John McDonnell
MP for Hayes and Harlington · Labour · United Kingdom
“It is not a laughing matter—I am sorry for interrupting the flow of the discussion. It would be useful if the review looked at NATS’s long-term investment plans, particularly since its partial privatisation in 2001, which I opposed. I thank the Minister for meeting Unite this morning and thanking the workers, who have worked so hard.”
“On a number of occasions, I have raised the case of Lee Cheuk-yan, who many Labour Members will remember was the general secretary of the Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions and founder of the Labour party in Hong Kong. He was detained during the democracy movement five years ago.”
“I thank the Minister for his statement. NATS used to be in my constituency and then moved down to Swanwick. Of course, with Heathrow in my constituency, I receive—as I mentioned yesterday—a large amount of correspondence from a whole range of other MPs’ constituents, who think I am responsible for Heathrow airport.”
“I fully agree, and let me also say that wheelchair compensation is significant in this legislation. Most of us have dealt with cases like that. Going back to accountability in the process, a number of different organisations have provided us with notes on the legislation.”
“I apologise to my right hon. Friend; I should have checked this before the debate. The proposed new section 61G refers to priorities and objectives of the Secretary of State, which include a requirement for the Secretary of State to issue a document setting out those priorities and objectives for the CAA.”
“At the moment, when people in my constituency are faced with these problems, they do not know where to go; it is as simple as that. Finally, the debate that we will have on Heathrow expansion and the new policy statement will be interesting, given that we do not know what the flight paths will be. If I was a constituent of my hon.”
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“Madam Deputy Speaker, may I take 30 seconds to associate myself with the Speaker’s remarks about Sir Alan Haselhurst? He was in the Chair when I seized the Mace, and he expelled me from the Chamber, but he did it with such good grace that we became firm friends and have been ever since. I send my condolences to his wife. As the Minister knows, I am the secretary of the National Union of Journalists parliamentary group. We are now experiencing in Lebanon exactly what we saw in Gaza, with the targeting and murder of journalists. When he was there in April, Amal Khalil, the famous woman journalist, was hit by an Israeli strike, and the Red Cross ambulance that went to assist her was hit as well. The Lebanese Prime Minister has made it quite clear that these are war crimes.”
“Given the huge sums that the Secretary of State is talking about, what I want to raise might appear relatively trivial, but for my community it is quite significant. We have a charity called Hillingdon Outdoor Activities Centre, which used a lake where local young people in particular could learn to sail and canoe. That lake was taken over by HS2 as part of the route and has not been available for six years. An alternative was not identified until very recently—again, that is part of the decision making on HS2. All the charity’s reserves have now gone, and staff are being laid off. Will the Secretary of State arrange a meeting for me with her officials and HS2, so that I can talk through the opportunities that there might be to assist the charity in continuing to provide an excellent service to our community?”
“I can also report that evidence was submitted to the inquiry being run by Sir Laurie Magnus, the Prime Minister’s ethics adviser, by Paul Holden, one of the journalists and victims of the smears, but evidence was not supplied by the Cabinet Office to the secretariat to the Sir Laurie Magnus inquiry. On behalf of the NUJ parliamentary group, I express our concern— [ Interruption. ] This is important. The NUJ parliamentary group is concerned about the smearing of journalists. We need to know what surveillance, if any, was taking place of hon. Members and for what purposes. We call again for an independent inquiry into the role of APCO and Labour Together in this issue.”
“I referred this week to information from a whistleblower —a freelancer involved in the Labour Together inquiry—indicating that APCO had instructed this person to destroy files and material related to the inquiry. Only hours ago, we had it confirmed online by the Financial Times that tapes exist that include conversations by APCO’s head of media relations for Europe, Tom Harper, discussing the deletion of an email account and saying “they will be able to see that through digital forensics or something like that” with regard to references and this inquiry. He also refers to processes to “muddy the waters” and the audit trail. I can also report— [ Interruption. ] I am sorry for the delay.”
“On a point of order, Mr Speaker. As you know, I am the secretary to the National Union of Journalists parliamentary group, and I raised earlier this week a point of order concerning the role of the US agency APCO in undertaking the investigation of journalists for Labour Together, which resulted in the smearing of those journalists. I explained that as a result of concern about the reach of APCO’s investigation, a number of hon. Members have submitted subject interest requests to the company and to Labour Together. There has been a delay in the response from Labour Together to those requests, but APCO has confirmed, in a very redacted form, that information on MPs was being collected.”
“I am also a member of the FBU parliamentary group. I understand that consultations on the formula are going on, and we welcome them. Will the Minister ensure that trade union representatives are built into those regional consultations?”
“My hon. Friend mentioned my recommendation that the Prime Minister should refer himself. I did that because when someone is under attack like this, they should not run away from the attack; they should face it with confidence. They should argue that if people want to criticise the individual concerned, they should produce the evidence. My hon. Friend knows as well as I do that the Privileges Committee would deal with this matter fairly, and I believe that the Labour party would come out stronger as a result.”
“Last week, a whistleblower—this is before the London Court of International Arbitration at the moment—confirmed that APCO had instructed one of the freelance employees involved in the investigations to destroy materials related to the investigation, and evidence. May I request again that Members on the Treasury Bench take back to the Prime Minister that we need a full, independent inquiry on the role that Labour Together, and APCO in particular, has played?”
“On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. Over a number of weeks, I have been raising the issue of Labour Together and its link with the agency APCO Worldwide. APCO prepared a report for Labour Together that smeared journalists. I called for an inquiry into Labour Together. A number of hon. Members then submitted subject access requests to both Labour Together and APCO. Labour Together has gone for an extension, and the three-month period should be up shortly, but a number of us received responses from APCO. I raised this in the House; the responses were heavily redacted, but they demonstrated that APCO was collecting information on hon. Members of Parliament.”
“Friend the Member for Sheffield South East (Mr Betts) raised the issue of the preparation of in-house provision of the civil service pension scheme. The Minister did not refer to those preparations. Will he meet the trade unions and discuss how we bring the administration of the civil service pension scheme in house, because as sure as night follows day, Capita will fail on this contract, as it has done on every other?”
“I declare an interest as the chair of the PCS trade union parliamentary group. The Minister just said that there was an offer from Capita. It should not be an offer; it should be a requirement that it covers the recovery costs. It was outrageous that the civil service scheme was given to Capita after its failure on the teachers’ pension scheme, its failure with regard to the NHS data releases, and the failure on the military contract. This failure has affected so many civil service pensioners. It has caused real harm, suffering and stress. It is equally outrageous, I have to say, that its performance has not warranted the removal of the contract altogether. The Minister has today terminated the contract with Royal Mail. Why has he not terminated this contract? My hon.”
“In addition, through you, Madam Deputy Speaker, I want to ask those on the Treasury Bench to take this issue back to the Prime Minister; I urge them to press upon him the importance of this issue and the need for an independent inquiry.”
“He has refused. I have kept the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee informed, but of course it cannot take up individual cases. It appears that the only route for me to secure the truth of this whole episode is for the Government to set up an independent inquiry. I have requested that in correspondence with the Prime Minister and others at least five times. We have tried the formal routes. We now need a full inquiry. The reason I raise this issue on behalf of the NUJ is because smearing journalists in that way destroys their careers. For at least one of the journalists concerned, I think it has put his safety at risk as well—it is as serious as that. We have Members on the Treasury Bench today. I want to put this issue on the record.”
“I was in correspondence with Sir Laurie Magnus because I was informed that he failed to call any witnesses during that inquiry, even though written evidence was submitted to him by one of the journalists who was the victim of the smears. I wrote to him as he had informed the victim that he had not seen the evidence because his secretariat had not provided it to him. The journalist had written to Sir Laurie Magnus in advance to say he was submitting evidence. He submitted that evidence and it was not provided to him by his secretariat. The secretariat to the inquiry is the Cabinet Office. I wrote to express my concerns to Sir Laurie Magnus that his inquiry could not be complete, as he had not seen that evidence. I therefore urged him to withdraw the conclusions of the inquiry and to consider the evidence that has been provided to him.”
“On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. May I first associate myself with the comments made with regard to our colleague who stands at your left-hand shoulder? Madam Deputy Speaker, you may recall that a number of weeks ago, in my capacity as the secretary of the National Union of Journalists parliamentary group, I raised the allegations of the smearing of journalists by the organisation Labour Together during the period when the hon. Member for Makerfield (Josh Simons) was the director of that organisation. At that point, the Prime Minister referred the matter to the ethics adviser, Sir Laurie Magnus. I have been in correspondence with Laurie Magnus, after he produced his report to the Prime Minister very quickly after the reference.”
“I urge the Prime Minister to take steps to clear this toxic culture out of our party, and to take the first step by having an independent inquiry into Labour Together.”
“Many on the Labour Benches, at least, will appreciate my right hon. and learned Friend’s apology today, but many of us remain bewildered about why the appointment took place, despite the warnings that many of us gave him. Is not the reality this? When he sought to realise his ambition to become leader of the Labour party, with very little base within the party, he became dependent on McSweeney, Mandelson and Labour Together to organise and fund his election. When he became the Prime Minister, the reward for McSweeney was control of No. 10, and the reward for Mandelson was the highest diplomatic office. The unspoken message to civil servants was, “What Mandelson wants, Mandelson gets.” This has damaged the party that I have been a member of for 50 years.”
“Many business people were made to believe that they had failed through their own fault, when in reality tens of thousands of businesses were deliberately targeted for insolvency.”
“Nothing meaningful came out of that debate or has happened since. In many people’s eyes, that has left the FCA still not fit for purpose, with Parliament having failed in its duty to fix it. Where was the Treasury in all of that? The Treasury turned a blind eye and its motivation was simple. It needed the banks to do whatever was necessary to shore up their balance sheets after the global financial crisis, having already made the taxpayer bail them out. As I mentioned, where that has occurred the financial and emotional consequences for victims have been devastating in the extreme. The scale of the carnage has been horrific, with widespread forced insolvencies; suicides and early deaths; thousands of repossessions; and broken families.”
“They related what The Times assistant business editor James Hurley described across four articles as financial and accounting fraud, including theft from Ulster Bank fixed-rate loan customers, and all the hard evidence was shared. In our view, the FCA should have immediately launched an inquiry at that stage. Instead, it let the NatWest Group mark its own homework. When the bank concluded it had done nothing wrong, the FCA took no meaningful action, even deploying the astonishing argument that the fraud that had occurred was not criminal fraud. The FCA’s unfitness for purpose is not a new observation for many of us here. On 1 February 2016, Conservative MP Guto Bebb led a Commons debate on the motion, “That this House believes that the Financial Conduct Authority in its current form is not fit for purpose”.”
“Alongside the banks’ predatory behaviour, there has also been a catastrophic regulatory failure, associated with a deliberate policy by the Financial Conduct Authority and, before that the Financial Services Authority, of siding with the banks and often with Treasury policy under successive Governments, rather than the innocent business owners who were being fleeced at the time. The FCA has repeatedly and deliberately failed to act. I will give one example of participants’ experience from our all-party group. In November 2022, Lord Prem Sikka, Steve Middleton of BankConfidential and banking derivatives expert Ian Tyler, whom I have quoted, met the FCA to explain the hidden credit liability scandal in detail.”
“Worse, when the financial crisis hit, they became a mechanism for destroying viable businesses, some already in breach of lending covenants on day one, because of the undisclosed liability that had been taken on. The potential financial upside was so significant that whistleblowers revealed that staff at the state-controlled NatWest Group were encouraged to send victory emails when they successfully brought down a business that could then be feasted upon, with the bank sometimes buying distressed assets directly from the victims of such frauds. There are too many examples of that, and some of those affected are with us in the Public Gallery.”
“This…led to a material increase in the credit line marked for the derivative as both the Current Exposure and the Potential Future Exposure increased, pushing many SMEs into the position where their LTV % was in breach of their security covenant. However, as the bank had invariably not told the customer about the derivative credit line, in clear breach of conduct regulation, the bank often forced a technical breach of loan covenant through some other mechanism and then transferred the business to their so-called Business Recovery Unit where most businesses were subsequently put into administration.” Many in the Public Gallery would testify to that. What was the motivation of the banks? Hidden credit liabilities generated huge up-front revenues, bonuses and commissions.”
“He explained: “The fundamental truth that has been buried by the banks and the FCA is that when a bank executes an interest rate derivative, such as an interest rate swap, it is required by prudential regulation to mark a counterparty credit risk limit to cover the Potential Future Exposure. This credit limit is a hard credit limit as the exposure generates a risk weighted asset that requires the bank to hold capital in support. All hard credit limits are typically included in a bank’s Loan to Value security covenant calculation and so the moment a customer executes a derivative their LTV % increases and this weakens their credit standing. This situation was made materially worse in…2008 when in response to the failure of Lehman Brothers, policy makers reduced Bank Rate to 0.5%.”
“The sale of products as ‘protection’ when their fundamental structure achieves the opposite is a profound and fraudulent misrepresentation. It is a profound tragedy that these banking frauds have pushed individuals to the brink, resulting in devastating loss of life, ill-health and destruction of families. As a legal advocate for justice, I believe this affront to human dignity demands not only our deepest sorrow, but a relentless and unwavering pursuit of accountability.” That is what we are about today. To understand the behaviours of the banks more fully, we drew on the evidence provided by Ian Tyler, a former senior banking executive who has used derivatives since the 1980s to manage interest rate risk for some of the UK’s largest banks. I will quote Ian at some length.”
“Lorraine Morris, an expert and specialist derivative lawyer, gave evidence to us on what she found: “My research confirms that, far from mitigating risk, these instruments were deliberately engineered to transfer significant, undisclosed, and uncapped risk directly onto the customer. The mechanism was the concealed creation of a credit-line liability, booked against the customer’s assets from day one. This contingent obligation was not a notional figure; it was a hard liability that directly impacted the customer’s credit grade”. Generally, when such a loan is taken, there is an agreed loan-to-value covenant. According to Ms Morris, the application of the derivative and credit line mechanisms impacted on those covenants and “pushed viable businesses into a state of artificial distress.”
“The scandal that has come before our APPG is the use of hidden credit lines, which has caused such serious harm to so many small and medium-sized enterprises, and caused personal disasters for many individuals and their families. We have drawn on the evidence presented to us by constituents, specialist advisers and the reports of BankConfidential, a specialist whistleblowing service for banking staff. Put simply, the story commences with a large number of SMEs approaching their banks for a loan and some of the banks then attaching to the loan a derivative such as an interest swap, supposedly to protect the loan against the risk of interest rate changes, and establishing a hidden credit line.”
“I beg to move, That this House has considered hidden credit liabilities and the role of the Financial Conduct Authority. I will explain the genesis of this debate, Sir Roger. I chair the all-party parliamentary group on investment fraud and fairer financial services. The group was established some years ago as a result of hon. Members being approached by constituents who had experienced scandals in the delivery of financial services and the failure of regulatory bodies to address their concerns. It was chaired effectively by the hon. Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman), who has now gone on to greater things as the Chair of the Backbench Business Committee. I thank him for enabling this debate to take place.”
“However, I do not want to be here in years to come—as we were in 2016—dealing with the same problems and with a system that is not fit for purpose, with more victims making representations to us. I hope today that the Government will accept there is a need for an independent inquiry, that we can present the evidence to it and that we can successfully reform the system to protect our financial services and, more importantly, the people—our constituents—who rely on them.”
“In the short term, we are demanding at least a specific inquiry into hidden credit and the role of the FCA. That inquiry must be fully independent, well resourced and—if it is to have confidence in it—judge led, and it must be granted statutory provision under the Inquiries Act 2005. This all arose because many of us, as individual MPs, were approached by constituents who have suffered. We must remember that it is ordinary people who have been the victims of this tragedy, and some of them are with us in the Public Gallery. They have kept the flame of hope for justice alive, and I urge them to maintain their efforts and to continue to inspire us with their righteous indignation and justified anger.”
“The FCA’s Financial Lives survey shows that less than half the public trust the financial sector and its regulatory framework. That is a damning indictment, and it is problematic particularly among SMEs, where we need business confidence to stimulate growth in our wider economy. Let me conclude. The all-party group, having consulted so many experts, victims and constituents, has come to the conclusion that the only way forward is some form of royal commission or equivalent inquiry to address the deep structural flaws in the system and the widespread injustices that remain unresolved. We need to establish what happened and who was responsible; otherwise, there is a real risk of history repeating itself, and we cannot stand by and allow that to happen.”
“The failure of the system to reform or to deliver justice and compensation to victims has been the outstanding theme of our discussions and debates as an all-party group. Numerous schemes, inquiries and reports were meant to deliver meaningful reform and provide victims of banking misconduct with access to justice and redress. We have had the Foskett panel, the Swift review of interest rate hedging products, the Cranston review, the Tomlinson report, the Project Lord Turnbull report by Sally Masterton, the parliamentary commission on banking standards and various Treasury Committee inquiries. The truth is that they have had little effect: victims remain out of pocket and meaningful reform still has not happened. The result is that trust in the system has now been shattered.”
“One of the cases I have dealt with involved reading the last letter of a man who committed suicide in the hope that his insurance would pay out to save his family home. Many whistleblowers have courageously come forward. In fact, that is what led to the creation of BankConfidential. I will cite just one example: Mark Wright, a former Royal Bank of Scotland manager. One of our former colleagues, Norman Lamb, supported him. Mark provided internal evidence of the bank deliberately defaulting customers to improve capital ratios and targeting customers for debanking and insolvency. He even named the person who taught trainees how to forge customer signatures on bank documents. Mark experienced incredible levels of personal stress, and I congratulate him on his courage in coming forward, but the FCA failed to act.”
“Despite being a thriving business, Bredbury Hall was manoeuvred into administration. Stephen Finch was bankrupted and the family had to raise £600,000 to pay off vulture fund Cerberus, to which the loan had been sold, to save their home. Suspicious of what had happened, the Finches contacted Greater Manchester police with evidence of all three offences that had been committed under the Fraud Act 2006. The police took the matter seriously and investigated, but when they asked the FCA for technical assistance, the FCA refused, so last June the police closed the case, citing three reasons: lack of FCA assistance, insufficient resources for a complex investigation, and concern that examining the case would oblige them to investigate numerous similar ones. There are so many other cases.”
“There are so many examples, but I will give just one. Steve and Joan Finch spoke movingly at our summit last November. They took out what was meant to be a simple fixed-rate loan from Lloyds bank to buy Bredbury Hall hotel. Alongside that loan, the bank added the credit liabilities of a derivative, a swap, with a starting hidden credit liability of £1 million, rising to £3 million. Those undisclosed arrangements generated £179,000 in secret up-front commissions. A further £1 million was taken in fees when the bank processed the case through its so-called business support unit, widely criticised as an asset-stripping mechanism. The business ended up there because undisclosed credit liabilities created a loan-to-value risk of 136%, against a permitted maximum of 70%.”
“That theme runs through many of the reports that we have had from constituents about the failure of the FCA to protect them—to ensure that regulation was implemented to protect them. There were also elements of almost turning a blind eye and collusion, and that is the reason for the anger that people feel. Let me press on because the figures that we have heard in the past need to be challenged. As I said, many people thought that they had failed themselves, but in reality tens of thousands of businesses were deliberately targeted. Internal reports confirm that not 16,000, as claimed by the FCA, but 3 million customers were placed in NatWest’s non-core division, effectively a waiting room before being pushed into the notorious global restructuring group, or Lloyds’ equivalent business support unit.”
“There are only a few seconds left. I have heard the Minister’s arguments. I fully agree on the independence of the FCA from Treasury, but that does not mean that we must accept the FCA as infallible. In other instances where separate organisations have made mistakes, the Government have intervened. I understand that the Minister is not convinced this morning, but will she meet the all-party parliamentary group on investment fraud and fairer financial services, so that we can take her through the report with our experts to convince her that there might be a different way forward from the one she is setting out this morning?”
“There is a risk that, through this legislation, we undermine our historic, real commitment to democratic, peaceful protest. That right has achieved so much in our country; we have achieved so much through the reforms that have been demanded. This legislation puts in peril those rights, and in addition, through it, we could be acting provocatively, undermining the peaceful protest that we want to see. That could result in the potential for riot. That is why we needed more time to debate and discuss the issue, and why we needed a right to vote on the motion to disagree. That is not going to happen tonight, and I think we will regret it in the long term.”
“Planning and discussions were taking place, and then the police said, “No, you can’t go on your normal route.” Why is that? Because the police had allocated it to Tommy Robinson. We saw what happened last year in London on Tommy Robinson’s march. There was violence, and there were attacks on police and individuals, yet the Palestinian demonstration was displaced for this far-right group—thugs, in many instances. That demonstrated to me the bias among Metropolitan police senior officers. In many ways, it demonstrates how they could start interpreting the concept of cumulative impact in this legislation, which will go through today. With every move towards restricting peaceful protest in any way, there is a risk. We have seen in the past, on a number of occasions, that if we deny people the right to peaceful protest, they will riot.”
“The organisations in the Jewish bloc have never been consulted about the march. The Haredi community, which is the largest Jewish community, particularly in London—the orthodox Jewish community —has never been consulted about these demonstrations. I am sorry, but I have lost confidence in the assurances that we have been given that there are wider consultations with the community. In the past few weeks, I have lost so much confidence in the judgment of Metropolitan police senior officers. Every year for decades, we have had a march in London for the Palestinians on the anniversary of Nakba, to commemorate the Palestinians being forcibly removed from their own land. Nakba means catastrophe. There is a march in London every year around 16 March. This year, it was going to go ahead as normal.”
“I have lost that confidence, because we were assured that the Metropolitan Police Commissioner and his senior team would consult with the wider communities in advance of planning for these demonstrations, so that views could be taken on board, particularly the views of the Jewish community. “Consultation with the Jewish community” has largely been interpreted as consultation with the Board of Deputies. The Board of Deputies represents a certain section of the Jewish community. In fact, it has split. Last year, 37 members expressed their concern about how the Board of Deputies was expressing its position on Gaza. During the demonstrations, I start the march with the Jewish bloc. I have marching beside me Stephen Kapos, the Holocaust survivor who became quite a famous architect.”
“However—I do not say this lightly—as a result of my experience of the whole process, I have lost confidence in the judgment of the senior Metropolitan police officers. I say that because I was involved in some of the discussions on the demonstrations in which Ben Jamal and Chris Nineham were arrested. I found then that the use of the restrictions was deliberately provocative. What has been said in court since then has been disingenuous, because I was there on the spot, and I saw what happened. In fact, the next day, I was pulled into the police station and interviewed as a result of the events that day.”
“I have been involved in some of the processes of negotiation with the police on each of those demonstrations—I have been on virtually every one, over two years. I have been advising the organisations involved when they are going into the negotiations, as well as during those negotiations. So that Members understand, what happens is that a date is identified months in advance. As that date gets nearer, discussions take place with the police, and severe restrictions are placed on the route and the timing of the march. The issue of synagogues has come up; I do not think there has ever been a synagogue within half a mile of one of those marches, but the demonstrators themselves have said, “We’ll adjust the times, so that it does not in any way interfere with any service.” Those are the negotiations that go on. It is a thorough process.”
“At that time, we were condemned in this House for supporting a terrorist, and for supporting a terrorist organisation called the African National Congress. These days, if we held up the banners that we held up then, we would probably be arrested. The other example I give is from 1985, I think. I was involved in the organisation of the people’s march for jobs. A group of unemployed workers marched from the north all the way to London, and my job was to prepare for their arrival in London, but in every town and city, they were met with a demonstration. On many occasions, those demonstrations were disruptive—that is cumulative. For me, the other issue is that unfortunately, I think this change is largely targeted at the Palestine Solidarity Campaign demonstrations in London.”
“That seems like a simple, small step forward, but I think it will cause immense problems. In particular, it will place a burden on the police, but it will also introduce an element of subjective judgment by a number of senior police officers. I will give examples from our history. In the 1980s, I was involved in the City of London branch of the anti-apartheid movement, and for two years, we held a permanent demonstration outside South Africa House. I remember being there, singing Christmas carols, on Christmas day. It was disruptive, and people were arrested for individual offences, but that was the whole point. We were there because we said that we would not leave until Nelson Mandela was released.”
“I do not want to talk about the principles; I want to talk about the practicalities, because I am worried that it is when the Government rush to legislate around a particular incident, and do not provide adequate time for debate and individual votes, that Parliament makes significant mistakes. That has been demonstrated in the past. The Minister referenced the Manchester events, which were absolutely tragic, and the demonstrations that took place then. However, she also mentioned that the powers to deal with such events—to prevent and restrict demonstrations that are causing such distress—already exist. She also mentioned that the cumulative impact is a factor that police officers need to take into account; the change made by the Bill is simply that it will say that police will be required to take the cumulative impact into account.”
“I wholeheartedly support the amendment that my hon. Friend the Member for Lowestoft (Jess Asato) has tabled to Lords amendment 300. Those of us who have dealt with honour cases recognise the overall family involvement, and there needs to be recognition that we are talking about persons, not a person. I have listened to a large number of speeches that have done a tremendous job of setting out the principles behind the motion to disagree with Lords amendment 312, tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Middlesbrough and Thornaby East (Andy McDonald), which I support.”
“I entirely agree with my hon. Friend. He made the point earlier, and I think it is completely rational and understandable. What adds to my anxiety is that in the normal run of things, a serious matter such as this would be introduced in the House of Commons, and there would be a proper Commons debate, after which the matter would go off to the Lords, and then come back to us. I feel that we are being bounced into this today, and I did not expect that of my Government on an issue of this sort, because it is so important, and because it will have major consequences for us in the future—and particularly for our movement, which was based on protest from the very beginning. We seem to be undermining our historic tradition, and our commitment to a role that we have played historically and will almost inevitably need to play in the future.”
“I think it would be really helpful if the Minister brought the guidance before the House at some stage, once it is completed, so that we could have some clarity about it. There will be protests in the future. A third runway at Heathrow has been threatened again, and there will be a cumulative impact of protests in my constituency. I want to know if I will have to hand myself in at some point in time as a result of that.”
“I think the House is at one with the Prime Minister on the inclusion of Lebanon in the ceasefire. The problem that we face is that today there have been more airstrikes against the Lebanese, and the Israeli artillery is now shelling Lebanese cities and towns. Many of us feel that it is because Netanyahu is out of control, and Donald Trump is not willing to exert that control or influence to bring him into line. In the Prime Minister’s next discussions with European leaders that he is successfully convening, will he place on the agenda a comprehensive European sanctions strategy, so that we can exert some influence to prevent Netanyahu running out of control and creating problems for the globe, and not just the middle east?”