Zarah Sultana
MP for Coventry South · Your Party · United Kingdom
“In September, the Prime Minister stood at that Dispatch Box and told the House that he had full confidence in Peter Mandelson, a man whose relationship with convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein was public knowledge.”
“I rise in support of the motion tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Middlesbrough and Thornaby East (Andy McDonald) to disagree with Lords amendment 312.”
“US congressional staff were told on Sunday that Iran was not planning to strike American forces or bases unless Israel attacked Iran first. In other words, there was no intelligence indicating an imminent threat. Yet we have already seen pre-emptive strikes attacking a girls’ school, killing over 100 children.”
“That’s right: the leader of the Labour party and Prime Minister had full confidence in a man who was besties with a convicted nonce. What a disgrace! What we are witnessing is not accountability but the Westminster club protecting its own. This is not just about this Labour Government; large sections of the media also played their part.”
“This situation stinks. Peter Mandelson maintained a relationship with Jeffrey Epstein after he had been convicted. It was not before anyone knew about his grotesque crimes, not when it was being whispered about, but after his conviction, when the world knew exactly who and what Jeffrey Epstein was.”
“Suddenly it is about experience, pragmatism and “getting things done”. This is how power protects itself. What about the victims—the girls and young women abused by Epstein? They received an apology from Mandelson only after sustained pressure. It was not freely given, not offered because it was the right thing to do.”
The complete record
Every one of 600 lines we hold for Zarah Sultana, in date order, each linked to its source. Free to read, in full, without an account. Page 12 of 12.
“It is not a surprise that a British Medical Association study found that nearly three-quarters of its members fear that they will be overwhelmed this winter. Nurses in Coventry tell me that morale is at rock bottom, but the stress and overwork that NHS staff experience are not new. They did not begin with the pandemic. Instead, a decade of NHS underfunding and privatisation has left NHS staff underpaid and overworked. Nurses’ and doctors’ pay has fallen by more than 8% and 9% respectively since 2010. Many cleaners and porters are on less than the real living wage. Underfunding means that we now spend 22% less per head on health than France and 47% less than Germany. It is in this context that NHS staff are being battered by a Government that have overworked and overstretched them for 10 years.”
“She told me that staff are acting outside their roles, working overtime for free and being redeployed across wards and positions to try to cover the gaps. Another told me how frightening battling covid has been, with consistent failures to provide NHS staff with proper PPE. A Sunday Mirror investigation found that healthcare workers needed almost 2 million days off for mental illness in the first wave, with doctors and nurses suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and more than 2,000 doctors quitting the profession since March. Tragically, we know that more than 200 health and care workers have lost their lives to the virus. Even now, staff are being forced to use repurposed bin bags as official PPE at some hospitals in the UK.”
“This is not just about the Government failing to keep their word; it is about public safety and basic fairness. Working on the frontline, NHS staff are already more exposed to the virus. As the Royal College of Nursing and UNISON highlight, travelling to work by car reduces the risk of NHS staff catching or spreading the virus. Reintroducing parking charges makes that safer option more expensive. It also makes it more unaffordable for some workers. To ensure public safety, parking charges must be abolished throughout the pandemic. But it is not just that; NHS staff are battling the virus day in, day out. Some tell me how exhausted they feel, pushed to breaking point by the pandemic. One nurse at the Royal Victoria Infirmary in Newcastle told me: “We are exhausted, we are on our knees”.”
“I will touch on the mental health of NHS staff later, but my hon. Friend makes the point that some trusts are introducing parking charges, in some cases with a 200% increase, which is absolutely scandalous. The Government should provide enough funding to cover the gaps from a decade of cuts to the NHS. I will talk later about increasing NHS pay so that actual rewards and recognition are given to our NHS staff. When I asked the Prime Minister about this in the Chamber, he promised to look into it and get back to me. I have heard nothing since and would be very interested to hear the Minister’s update today. It appears that the Prime Minister and Health Secretary are so out of touch that they do not even know that this has happened.”
“What I hear from the conversations I have had at University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire is that the money has not continued to come; it has stopped. The Minister makes the point that NHS trusts have decision-making powers around parking, and I want to clarify that point, because I find that it then becomes a decision on whether to fund parking or frontline services, and it should not be a choice between those two. There should be enough funding for frontline services and additional funding for parking, so that trusts do not have to make a decision between those.”
“Clubs should be run in the interests of the people who sustain them, who watch them week in, week out, who stick with them when times are good and also when they are not. They should be run for their fans. I call on the Government to give fans control and a say in how their clubs are run, to give accredited supporters’ trusts representation on club boards, and to promote fan ownership models, because that is ultimately the only way the beautiful game will work for the people who love it the most. We must put control in the hands of fans, not of the wealthy few who seek only to enjoy its spoils.”
“The financial troubles of the English Football League clubs is part of a bigger problem and a bigger story. That story is about how the beautiful game has become divided between very wealthy clubs, brought up by billionaires and often used as public relations to sanitise their public image, and poorer clubs that struggle to survive and that often face collapse, as we have seen with Bury and Bolton. Our football clubs are too important to be left in the hands of the likes of Mike Ashley and other bad owners, and too important to be at risk of financial collapse. I call on the Government to step in and ensure that Coventry City is given financial support to weather the storm, but I also call for more far-reaching reforms.”
“As the Sky Blues chief executive, Dave Boddy, said this week, that puts the national sport at severe risk. He has written to the Prime Minister to say that the club, along with all English Football League clubs, has been hung out to dry by the Government. While premier league clubs have the wealth to weather the storm, and while there is hope that the Government will bail out the English Football League, clubs should not be in this position of financial insecurity. There have to be guarantees and financial support for all of our clubs to survive. None of them should be at risk, and it should not be sink or swim. A football club is more than a business: it is part of the community, and for many people it is part of the social fabric that ties us together. That is why I wrote to the Secretary of State calling for this financial support.”
“The club was once again forced to play home matches outside of Coventry in 2019, this time at St Andrew’s in Birmingham—a 38-mile round trip from the city. That is where the club plays its home matches now. Fans are forced to travel out of the city to watch their club. For them, it is an absurd, ridiculous and, frankly, disgraceful situation. The solution is simple. Coventry City football club should be playing football in the city of Coventry. Since being elected, I have been determined to do everything I can to help resolve this situation. That is not the only issue affecting the club. The financial hit of the pandemic and the restrictions has been severe for football clubs across the country, including Coventry. The sport winter survival package announced last week failed to provide any support for the English Football League.”
“Following some difficult years, the club is again on the rise, having been crowned league one champions last season and now competing in the championship once again. However, the club is also an important example of the need for fans to have a greater say in the running of their clubs. Although the club was initiating the plans to build a new, modern stadium at the turn of the millennium, its financial position meant that it did not own the newly built Ricoh Arena. That led to the club playing home matches at Sixfields Stadium—a 70-mile round trip to Northampton—in the 2013-14 season, before returning to the Ricoh the following season, thanks to a fantastic campaign led by supporters and the local paper, the Coventry Telegraph.”
“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairwomanship, Ms Fovargue. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Eltham (Clive Efford) for securing this debate. Although I was born and grew up in the west midlands, my family, my friends and now my social media followers will know that I am a die-hard Liverpool fan. I have my dad to thank for that. That means that I know what it is like to care about the club and to go through the highs and, of course, the lows. While I am a Liverpool fan and I bleed red, I am also very proud to represent thousands of passionate Sky Blues fans, I am here today for them. Coventry City has a long, loud and proud history. They were FA cup winners in 1987 and an inaugural member of the premier league.”
“What discussions she has had with the Chancellor of the Exchequer on the economic effect of the covid-19 outbreak on (a) women, (b) disabled people and (c) Black, Asian and minority ethnic people.”
“Nearly one in seven people in Coventry are now on universal credit. That is a 97% increase since March. Low earnings, higher rates of poverty and greater need mean that women, BAME communities and disabled people rely more on UC and the social security system. Fixing it, from scrapping the two-child limit and benefit cap to an uplift in payments, is a question of gender, racial and disability justice. What has the Minister done to push for these measures in today’s spending review, including keeping the £20 UC uplift from April 2021 and extending it to jobseeker’s allowance and employment support allowance?”
“I call on the Government not only to compensate local authorities for temporary funding shortfalls, but to give them the funding and the powers they need to tackle everything from the housing crisis to the social care crisis, to give low-paid staff the pay rise they deserve, and to truly meet the needs of our communities.”
“When we take into account the effects of austerity and covid on local authorities, we see how utterly inadequate the Government’s funding announcements truly are. Councils do not just need eight months of funding to be plugged; they need 10 years of cuts to be reversed. The crisis has highlighted how fundamental our local authorities are and it has shown who our key workers really are, too. They are not the hedge fund managers or the City bankers, who have had it so good for so long. They are the carers looking after our older residents in Coventry, the refuse collectors and the street cleaners, and the working people who have kept our country going. I will finish by placing on the record my thanks to them.”
“It is a similar story across the country. The National Audit Office estimated that between 2010 and 2018 central Government funding for councils was slashed by nearly 50% in real terms. Those cuts have meant a decade of youth club closures and children’s centres having to shut down, and domestic violence refuges and homeless shelters being forced to close their doors. My inbox is inundated with people struggling on the housing waiting list, which now stands at 14,000 people in Coventry. That is what a decade of Tory cuts looks like. Local authorities have now been rocked by the impact of the pandemic. Councils have been forced to spend more to meet rising needs, and their budgets have been hit by a loss of income in tax receipts and business activity.”
“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hollobone. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Bethnal Green and Bow (Rushanara Ali) for securing this important debate. I also thank and pay tribute to everyone at Coventry City Council who has worked tirelessly through the pandemic, as they did before it hit, to care for the city’s residents and keep services going, even as workloads have been stretched and budgets have been pushed harder. The truth is that local authority budgets were in crisis way before the pandemic. They have faced a decade of brutal Tory cuts. In Coventry, that has meant a cut of £120 million to the central Government grant every single year since 2010, meaning a total reduction of funding of £1.2 billion to date. That amounts to nearly £350,000 in lost funding every single day.”
“Teachers in Coventry South have stressed to me the importance of pupils having access to computers at home, but many children from working-class communities do not have that. One school in my constituency, Ernesford Grange Community Academy, found that 12% of students—101 pupils—struggle to access a device at home. The Government introduced a new duty on schools to provide online learning, but the next day they slashed the allocation of laptops. Ernesford Grange saw its allocation fall from 111 to just 22, so will the Minister today guarantee that every school in Coventry has the laptops that their students need?”
“Last week, the Health Secretary told “Good Morning Britain”, “We don’t have parking charges in English hospitals” for NHS staff “and we’re not going to for the course of this pandemic.” But that is not true, because they were reintroduced for staff at University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire in June, as they have been elsewhere. I have written to the Prime Minister about this matter, and I now ask him whether he will live up to the Government’s promise of free parking throughout the pandemic for NHS staff in Coventry and across the country.”
“Government Members like to pretend that they are the champions of the working class, but when it comes to concrete policies, such as the self-organised training of working people or feeding working-class kids during the school holidays, that façade vanishes and they show their true colours. However, they could prove me wrong and I would be very happy if they did. So, instead of their claiming the mantle of supporting working people only when it means pitting white working-class people against poor black and brown working-class people, I urge them to stand up for all working-class people, by committing to maintaining and expanding the union learning fund.”
“Our society is hooked on deadly fossil fuels. We need to break that addiction, decarbonising our economy with a green new deal, training and investing in our young people, so that instead of being trapped in unemployment, they are building the wind turbines that we need to power our country forward, building the clean public transport that is fit for the future, and retrofitting our country’s homes to reduce energy bills and emissions. There is work to be done, and it is the Government’s job to see that it is done. That is why, instead of scrapping the union learning fund, we should be investing in and expanding it.”
“A 2018 evaluation found that for every £1 spent on the scheme, workers gained £7.60 in better pay, employers gained £4.70 through higher productivity and the Government gained £3.57 from social security savings and revenue gains. That is why it is not only workers who back it, but businesses like Tata Steel. The fund pays for itself and enriches everyone else. It was needed in normal times, never mind times like these, when Britain has entered the worst recession on record, unemployment is surging to levels not seen in decades and the climate emergency is already with us. While people are losing their jobs in record numbers, work needs to be done. Our public services are in ruin: 10 years of Tory cuts have brought them to their knees. We need to build them up, skilling workers along the way, from the care sector to education to the NHS.”
“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairpersonship, Mr Hollobone. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham South (Lilian Greenwood) for securing this honourable and important debate. I am proud to be a trade unionist and to have the support of trade unions, and I declare an interest: I am a member of Unite the union. It is through trade unions that working people advance our collective interests, from winning rights and better pay at work to building up our skills and talents. That is what the union learning fund is all about. Every year it supports 200,000 workers, enhancing literacy, numeracy, ICT skills and professional development, amongst much else. As hon. Friends have said, it is a proven success.”
“Throughout this pandemic, staff at Coventry City Council have stepped up to the challenge, doing amazing work to support residents in need, but a decade of vicious Conservative cuts to budgets have taken their toll on local authorities, and now this crisis has further hit finances at the city council. Will the Leader of the House give Government time to discuss not only compensating councils for the financial hit of the pandemic, but providing them with funding to invest in the city and meet the community’s needs—from building more council houses to reopening youth centres?”
“In the spring, the Everyone In programme showed that where there is the political will, it is possible to take action to provide shelter for people who need it, but that should not be done only in emergencies; it should be done all year round, guaranteeing safe and warm shelter to everyone who needs it, including those with no recourse to public funds. Rather than wasting hundreds of millions of pounds on covid contracts for friends and family of the Conservative party, will the Government instead provide permanent funding to end homelessness for good?”
“While this week the Government have extended the mortgage holiday for homeowners, they have refused to help tenants, pay their rent or stop them facing evictions, even if they have lost their job or been placed on furlough. How exactly does the Minister think that that is fair, and will he instead commit to helping renters in Coventry South by immediately putting a stop to all eviction proceedings, reintroducing the evictions ban, and cancelling rent arrears for all tenants?”
“There are 3,829 children in Coventry South who receive free school meals. Talking to their parents, I know how valuable that provision is—how they depend on it, and how their kids would starve without it. So I ask the Minister and MPs on the Government Benches: “If you vote against the motion, if you let kids go to sleep hungry at night, how do you not feel any sense of shame?””
“Since March, unemployment has doubled in Coventry South. The Government are replacing furlough with the utterly inadequate job support scheme. Research from the Institute for Public Policy Research found that, of the 2 million jobs at risk, it will save only 10%. Where it is used by businesses that are required to close, two thirds of wages is simply not enough for low-paid workers. Is the Chancellor happy to see 1.8 million jobs go? Could he live on two thirds of the minimum wage? If not, he should extend the furlough scheme for the industries that desperately need it.”
“In March, the Government were advised by SAGE to lock down. The Government delayed that by a week, and senior scientists estimate that the delay cost tens of thousands of lives. I fear that the same mistakes are being made again. Three weeks ago, SAGE advised a circuit-breaker lockdown. In Coventry, we have seen cases rise rapidly, with more than 100 new cases in 24 hours. Before it is too late and there are tens of thousands more avoidable deaths, I urge the Secretary of State to impose a circuit-breaker lockdown and bring in the economic support that will get us through this crisis.”
“Key to stopping the spread of the virus is giving people the financial support they need to self-isolate when they need to, but millions of working people still do not have that. The Government’s test and trace support payment scheme is totally inadequate; only a small proportion of workers qualify, and even for those who do, at £500 for up to two weeks, the scheme pays less than the minimum wage. Will the Prime Minister finally do as I urged him at Prime Minister’s questions back in March and raise statutory sick pay to the level of the real living wage, extend it to cover all workers and give people the financial security they need to self-isolate?”
“Instead of a planning system rigged for developers, it is about time we put human needs first. That means the biggest council house building programme in generations, with local councils given power and funding to build the homes that people need. It means rent controls, and ultimately, it means a Government who are no longer in the pockets of developers.”
“The president of the Royal Institute of British Architects has described these plans as “shameful” and said that it could lead “to the creation of the next generation of slum housing.” Housing charity Shelter says that social housing could face “extinction” under the plans, and dozens of my constituents have told me of their concerns. They fear for our green spaces under these plans, which too often are already under threat. They know that the priority for Coventry is council and genuinely affordable housing, but these plans do nothing to meet that need. This White Paper is a good deal for developers, but for the thousands of people in Coventry struggling to pay rent, for those on the housing waiting list desperate for a decent home and for people praying to get on the housing ladder, it is a rotten plan set to make a bad situation worse.”
“It significantly raises the threshold needed for section 106 requirements, meaning that for many more projects, developers will not need to provide any contribution to affordable housing. It cuts away what the Government call red tape, rather than learning the lessons from the Grenfell Tower tragedy on the need to raise standards and safety. As the Campaign to Protect Rural England highlights, these plans contain no new protections for green-belt land. Instead, they “weaken protection” of undesignated green spaces in what the CPRE describes as a “free-for-all for development”.”
“In the Prime Minister’s first year in office, the Conservative party has received more than £11 million from these super-rich developers and construction businesses. These people have paid small fortunes to sit down with Cabinet members and talk about whatever it is property developers like to talk about with the people who decide planning policy. Eleven million pounds is a lot of money, but with this planning White Paper, property developers have really got value for money, because this White Paper is a developers’ charter. It strips away local oversight of planning applications, with pre-approved applications in designated zones getting an automatic green light.”
“There is an elite dining club called the Leader’s Group. It is a club exclusively for the super-rich, and to join, a member must donate £50,000 to the Conservative party. The Conservative party’s website described the group as follows: “Members are invited to join the Leader and other senior figures from the Conservative Party at dinners, post-PMQ lunches, drinks receptions”. I say “described” because, as The Daily Telegraph reported this summer, that page has been quietly removed from the website, along with the public register of the Prime Minister’s dinners with the party’s biggest donors. I draw attention to that because some of the Conservative party’s biggest donors are property developers who qualify for membership and will have attended those dinners.”
“The Government told the Investigatory Powers Tribunal in November 2019 that, in tasking agents, the state “is not the instigator of that activity and cannot be treated as responsible for it”. According to the Government’s own standards, the Bill will therefore not place any limits on the crimes that agents could be authorised to commit—not on torture, not on murder and not on sexual violence.”
“Instead, authorisation will be granted internally, which means that incredibly serious crimes could be authorised with less oversight than is currently required for phone tapping or police searches. As the human rights group Reprieve has noted, survivors of the spy cops scandal have sought justice through the courts for abuses they suffered, but this Bill will block future claims being brought forward, since it outlaws civil action against authorised activities. That is utterly unconscionable. In the Bill’s defence, the Government claim that public authorities are bound by the Human Rights Act, and for that reason, the prohibition of crimes such as torture is guarded. In reality, that offers no protection against agent criminality, because in the Government’s view, the Human Rights Act does not apply to crimes committed by covert agents.”
“They include not only national security but “preventing disorder” and to promote “the interests of the economic well-being of the United Kingdom.” That has rightly raised alarm bells for trade unions such as my union, Unite, and justice campaigns such as the Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign, which fear that these powers could be used to interfere with the legitimate activities of trade unions. The Bill grants these powers to a dizzying array of agencies—not just intelligence agencies and the police, but the Competition and Markets Authority, the Gambling Commission and the Environment Agency, just to name a few. The oversight for authorisation of potentially serious crimes is scandalously weak. There are no provisions in the Bill for warrants or independent judicial approval.”
“Instead, all it requires is that authorising officers themselves believe that the conduct is appropriate, necessary by broadly defined criteria and meets requirements that may be imposed by an order made by the Secretary of State. Even the FBI expressly bans operatives from certain criminal conduct, but this Bill does not ban any type of criminal conduct for British state agents. The grounds upon which the authorisations can be granted are ill-defined and wide-ranging.”
“In 2010, it came to light that for 40 years, Britain’s police had run covert operations spying on thousands of civilians. More than 1,000 political groups were spied on. Overwhelmingly, it was left-wing, anti-racist and climate justice groups that were spied on, with just three far-right groups included on the list. The spy cops revelations have shown that police operatives deceived women into sexual relationships and even spied on grieving families seeking justice, including the parents of Stephen Lawrence. This Bill must be opposed. It places no limits on the crimes that state agents can be authorised to commit. It does not prohibit torture. It does not prohibit murder. It does not prohibit sexual violence.”
“As I am making the final Back-Bench speech, I will not be taking any interventions—apologies. On 12 February 1989, Pat Finucane, an Irish lawyer in Belfast, sat at his kitchen table to have dinner with his wife and three children. As they ate, two gunmen burst through the door, entered the room and shot Mr Finucane 14 times. He was killed by a loyalist paramilitary group that, as the Prime Minister at the time, David Cameron, admitted in 2012, was acting in complicity with British security services. Far from stopping Mr Finnigan’s murder, the Prime Minister described the “shocking levels of state collusion” —[ Official Report , 12 December 2012; Vol. 555, c. 296] in Mr Finucane’s murder. His family are still owed a public inquiry into the murder. Deeply troubling acts of state agents such as those in the Finucane case are not isolated.”
“I must make progress. This Bill marks the latest step in a frightening descent into authoritarianism by this Government. In the past two weeks, they have proposed the effective decriminalisation of torture by British soldiers overseas, the shipping of asylum seekers more than 4,000 miles away to be imprisoned on Ascension Island, the ban on anti-capitalist teaching materials in schools and now this—licensing undercover agents to commit torture, sexual violence and murder. This descent into authoritarianism should be a concern to us all. It must be resisted.”
“Public health must be our first priority, but restrictions on pubs, bars and restaurants need to be accompanied by new economic support for workers and businesses; otherwise, people will be pushed into unemployment and destitution, and businesses will be forced into bankruptcy. So, on behalf of hospitality workers and businesses in Coventry South, I urge the Secretary of State to speak with his Cabinet colleagues and bring forward new measures that will support livelihoods and businesses and actually save jobs.”
“Students are asking why they have been sent to university halls only to be locked in their rooms and—rightly—receive online teaching. The University and College Union and the National Union of Students warned what would happen, but the Government ignored them. One answer—maybe a cynical one—is that the marketised higher education system needed students to return. It needed their tuition fees and their rents, and that is why student welfare has been sacrificed. Is the cynic right, or is this straightforward Government incompetence?”
“This Government are deeply complicit in this war and in pushing Yemen to catastrophe. So my message is simple: stop selling arms to Saudi Arabia, stop your support of this horrific war, and truly stand up for peace, justice and human rights on the world stage.”
“Yet this summer, the Government decided that those violations were not systematic, in spite of their repeated, consistent occurrence, so they resumed granting export licences to the Saudis. This war could have been stopped by the British and American Governments. They could have withdrawn their support. They could have stopped selling the weapons, stopped training the pilots and stopped maintaining the planes, but they have not. The British and American Governments have put the profits of arms dealers first. They have put their alliance with the Saudi dictatorship ahead of the basic human rights of the Yemeni people. This Government like to boast that Britain upholds peace and justice on the world stage. Their record in Yemen is the latest example of what a cruel joke that is.”
“As an expert on the war has observed: “Bombs supplied by Britain and America are dropped from planes built by Britain and America, flown by pilots trained by Britain and America, and kept in the sky with British and American maintenance.” This war would not be possible without that support, these violent deaths would not occur without that support, and a humanitarian crisis on this scale would not have happened were it not for that support. Since the war began, the UK Government have issued arms export licences worth £5.3 billion to the Saudis. Figures revealed in response to a written question that I tabled show that, in that time, the Ministry of Defence has recorded 516 known instances of alleged breaches of international law.”
“Last week, the UN warned that more than 20 million Yemenis face starvation, including 10 million children. Eighty per cent. of the population is now dependent on aid, and an estimated 1 million Yemenis have covid-19. What utterly shames this House—it should be a national scandal, leading the front pages of newspapers every single day—is that these war crimes and this humanitarian crisis would not be possible without British and American support.”
“On the morning of 9 August 2018 in Dahyan, Yemen, a group of schoolchildren were on a day trip. On their way, the bus driver stopped at a market to pick up water for the children. Then, the bus was hit by an airstrike. At least 40 children were killed, along with a dozen adults. A further 63 people were injured. The bomb had been dropped by a Saudi jet. The Saudi authorities later admitted that there were no military targets in the area. The strike was a mistake, they said. That is just one of countless examples of apparent war crimes that have been committed by the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen. The conflict has now lasted five years. More than 100,000 people are estimated to have been violently killed in that time, and the war has triggered the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.”
“In August, the Labour party announced that should annexation take place, we would call for a boycott of goods sourced in the occupied territories. Does the Minister agree that this would demonstrate a genuine commitment to the rights of the Palestinian people and international law?”