Chinese and East Asian Communities: Racism during Covid-19

David Linden Excerpts

Tuesday 13th October 2020 Westminster Hall

[David Linden (Glasgow East) (SNP)]

It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Mrs Cummins. I think this is the first time that I have served under your chairmanship, and it is good to be here.

I start by warmly congratulating the hon. Member for Luton North (Sarah Owen) on securing this debate. She spoke powerfully in what has been an excellent, if short, discussion. I echo the comment that it would have been nice if more of us were here. I do not say that to be party political. I have been in this place since 2017, and I actually think that Westminster Hall is probably one of the better places for discussing policy. It is a bit of a shame that numbers are limited, but none the less, what we have not had in quantity we have certainly had in quality.

I also place on the record my thanks to the hon. Members for Hornsey and Wood Green (Catherine West), for Liverpool, Riverside (Kim Johnson) and for Luton South (Rachel Hopkins), who all made passionate speeches from the Back Benches. Their constituents can be incredibly proud that they came here today to stand up for social justice and against racism.

The covid-19 crisis has had untold consequences on all our lives, from the vast redundancies across the UK to the many families facing poverty and, of course, to the huge loss of life. However, another consequence has been the rampant and utterly unacceptable racism against Chinese and East Asian communities. In the first few months of the covid-19 crisis, racist offences against Chinese and East Asian people rose rapidly, including assaults, robberies, harassment and criminal damage. The hon. Member for Luton South rightly brought some of those numbers to the attention of the House, and it was right that, in response to the intervention from the hon. Member for Hornsey and Wood Green, she focused on international students. My own city of Glasgow is blessed with three universities, and in the past few weeks a number of people have arrived in our city. I have some anecdotal concerns from what I see on social media and the comments that people have overheard in the city centre. As we go into a new academic year, that could be a real problem. There is an onus on us all, as community leaders, to call that out for what it is: utterly unacceptable.

Members of the Chinese and the East Asian community have described the attacks against them, with restaurants and take-outs being vandalised and boycotted and victims being punched, spat at and coughed on in the street and even verbally abused and blamed for the coronavirus pandemic. With even the President of the United States dubbing covid-19 the Chinese virus, and his Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, calling it the Wuhan virus, I make it clear that no one race or ethnic group is responsible for the outbreak of coronavirus, and that absolutely everybody has a right to be protected from targeted abuse. Indeed, President Trump’s foolish remarks are a total insult to the families of the 4,634 people in China who to date have lost their life as a result of coronavirus.

The UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination recommended that Governments adopt national action plans against racial discrimination, laying out specific approaches to combat racism and discrimination, from enhanced policing of hate crimes to public messaging and education programming encouraging tolerance. Like others, I encourage the Government to take action and adopt new action plans to address the wave of racism and xenophobia that has occurred as a result of the covid-19 crisis. I also echo the calls made by End the Virus of Racism urging the Government to condemn the growing hate crime and to give extra protections to targeted communities.

As was touched on by the hon. Member for Liverpool, Riverside, the UK must acknowledge its painful history of racism, from the slave trade that originated at our ports, to Enoch Powell’s “rivers of blood” speech, to the hostile environment created by the current UK Government. That racism still exists in the UK. It is nuanced, it is striking, but it is still, none the less, completely intolerable.

Racism will not disappear overnight. We must all work actively to stamp it out from our society. The vile xenophobia against the Chinese and East Asian people is completely unacceptable, and I hope that all parties in the House will come together in unity to condemn racism in all its forms and to work towards tackling the issue head-on. One simple way of doing that, as the hon. Member for Luton North said, is to wear red on Friday, to at least make the point that we stand united on the most fundamental issue of humanity.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government (Kelly Tolhurst)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Cummins, on your first day in the Chair. I thank the hon. Member for Luton North (Sarah Owen) for securing this vital debate, and hon. Members for their many contributions. It was powerful to hear about the experiences of the hon. Lady, particularly when she was at school, and the frightening experiences that she was subjected to. Also, however, the account of the hon. Member for Hornsey and Wood Green (Catherine West), including the experience of one of the mental health workers in her constituency, was very powerful, as was the speech by the hon. Member for Liverpool, Riverside (Kim Johnson), in which she outlined some of the historic events in her constituency, which are still felt very acutely by the community there.

I am sure that some hon. Members will know that one of the most famous poems in the Chinese language is actually about this country. The poem “On Leaving Cambridge”, by Xu Zhimo, was written nearly a hundred years ago. However, it has stood the test of time, not just in the canon of Chinese literature but as a powerful symbol of the ties that bind our country with the Chinese-speaking world. These ties connect with every part of our national life, from the people we elect to this House to our educational establishments, and from the food we eat to our own language. Few communities can claim to have had such a powerful effect on our culture, and people of Chinese and East Asian heritage have been particularly successful at integrating into the fabric of our society. Equally, few countries can claim to have been as tolerant and as welcoming as the United Kingdom, a place where people of all ethnicities are free to lead successful and rewarding lives.

I deeply regret that the covid-19 pandemic has brought out the very, very worst in a small minority of our citizens. Chinese and East Asian communities, through absolutely no fault of their own, have had to contend with a significant and completely unacceptable rise in hostility towards them, as has already been outlined. According to police reporting, in the period following the start of the pandemic, Chinese and South-East Asian citizens accounted for 1% to 2% of all hate crime victims, but they accounted for 12% to 18% of the victims of hate crimes where covid-19 was mentioned.

As the hon. Member for Luton North said, people were rightly horrified at the dreadful assault on Jonathan Mok, a Singaporean student who was badly injured in central London. It is also very disturbing to read and hear about other such attacks. Although they are rarely as violent as the one I have just mentioned, we can all agree—quite clearly, there is a consensus in Westminster Hall today on this issue—that such incidents are abhorrent, and totally and utterly unacceptable in the United Kingdom in 2020.

I am equally concerned by reports of people experiencing lower levels of intolerance. Although those actions have not always been criminal, they are undoubtedly immoral, dehumanising and totally distressing to the individuals who have to hear and live with such comments. This type of prejudice has also had an impact on Chinese businesses, which had found themselves struggling for custom even before the lockdown began.

My Department works closely with Chinese and East Asian community organisations, and in those early weeks of the pandemic we engaged with communities where we could see that tensions were rising. We held community events and spoke to community members. They told us of a sudden change, and of increasingly negative social attitudes towards anyone believed to be Chinese. They reported the fear and anxiety experienced by people who had not faced such hostility before. They also expressed concern that their communities were not always well served by portrayals in the media, not least the labelling of covid-19 in some quarters as “the Chinese virus”, as has been outlined by a number of Members here today. I am totally against such labelling.

One of the comments by the hon. Member for Luton North was about the “cesspit” of social media. We are in agreement on that point. After this debate, I hope that the media will reflect on their use of images when reporting on covid-19. I absolutely understand the pain and anguish caused to individuals who are living in the United Kingdom. Obviously, as outlined, the online harms White Paper is coming, and one of the commitments in that is to form a communications campaign about hate crime. Part of that will involve working through some of those issues with the Society of Editors and the Independent Press Standards Organisation.

I want to be clear, as Members in the Chamber have said, that no single community is responsible for the spread of the disease, and no single person should face abuse for it, in any way, shape or form. We, this Government, condemn that completely. We condemned it at the time—the Minister for Faith and Communities did so publicly, and so did the Home Secretary—and I, today, condemn it again.

[David Linden]

As we reflect on the deeply special relationship that Britain has with America, will the Minister undertake to raise with the Foreign Office that strong representations should be made from Whitehall to Washington, DC, that that kind of language is unacceptable? Will that message be conveyed from London?

[Kelly Tolhurst]

As the hon. Gentleman knows, I speak regularly with my colleagues across Departments when dealing with a whole host of issues that affect the United Kingdom, in particular in my new role as in the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government. I have only been in post for about three weeks now. I will definitely pass that sentiment on to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.