not go into the details about the camps, because the hon. Gentleman made those clear, but detainees reported often being subject to forced labour, political indoctrination and torture. Almost 400 internment camps have been built, with dozens more still under development and yet to be built. We all saw the film that was shown to the Chinese ambassador on “The Andrew Marr Show”. The ambassador preferred not to recognise anything said to him, but the reality is that those things were redolent of a time that we thought had gone—treatment of human beings that, looking back in history, we thought we had finally banished, but not so. The hon.”
“The key thing to say is that the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China—now formed of 18 countries, from east to west around the world, on the left and on the right—helped to sponsor Adrian Zenz’s first report on the Uyghurs. I am not saying that people were not aware of the issue, but the report has reignited it with some of his findings. The findings come from official Chinese documents that relate directly to individual officials—I will come back to that, in response to the point made by the hon. Member for Islwyn about Magnitsky sanctions, because there are individuals party to this named in the papers by the Chinese Government. Adrian Zenz made the point clearly that at least 1 million Uyghurs—up to nearly 3 million—have been detained in Xinjiang in the re-education camps.”
“I am glad. That is very kind of you, Mr Gray. I congratulate the hon. Member for Islwyn (Chris Evans) on a powerful speech to begin this brilliant debate. It is important that he laid out many of the issues before us, and he did so with great power and oratory. I commend him for that. This is not an issue that should in any way divide those of us who are present today, I hope, but rather it will unite us, in the best traditions of this House. My hon. Friend the Member for Wycombe (Mr Baker) asked to be recommended to the debate, although he was unable to join it. I said I would do so, if you do not mind him being on the record, Mr Gray. It is by the by, because he will not be coming to speak—you do not need to worry about that.”
“Given the Government’s objective of driving down the infection rate, and given that the average age of death at the moment is 82.4, should we not make those antivirals much more widely available at the earliest opportunity, through GPs and every other doctor, in order to get them to people to reduce the likelihood of their going into hospital and dying?”
“I welcome my right hon. Friend’s statement. I recognise that these are difficult times and that he has to make difficult and, I hope, balanced choices, balancing the economic damage against the need to save our fellow citizens. In all this, one positive point that has barely been referred to is that the death rate has fallen from 3% in June to 0.6% at the moment, which has to be seen as possibly part of what the Government are trying to do. The Government’s strategy, quite legitimately, is therefore to drive down the infection rate—I understand that—while searching for a vaccine, so I simply want to raise a point that others including the scientific advisers have raised. There is a lot of talk at the moment about the two antivirals that have now arrived, remdesivir and ivermectin.”
“Civil servants are also placed in Uyghur homes to monitor behaviour, and children whose parents are detained are being taken from their families and placed in state facilities. But it is not just the Tibetans and the Uyghurs; it is now also the Christians. Party members who profess a faith are now subject to disciplinary procedures, with the arrest and detention of Christian leaders such as Pastor Wang Yi of the Early Rain Church, who was detained in December 2018 and sentenced to nine years in prison for “incitement to subvert state power”.”
“We have seen this pattern of eradication—or attempted eradication—of ethnicity across China. We know from the parallel report that was published a little earlier on the Uyghurs that at least 1 million Uyghurs are in mass arbitrary detention in Xinjiang. There are almost 400 prison camps in the region, with more still under development. It is disgraceful, but we understand that western fashion brands use supply chains where forced labour is prevalent. I am sure that will apply in due course, if not already, in Tibet. The Government-sponsored forced sterilisation and birth suppression in the Uyghur populations, which we believe do exist, would meet the genocide criteria—we have yet to get the UN to even look at that, but it is the key.”
“Of course, this process has close similarities with the training and labour transfer in the Xinjiang Uyghur autonomous region, which I will touch on. The Government’s attempts to dilute Tibetan identity are really critical. That is being done through forced cultural assimilation, and the same pattern is going on in a number of areas. Interestingly, the Government documents state that these programmes aim to reform Tibetan cultural “backwardness”. That is an interesting concept and a relative concept, and of course its relativity is defined by those in power, which is to say the Communist party of China. That aim is achieved by the Government enforcing the learning of Mandarin and weakening, however they can, the religious influence that exists among those who claim to be indigenously Tibetan. This is not an isolated incident.”
“Over half a million labourers were collected together into these camps in the first seven months of 2020. Local government officials are required by the Government to meet quotas for what they term recruitment to the scheme—it is nothing like any concept of recruitment that we might understand. It basically means that they have to get people in certain categories into those camps as quickly as they can. This process is overseen by strict military management, which includes enforced indoctrination and intrusive surveillance of participants. Labourers may also be forcibly transferred from their homes to work all over China. In other words, this is not just about camps in Tibet; people are being moved around to fulfil requirements elsewhere.”
“What this paper has done is reminded us that, over a longer period than for anything else, the Chinese authorities have been bearing down on the human rights of the indigenous population in Tibet. The findings of the report are particularly interesting, because they show that there has been mandatory—I use this term advisedly—vocational training, which basically means driving out the sense of identity of the people in Tibet. Alongside these programmes, there are forcible labour transfer schemes. Those are slightly gentle words, but what they mean is that people are being taken from one place and put into camps, a bit like—well, a lot like—the Uyghurs we uncovered, who are forced to do hard labour in all sorts of areas and without proper pay or support.”
“As I say, Adrian Zenz is a scholar in this area, and he has previously published a paper with IPAC on the forced sterilisation of Uyghur women, and I will touch on that issue shortly. Adrian Zenz has uncovered this material through existing Government papers. That is the interesting thing: none of this is secret. In a sense, it is quite open, and these Government papers spell out exactly what has been going on. The findings are shocking, although it is important to note that, with all the other debates about China, which I will touch on in my conclusion, Tibet has, funnily enough, been rather forgotten. It has been an issue for a while, and then it has disappeared, and nobody seems to talk about it.”
“I beg to move, That this House has considered reports of China’s rapid expansion of the labour programme in Tibet co-published by the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China. It is a great pleasure to see you in the Chair, Mr Hollobone. Having wiped my microphone, I feel like I am ready to go. Today’s debate is about the recent report on China’s rapid expansion of mass labour programmes in Tibet. This paper was co-published by a leading human rights adviser and scholar, Adrian Zenz, with a group that I am a member of called IPAC—the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China—and there are others in the room who are also part of that group. It includes both left and right parliamentarians in 17 countries who are concerned about the behaviour of China across a range of issues.”
“There is one other action that the Government can take. The winter Olympics are planned to be in China. Many of us believe that, if it were any other country, there would now be calls for the Olympics to be moved. I simply say to the Government that they will have to take a stance on this issue pretty soon. Overall, we are dealing now with a country that appears to have bullied and threatened its way through all of this. It is imposing the most dreadful and terrible things on many of its people, it is abusing human rights, and many people now believe that it might even be guilty of a form of genocide. I simply say to my Government that it is time for them to stand up. It is time for this Government to lead, and it is time for this Government to act.”