Kirsty Blackman
MP for Aberdeen North · Scottish National Party · United Kingdom
“I first raised the issue of self-generated images in Parliament more than four years ago. I have asked almost every single Culture, Media and Sport team about the issue of livestreaming. I am pleased to hear from the Secretary of State that action is being taken, and about the belt-and-braces approach that is coming in.”
“Labour promised £200 million for Grangemouth, none of which has materialised. Labour promised 1,000 jobs for GB Energy, and it turns out that a third of the 130 delivered so far are not actually in Scotland.”
“There is a geographical divide on this issue starker than I have ever seen in this place. Across all parties, every Member representing a Scottish constituency has stressed the issue of jobs, and how important this is to the north-east of Scotland.”
“There is a fundamental question here about what our priority is. Is it to reduce the bill, to reduce the amount of money that we are spending, or to ensure that disabled people can access all the human rights that the rest of us can, access society and be supported? We must recognise the extra costs of disability. What is the priority?”
“May I continue to encourage the Minister to talk to Social Security Scotland and our colleagues in the SNP Government about their experiences of the adult disability payment and whether the changes that have been implemented in Scotland would make a positive difference to those claiming PIP?”
“I will point out where things are today and how we can improve them, rather than looking at what was done in the past, but first, I recognise that although Pride is about celebration, it is also about being angry. We should be angry about the injustices.”
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“An algorithm is a calculation that is learning from people’s behaviour. If society is racist, an algorithm will be racist. If society is white, an algorithm will be white. You can train an algorithm to do different things, but you have to remember that these companies are for-profit businesses that sell ad space. The only thing they are optimising for in an algorithm is engagement. What we can do, as Ellen said, through a system is force optimisation around certain things, or drive algorithms away from certain types of content, but again, an algorithm is user-neutral. An algorithm does not care what user is saying what; it is just “What are people clicking on?”, regardless of what it is or who said it. An approach to safety has to follow the same methodology and say, “We are user-neutral.”
“Obviously there is a relationship, but one piece of content may have very different effects when it is encountered by different users. It may cause a lot of harm to one user, whereas it may not cause a lot of harm to another. We know that when certain kinds of content are scaled and amplified, and certain kinds of behaviour are encouraged or incentivised, we see harms at a scale that the Bill is trying to tackle. That is a concern for us. We want more of a focus on some things that are mentioned in the Bill—business models, platform algorithms, platform designs and systems and processes. They often take a backseat to the issues of content identification and removal. Kyle Taylor: I will use the algorithm as an example, because this word flies around a lot when we talk about social media.”
“What we would want from a Bill that was taking more of a systems approach is thinking: where are platforms making decisions about how they are designing their services, and how they are operating their services at all levels? Content moderation policy is certainly included, but it goes back to questions of how a recommendation algorithm is designed and trained, who is involved in that process, and how human moderators are trained and supported. It is also about what functionality users are given and what behaviour is incentivised and encouraged. There is a lot of mitigation that platforms can put in place that does not talk about directly affecting user content. I think we should have risk assessments that focus on the risks of harms to users, as opposed to the risk of users encountering harmful content.”
“Q You have done a really good job of explaining the concerns about journalistic content. Thinking about the rest of the Bill for a moment, do you think the balance between requiring the removal of content and the prioritisation of content is right? Do you think it will be different from how things are now? Do you think there is a better way it could be done in the Bill? Ellen Judson: The focus at the moment is too heavily on content. There is a sort of tacit equation of content removal—sometimes content deprioritisation, but primarily content removal—as the way to protect users from harm, and as the threat to freedom of expression. That is where the tension comes in with how to manage both those things at once.”
“Companies will be able to do certain amounts of things, and regulators will have certain powers to investigate and do their own research, but it requires the added efforts of civil society properly to hold companies to account for the effects of certain changes they have made—and also to help them in identifying what the effects of those changes to design have been. I think that is really crucial.”
“First, we want companies to have to be more transparent about what kind of testing they have done, or, if not testing, about who they have consulted when designing these products. Are they consulting human rights experts? Are they consulting people who are affected by identity-based harm, or are they just consulting their shareholders? Even that would be a step in the right direction, and that is why it is really important. We feel that there need to be stronger provisions in the Bill for independent researcher and civil society access to data.”
“Q Thanks. On the propensity to cause harm, we heard earlier that a company might create a great new feature and put it out, but then there is a period—a lag, if you like—before they realise the harm that is being caused. Do you trust that companies would have the ability to understand in advance of doing something what harm it may cause, and adequately to assess that? Ellen Judson: I think there are a lot of things that companies could be doing. Some of these things are in research that they probably are conducting. As we have seen from the Facebook files, companies are conducting that sort of research, but we aren’t privy to the results. I think there a couple of things we want to see.”
“They are making that case stronger for the Scottish people, who can see the two Governments working on their behalf. They can see the Scottish Government enshrining fair work and principles in every single thing we do and putting the wellbeing of the population first in every single thing we do, and they can see the Tories doing everything they can to dismantle those protections, to reduce social security in real terms and to ensure that people do not have enough money to live on, and they can see them to step up to solve the energy crisis. The case for independence is getting ever stronger, and the Conservatives’ continued failure is bringing the reality of independence much closer every single day.”
“We have made these cases on behalf of our constituents and the people of Scotland: we want employment law to be devolved. The longer that this Tory Government continue to refuse to devolve employment law; the longer they continue dismantling the protections in place for workers; the longer they keep coming on television saying things like, “People are using food banks because they can’t budget”, or, “People should just work a few more hours and that will be great; that will reduce the need for them to have the £20 universal credit uplift”; the longer they continue to refuse to increase benefits by anything close to inflation—the Scottish Government have increased benefits by almost double what the UK Government have increased them by this year, and the Scottish Government have a child poverty action plan in place—the stronger the case they are making for independence.”
“The Government must absolutely commit not to roll back workers’ rights—not that it will mean anything if they do say it, but it would be useful for us to be able to repeat it back to them—and to increase the protections in place for workers. The promises that they have made need to come through. We have been asking for years for employment law to be devolved. I would love for the Labour party to back us in that call. If it did not back us on this, it would feel a bit like it was willing just to let us sink with the rest of Britain. It would be very nice for the Scottish Parliament to have control of this area, because we could make a positive difference to workers in Scotland, even though we have a Tory Government and even though the Labour party is letting down workers in Scotland by failing to call for employment law to be devolved.”
“It is about taking back control away from Parliament and taking back control from having things in primary legislation and moving it to secondary legislation, ensuring that the UK Government can do what they want to remove the protections put in place by EU law. The only reason why we have the level of workers’ rights that we have, and the only reason why we have been saved from the Tories’ untrammelled reductions in workers’ rights, is EU law. The Brexit freedoms Bill will undo that. It will allow them the absolute power to do what they like with our workers’ rights and to ensure that employers are put first rather than employees at every possible opportunity.”
“People are still living with the level of uncertainty that the deputy leader of the Labour party mentioned, getting texts the night before saying, “Your shift is being cancelled”, or suddenly being given an extra shift that they somehow have to find childcare to cover. They are still living without the benefits of having a pension, sick pay and all those things that workers should have to be able to live lives and not just live to work. We all should be aspiring for our constituents to be able to live, to enjoy living and to have fair work that they can go to. I want to mention the Brexit freedoms Bill, which has a hilarious name. It is about taking back control—which is ironic—to the UK Government.”
“The UK Government should be taking action to press for changes in maritime law to ensure that everybody who is in a boat or ship within our seas is being paid a living wage, not just those on UK-flagged boats. We are five years on from the Taylor review. Why did the Government bother doing the Taylor review? What was the point in all the money, time and hard work that went into it? Nothing has happened and nothing has come of it. Nothing has changed for people working in the gig economy or for people working in companies where they are pretending to be self-employed. Those changes have not been made.”
“Although I welcome the Bill, and I am glad that action is being taken on low pay for seafarers, it is not for all seafarers; it is for ferry seafarers. It covers only people who work on ferries, and it is not any broader than that. Representing a port in my constituency, I am keen to hear the Government explain how they will indemnify ports having to take action against large boats and large companies. How will the Government ensure that those ports are not put at risk by the action they should be taking? I agree that action should be taken, but I do not want this to land in the lap of the ports and for them to be left holding all the responsibility.”
“We need to see those protections in place for new mums. The reality is that the lack of action by this Government has enshrined inequalities and means that the gender pay gap and the gender pension gap will continue to grow, because women are more likely to be on low pay and low hours, working a number of different jobs and not being put into auto-enrolment. The UK Government are making things worse for this generation of workers and future generations of pensioners, as well as for current generations of pensioners. We saw some action in the Queen’s Speech on fire and rehire specifically for seafarers—it is not actually in relation to fire and rehire, but the P&O issues that there have been.”
“After 29 months, nothing has happened. There is nothing in the Queen’s Speech about that. They said 43 months ago that they would like tips to go to workers in full. Where is the legislation? They said 54 months ago that they would evaluate shared parental leave. We have been waiting 54 months for UK Government action on that, and they have failed and failed again, and they failed this week in the Queen’s Speech. The Government have said that they want to look at redundancy protections for women. That was mentioned by the deputy leader of the Labour party, the right hon. Member for Ashton-under-Lyne (Angela Rayner), who made a very good speech that I agreed with the vast majority of. We need to see new mums being given that protection. Having been made redundant when I was pregnant, I know how painful and difficult that situation is.”
“They do not get any of the benefits that people should get with work because the work is not paying. We see the level of stress, pain and mental health suffering that this is causing people. If the UK Government decide that they want to put employers first, ahead of employees, then surely they should recognise that employees having no money and living with that level of stress makes them worse employees. If that is the key thing for the UK Government, they should be trying their best to improve lives for employees by making sure that work actually pays. We would like to see flexible working requests available from day one. The UK Government have promised to look at that. Some 29 months ago, they said they would look at neonatal leave and pay. Where is it? They said they would look at making flexible working the default 29 months ago.”
“The living wage is not actually enough money for people to live on. The UK Government have continued to call it a living wage, but it is a minimum wage rebranded as a pretendy living wage, because people cannot afford to live on it. We can see that from the fact that the Child Poverty Action Group has said that 72% of families with children where at least one parent works are struggling to afford food. If this Government were committed to making work pay, those people would not be going to food banks. They would not be in poverty while working. They would not have to have so many jobs, including zero-hours contracts. Because they have so many jobs that are so low-paid, they do not meet the thresholds for things like auto-enrolment or statutory sick pay.”
“He promises and promises and clearly cannot convince the UK Government to actually deliver—if he even believes it should come through at all. There are so many reasons why we need an employment Bill—why it is absolutely vital and more so today even than it was when it was in the Conservative manifesto back in 2019 or when the Taylor review was published more than five years ago. It is desperately needed because of the cost of living crisis that we are seeing and the absolute pain that our constituents are going through. The Conservatives might want to try to rebrand it as a cost of living crunch, but it is an absolute crisis that people are struggling with every single day. The first thing that we would like to see in the employment Bill is a proper living wage and the removal of the age discrimination within it.”
“In giving some thought to what I might say today, I thought that the best way I could say, “Where is the employment Bill in this Queen’s Speech?”, would be to quote the Scottish TUC, which absolutely got it right: “20 times the Tory UK Government promised to bring forward an employment bill. Absolute silence in today’s State Opening of Parliament. True to form, Tories have shafted workers and armed bad bosses. Devolve it already.” I could not say it better than that. The Minister has given us all sorts of promises about an employment Bill, as he has been doing all year, like many other Ministers. We cannot believe anything that he says in relation to the employment Bill, because it has not been forthcoming.”
“Unfortunately, I missed the article this morning but I will be sure to read it. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that one of the biggest issues with this scheme is the length of time it takes for decisions to be made? People are waiting a significant length of time even to get an initial contact with the vaccine damage payment scheme. Does he agree that that is one of the key things that needs to be fixed?”
“On the point the Minister just made, if this order is just bringing us back to pre-pandemic levels, it is not doing anything to fix the immigration situation we have because of Brexit. I know there is a major problem for bricklayers, for example. Will this just get us back to pre-pandemic levels, rather than making up for that shortfall that we see as a result of Brexit and this Government’s immigration policies?”
“An awful lot of what we have talked about is focused on England, but CITB is national, over all these islands. The difference in Scotland is that we are doing some of the things that the hon. Gentleman is suggesting: we have Developing the Young Workforce, which is a partnership between the private sector and education, in an attempt to ensure that the skills that come through are those that are needed by business. DYW is now embedded in Scotland and is a good success story. I urge him and the Minister to look into what is happening with it, and to consider it as a basis for something that could go forward in England.”
“Setting the threshold at £100,000 makes it much less likely that a company will be badly damaged by a harmful subsidy that it is unable to challenge because of the lack of transparency. I am also pleased that the CMA will report on the regime after three years; the period has been reduced. Again, I moved an amendment on that in Committee. I proposed two years, but we can meet in the middle at three years. I am pleased that that reporting is going to happen. Particularly in the initial period, it is important that we know how the subsidy schemes, the database and the challenges are working. This legislation will work only if it is kept under review, and I am pleased that there is an amendment to that effect.”
“I recognise the improvements on transparency, particularly through Lords amendment 14, which I drafted in Committee, so I am pleased that the Government have put that forward and that it is now in the Bill. It reduces the threshold for subsidies to be included in the transparency database from £500,000 to £100,000. That is incredibly important. The database will work, and we will know whether subsidies are working as the Government intend, only if we can see which subsidies have been made. The threshold of £500,000 was too high for us to have a good enough overview, and that is without mentioning people’s inability to challenge subsidies if they do not know they exist.”
“It is very good to be here to talk about the Subsidy Control Bill again. The Lords amendments that have been accepted and put forward by the Government do make the Bill better. The Bill is better as a result of almost all the amendments that have been introduced; I accept that that is the case. I feel sorry for the Minister because he had to argue against many of these amendments in Committee and on Report. Now they are in the Bill and he is arguing for them, which is great—I am glad he is arguing for them now—but I feel he has been put in a pretty unfortunate position. Although the Lords amendments make the Bill better, it still falls far short of where the UK’s subsidy control regime should be. We still have major concerns about a number of significant issues.”
“If the Government are serious about tackling climate change, they need to be looking at every piece of legislation that comes through this place and ensuring that it does not have a negative impact on our ability to meet net zero; and if it does, they should be ensuring that that is then balanced by further, more dramatic actions in order that we can meet net zero. In summation, the Bill is better than it was, but it still falls far short. I am still concerned about transparency and massively concerned about agriculture. I am hugely concerned about the lack of importance this Government are giving to net zero—that should go through everything we do.”
“Granting authorities are required to consider the environmental and net zero impacts of energy-related subsidies, but that is not what net zero is about. This is not the only time we will be thinking about how to reduce our impact on climate change. If a granting authority decides to give a significant amount of money to a bus company, for example, it does not have to consider the climate impact. If it decides to scrap all the buses and replace them with diesel taxis, it does not have to consider the net zero impact, because it is not an energy-related subsidy. I am massively concerned that net zero is included only in schedule 2 and not in schedule 1.”
“I absolutely do. The Government cannot hide behind agricultural subsidies being in the trade and co-operation agreement, because the TCA specifically says that agricultural subsidies can and should be excluded from subsidy control regimes. The Government still have not given a good reason for including agriculture in the subsidy control regime. It works in the EU and in the state aid regime, so it is perfectly workable to exclude agriculture from the subsidy control regime. Including such subsidies will cause problems. The fact that NFUs across these islands have raised concerns shows that it is incredibly serious. I urge the Minister to think again about how the issue of agriculture is treated by the Bill. The shadow Minister extensively addressed net zero.”
“The issue with that is that if a company is given money to run a freeport and it runs a freeport with that money, it can sack all the staff it likes at P&O and still be eligible for the subsidy. The issue is that there is a gap, which has been well highlighted by the shadow Minister.”
“The Scottish Government asked that the freeports that were going to be in Scotland had green stuff in them and fair work rules, but the UK Government said no. Now the Minister is saying, “Yes, we can totally do that. That definitely should be in it.” The UK Government refused to let us have that in the freeports planned for Scotland.”
“The anti-immigration, “hostile environment” rhetoric and actions of this Government are having a significant impact on our NHS workforce, both by not encouraging people to come here to work in our NHS and by discouraging current staff from staying here. The Health and Social Care Committee recommended the introduction of a national policy framework on migration to support national and local workforce planning. When will the Government implement that recommendation?”
“It must be flexible enough to work with the new technologies, social media and gaming platforms that are coming through.”
“All I want to do is speak to the people I know or have sent a friend request to and accepted a friend request from.” We need to ensure that there are enough safeguards like that in place for children and young people and their parents to be able to make those choices in the knowledge and understanding of how these services will actually be used, rather than MPs who do not necessarily use these services making these decisions. We need to have that flexibility. My final point is that the internet is moving and changing. Twenty years ago I was going to LAN parties and meeting people I knew from online games. That is still happening today and we are only now getting the legislation here and catching up. It has taken that long for us to get here so this legislation must be fit for the future.”
“Kids feel like that as well—my kids, and kids up and down the country—because, as has been talked about, once you get into these cycles of seeing inappropriate, harmful, damaging content, you are more likely to be served with more and more of that content. At the very first moment people should be able to say, “Hang on, I don’t want to see any of this”, and when they sign up to a site they should immediately be able to say, “No, I don’t want to see any of this.”
“That has been talked about in a lot of the information we have received—the requirement to look at algorithms and to opt in to being served with those algorithms, rather than having an opt-out, as we do with Facebook. Facebook says, “Are you sure you don’t want to see this content any more?” Well, yes, I have clicked that I do not want to see it—of course I do not want to see it any more. Of course I would like to see the things my hon. Friend the Member for Ochil and South Perthshire (John Nicolson) posts and all of the replies he sends to people—I want that to pop up with my notifications—but I should have to choose to do that.”
“Once this generation of kids are adults, they will know how their children are behaving online and what the online world is like because they will have lived through it themselves. The current generation of parents has not. The current generation of parents has this knowledge gap. I am finding that a lot of my kids’ friends have rules that I consider totally—totally—unacceptable and inappropriate because they do not match how kids actually use the internet and the interactions they are likely to have on there. I asked my kids what they thought was the most important thing, and they said the ability to choose what they see and what they do not see, and who they hear from and who they do not hear from. That was the most important thing to them.”
“But one of the important things I also want to stress is that a quarter of LGBQ and disabled girls found online forums and spaces an important source of support. So we need to make sure that children and young people have the ability to access those sources of support. Whether that is on forums, or on Fortnite, Minecraft, Animal Crossing or whatever it is they happen to be speaking to their friends on, that is important and key in order for young people to continue to communicate. It has been especially important during the pandemic. There is at this moment a major parenting knowledge gap. There is a generation of parents who have not grown up using the internet. I was one the first people to grow up using the internet and have kids; they are at the top end of primary school now.”
“I do not know if the Minister is aware of this, but you can only change the parental controls on Fortnite to stop your children speaking to everybody; you cannot stop them speaking to everybody but their friends. There are no parental controls on a lot of these sites that parents can adequately utilise. They only have this heavy-handed business where they can ban their child entirely from doing something, or they are allowed to do everything. I think some bits are missed in this because it does not actually reflect the way young people use the internet. In the girls’ attitude survey produced by Girlguiding, 71% of the 2,000 girls who were surveyed said that they had experienced harmful content while online.”
“Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. I want to focus on how people actually use the internet, particularly how young people actually use the internet. I feel, as was suggested in one of the comments in questions earlier, that this Bill and some of the discussion around it misses some of the point and some of the actual ways in which particularly young people use the internet. We have not mentioned, or I have not heard anyone mention, Discord. I have not heard anyone mention Twitch. I have not heard people talking about how people interact on Fortnite. A significant number of young people use Fortnite to interact with their friends. That is the way they speak to their friends.”
“Accountability and ensuring justice and consequences are hugely important, and I do not want to detract from that, but they are not helping survivors on the ground right now. Could the Minister give us a bit more clarity on what her Department is doing to help those who either are in Ukraine or have fled Ukraine, and who are survivors of sexual violence in conflict? What support are they being given on the ground, and if such support is not currently being provided, how does the Minister intend to ramp things up so that it is provided now?”
“Energy prices are going to skyrocket overnight, so today is meter reading day. Martin Lewis and Which? have both been encouraging people to submit meter readings today. It turns out that the websites of E.ON, EDF, Scottish Power, Shell, British Gas, SSE, Octopus Energy, Sainsbury’s Energy and Bulb are crumbling under the pressure of trying to deal with all these meter reading submissions. Will the Leader of the House join me in encouraging people who cannot submit their meter readings today to ensure they have an accurate record of their meter reading by taking a photo of it or attempting to email it to their provider, so that when the prices go up tomorrow, they are charged the correct rate up until today?”
“It is the very best thing for babies and we must do more to support it and normalise it and to make it clear that it is natural as well as truly excellent.”
“I could talk for hours on this subject, so the length of my speech will be no reflection of how passionately I feel about breastfeeding. Breastfeeding is the best thing for babies and the best thing for mums. It closes the gap and gives babies the best possible chance in life. I plead with the Minister to reinstate the infant feeding survey; it is incredibly important that we do that. I also echo the views of my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow Central (Alison Thewliss) about properly supporting the international code on marketing. There is much more that we can do on that. It is really important to ensure that all parents, all prospective parents and all people who might be anywhere near a parent or a baby have information on breastfeeding, know that it is normal and natural, and know that breastfeeding is brilliant.”
“In that time, the UK Government are ploughing ahead with this increase on national insurance. This is going to compound the increases that are being put in place. The increase will be nowhere near covered by the Government’s increase to the national living wage or by the universal credit taper rate. None of that will cover the cost that my constituents are being asked to pay to fund something that could be funded from somewhere else. The UK Government are choosing to balance the books on the backs of the poorest constituents that we have, and they need to change track now.”
“We would get to £450 billion pretty quickly if we added up the amount of positive benefits we can get from migration. If we made better choices—if we chose to not spend money on weapons of mass destruction, for example—we could have more money to spend on the NHS. We should be making better choices that reflect and assist the wellbeing of the population. This is a political choice. The Government have been asking people at the bottom of the pile for more than a decade to just pay a little bit more and cope a little bit more with austerity for a little bit longer, and now they are in the midst of a cost of living crisis where families’ energy bills are going to be shooting through the roof next month, with a £639 increase a year for every household.”
“We are already funding the NHS at a higher level per head of population than England is, and we are already increasing the Scottish child payment to make sure that the number of children in poverty is decreasing. The Resolution Foundation says that the UK Parliament “is on track to be the worst parliament on record for income growth”. I do not want to see a world being created by this Tory Government where my children’s generation will be poorer than my generation and where my generation are poorer than my parent’s generation, but the UK Government continue to bake that in. If the UK Government want to make money and reduce public sector net debt, a great way to do that is through immigration. In 2016-17, migrants reduced public sector borrowing by £4.4 billion.”
“People my age—younger people, people under 40—cannot just dip into their savings in order to fund the massive increase in energy bills that is coming, and the massive increase that is coming as a result of the national insurance hike. This is the least sensible time to be introducing a national insurance hike. People will be paying a massive amount more purely because of the choices of this Government—purely because the Government are choosing to fund health and social care in this way. We in Scotland went into the 2019 election spending more per head of population on our NHS than the UK Government was. We went into that election calling for the UK to up its spending on the NHS. In Scotland, we are making different choices. We are making better choices.”
“It is compounded by the fact that we do not have a real living wage, and that is even worse for people who are younger than 23 or 25, because the UK Government refuse to provide a single living wage. The “national living wage” is a pretendy living wage, because people cannot actually live on it. The Government refuse to provide a single set rate, apparently believing that somehow a 20-year-old can survive on less food or less electricity than someone older. It is ridiculous that the Government are doing this. People my age and younger do not have savings on which to rely. As I said in the House some years ago, the average household has less than £100 in savings—and that was pre-covid, before the period during which people’s incomes have been so massively squeezed.”
“There are many, many people like me out there, people who have been living their lives and paying their bills and have never seen an inflation rate like this, have never seen the increases that are coming down the line, and have never felt the massive squeeze that we are feeling now. This is a cost of living crisis, one that is unprecedented for members of my generation who are having to face these massive costs, and it is compounded by the UK Government’s terribly poor decisions. It is compounded by the fact that people in Scotland must pay massive fees for attending university in England. It is compounded by the fact that people will be paying off student loans throughout their lives; indeed, they will never be able to pay them off.”