Charlotte Nichols
MP for Warrington North · Labour · United Kingdom
“Does the Minister accept that although people co-infected with HIV and hepatitis C represent only around 7% of those on infected blood support schemes, they make up roughly 14% of those receiving special category support, because of the disproportionate harm caused by early hepatitis C treatments?”
“I completely agree with the hon. Gentleman’s points, and those of the victims whose voices he is bringing to the fore. Does he agree that both the proposals by the Government and the amendment to the Victims and Courts Bill that was agreed to in the other place, which says that victims will have the right to access a transcript of the jud…”
“In the spirit of cross-party consensus, I commend both the hon. Member on securing this debate and the hon. Member for Richmond Park (Sarah Olney) on her campaigning work in this area.”
“The violence against women and girls sector has not had the opportunity to come together to discuss it, and the Government’s framing and narrative has been to pit survivors and defendants against each other in a way that I think is deeply damaging.”
“I thought long and hard about speaking today. I will allow right hon. and hon. Members from the legal profession to make the legal arguments better than I can, and will allow Members who rightly have procedural or rights-based concerns for defendants, which I share, to raise them. I trust that those points will be satisfactorily covered.”
“Shamefully, the tariffs have not been uprated in line with inflation since 2012 and have no eligibility for non-contact sexual offences, which can cause significant and lasting harm.”
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“That means that the wrongful prescription of those medications could actually exacerbate the very misery that caused affected women to seek medical support in the first place. At best, it would be treating some of the symptoms but not the underlying causes. Let us hope that, as a Parliament, we are reflecting a society that increasingly understands and accommodates the symptoms of menopause, which affect so many in our country—around 5.1 million women aged between 45 and 55. As the right hon. Member for Romsey and Southampton North (Caroline Nokes) made clear, many younger women, and people who do not define themselves as women at all, also experience this. They may find it even more difficult to access support as they do not fit the typical profile.”
“It was not mentioned in the Commons until 1964, and the 100th reference was not until 2017. We are in a much healthier position now that we can consider it as one of the areas of life that we should properly appreciate. I was struck by the comments from my hon. Friend the Member for Swansea about the experiences of women wrongly prescribed antidepressants and anxiety medication when what they needed was HRT. I know at first hand the life-saving potential of medications of that type, but only when they are appropriately prescribed. Side effects can often include excessive sweating, insomnia, agitation, anxiousness and dizziness—all things that can, themselves, be symptoms of menopause.”
“It is a pleasure to see you serve in the Chair, Mr Robertson. I commend my hon. Friend the Member for Swansea East (Carolyn Harris) for securing the debate, and for her ongoing commitment to pursuing wider public understanding and support for menopausal and perimenopausal women. The fact that all four nations of the UK are represented here is a real testament to the diligence, determination and doggedness of her campaigning. Having spoken in the debate that she secured last year, I am pleased that this is now a regular feature, and that the needs and experiences of women undergoing this stage of life are now being properly considered. According to Hansard , the first time that the word “menopause” was used in our Parliament was in 1943, in the Lords, in a debate on “population problems”.”
“Given that, after months, the Premier League and the EFL have not been able to agree on this recommendation, will the Minister personally intervene to secure a solution rather than waiting for action from a regulator that does not yet exist?”
“I am sure the Minister will join me in congratulating Warrington Rylands, who won promotion over the weekend as champions of northern premier league west, and in sending best wishes to Warrington Town, who are in the play-offs tomorrow for promotion from the northern premier league. Both teams aspire to become league clubs, which would be absolutely huge for football in Warrington, but media reports suggest that the Government plan to leave the redistribution of wealth throughout the football pyramid to the football authorities, rather than implementing the review’s recommendation for a solidarity transfer levy.”
“Deregulation and a decade of Tory decline have meant that more than 3,000 bus routes and more than 350,000 passenger journeys have been lost. The majority of short trips, under 5 km, are made by car. As a result, our region has a significant air pollution issue. In the Liverpool city region alone, more than 1,000 deaths a year are linked to that silent killer. On public transport, 80% of journeys are taken by bus, yet bus fares have risen by 40% and routes have been mercilessly cut nationally. The millions of people who use buses and the communities who depend on them have been ignored for far too long.”
“I beg to move, That this House has considered funding for bus service improvement plans in the North West. Thank you for chairing the debate, Ms Nokes. In Warrington, we are proud of our municipal bus company. It provides connections between our homes and communities, between jobs and opportunities, between healthcare facilities and between our friends and families. For those without cars, like me and thousands of my constituents, buses are essential, and good, reliable bus services are a huge part of the wider picture of reducing carbon emissions and dependence on foreign oil. Because millions of people across this country rely on buses—they cannot just hop into a car if services are slashed—and they cannot find extra cash if fares rise, bus cuts mean being cut off.”
“In Warrington, our Labour-run council has shown real ambition with a plan to increase bus use by between 5% and 15% through excellent council working with partners to make buses more frequent, faster, reliable, cheaper, easier to use and better integrated. This is a local community backing buses.”
“Just a year ago, the Prime Minister and the Transport Secretary launched the “Bus Back Better” strategy and they pledged to provide a great bus service for everyone everywhere. They promised that it would be one of the great acts of levelling up. This was the ambition: £3 billion of transformation funding was supposed to level up buses across England towards London standards, with main road services in towns and cities to run so often that people would not even need a timetable, and better services in the evenings and at weekends; and to provide simple, cheap flat fares that people could pay with a contactless card, and daily and weekly price capping across operators and rail and trams, too.”
“I thank my hon. Friend for that important intervention. As he says, services being cut means communities being cut off from one another. The millions of people who use buses and the communities who depend on them have been ignored for far too long. They have been an afterthought in decisions made far away in Westminster by politicians who have no understanding of them. The shockingly bad services left behind have made public transport increasingly unviable. In Warrington over the last decade, almost 50% of services have been cut. That is absolutely appalling. It means that people in our community—in particular, elderly residents who do not drive—are completely cut off from other parts of the town.”
“In a letter he said: “Funding specifically pledged for transformation has been substantially reduced.” He concluded that he is “gravely concerned” that, far from seeing transformation, many areas face losing their services altogether. I mentioned the 50% loss of passenger numbers in Warrington. With the price of labour and fuel currently extremely high, it will be difficult for operators to hold down fares and for routes to continue, particularly those that serve more deprived areas where the profit margins are smaller.”
“The letter that let the cat out of the bag says: “Prioritisation is inevitable, given the scale of ambition across the country greatly exceeds the amount.” We know that bids for almost £8 billion have been submitted by local transport authorities, representing a blueprint for transformation up and down the country, but the levelling-up White Paper confirms that communities will see a fraction of that. Despite that, last month the Secretary of State said it was “absolutely incorrect” to say that funding to transform services has been slashed. One of his most senior colleagues, the Conservative Mayor of the West Midlands, directly contradicted him.”
“As we await the funding announcement in full, it looks as though Warrington will be one of the lucky places to receive this investment from the Government. Across the length and breadth of the country, particularly in the north-west, many are counting the cost of broken promises, because for all the rhetoric about levelling up, the small print reveals that “Bus Back Better” is in tatters. A letter sent to local transport authority directors by the Department for Transport on 11 January makes it clear that the budget for the transformation of buses—a pot from which local regions can bid for funds—has shrunk from £3 billion to £1.2 billion for the next three years.”
“I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention and absolutely agree that greening our transport infrastructure is a really important part both of meeting our climate objectives as a country and of ensuring that people have good-quality services they can rely on. I am proud of the fact that in Warrington we have bid to become one of the country’s first all-electric bus towns. Hydrogen for transport also has a really important part to play. With a lot of hydrogen production taking place across the north-west and in the Liverpool city region in particular, it is something that we are very excited about locally. I know that hydrogen trains are being manufactured in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Weaver Vale (Mike Amesbury). We are excited to be leading in the north-west and hope this can be rolled out more widely.”
“Will she today detail exactly how much local transport authorities are set to see in transformation funding, and come clean that there will be areas in the north-west that will miss out altogether?”
“It was supposed to be about improved accessibility across the network, including level access from train to platform, and it is part of the work that is beginning on networks of cycling and walking routes across our region. Labour leaders in power in towns and cities nationwide have real ambition to reverse the decline that we have seen under the Tories. We want a London-style system and to make buses quicker, cheaper, greener and more reliable, but we need a Government whose ambition matches our own. It is now becoming clear that, far from matching the ambition of our communities, Ministers have pulled the rug out from underneath them. Will the Minister now own up and admit what the Transport Secretary will not: that many areas will now not see a single penny of the transformation funding?”
“Because I had to change from First on to Stagecoach, I had to buy one of the much more expensive multi-operator passes. That is an issue across our region. I am glad that the Labour metro Mayors for the Liverpool city region and for the Greater Manchester region are looking to address that within their combined authorities. From Greater Manchester to Lancaster, places bypassed by good public transport for far too long have been demanding real change. They put forward an ambitious blueprint to use buses to connect people to jobs, families and opportunities, and tackle the climate crisis in the process. Despite the challenges, they have plans to completely overhaul and reregulate the bus network as part of the bus service improvement plan.”
“I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention, and I could not agree more, particularly when we look at the deregulation of bus services, with operators in some regions scrabbling for the same fares and most affordable routes rather than what best serves their community, so we end up with a mismatch of multiple operators running the same route. The Manchester Oxford Road corridor is the busiest bus corridor in Europe, yet people a mile away are left without bus services to get into Manchester city centre. For towns and cities that have multiple operators, it is an even bigger issue. When I lived in Salford, for example, the franchise changed from First to Stagecoach on part of my route. Overnight, my monthly bus pass trebled in cost, because I could no longer buy a First-only bus pass.”
“We need to receive our full funding ask through the BSIP—the bus service improvement plan—including capital and operating expenditure funding streams if we are to be able to improve. My hon. Friend the Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston was exactly right to highlight the fact that, for hon. Members who split our week between London and our north-west constituencies, the gulf between the service provision at home and the service provision here is staggering. If it is good enough for London, it is good enough for the north-west. I hope the Minister will take away our concerns and comments to her Department and ensure that the Government’s ambition finally begins to be met in our regions. Question put and agreed to. Resolved, That this House has considered funding for bus service improvement plans in the North West.”
“Levelling up requires the investment to enable integrated, affordable and green public transport. I am glad that the Minister highlighted some of the incredible achievements of Warrington’s Own Buses, but so much of that is possible because we do not have the broken franchise model that causes so many of the problems elsewhere that we have heard about today. I believe that we are now one of only 10 municipal bus companies left, which means that we seek to operate in the public interest, not for private profit. In Warrington, Government covid subsidy funding is now secured through to September 2022, but there could well be a cliff edge after that, particularly if fuel costs continue to skyrocket and the funding spoken about today just keeps us where we are.”
“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Nokes. I thank my hon. Friends the Members for Ellesmere Port and Neston (Justin Madders), for Weaver Vale (Mike Amesbury), for Bolton South East (Yasmin Qureshi) and for Wirral West (Margaret Greenwood), and the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon), for their contributions to today’s debate. Although we represent very different and diverse communities across north-west England—and even further north-west, in the case of the hon. Member for Strangford —the story for buses is the same. Having to take multiple bus services for a journey that would be straightforward by car is a daily reality across our region, not least because of a lack of orbital routes, as they tend to be less profitable, but also because of a lack of connecting services between our towns and cities.”
“The bus industry is hearing that the Government are contemplating the removal of current covid subsidies for bus companies from April or shortly afterwards. That would be extremely detrimental to bus services in Warrington, potentially requiring full route withdrawals and a stiff fares rise. Both would be extremely unpopular and could leave parts of our town cut off from public transport. Will the Leader of the House therefore please arrange for a statement in Government time on bus funding, so that this issue can be resolved and continued funding secured as we build back public transport after the pandemic?”
“May we draw strength from their strength, and courage from their courage, as we build a more decent, respectful and inclusive society where all of us can live in peace, harmony and security.”
“Ira Goldfarb said of his father, the survivor Aron Goldfarb, that “throughout my father’s life, survival adopted a new meaning. Survival to my father was carrying the nightmares of his childhood and choosing to find joy, humor, and compassion in life every single day. Survival was seeing the worst of humanity and still offering his last piece of bread to someone who needed it more, still building lifelong friendships, and being a devoted husband and father.” It is hard not to be moved by photos of a beaming Lily Ebert celebrating her 98th birthday in lockdown with thousands of cards sent by well-wishers, or welcoming the birth of her 35th great-grandchild. I can think of few people more deserving of happiness.”
“We allow a minority in public life to degrade and debase the memory of the holocaust—to make inappropriate comparisons with modern day events as though there can be any parallel drawn, rhetorical or otherwise, between, for example, those who choose not to be vaccinated, or a particularly poor performance in the football, and the experience of the victims of Nazi persecution. We still see the cancer of antisemitism in our communities, with the threat of hate crime in person and online a daily reality that we should not have to live alongside. Today we honour the victims, the survivors, the heroes and the martyrs of the holocaust. We cannot change the past, but by bearing witness we can change the course of the future.”
“The Hasidic mystic, the Baal Shem Tov, said: “If a man has beheld evil, he may know that it was shown to him in order that he learn his own guilt and repent; for what is shown to him is also within him.” If man can sink to these depths once, to industrialise the brutalisation and murder of their fellow humans, they can and will do so again. Indeed, “never again” rings hollow with the genocides that have taken place since the holocaust, and our failure as a nation to learn the lessons of the past as this Government turn away refugees from other parts of the world knowing full well the fate of the refugees from the holocaust denied safe passage to Britain and the US, and returned to their deaths.”
“This was not, as we might imagine, a quick process, with it taking up to 12 minutes to be poisoned to death, crushed in among hundreds of panicking people, desperately trying to cling to life, trying to break or claw their way out. Seven hundred Jews were murdered in the gas chambers on the very day before they were set to be liberated and many more died by disease or by suicide in the months following liberation. There are some things that a human just cannot endure. These survivors witnessed day in, day out what no human being should ever be condemned to see: the very depths of man’s cruelty and inhumanity towards his fellow man laid bare.”
“He fired a shot and that little girl who had miraculously survived the gas was dead. Nobody could survive. Everybody had to die, including us: it was just a matter of time.” Elie Wiesel speaks of watching Jewish babies thrown alive into the vast ditches where bodies were burned, confirmed by Telford Taylor at the Nuremberg trials. Lily Ebert testifies of witnessing babies torn from their mothers’ arms and dashed against walls. I have seen the piles of teeth, hair and shoes that represent a tiny fraction of those who passed through Auschwitz-Birkenau, and how small those chambers were, with up to 1,200 people piled into a tiny space so that no poison gas would be wasted.”
“To begin with, the sounds were spaced out, then they came more frequently until they became a continuous crying that we all identified as the crying of a newborn baby. The man who had heard it first went to see where exactly the noise was coming from. Stepping over the bodies, he found the source of those little wailings. It was a baby girl, barely two months old, still clinging to her mother’s breast and vainly trying to suckle. She was crying because she could feel that the milk had stopped flowing. He took the baby and brought it out of the gas chamber. We knew it would be impossible to keep her with us. Impossible to hide her or get her accepted by the Germans. And indeed, as soon as the guard saw the baby, he didn’t seem at all displeased at having a little baby to kill.”
“In spite of everything, however absurd her question may seem, it was quite relevant, since it did indeed happen. Few people ever saw and can relate this episode, and yet it is true. One day when everyone had started working normally after the arrival of a transport, one of the men involved in removing the bodies from the gas chamber heard a strange noise. It wasn’t so unusual to hear strange noises, since sometimes the victims’ bodies continued to emit gas. But this time he claimed the noise was different. We stopped and pricked up our ears, but nobody could hear anything. We told ourselves that he’d surely been hearing voices. A few minutes later, he again stopped and told us that this time he was certain he’d heard a death rattle. And when we listened closely, we, too, could hear the same noise. It was a sort of wailing.”
“The brutality and the hopelessness of the concentration camps and the lengths to which the Nazis went to extinguish any faint glimmers of hope are summed up in this quote from the survivor Shlomo Venezia, who was forced to work in the Sonderkommando at Auschwitz, emptying the gas chambers of bodies, including those of family members, processing their hair and teeth, and loading them into the ovens for cremation. He said: “One day, while I was presenting my testimony at a school, a young girl asked me if anyone had ever emerged from the gas chamber alive. Her schoolmates laughed at her, as if she hadn’t understood a thing. How could anyone survive in those conditions, when the deadly gas used had been carefully developed to kill everyone? It’s impossible.”
“We are commanded to remember the Amelikites brutal massacre of our people—'Zachor et Asher asah lecha Amalek’ (remember what the Amalek did to you)—through intentional, public, verbal affirmation, and by ridding the world of the evil that they represent. Neither of these Torah commandments can be fulfilled by quiet contemplation, memorialisation must manifest through specific action.” The theme for this year’s Holocaust Memorial Day is “One Day,” both as a call to action for that one day when we have eradicated the hatred that leads to genocide and because one day, as a snapshot of what happened, can be helpful in seeking to understand and process the enormity of the holocaust.”
“It may be a historical drama, but the hatred in it is very much contemporary. I have sat in synagogue while fellow Jews have been slaughtered elsewhere in the world for practising their faith, as I am, and so to proclaim our faith proudly, to stand as proud Jews, is itself an act of defiance. As the partisan vow declares, “Mir veln zey iberlebn”, which means, we will outlive them. From generation to generation, the Jewish spirit endures. In Kveller, Rachel Stomel writes: “In the context of Jewish law, remembrance is not a reflexive, passive process directed inwards. Our sages teach us that the way we fulfil the Torah’s commandment to remember the Sabbath—'Zachor et Yom HaShabbat le’kodsho’ (remember the sabbath day to keep it holy)—is by active declaration in the performance of the kiddush, the Shabbat blessing over wine.”
“Jewish soldiers such as Morris Beckman and Jules Kanopinski returned to London to find fascists staging outdoor rallies in the east end, “shouting out the same antagonism and the same filth as before the war, and now even worse—they were saying the gas chambers weren’t enough”. The anti-fascist 43 Group that they and their comrades established, and the later 62 Group, would be breaking up, on average, 15 fascist meetings a week and engaging in regular physical confrontation with fascists, including in the battle for Ridley Road, which was memorialised this year in a BBC drama. The irony is not lost on me that, in the very week that Ridley Road was released, my synagogue in Manchester, where much of it was filmed, had our Friday night service gate-crashed by the far right.”
“Marceline Loridan-Ivens said: “If you only knew, all of you, how the camp remains permanently within us. It remains in all our minds, and will until we die” Similarly, Shlomo Venezia, said: “Everything takes me back to the camp. Whatever I do, whatever I see, my mind keeps harking back to the same place. It’s as if the “work” I was forced to do there had never really left my head…Nobody ever really gets out of the Crematorium”. Those who survived the camps were greeted with “incredulity, indifference, and even hostility” upon their return to their communities. Although the allies won the war against Nazism in Europe, antisemitism has never been defeated, and fascism grew rapidly in the UK in the post-war years, contrary to the narrative of triumph over Hitler.”
“I rise to speak today to commemorate Holocaust Memorial Day, which, on the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, commemorates the 6 million Jews murdered during the holocaust, alongside the millions killed under Nazi persecution of other groups, including Roma and Sinti people, Slavic people, LGBT and disabled people and political and religious minorities. On this day, we also remember the subsequent genocides in Rwanda, Cambodia, Darfur and Bosnia. As the holocaust fades from living memory, I want to put on record my gratitude to all of the survivors whose testimonies are at the heart of holocaust education, but which come at huge personal cost. It is impossible to comprehend the abjectness of the horrors that they experienced, the trauma that follows them through their lives, or the sacrifice that bearing witness entails.”
“A constituent of mine, who I will call Malcolm, got in touch this morning having been fined with a £100 fixed penalty notice for breaching the coronavirus regulations. He accepts his wrongdoing, but it strikes me as incredibly unfair that, at the same time as the Downing Street parties were happening and Ministers and MPs seemed to be flagrantly breaching the rules, constituents like mine should have to pay. When will Malcolm and everyone else who has been fined for breaching the regulations be getting their money back?”
“Let us hear the facts: nuclear power has the lowest lifecycle carbon of all technologies, the lowest land use of all low-carbon technologies, the lowest mining and metal use of all low-carbon technologies and the highest employment multiplier of all low-carbon technologies. Those peddling the myths rely on misleading comparisons, over-optimism about alternatives and wholly outdated concerns about safety that do not reflect the reality of modern nuclear plants. We should not be scared of making the positive case for nuclear, and making it strongly and proudly. Nuclear is safe and reliable, and it directly creates quality, high-paying and unionised jobs, as well as supporting many more in its supply chain.”
“This is especially important with the retirement of Hunterston B last week, which alone provided 1 GW of the UK’s 7.9 GW nuclear capacity—enough to power 1.7 million homes. As our energy bills rocket in the months to come, as a result of huge volatility in the international gas markets, we will be reminded yet again of the importance of the diversification, sovereignty, security and constancy of our power supplies, which Labour’s amendments address. Ensuring that there is a further generation of nuclear plants is the best way to address that as well as to be environmentally sustainable as we seek net zero. There are too many myths about nuclear power that undermine it in the public mind and in pockets of this place.”
“I welcome the return of this important Bill from Committee and I am pleased to support it, as is the Labour party. Indeed, although our NHS is the Attlee Government’s greatest achievement, it was his Labour Government who approved this country’s first nuclear reactors, which have been supplying clean energy ever since. It is regrettable that it has taken the Conservatives more than a decade in office to bring forward these new plans to finance and ensure that we have the next generation of nuclear that we need. I am concerned that much of our domestic expertise and supply chain capacity has eroded in that time, but it is still true that if the best time to build a nuclear plant was 10 years ago, the second-best time is today.”
“This message is fundamental as we hopefully move on from Sizewell C to other projects and plan these as a fleet to drive down costs and to maintain and expand the world-class expertise and skills of the British nuclear sector.”
“None the less, the model that we are discussing must be recognised as an investment that guarantees construction and production over the longer term. As I wind up my remarks, I want to point out that the uncertainty and lack of guarantees have left the industry in the dark for so long. With the uncertainties now addressed by the Bill and the amendments that Labour has tabled, the industry can now have the confidence to plan and move forward. My hope is that by passing the Bill on a cross-party basis, it will send the signal that there is a clear consensus on the vital role that nuclear will continue to have in our energy mix.”
“I do not have the data on my person at this point, but ultimately more jobs are at risk in Warrington North’s nuclear sector if we do not approve the building of new nuclear. Regardless of whether that involves direct state investment, a regulated asset base model, as we are discussing today, or foreign investment, the fact is that we need to get it built, because all those jobs will be at risk if we do not. Going back to the point that the hon. Gentleman raised, we have heard complaints about the cost of the regulated asset base model. Indeed, my preference would be direct state investment in this vital national infrastructure, which would keep the stations and the power they produce in public ownership.”
“Groundbreaking research published yesterday in the Journal of Psychopharmacology , from King’s College London in partnership with Compass Pathways, has now established that psilocybin can be safely administered and may have significant therapeutic benefit in treatment-resistant depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. As someone who knows first-hand how debilitating PTSD is, as well as hearing from many constituents who have developed the condition as a result of sexual assault or their experience serving in our armed forces, I ask the Prime Minister to commit today to a review of the regulatory regime that would allow further and more rapid research in this vital area of mental health support, for which current treatment options are sorely lacking.”
“The amendment would allow a loophole for Nazis, fascists and people who hold absolutely objectionable views. As we have heard, those people have, in the public interest, always had their right to absolute freedom of speech, qualified by that public interest, libel laws, the Equality Act 2010 and so on. The unintended consequence would be to drive a wedge in the Equality Act. Our university campuses would become less safe spaces than the street outside them, where those rules would still be in place. Like my hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle, I have nothing but respect for the right hon. Member for South Holland and The Deepings, but if his amendment formed part of the Bill, it could have really adverse consequences.”
“Nick Griffin, along with a number of members of the British National party and the National Front, has been repeatedly prosecuted for hate crimes, incitement to racial hatred and Holocaust denial. Inviting someone with those sorts of views to address students on campus—for example, in a politics lecture—might mean someone like Nick Griffin laying out all the reasons why he believes that anyone who is not white British should be repatriated to a different country, why he believes that the Holocaust did not happen, and so forth. Clearly, if he made those remarks outside a university setting, in a discussion that was not about an academic or scientific matter in a higher education setting, he could be prosecuted for that, as he has been repeatedly.”
“I want to follow up on my hon. Friend’s comments about what the Bill means in relation to the Equality Act 2010. As someone who is Jewish, one of my key areas of concern is what it would mean for Jewish students—an issue I have raised a number of times throughout the passage of the Bill. I have raised concerns about what it would mean for Holocaust denial, after the Minister appeared to suggest on the radio that that would be protected speech under the Bill. In fact, we heard from witnesses such as Professor Goodwin that he would invite a speaker from the National Front or the British National party, if they were available, to address his students. We have heard evidence that that is what some academics would seek to do, if the Bill were in place. We need only look at the British National party.”
“On amendment 27, I am interested in what form of words other than “within their field of expertise” could be used to act as a safeguard, because we might see cases in which academics are picked up for use of their freedom of speech more widely, but there is a distinction between freedom of speech and academic freedom.”
“I am interested in the examples that the hon. Member has raised as things that should be protected as part of academic freedom, but I would draw the distinction back between academic freedom and freedom of speech. Just because someone is an academic, for example, does not mean that any topic that they choose to wax lyrical about should necessarily be protected, particularly if they are engaging in harmful stereotypes, discriminatory behaviour and so on. As much as I agree with the broad thrust of taking this out, I think that we need to reflect in the legislation a way in which we might draw that distinction between academic freedom and freedom of speech. Does the hon. Member not agree?”
“The Minister may find herself promoted and able to follow through on the assurance she has given today, so perhaps the vote is the right way to make sure that we sort that out.”