Rupert Lowe
MP for Great Yarmouth · Restore Britain · United Kingdom
“A 12-year-old could take the vaccination against their parents’ wishes. Think about that—12 years old. Then came vaccine passports, also forced through by Reform UK’s Zahawi. I found the entire concept morally repugnant. The state making access to ordinary parts of life dependent on someone disclosing their medical status was criminal.”
House of Commons27 October 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“That responsibility now rests with Government, regulators and, where necessary, the courts. The inquiry itself recognised the heavy cost of lockdowns, even if it criticised how decisions were made.”
House of Commons27 October 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Stuart. The covid lockdowns were the darkest period in recent British history, bar none. Our freedoms were stripped away in ways most of us never imagined possible. Alongside all that came extraordinary pressure on millions of people to take the covid vaccine.”
House of Commons27 October 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Let us remember that the roll-out to teenagers was forced through against the advice of the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation, which originally declined to recommend a mass roll-out for younger teens. The facts are quite clear.”
House of Commons27 October 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“A vulnerable elderly person faced a very different calculation from a healthy 25-year-old. In fact, they could not have been more different. The 25-year-old was at no risk whatever—they were more likely to drown to death than have serious issues with covid—yet so much of the messaging treated vaccination as though it were the same decisio…”
House of Commons27 October 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“First, can I say how much I enjoy serving on the Public Accounts Committee with the hon. Lady? I think—and I am sure she agrees with me—that the key to correcting this situation is for the Government to make better decisions.”
House of Commons15 September 2026Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
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“On 24 November, I questioned the Home Office permanent secretary in the Public Accounts Committee on the number of illegal migrants who have absconded from Home Office accommodation in the past five years. I got no concise answer. During all this, a Home Office whistleblower presented themselves with these figures, in black and white, regularly disseminated within the Home Office. The actual data is as follows: there are 736 foreign criminals in the total absconder pool for foreign national offenders. That is 736 foreign criminals who have been released from prison and then absconded before deportation. Please think about that: 736 criminals—rapists, murderers, paedophiles. They were meant for deportation but have escaped into the community—736 of them. It is a terrifying thought.”
House of Commons9 December 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“I thank the hon. Member for that intervention, and I will come to that point in a minute, but I completely concur. To recap, I asked the Home Office “what information the Department holds on the number of irregular migrants defined as absconders.” A Minister replied: “The requested data is not readily accessible from published statistics, and could only be collated and verified for the purpose of answering this question at a disproportionate cost.” That was not true. On 3 September, I asked the Home Secretary “what estimate she has made of the number of foreign nationals who have absconded after being served with a deportation order.” The answer, from a different Minister, was: “The Home Office does not hold any central record of the requested information.” That was not true.”
House of Commons9 December 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“We deserve to know the facts. We deserve to know what is being forced on to our communities. The answer is staggering: 736 foreign criminals gone, disappeared; and 53,298 illegal migrants gone, disappeared. My questions—”
House of Commons9 December 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“I do agree with the hon. Member’s helpful intervention. Unvetted and unknown men—sex pests, misogynists, and even far worse—are in our communities, on our streets and near our schools, in the thousands and thousands. This is a national security emergency and must be treated as such. The evidence is undeniable. I have seen it in Home Office documents. It exists. It is real. The figures were not even disputed by the Home Office; they simply told The Daily Telegraph : “The Home Office has refused to confirm whether the figures are accurate, saying it does not comment on speculation.” This is not speculation. This is cold, hard data. The numbers demonstrate quite spectacularly how the Home Office has failed to keep the British people safe. It is an outrageous scandal that this information has been deliberately hidden from the British people.”
House of Commons9 December 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“My questions are these. Where are they now? What is the Minister doing to detain them? Where did they come from? What are their convictions? How has this been allowed to happen?”
House of Commons9 December 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Will the Minister now commit to publishing these figures on a regular and transparent basis, or will I have to continue exposing this? Further whistleblowers have already come forward with additional information, and I thank them for that. My warning to the Home Office and to other Departments is this: be very careful about any further misleading statements. There are many decent people in the civil service who will not tolerate it, and I want them all to know that they have a safe and secure channel to release this information publicly through me. Sunlight is the best disinfectant, and this festering, rotting mess desperately needs to be disinfected.”
House of Commons9 December 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention, and I will indeed write to the Committee. I have one final question for the Minister: what else is the Home Office lying about?”
House of Commons9 December 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“It assumes that the state has the right to look over our shoulders. We defend against it by severely limiting the power of the state, not radically expanding it. Abolishing jury trials, cancelling elections, implementing facial recognition—and now this. This incoming dystopian future must be resisted. I will be holding my own protest against this creeping move towards George Orwell’s “Animal Farm”. I will simply not comply. I will not be downloading a digital ID and I urge other MPs to commit to doing the same. The solution is obvious: I will just have to reinvest in a Nokia—I preferred the simplicity of that anyway. The sound people of Great Yarmouth do not want digital ID.”
House of Commons8 December 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“I certainly do not trust this Government. Let us remember: once the Government get a new power, they never give it back. It expands and evolves. Digital ID will not stop at proving who we are. It will creep into travel, banking, housing, benefits and even voting. Today, it is voluntary; tomorrow, it will be required for security reasons. The day after that, we will not be able to access basic services without it—all for our own good, remember. Britain is supposed to be a country in which the Government serve the people, not the other way around. It is a country built on privacy, liberty and trust. British people just want the Government to leave them alone and get out of their lives—to build a business, raise a family and live in peace. Digital ID treats every citizen as a suspect.”
House of Commons8 December 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Edward. I cannot tell you how uncomfortable I feel sitting on the Government side of the Chamber, but I could not find a spare seat anywhere else, which is a testament to the fact that this subject is contested extremely passionately and that arguably it needs to be debated in the Chamber. Digital ID is the biggest step towards a surveillance state that this country has faced in my lifetime. If any Government want access to every detail of our lives, they are the ones who should be feared. We live in a country where the state cannot even run a basic IT system without losing data or leaking personal details. Digital ID will not last a week before a mountain of sensitive personal data is left at a bus stop in Kent again. I do not trust any Government.”
House of Commons8 December 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Her courage in speaking openly about her experience has helped to expose a growing problem: namely that the British state is now more willing to imprison somebody for a social media post than for a rape. That is not justice, that is not proportionate and that is certainly not the mark of a free country.”
House of Commons17 November 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Roger. I am grateful to the Petitions Committee for granting time for this extremely important debate, following our successful petition. Most importantly, I thank the more than 190,000 British people who signed the petition that we initiated, which calls for an end to the creeping use of prison as a punishment for what people say online. We would not be here today without their support, which is a credit to the petitions system, one of the better-functioning arms of Parliament. I welcome Lucy Connolly and her husband, who are here today. She is one of the many ordinary citizens who has been swept up in the chaotic and inconsistent enforcement of our online speech laws.”
House of Commons17 November 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“This debate is not about whether we are prepared to live in a country where liberty exists only for those who never cause offence—an impossible and undesirable standard. To Lucy and to every other person who has found themselves dragged through the system for a post online: you deserve better from your Government, and I sincerely hope today marks the beginning of a serious rethink in this House.”
House of Commons17 November 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“We must be clear: no free society can survive with a people afraid to speak. Democracy depends on robust argument, dissent and the ability to challenge orthodoxy. As George Orwell so presciently stated: “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” Parliament needs to draw a deep line in the sand: in Britain, nobody should ever be sent to prison for an offensive social media post—full stop. That requires legislative reform. We need clearer thresholds in law, a robust statutory requirement that prosecutorial decisions consider freedom of expression, and a prohibition on custodial sentences for pure speech cases. The poison of two-tier justice must be forensically extracted from our judicial system.”
House of Commons17 November 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“The Met police have said no action will be taken. I do not want people in prison for social media posts; I also do not want such obvious two-tier policing. Shola walks free, yet Lucy Connolly was imprisoned for one foolish social media post, soon deleted. Where is the fairness in that? If these ludicrous laws are to be implemented, it must be done fairly, with no political bias. Evidently, that is not currently happening. Is our prison system so efficient, so functional and so unoccupied that we have the capacity to put a young mother like Lucy in prison for more than 300 days? I think not. When rapists and murderers are walking free—even being released early—there is zero justification for imprisoning Lucy and the many others like her, particularly when the influence of such questionable legal aid is so heavily involved.”
House of Commons17 November 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“The Reform leadership’s bitter attempt to see me in prison failed, but too many others do not escape the consequences of such vile misuse of the system. We now have laws being used to punish subjective offence, based on the most fragile interpretation of “harm” and enforced through discretionary and—far too often—politically skewed policing. A post that is deemed sharp criticism one month somehow becomes grossly offensive the next. It is arbitrary, it is inconsistent and it is fundamentally incompatible with a healthy democracy. I receive multiple death threats, yet the police take no action. To take just one example, online influencer Shola Mos-Shogbamimu recently posted on X: “I’m against the death penalty but for you @RupertLowe10 I’ll gladly make the exception.” This post currently has 2 million views.”
House of Commons17 November 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“I am sure that the hon. Gentleman has heard of the Pakistani rape gangs, which are currently the subject of my crowdfunder. When he reads the report that is coming out in March, I am sure he will agree with me. We are witnessing the steady expansion of what are essentially speech crimes—offences where there is no violence, no real threat of violence and, often, no identifiable victim at all. Yet people face dawn raids, criminal records, ankle tags and even lengthy prison sentences—for words, for arguments, for opinions that somebody somewhere claims to find offensive. I had my own experience: a late-night police raid, initiated by false allegations from former Reform party colleagues, relating solely to words I had allegedly spoken—the party of free speech, indeed.”
House of Commons17 November 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“T6. Does the Home Secretary agree that if a migrant—legal or illegal—cannot speak English, claims benefits, lives in social housing, refuses to work, rejects integration, commits crime, and is a drain on our society or even actively hates Britain and wishes to do us harm, they should be removed from our country, regardless of how many millions of deportations that would inevitably result in?”
House of Commons17 November 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Q14. Every week we hear of a brutal murder, rape or stabbing, far too often perpetrated by someone who should not be in our country to begin with. Does the Prime Minister agree that, for cases in which the guilt is so undeniable, the crime so monstrous and the evil so irredeemable, the reintroduction of the death penalty for both foreign and domestic criminals should be put to the British people in a legally binding referendum?”
House of Commons12 November 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Will the Secretary of State today agree to publish clear, honest and regular statistics on the number of illegal migrants convicted of sexual offences, murder or indeed any other crime? A yes or no answer will do well.”
House of Commons11 November 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
““Auntie” is definitively a monopoly. When Mr Reith wrote into the charter that she should inform, educate and entertain with complete impartiality, he did it for good reason. This recent disgusting episode with this “Panorama” programme, where we have undermined our relationship with probably our greatest ally, is just the tip of the iceberg. Would the Minister agree that now is the time to responsibly defund this monopoly? If she does not, would she agree that it is time for root-and-branch reform with a view to ensuring that, in the same way that she has done with football club boards, we see people from across the country who are actually forced to pay for this service represented on the board of the BBC?”
House of Commons11 November 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Mundell. What does the ECHR actually mean for British people? Let us go through a few examples. A convicted Sri Lankan sex offender was allowed to stay in Britain because he is gay and would be at risk of persecution if he was returned to his home country. I do not care. A Jamaican drug dealer was jailed twice but allowed to stay in Britain after claiming that his removal would breach his right to family life. I do not care.”
House of Commons5 November 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“No. A Zimbabwean was jailed for killing a man in a car crash but allowed to stay in Britain after it was discovered that he had an illicit love child. I do not care. A convicted Indian paedophile was allowed to stay in Britain by claiming that the move would harm his children. I do not care. An Albanian criminal was allowed to stay in Britain partly because his son will not eat foreign chicken nuggets. I definitely do not care. We hear so much about the human rights of foreign paedophiles, sex pests and murderers—”
House of Commons5 November 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“What about the human rights of the British people? They have the right not to be raped, stabbed and killed by foreigners who should never have been in our country to begin with. Please spare me the continued moral outrage.”
House of Commons5 November 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Step one: we should leave the ECHR and remove all other legal obstacles to mass deportation—Restore Britain’s new 100-plus page policy document proves it can be done. Step two—”
House of Commons5 November 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Please spare me the continued moral outrage. I am bored of it. The British people are bored of it. It is not cruel to deport criminals, and it is not inhumane to defend our own citizens. What is cruel and inhumane is allowing foreign killers and sex offenders to walk among us in the name of the human rights they should have forfeited the moment they committed their crimes. Hon. Members can sit here and persuade themselves otherwise, but one simple fact remains: the British people want those people gone—not some of them, not most of them, but all of them. What happens on their return to their own country is quite simply not our problem. The solution is to take three straightforward steps.”
House of Commons5 November 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Through freedom of information requests, Restore Britain has uncovered unpublished Treasury analysis breaking down contributions by ethnicity. Evidently the data exists, so will the Chancellor commit to going further by publishing the same analysis by nationality, so that we can see which groups are paying their way, and, more importantly, which groups are not?”
House of Commons4 November 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Meanwhile, schools hold teacher training days in term time, or teachers strike and shut classrooms; yet somehow it is parents who are punished when learning is interrupted. I say they should take the teacher training days in the school holidays—there are certainly plenty of those to choose from. The state must realise that parents are not the enemy. A short term-time family holiday is not an act of neglect; often, it is the only opportunity many families ever get for such an experience, because the travel industry hikes prices to astronomical levels outside term time.”
House of Commons27 October 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Lewell. Parents bring their children into this world; they clothe them, feed them, love them, raise them and, yes, educate them. Schools should support families, not to replace them. Yet right now in Britain parents are being fined and threatened simply for taking their children out of school for a handful of days to spend meaningful time together as a family. Is that such an awful crime? I think not. This is a society that treats the state, not the parent, as the ultimate authority. The Government claim that missing five days of school a year will somehow destroy a child’s education. Really? If so, we have no confidence in our education system at all.”
House of Commons27 October 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Every family should have the right to a small number of authorised term-time absence days each year, at the family’s discretion; there should be no fines for responsible parents; headteachers must be empowered to use their own judgment. Let us end the nonsense that Government officials somehow know our children better than we do. Childhood is short. Parents should not need permission from the state to raise their own children. It is time to return authority to parents and to shrink the reach of this bloated and inefficient state into our family lives. Let us put families back at the top of the agenda, where they used to be.”
House of Commons27 October 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“I agree with the hon. Member. Why should working families be priced out of memories—particularly parents such as those in my Great Yarmouth constituency, who rely so heavily on the tourism trade during the school holidays for their careers or business activity? Parents know what is best for their children far better than a distant bureaucrat sitting in Westminster armed with a spreadsheet. Those are the same bureaucrats who thought it best to lock children away from school for months on end for what equated to a bad cold for the vast majority of them during lockdown. I think I will listen to the parents. I suggest three basic reforms.”
House of Commons27 October 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“I concur with the comments about Charlie Kirk that the Minister made at the beginning. It shows that anybody who is brave enough to put themselves up for public service and try to change the world for the better faces such dangers and risks. May I ask the Minister, first, to reassure us that we will have total transparency about the process that was followed in this ambassadorial appointment? Secondly, assuming we get over that hurdle, can he please explain to the House why the appointment of a man who described President Trump as a “danger to the world”, whom the Americans described as an “absolute moron”, who has close links with China and who has a history of misfeasance in public office was the right appointment for the relationship with the most important and powerful country in the world, and one that is essential to this country?”
House of Commons11 September 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“My new political movement, Restore Britain, is currently running a membership poll on support for deporting all illegal migrants. The response, from thousands of people, is almost unanimously in favour. Will the Leader of the House make time for a debate on mass deportations, given the extraordinary level of public support, and ensure that the House has the opportunity to debate not just the moral imperative but the legal and operational reforms required, including secure detention facilities, bilateral returns agreements, foreign aid suspensions, remittance taxes, visa cancellations, the introduction of a true hostile environment and plenty more, in order to deliver the mass deportation of every last illegal migrant at scale and pace?”
House of Commons11 September 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“After 20 years in the City of London, over the last year I have had to endure a stream of what I would call financially illiterate verbal baby food. Today I hear the Chancellor talk about regulating for growth. You do not regulate for growth; you deregulate for growth. The genesis of our problems are the Financial Conduct Authority and the Prudential Regulation Authority, which sprung from the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000. This was a Labour Act that created the Financial Services Authority, which turned into the PRA and the FCA. Those two organisations have shut the City of London down. We are now a shadow of our former selves in terms of raising global capital, and I heard you say the opposite—”
House of Commons16 July 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“My question is this: is the Minister aware of the concept of buyer beware, or caveat emptor, which used to be the basis of financial regulation? It is very risky to force people into more and more high-risk investments as you hollow out our economy with higher taxes and regulation.”
House of Commons16 July 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Jury trial has been deeply embedded in the British psyche and, indeed, in our constitution since Henry II, who introduced it in order to deal fairly with land disputes. It is also embedded in the United States constitution through the sixth amendment, to protect against biased judges and oppressive prosecutions and to safeguard individual liberties. I have severe doubts about our judiciary at the moment—I am not sure that it is going in the right direction—and when I read the “Adult Court Bench Book”, it gives me even greater concern. As the Minister probably knows, jury trial is already under threat in defamation cases. I have three questions. Why do the Government appear to be so terrified of decent British people sitting on juries? Are the Government intent on further undermining jury trial.”
House of Commons9 July 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Millions of Brits are eating halal meat against their will and without their knowledge due to our deceitful labelling system. The two-tier regulatory arbitrage between our abattoirs and halal slaughterhouses means that economic factors foster a more widespread adoption of the cheaper option, which means that halal meat is seeping into the food chain and the consumer is unwittingly eating it.”
House of Commons9 June 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“It experiences a minute of pure agony while the blood pours from its body. There is no sedation or stunning, just raw terror and suffocation. As a farmer, I would rightly be prosecuted for treating our animals like that, but in the abattoir, it is legal under religious exemption. It is two-tier slaughter. Instead of an instant, painless death, these poor beings are put through the most unimaginable pain, all in the name of religion. This is not farming; it is torture. The British people have no idea that this is happening, because supermarkets do not label it, restaurants do not mention it and schools do not highlight it, and politicians in these buildings are too terrified to mention it, out of fear of upsetting the religious minorities. I am afraid I do not care—it is about animal welfare.”
House of Commons9 June 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Dowd. I accept that this is a very sensitive debate. We all get along fine in Parliament, so I hope that Members will accept what I say as my genuine view. One of the greatest joys of being a farmer is raising livestock. We see them born, we feed them, we watch them grow and we care for them. When their time comes, we want the end to be swift, calm, dignified and painless. Right now, today, in abattoirs across the country, we are allowing vile practices that would turn the stomach of any decent person, all in the name of religious exemption. There is no bolt to the brain, no stunning, no anaesthetic, but a blade—a deep, crushing cut across the throat. The animal does not die instantly; it thrashes, gasps and panics—it feels everything.”
House of Commons9 June 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“I do, and I will cover that at the end of my speech. We are all eating halal meat without knowing it. I find that morally repugnant. We should ban non-stun slaughter, we should ban halal slaughter and we should ban kosher slaughter.”
House of Commons9 June 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“The issue of stunning is complex, as the hon. Member probably knows. The halal stun is a lower voltage than the non-halal stun. As the hon. Member for Dewsbury and Batley (Iqbal Mohamed) rightly said, chickens are put into an electric bath before they are killed. It is the level of the stun that counts. Freedom of belief does not mean freedom to cause cruel and brutal pain. When I care for animals, I have the most stringent set of rules to abide by. I am regulated on how I house them, feed them and transport them. There are inspections, paperwork and codes of practice, all to make sure they are treated with dignity.”
House of Commons9 June 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“I am going to finish. A halal abattoir can brutally butcher an animal alive, and all is fine. Where is the fairness in that? Where is the humanity in that? This is not a fringe issue. In 2024, an estimated 214.6 million animals were slaughtered for halal meat: 27 million entirely non-stunned and the remainder with some form of weak and ineffectual attempt to ease the animal’s pain, often just causing an epileptic fit. It is state-endorsed butchery. We talk so much in this place about being a nation of animal lovers. It is time to prove it. Let us ban non-stun slaughter, along with any fig leaf of reduced-stun slaughter, which simply accentuates the suffering.”
House of Commons9 June 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Q14. Does the Prime Minister agree that imprisoning Lucy Connolly, a young mother with a 12-year-old daughter, for one foolish social media post that was soon deleted is clearly not an efficient or fair use of prison?”
House of Commons21 May 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Despite multiple promises of inquiries from political parties across this House, it seems the only operational investigation will be the rape gang inquiry that I have privately launched. It has garnered cross-party support, and I implore MPs from any political persuasion to align with our cause. Will the Minister commit today to engaging in a co-operative manner with the investigation and make herself available to answer questions from our expert panel?”
House of Commons28 April 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“A regulator will simply make the job of smaller clubs more difficult and limit their ability to take calculated risks to successfully compete for promotion, league position or cup success. It is the larger clubs that will benefit, and the dynamic that has driven the premier league’s success will be undermined.”
House of Commons28 April 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“English football works and has worked for many decades. My message to all Members today is to leave it alone. Football is a risk business, supported in this country by the most passionate fans in the world. It requires a balance between risk taking and business savvy, if the aspirations of the supporters are to be delivered in the form of entertaining, successful football of which they can be proud. Many of the failures in our game, such as Bury under Hugh Eaves and Leeds under Peter Ridsdale, were driven by boards dominated by fans rather than by more logical businessmen. The job of running a smaller club in the premier league is difficult at the best of times—I should know—when competing with clubs that have substantially greater turnover.”
House of Commons28 April 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“I should declare my interests, as on the Register of Members’ Financial Interests, in two football-related businesses as a result of my chairmanship of Southampton football club. We do not have many success stories left, but English domestic football is one of them—so what do politicians want to do? Regulate it, of course. The biggest beneficiary from the success of the Premier League is His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, through tax and national insurance levied on player and staff wages. That is money flowing out of the beautiful game. Salaries have correlated closely with the growth of broadcasting income, particularly from overseas television rights. Lord Sugar referred to it as the prune juice effect. No regulator played any part in laying the foundations of the world’s most successful league.”
House of Commons28 April 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Judging by this debate, the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport looks like she is pretty handy on the terraces. I say to her, in football lingo: you don’t know what you’re doing.”
House of Commons28 April 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Fans do not want ideological lessons from their clubs; they want to watch exciting football, enjoy a beer and have a proper day out. Good for them, I say. All of us here need to leave them alone. Those responsible for this Bill must also take full responsibility when the premier league inevitably wanes as the woke do-gooders perpetrate the damage that history teaches us is inevitable. The Chancellor speaks oxymoronically about trying to revive our financial markets by regulating for growth, after the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 destroyed London as a centre where capital meets risk. You do not regulate for growth; you deregulate for growth. We do not need this interference by tyre-kicking regulators in our national game.”
House of Commons28 April 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗
“Just last week, I uncovered two coaching roles offered by Ipswich and Fulham, both specifically excluding white men from applying. Ipswich made the right choice and removed the racist ad; Fulham have not. These roles have been pushed by the Premier League itself. Match-going fans are overwhelmingly male and overwhelmingly white. They would be surprised to hear that clubs are banning them from applying for certain roles based on their skin colour. Racism is racism, even when white people are on the receiving end of it. I hope that all of us in this House call it out for the wickedness that it is. We must eradicate the poisonous DEI from our beautiful game. Fans attend football to escape all that nonsense. A functional football team is the perfect analogy for any successful society, based on merit and merit alone.”
House of Commons28 April 2025Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0Source ↗