Jeremy Corbyn
MP for Islington North · Your Party · United Kingdom
“In two minutes, I will do my best, Sir Desmond. I am proud to represent a very small urban area of Britain in which, over the years, we have managed to increase the number of parks and open spaces.”
“I grew up in a country area where we had a competition over who heard the first cuckoo in spring. It is that sort of change in understanding that we have to bring about if we are to win this debate on biodiversity and sustainability on our planet. The Government are pledged to the 30by30 target for the oceans.”
“We have to address the wider issue, which is the pollution emanating from our towns, cities and industries into our rivers and the water companies that do not deal with it. I have 13 seconds left, so I will simply say this: it is great that the House has come back to this issue and that so many Members want to speak today.”
“I congratulate the right hon. Member on becoming Prime Minister and on his stamina at taking questions for already even longer than the longest world cup match. He has said some helpful and useful things about housing, particularly on rough sleeping.”
“Surely the obvious answer is to bring in some kind of ceiling—a rent control of some sort—to the sector, and immediately look at not postponing the rise in the local housing allowance, but to bring real relief to people who are desperately up against it and subsidising their rent out of their benefits.”
“When the hon. Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman) introduced the debate, he quite rightly drew attention to the huge work done by our constituency and parliamentary staff. It is right that we should thank them on this occasion and also thank all the parliamentary staff for what they do.”
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Every one of 8,612 lines we hold for Jeremy Corbyn, in date order, each linked to its source. Free to read, in full, without an account. Page 26 of 173.
“Under this legislation, the Government will make the task of anyone trying to into Britain much more difficult. The Bill will also create two tiers of asylum seekers: those who come through a moderately legitimate route by arriving in a port of entry and applying, and those who come out of desperation on leaking dinghies. So what are we doing? Are we looking after the refugees or accusing them of wrongdoing for trying to get to a place of safety, and then condemning those who try to save them so that seafarers around the world who pluck refugees from the sea will be accused of illegally abetting migration to this country? It is a terrible situation. Ten days ago, a Royal National Lifeboat Institution lifeboat took a group of people on a dinghy into a north Kent harbour to give them a place of safety.”
“At a time when country after country is closing its borders to refugees, who are stuck for decades in refugee camps, our Government are joining the throng who stand against refugees, rather than for them. Instead of patting ourselves on the back for our historical good work in supporting refugees from some countries, we should recognise what is happening at the present time. I took the opportunity to visit the refugee camp in Calais in 2015, for which the then Prime Minister, David Cameron, described me as preferring to spend a weekend hanging round with a “bunch of migrants”. I found poor and desperate people who had walked all across Europe to try to get to a place of safety. They were frightened of gangs in the camps, the police and fascist gangs, and they wanted to get to this country, where they hoped they would be better treated.”
“Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker, for the opportunity to speak in this debate. History is going to judge our Parliament and our Government harshly for introducing this legislation at a time when there are unprecedented numbers of refugees around the world—the total figure globally is about 80 million. They are fleeing from war, poverty, injustice, human rights abuses and environmental disasters, and they are living in refugee camps in enormous numbers —in Bangladesh, where there are 1 million Rohingya people, and in Jordan, Lebanon and other countries across the middle east, including Libya. Those conditions are created by unfair trade and the arms that we sell, which bring about the wars that bring about the refugee flows. The number of refugees is likely to rise.”
“Is not the issue that the Government have refused to take any action towards ending social media discrimination of any kind? That, in turn, has fanned the flames of divisiveness and hate in our communities that we are currently witnessing, as my hon. Friend the Member for Coventry South (Zarah Sultana) pointed out. The Amnesty International report on “Toxic Twitter” pointed out that black women are 84% more likely to experience racist abuse online than anyone else. What real steps will the Minister take, urgently, to ensure that no one—and I mean absolutely no one—is able to post racist abuse online?”
“What efforts will the Prime Minister be making to try to ensure that there is not a descent into civil war but some kind of diplomatic initiative at least to bring about security for the people of Afghanistan, and obviously that includes the entire population, particularly those children who have suffered so much and those women who have been so grievously discriminated against in that country? While Britain is withdrawing, surely we need to recognise that when we make hasty foreign policy decisions to go to war, the consequences go on for a very long time. In this case, it is now the 20th anniversary of such a decision.”
“Surely we need an inquiry into how such a decision came around to go into Afghanistan in the first place, and now the withdrawal from Afghanistan and of course the chaos that is being left behind. The Prime Minister will have noted that some talks are going on, which have been cautiously welcomed by the United States, in Tehran between the Afghan Government and the Taliban. He will also have noted that there are large numbers of Afghan refugees now in Tajikistan as well as in Pakistan.”
“This has to be a day of reflection. We have spent billions of pounds in the war in Afghanistan, 450 British troops have lost their lives, thousands of Americans and other troops have lost their lives, many, many thousands of Afghan people have lost their lives and many more have been forced to be refugees in exile all around the region as well as in western Europe. Surely we need to think about this very carefully. It is disappointing that the Prime Minister appeared to reject calls for an inquiry at the Liaison Committee yesterday and appeared to reject the request for an inquiry made by the right hon. Member for Bournemouth East (Mr Ellwood) today. May I ask him to think again about that?”
“I hope that our debate will consider what I started my contribution with: real security in a very difficult and very dangerous world. That, surely, is something we could all, I hope, agree with and sign up to.”
“We need to think a bit more carefully and a bit more seriously about that. The study of history is always important: the way in which the world went from the complacency of Edwardian England to the horrors of the first world war by a series of semi-secret mutual defence treaties all around Europe and the borders of Europe; and the way in which the rise of fascism was for a long time ignored in Germany and we ended up with the holocaust and the genocide of the second world war. Let us not go back to those days. Let us instead look to a world where we are actually making our contribution to peace around the world, and our contribution to supporting people who are going through human rights abuses and oppression.”
“The people of this country do not want to see soldiers underpaid, badly treated, suffering mental health stress when they come out of the armed forces and getting inadequate support for it, nor do they want to see the privatisation of their facilities. They are proud when our armed forces help to deal with Ebola or save people, desperate refugees, drowning in seas around the world. They are proud of that. Can we not move in a slightly different direction and start looking not just at our own defence policy and the need to diversify so much of our defence industry while protecting jobs that are so important in different parts of the country, but also recognise that when we sell arms to others, they get used? They get used by Saudi Arabia to kill people in Yemen. They were used by Israel in the recent bombing of the Gaza strip.”
“What happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 was a firework compared with the power of the current nuclear weapons held by China, Russia, France, the United States and ourselves, so we have to think about what that means. There was an article yesterday in the i about some of the survivors of the nuclear tests on Bikini Atoll in 1954. Many died from cancers as a result of those tests, as indeed did many British nuclear test veterans as a result of being forced to observe those particular tests. Can we not instead start looking towards a future where we play our part in trying to bring about a more peaceful world? We as a country want to live in a peaceful world. The people of this country want to live in a peaceful world.”
“How on earth will Britain go to the NPT review conference and say, “We support the nuclear non-proliferation treaty”, while at the same time expanding our nuclear warheads from a maximum of 180 to 225 or 250—the figure is unclear from the White Paper and statements from the Ministry of Defence? Or, will we be able to say something more positive: that we will adopt a “no first use” policy, that we will not further increase the number of nuclear warheads, that we will take steps on greater mutual verification and on reducing the number of warheads and that we will seriously engage with the idea of a global ban on nuclear weapons? Nuclear weapons usage is inconceivable and unthinkable for anyone who wants to see the world survive. Any one nuclear weapon used anywhere would cause massive and intense damage.”
“We are in a minority of countries that does not support the principle of a global ban. We are in a very small minority of countries that, contrary to what the right hon. Member for New Forest East says, are, in my view, in breach of the principles of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. The nuclear non-proliferation treaty was set up with the idea of preventing the proliferation of nuclear weapons, and it has had some successes in that through nuclear weapons-free zones in Africa, central Asia, Latin America and others that are proposed, but it has not been so successful in persuading the declared nuclear weapons states or the non-declared, but “no nuclear weapons” states such as India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel to take part fully in the principles of the NPT. The NPT review conference is coming up later this year.”
“The World Health Organisation frequently points out that the greatest risk to the health of us all is another novel virus that will come from goodness knows where and goodness knows what source. It will not be dealt with by military means; it will only be dealt with by healthcare and health means. When Prime Minister talks of sharing our vaccine surplus, I hope it happens. I hope he is right in doing that and I hope those vaccines get to all the people and all the countries that need them. I want to say something more on the issues of nuclear weapons. The General Assembly of the United Nations and the vast majority of nations in the United Nations have supported the idea of a global ban on nuclear weapons. They have signed up for it. A number of countries have already ratified that particular treaty.”
“Before anybody shouts at me about human rights abuses in China, Russia or anywhere else—Saudi Arabia, Yemen, or any country you care to name—I will just say this: I would challenge any country or any leader on their human rights record if I thought they should be challenged, and I do think they should be challenged, because human rights are a universal concept, based on the universal declaration of 1948. Would it not be so much better if we put our energies into engagement with all those countries to try to ensure that the ideals of the universal declaration were actually met in a proper way and if we supported the United Nations in what it is trying to achieve? In this post-covid world, let us recognise that we need to spend a great deal of money on healthcare around the world.”
“We are a country of 65 million people in one part of the world. We are not a global power. We are not an imperial power. We should not be having pretensions of being an imperial or global power but play our part in the family of nations, through the United Nations, to try to improve the lot and living standards of people all around the world. In that context, I ask myself what we are doing sending an aircraft carrier to patrol the South China seas to encourage a build-up of military hardware between India, Australia, the United States and ourselves all around the South China sea and towards China. It seems to me that this is a recreation of the whole idea of a cold war philosophy, which will not serve us well any more than building up to further conflict with Russia by the deployment of the Navy in the Black sea.”
“The White Paper also makes real a decision that the Government have been inching towards, perhaps galloping towards, for quite a while, and that is to, as they see it, restore Britain’s global role. In the 1960s, the Labour Government led by Harold Wilson, while giving political support to the Americans in Vietnam—which I profoundly disagreed with at the time, as did many others in my party—nevertheless recognised that Britain’s role of imperial grandeur around the world had to come to an end, and so ended the east of Suez policy on deployment of the Navy and of significant numbers of troops. That was a significant, important and quite seminal moment. This Government seem to have abandoned all those ideas and now talk grandly of a global role for this country. We should just pause and think about this for a moment.”
“The Government’s proposals in all this, in a post-covid world where wealth has been transferred from the poorest to the richest at an unprecedented rate over the past year to 18 months, are to spend £24 billion more on our defence budget over the next four years and to cut our overseas aid budget from 0.7% of GDP to 0.5%. What kind of message to the world is that? It says that post-covid, recognising all these issues around the world, we are increasing expenditure on arms and preparedness for war and decreasing that which we invest in clean air, clean water, education, health, housing and all the other things that are so important in many parts of the world that are significantly poorer than we are.”
“Is real security the ability to kill somebody else, to destroy something else or to go to war with somebody else, or is it the ability to feed your population and to ensure that they have good healthcare and good education and breathe clean air, and that their young people can look forward to a future with some degree of hope? For many around the world, that is not a possibility and they suffer grievously. Looking at the causes of wars that have happened over recent years in Afghanistan, in Iraq and in Libya, they have all been followed by non-state actors getting more and more active and thus more and more dangerous. There are consequences to every military conflict that we involve ourselves in, and we would do well to think about that.”
“It is a pleasure to speak in this debate, but I have to say, with all due respect to the right hon. Member for New Forest East (Dr Lewis), that it is deeply depressing to follow him when he seems to be contemplating with equanimity the idea of further nuclear arms and a global nuclear war. Surely this debate, of all debates, ought to be concentrating on issues of peace, issues of security and issues of hope for the future, but very little that I have heard so far offers any hope to anybody for the future other than a preparedness for more conflicts and more wars. The Government’s White Paper on security was very interesting, and I read it with interest and care, yet I felt that it had missed the fundamental point. What is real security?”
“Is he confident that we will make sure that no further arms are supplied to Ethiopia and, indeed, that there is an arms embargo on the whole region to try to force the pace on bringing about peace for the future? Have he or the Government had any contact with the African Union on this issue, and what role is the African Union playing in trying to bring about a political settlement and a political solution so that another conflict does not break out and the many refugees who have gone to Sudan and other places are able to return home in safety?”
“Tragedy has hit many people in the region, and sadly much of the world’s media seems to be ignoring it. Children are ultimately the most horrendous victims of this kind of war, and sexual violence has been perpetrated against many women in Tigray. Two million people, as others have pointed out, are now homeless or have been driven from their homes, and 350,000 people face imminent hunger. There has to be a political solution to this situation, and there has to be a humanitarian response to it. Is the Minister confident that the Ethiopian Government will allow unfettered access to United Nations human rights inspectors to look at the human rights situation?”
“Will the Secretary of State also assure me that the money being spent on tutoring will be paid only to qualified tutors who will be carefully selected and vetted by local education authorities, so that we do have the best possible educational opportunities for all our children, and particularly for those who come from the poorest families in this country?”
“Many students have suffered greatly during covid and the lockdown. Many children in large families in overcrowded flats have had no access, or very limited access, to computers and the internet, and have therefore lost out massively on educational opportunities. I am very unclear as to how they will be helped with the very small amount of money that the Secretary of State has offered. A total of £50 per pupil is nowhere near what is needed to help these young people catch up on the hundreds of hours of education that they have lost over the past year. Will he please look at it again?”
“We should not be complacent about our own society, either, because often in Parliament we have this sense of complacency that bad things—”
“However, we need to make sure that those who collect and gather that information—irritating as they often are to politicians; that is the world in which we live—are a crucial part of any democratic society. The work done by the International Federation of Journalists and others in trying to get global agreement on the protection of journalists is very important. It is also important that the United Nations Human Rights Council continues its work on protecting journalists, and that we have an effective protection mechanism for journalists all around the world. Too many have died, too many are in prison and too many are frightened to report the news they ought to be reporting, because they are scared of what will happen to them if they do so.”
“They included the offices of al-Jazeera and a number of other journalistic outlets in the region, so they could no longer effectively report what was happening in Gaza. Some brave journalists managed to use satellite phones and so on to keep in communication, but they were reporting while under fire from Israel that was quite clearly targeting those places where journalists were trying to report the reality of what is going on. And Yousef Abu Hussein, a young journalist, was killed during that whole process. In this debate I hope that we can reflect on the bravery of journalists around the world—those who seek to speak truth to power and who try to tell us the truth about what is happening around the world. We all love newspapers; we all love news and information.”
“Our complaints and objections about the way in which Roman Protasevich is being treated would be far more credible if the London Stock Exchange was not at the same time hosting financial servicing arrangements and opportunities to raise cash for the Belarussian Government. If we are serious about press freedom and freedoms in general, we must think very carefully about what financial institutions and others are doing. The terrible events in Gaza and the west bank over the last few weeks and the loss of life of people both in Israel and in Palestine are obviously shocking and appalling. It is also very clear that the bombing was very effectively and efficiently targeted in Gaza. Two towers were taken out completely; they were demolished by targeted bombing.”
“They are all people who have been imprisoned because they were trying to report the truth. The hon. Gentleman quite rightly pointed out what happened to Roman Protasevich. Obviously, it is appalling that the plane was effectively hijacked and he was taken to Belarus because he had been writing stories that were critical of its regime. Obviously, action should be taken. I am a member of the Council of Europe and my fellow members and I will make our views very well known at subsequent meetings. Unfortunately, Belarus is not a member of the Council of Europe; it is the only European country that is not a member.”
“She was lucky that day, because she was not at home; she was away. That is the kind of life that she and other very brave journalists live in Mexico, in Colombia, in Egypt and in other countries where journalists are consistently under threat. We mourn those who have been killed, but there are many others in jail and the threat of jailing journalists is a form of censorship. Many of the world’s Governments know that by consistently threatening journalists, they will either tone down their reporting or simply not report what is going on where corruption, drug cartels and so on are involved. There is a kind of league table of journalists who are in prison. Globally, there are 235 of them in prison—those are the ones we know of —including 67 in Turkey, 21 in Egypt and 20 in China.”
“A good friend of mine, Anabel Hernández, a Mexican journalist, launched a book called “The Sorrows of Mexico” with Lydia Cacho and others at the Edinburgh international book festival three years ago. I was there. She described what she had gone through in preparing the book and in writing about the power of drug cartels, corrupt police forces and the role of the military. She described the threats made to her: “Ever since, I have lived with 24 hour protection, if you can call that living.” The threat never goes away. On 21 December 2014, a dozen men, armed with AK47 rifles and handguns, closed off the street where Hernández lived, and started asking her neighbours in which house the journalist lived. They deactivated the security cameras in the immediate area, including those installed in her house.”
“Social media is restricted in a number of countries, and Google and others are quite happy to do deals with national Governments in order to restrict access to information. These things have to be looked at seriously and carefully. We need international agreement on this, which I will come on to in a moment. I have in front of me the “White Paper on Global Journalism”, produced by the International Federation of Journalists, of which I am a member, in the sense that I am a member of the National Union of Journalists in Britain. This report makes for chilling reading. Since 1990, as the hon. Gentleman has pointed out, 2,650 journalists have been killed around the world. Those are the ones we know of—there may well be more.”
“They rely completely on news that they believe they select themselves from various websites around the world, but they are often unaware of the complex, complicated and very efficient algorithms used to drive people in certain directions on certain stories and news issues. We must look not only at the freedom of journalists and the importance of independent ownership of all media outlets, but at making social media accessible to everyone. Social media companies have shown themselves to be very happy to operate with authoritarian and oppressive regimes and close down access altogether to certain individuals. For example, in the middle of their strike action in Delhi, Indian farmers suddenly found that they had no access whatsoever to social media, which was a crucial outlet for them.”
“In considering press freedom, we should also look at media ownership and control, and the concentration of media ownership into a small number of global companies that impose news values on their outlets, which are not necessarily very open and which are often not interested in many of the poorest parts of the world but only in celebrity and the goings on in the wealthiest parts of the world. It is important that we recognise the importance of the right to know, and therefore the importance of diversity of ownership and diversity of access to the media. As the hon. Gentleman quite correctly pointed out, many people now get most of their information from online sources, through social media and associated outlets. Many people simply do not buy newspapers and do not access newspaper websites or anything else.”
“I compliment the hon. Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Damian Collins) on securing the debate and on the way in which he introduced the subject. It is absolutely crucial and essential to all our lives that we think seriously about what press freedom actually means. In any free society, the right to know, the right to speak and the right to assemble are important and precious, and indeed are encapsulated in the 1948 universal declaration of human rights.”
“I apologise, Ms Ghani. I was not aware that there was a time limit. I will briefly say this. In our complacency, let us not forget brave people who have blown the whistle on the truth around the world. I think of Julian Assange and the work he has done in exposing what has happened around the world in preparation for war and other things. In some countries, he would be called a hero for being a whistleblower; here, he is called something very different. We should think of what news values and freedom of speech values are actually all about. Thank you for the opportunity to speak, Ms Ghani.”
“Our public need to know exactly the nature of that military relationship with Israel. Of course, the Minister rightly says that the occupied territories, which are occupied by Israel, are the places that suffer as a result of this bombardment.”
“The images of death, destruction and loss of life all over the region are horrific. The targeted bombing of buildings in Gaza, the tanks on the west bank, and the destruction of education and health facilities is absolutely appalling. Will the Minister explain exactly what is the nature of Britain’s military relationship with Israel? What is the nature of that co-operation with Israel? Can he tell the House whether any munitions sold by Britain to Israel have been used to bomb places in Gaza, and whether any drone equipment supplied by Britain or bought by Britain has been used as a surveillance method on either the west bank or Gaza and followed up by the destruction of civilian life and the death of many people, including the tragedy of the deaths of whole families and children?”
“In short, it means creating a country fit for the next generation, where we say that our core principles are supporting people, opposing those who would wish to divide our society—the far right and the racists—and, above all, investing for a future that works for everybody. That is the task before us and no doubt in all these debates all these issues are going to come to the fore. That is our job as MPs: to try to articulate the problems that people face and, above all, to find solutions to them. I do not think they are going to be found in any ideas of free market economics; it is only about what the public can do for the public.”
“When we deal with the Queen’s Speech, it is the start of the parliamentary Session. There is a whole legislative programme ahead and a lot of debates coming up, but we should have in our minds the kind of country we, as MPs, have been elected to represent. It is not a happy place. There is massive disillusionment and division, and there are massive levels of poverty and of underachievement. That can be changed, but it means tackling injustice and inequality. It means chasing down the tax avoiders in the tax havens. It means investing in public services for tomorrow and in the jobs for tomorrow.”
“We need net zero by 2030, but we also need investment to ensure that the jobs that are created tomorrow are environmentally sustainable, as well as economically sustainable, and that we have economic planning that has sustainability at its heart and is not about destroying biodiversity, and polluting our rivers and oceans. This is about putting recycling, reusing and protecting our natural world at the very heart of what we do. I was proud on 1 May 2019 to propose to Parliament that we declare a climate emergency. It was agreed, without a vote. We were the first Parliament in the world to do this. Let us go to COP saying that we have carried that out, that we will achieve net zero by 2030, and that we will share the technologies around the world and have a trade and economic strategy that sustains the world, rather than damages it.”
“I have taken part in many conferences, calls and discussions with people from Israel, from Palestine and from different organisations all over the world. Peace will not be achieved by bombardment or by land-grabbing; peace will be achieved only by the recognition of the rights of the Palestinian people and an end to the occupation. I finish with this: the world is at a crossroads. It is at a crossroads of inequality, injustice and poverty, which covid has shown. It has shown us the need for universal healthcare around the world, to make us all healthy. It has also shown the need for us to urgently address the environmental crisis. The Paris COP went some way forward, in that most countries signed up for it, although they have not fully implemented it.”
“Settlers are trying to drive the people out of those homes, and this is emblematic of the way in which settlers all across the west bank have taken over Palestinian land, divided up farms, created settler roads and created the quite correct anger of the Palestinian people against the occupation. Surely the way forward is to end the occupation, end the siege of Gaza and ensure that there is peace in the future. I say that because I believe very strongly in it, and if anyone doubts the horrors of what it is like to live under occupation, I urge them to look at a film called “The Present”, which demonstrates just how difficult life can be for people trying to undertake an ordinary thing like going out to buy a present.”
“The famine that is now going on for many people in Madagascar and other places in something that our aid, as well as United Nations aid, could help to deal with. This is a question of dealing with the causes of conflict and the causes of human rights abuses around the world. That means having challenging conversations with every Government, whatever their colour and whatever kind of Government they are, if they are abusing human rights in any form. This has to be a universal. The news over the last couple of days has been heavily dominated by what is happening in Jerusalem and what is happening now in Gaza. Some years ago, I went to Sheikh Jarrah in Jerusalem, a place of Palestinian homes. It has been a place of Palestinian homes for almost all of my lifetime.”
“The wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya, the oppression of the Rohingya people in Myanmar, the way in which militia groups in the Congo have driven people off their land to make way for mining corporations, and the way in which people in Colombia have been driven off their land to make way for land-grabbing by global corporations—these things exist all over the world. The causes of instability are the inequalities on this planet. When the Government propose to dramatically increase expenditure on defence and armaments and turn their back on the possibility of a global treaty to ban nuclear weapons, and at the same time cut overseas aid, they are not dealing with the problems of the world; they are ignoring them or, indeed, making them worse. The levels of hunger in the world have gone up.”
“The Government said in the Queen’s Speech that they were going to carry through the security review. There are 80 million people on this planet who are refugees. That is 80 million people with no place to call home, no place that they know is safe, and no future in which they know what is going to happen to them. They are stuck in refugee camps, they are stuck on borders and they are stuck in desperate levels of poverty. I am not defending people traffickers or smugglers or anything like that, but they are the symptom, not the cause. Refugees undertake dangerous journeys because they are desperate and they are in a dangerous situation. We have to look at the causes.”
“The idea that we somehow have to bring in a system of identification before we vote is under consideration, but it was not that long ago the Prime Minister said he would eat an ID card rather than show it to somebody. Most people do not carry ID with them, and there is no ID card system in this country. I believe that the Prime Minister and many others voted against the ID card idea, as did I, when it came up some years ago, so let us drop the idea. It seems to me that it is looking to solve a problem that does not exist. The levels of voter fraud are less than minuscule in elections in this country, and I am pleased about that, so there is no need to bring this in. All it seems to be is voter suppression, as has happened in so many states in the USA.”
“If he was, why would he attempt for a second time to push through the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, with its control over the right to protest and the right to assembly and its requirement for those who wish to protest or assemble to seek police permission? We would condemn such legislation in any other part of the world and it should be condemned here. Those who turned out on Clapham common did so for a vigil but ended up being driven off the common by the police, who saw it as an illegal demonstration. These are dangerous precedents. We need to have the right of free speech and the right of assembly enshrined in the very being of our legislation in this country.”
“As we have seen throughout the covid pandemic, too many children have been stuck at home in small, overcrowded flats, with insufficiency of computer access, unable to achieve what others can achieve in school. If we improve housing for all children throughout the country, we will improve the life chances and educational opportunities for all those children. The Queen’s Speech includes some depressing passages on civil liberties. I always thought that the Prime Minister was a sort of right-wing civil libertarian. I have always thought he was right wing—he would not be too worried about being called that—but he is not actually a libertarian at all.”
“The Queen’s Speech mentions something about the private rented sector and guarantees within it. Well, a third of my constituents live in the private rented sector and they need to know that their rents are controlled, that their tenancies are long term, if not permanent, and that they have a chance, later on, of getting council housing. That means giving local authorities the finance and power to build, rather than having to go through the most arcane negotiations to get some degree of social housing from each development site. In my constituency, buying a place is impossible for anyone on average earnings, twice average earnings or even three times average earnings. It is simply not possible. For so many, the only way out of the housing crisis is council housing.”