Proscribed Psychedelic Drugs

Debate between Jim Shannon and Crispin Blunt

Tuesday 14th March 2023 Commons Chamber

[Crispin Blunt]

I have learned so much with the hon. Gentleman over the last five years, as well as with the hon. Member for Warrington North (Charlotte Nichols), who has joined this debate with personal testimony and the most enormous strength; I know that she has had conversations with the Minister, and I thank him for making time for these conversations and for learning.

It is the Minister to whom, inevitably, we now look for positive leadership in this space. That is why I do not want to push him this evening. I could have spoken for five minutes and then left him swinging on the hook, where we could beat him all around the Chamber trying to defend the indefensible of how we got into this position, but I do not want to do that. I want this debate to be a positive contribution, to lay out the challenge of why we are having to respond in this way and to give the Minister the room for manoeuvre to come forward with positive answers about all the opportunities of this policy.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

The hon. Gentleman and I may have some differences of opinion on this. The Minister responsible in the previous Administration was the person who enabled my constituent, young Sophia Gibson, to get medicinal cannabis, which helped to stop the fits that that wee girl had. Today, her and her family have a better standard of life. While I understand that steps sometimes have to be taken, I would caution that we do not move forward until we are absolutely sure that there will be no side effects. In Sophia’s case, it worked, but it will not work in every case.

[Crispin Blunt]

I listened with care to the hon. Gentleman and thank him for attending this debate and for championing the cause of his constituent. It is part of a piece. Behind the consideration of psychedelics sits consideration of cannabis as a medicine and, indeed, a wellness treatment. There is a huge economic as well as a health opportunity. They are not completely unrelated. His points are well made, but we do not want to get ourselves into a place where we have so much anxiety about risk where risk does not really exist in reality that we create blocks to progress.

This is where we need to come back to the historical context that led to the irrationality of the position we are in, which of course was the thalidomide crisis. That crisis led to the tightening of a number of regulations concerning the testing of investigational drugs. The commendable intent of those regulations was to ensure that drugs came to the market safe and effective. Double-blind, randomised, placebo-controlled trials became the gold standard for testing emerging medicines, but because psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy is ultimately a form of psychotherapy, rather than a drug treatment in the traditional sense, strict adherence to those standards proved close to impossible to meet. The story of psychedelics is thus one of an extremely promising treatment modality that was lost in discussion over how to understand and evaluate therapeutic treatment effectiveness.

The primitive design of psychedelic trials in the 1950s and 1960s, as well as a lack of flexibility in how regulators evaluated more traditional pharmaceutical interventions, ultimately led to psychedelic-assisted therapies falling below the cut-off for approval as market-authorised medicines. Those drugs were completely novel to researchers and regulators. They troubled the distinction between biological psychiatry, with its pharmacological interventions, and the psychological arm of psychiatry and its psychotherapies. Given the novelty of the way in which these treatments work and the virtual impossibility of designing placebo controls for psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, it is no wonder that the trials of those drugs did not meet the standards of regulators remaining faithful to the standards used to test pharmaceutical interventions on their own. These treatments are fundamentally forms of psychotherapy, and need to be tested as such.

A flexible and intelligent capacity to measure the efficacy of a drug that facilitated psychotherapy was simply not yet present in the culture of the regulators of the time. With the stigma surrounding those drugs fuelling the tabloid appetite for excitable exaggeration, misinformation abounded about these mysterious, mind-altering substances. They appeared to belong to indigenous communities in remote jungles—surely there was nothing to learn there. I think that, in the decades since, we have learned a great deal about learning from experiences elsewhere in the world. In reality, death and injury rates, both physical and psychological, from unadulterated psychedelics are extremely low. Teams of researchers from the United States, the UK, the EU and Australia have consistently found psychedelics to be of the lowest possible harm potential of all the controlled drugs to both user and society. Those studies considered the physiological toxicity of these drugs, as well as other risks.

However, these drugs are best administered within supportive psychotherapeutic environments; doing so reduces the risks yet further. The medical research shows that, when administered in such settings, psychedelics are associated with very positive psychotherapeutic outcomes. For example, research by Robin Carhart-Harris and others in 2016 showed a significant decrease in depressive symptoms for up to six months—that in a cohort already suffering from treatment-resistant depression. Research by Ross and others in 2016 showed significant decreases in anxiety and depression, and research by Johnson and others in 2014 showed that 80% of the cohort were abstinent from smoking following treatment with psilocybin. Mental health harm is estimated to cost the UK economy more than £110 billion a year annually, a staggering 5% of our gross domestic product. Smoking alone costs the economy £14.7 billion per year, £2.5 billion of which falls to the national health service. Even if psychedelics were to play a small role in improving outcomes in those areas, the impact would be huge, given the impact of those areas on society and the economy.

The safety of these drugs has been firmly demonstrated, too. Phase 3 trials are now under way, meaning that their safety is well enough established in healthy and clinical populations that regulators are allowing research into their effectiveness in clinical treatment. Psilocybin and the other psychedelics have been well enough established as safe—that is all but unquestioned within the scientific and medical literature—and when administered under the supervision of trained professionals in suitably controlled environments, we move from a risk range of “minimal” to one of “very significant benefit”. The method of achieving the maximum benefit for patients and its extent is yet to be established, but there is every indication that it will be remarkable compared with psychotherapy unassisted by pharmacology or today’s pharmacological assistance of antidepressants, from which a depressing number of patients—please excuse the pun, Mr Deputy Speaker—now need withdrawal services, something that my hon. Friend the Member for Devizes is campaigning to address.

Research methods have matured since prohibition, so the best and easiest way to obtain information on how effective psychedelic-assisted psychotherapies will be in the real world is to establish research and access to prescribing physicians and researchers, but we are already falling behind. The potential has been identified across the world. To our embarrassment as a nation committed to science, entrepreneurship and sustaining one of the world’s great financial sectors, not only has $7 billion been raised on the markets of North America to invest in this emerging bioscience technology—as compared with very little raised here—but our scientists, having largely owned this knowledge within the United Kingdom, are now following that investment.

The market for psychedelic substances is projected to grow from $2 billion in 2020 to $10.7 billion by 2027. Facilitating the investigation of these drugs in that way would have allowed the United Kingdom to become the leading country in the study of the therapeutic potential of the psychedelic class of drugs and simultaneously facilitate access for patients. Hopefully, it is not too late, but unless this science is noisily supported and championed in the UK, it will be too late for the United Kingdom to make its proper contribution in this area.

The use of psilocybin and other psychedelics in psychiatry is of even greater medical and scientific importance than simply their commercial promise, yet the Government still want to evaluate the evidence regarding safety, scheduling and classification. To add insult to injury, it seems that they will only do so following a successful application for a medical formulation containing psilocybin to the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency.

In practice, there appear to be three routes to the rescheduling of a substance within the Misuse of Drugs Regulations 2001, of which it seems the Home Office remains wedded to one: rescheduling being triggered following a market authorisation by the MHRA. The more evidence-based route—a self-commissioned review by the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs—is effectively ruled out because of the AMCD’s lack of funding and capacity. The simple third route is for the Minister in the Home Office to take the initiative and commission such a review of evidence with a view to rescheduling by the ACMD.

The Minister, had I given him time, would no doubt have referred to his commissioning of the ACMD to investigate barriers to researching substances controlled under schedule 1, and especially psilocybin, which I welcome. Forgive me for offering him time to reflect further before responding to more colleagues than just me. In July 2017, the then Home Secretary commissioned a review of the barriers to research caused by drugs designated as schedule 1, only for the long-term recommendations of the ACMD to be rejected. The current review has already been ongoing since 2020. Is this delay without cost?

Members of Parliament from across the House have provided to me and others, including the Home Office, a proposal for the Minister to safely resolve the issue based on evidence and in a short space of time. Indeed, when cannabis-based products for medicinal use were rescheduled in 2018, it took a mere 12 weeks. When the evidence and need are so overwhelming, just as they were for cannabis-based products for medicinal use, for what reason can the Government wait to take decisive action? The letter of the laws that govern use in medicine and science of these controlled substances is designed to be flexible and permissive. As I understand it, nearly two years ago, when the then Prime Minister, my right hon. Friend the Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip (Boris Johnson), endorsed advice from his policy unit to get this done, the Home Office dived for the weeds of process around an application for a medicine before contemplating changing scheduling or classification.

I have asked the Home Office on three occasions by written parliamentary question whether it has in its possession any evidence that supports the current scheduling of psilocybin. I am wholly certain the answer is none. The MHRA, the Food and Drugs Administration, the Australian Therapeutic Goods Administration and the UK science and research community all know there is not that evidence. Every day that we do not act to support and enable the efforts of UK researchers, we hinder the progress of science and put what were our globally renowned research institutions at a growing disadvantage.

Perhaps most scandalously of all, this delay in the science now will be delay in the medicine deployed and the therapeutics established on the basis of those medicines. Some 1.2 million people with depression in the UK will continue to provide the grim reaper with 18 suicides a day. Our untreatable soldiers, traumatised from their active service in Iraq and Afghanistan, will continue to self-medicate with alcohol and other unsupervised drugs to the misery of themselves and their families. Addiction will be treated less effectively. Anxiety will not be addressed as it could be. That pain, and the scale of the economic cost to our country, demanded “Action This Day” a long time ago.

All that I have heard reinforces my hope that the Minister will break the logjam, which would be in direct accord with the Government’s 10-year drugs plan that aims to put evidence at the heart of drug policy. Behind the issue of psychedelics—practically and intellectually the easiest part of the drug policy thicket—sits the possibility of a legal cannabis and hemp industry, with huge economic and environmental positives to secure. The chance to seize that low-hanging fruit and reap the rewards presents itself to the Minister, the Home Secretary and the Prime Minister.

The Prime Minister has begun the machinery of government changes that should enable many departmental Ministers, as yet unrepresented in the councils and committees that in effect control our nation’s drug policy, to make a reality of that opportunity. If we make a reality of policy based on evidence, we can finally start to right the wrongs of 60 years of policy failure. The Minister has a historic opportunity to radically improve the lives of millions of his fellow citizens while helping the United Kingdom to be a world leader in medical research. Current drug policy has produced far more victims than successes; he can begin to reverse that.

Assisted Dying

Debate between Jim Shannon and Crispin Blunt

Thursday 4th July 2019 Commons Chamber

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

On 4 June, in making the case for holding this debate to the Backbench Business Committee, the basic justification set out by the hon. Member for Grantham and Stamford (Nick Boles) was that a lot has changed since the House last debated these matters, and therefore it would be opportune for the House to have an opportunity to discuss them. I would like to go into that in some detail, in the short time that I have.

First, I want to say that I respect the views of others in the House greatly, and I hope that right hon. and hon. Members will respect my point of view, which may be very different from some of those expressed in today’s debate. I am a man of faith. My father was a man of faith; he died, and I know he believed in the sanctity of life, as do I. I believe that in my constituency of Strangford, the vast majority of my constituents also believe in the sanctity of life, and they also believe that the law should not be changed. I want to put that on the record at the start of my speech.

Both the Royal College of Nursing and the Royal College of Physicians have moved to adopt a position of neutrality on the question of assisted suicide. The Royal College of Nursing actually adopted its position of neutrality some 10 years ago—six years before the Marris Bill came to this House. Neutrality is far from endorsement, and that has to be understood. It no more gives grounds to positively endorse assisted suicide in 2019 than it did in 2015.

The manner in which the Royal College of Physicians approached its poll, however, has had the effect of leaving a significant cloud hanging over it. In the 2014 poll, those who opposed assisted suicide were 44.4%; in the 2019 poll, they were 43.4%. The proportion opposed to assisted suicide is the largest by a significant margin, and almost identical to the 2014 result. For the Opposition side of the House—indeed, it is important for the whole House—I point out that in Tony Blair’s landslide 1997 general election victory, he received 43.2% of the vote. The Royal College of Physicians actually voted against this change by 43.4%. So there is a figure, when we come to stats in this House.

Before that poll, however, the council of the Royal College of Physicians, without consulting its members, decided that it wanted to go neutral, and structured the rules of the contest in such a way that that was bound to be the outcome. It took the extraordinary step of saying that unless 66% of respondents either opposed or supported assisted suicide, the college would adopt a neutral position. From that very moment, the result was a foregone conclusion. I want to talk about some reasons why it is the wrong one, and worded the wrong way.

Professor John Saunders, a former chair of the RCP’s ethical issues in medicine committee, wrote in The Guardian to accuse the college of carrying out

“a sham poll with a rigged outcome”.

Over 1,500 doctors and medical students signed an online petition expressing alarm over the college’s behaviour. Professor Albert Weale, chair of the college’s ethical issues in medicine committee, resigned in protest. He claimed that the RCP council failed to take notice of ethical advice that the committee had provided on the subject of the poll.

[Crispin Blunt]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Jim Shannon]

I am sorry; my speech is subject to a time limit.

Professor Weale commented:

“There is simply no point in the committee offering reasoned positions if they are ignored by council.”

The process has resulted in a legal challenge, which is ongoing, and damaging criticism from the Charity Commission as well:

“It is unclear whether the Council took into account that”

the majority of at least 60% required

“would make it almost impossible to achieve”

that majority.

In looking at the results of the RCP survey, it is very important to consider the detailed response to the 2019 poll by specialty. It reveals that those whose specialism means that they have a real expertise in the field of death and dying remain overwhelmingly opposed to assisted suicide: 80.9% of those participating in the poll working in palliative medicine were opposed to a change in the law. Some 48.3% working in respiratory medicine were opposed, 44.1% in geriatric medicine, 43.5% in neurology and 43.4% in gastroenterology. Again, those figures tell the story.

I appreciate that the Royal College of General Practitioners and the British Medical Association have said that they will poll their members on this issue, but we do not have any results yet. Both those bodies would be well advised to study the RCP experience and learn from its mistakes. In that regard, they would do well to study an important new paper written by the former chair of the ethics committee, Professor Weale. They would find it very helpful indeed.

There were questions about the wording of the ComRes poll. In Dr Al Baghal’s executive summary of his review of the poll, he says:

“Overall, we would caution MPs and the public…There are a number of problems noted with this survey.”

Those problems included the fact that the poll is likely to be unrepresentative because of the demographic profile of respondents; the fact that only one side of the argument was presented to respondents in the question wording, using emotive language including terms such as “unbearable suffering”; and the fact that response options for several questions were designed such that they led people to choose a certain answer, even if they did not have a strong opinion, and may have led to respondents tending to select positive options even if that was not their settled opinion.

The basic problem with the proposal to legalise assisted suicide remains unchanged. It costs about £5 to give someone a lethal dose of barbiturates. It costs between £3,000 and £4,000 to keep someone in a hospice for a week. In that context, the right to die for the eloquent and financially well off will become a duty to die for the vulnerable. That is how I and other hon. Members feel, and it is deeply shocking that anyone living in a so-called civilised society should avail themselves of a state-sanctioned means of killing themselves.

In both Oregon and Washington State, 52% of those questioned said that not wanting to become a burden was one of the motivations for their decision. I have no desire to live under a law like that, and no desire therefore to see the legalisation of assisted suicide in the UK. We need a system that supports and helps families so that no one feels they are a burden, and I will push for change on this rather than in the current law.

Drug Addiction

Debate between Jim Shannon and Crispin Blunt

Wednesday 22nd November 2017 Westminster Hall

[Crispin Blunt (Reigate) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Gapes. It is long overdue. It is also a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for North Norfolk (Norman Lamb). I congratulate him on his speech. I agree with his analysis entirely. I also congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for South Thanet (Craig Mackinlay) on raising this issue. He is right to point out the dramatic risk of fentanyl-associated harm that is perhaps coming our way following what is happening in the United States.

Any examination of the global evidence shows that the costs my hon. Friend pointed to, financial and human, are infinitely higher than they should be owing to the global policy of prohibition and criminalisation of drugs since the 1961 UN single convention on narcotic drugs, which has been an unmitigated global public policy disaster. He rightly drew attention to the dangers of drug-driving and his concern at the increasing number of road deaths caused by drug-driving, as in the United States. That will require strong enforcement action to catch, warn and punish offenders, in the same way as drink-driving here in the UK has met with effective policing and societal attitude changes.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Crispin Blunt]

Forgive me; I am short of time.

I come to this debate from the criminal justice perspective, having seen for myself as Minister for Prisons and Criminal Justice the time and costs incurred by the police, courts, prisons and probation service in managing the effects of drug-related crime. My hon. Friend the Member for South Thanet also drew attention to the problems of cannabis, particularly street cannabis, which, with its high levels of tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, is more potent and liable to cause schizophrenia in long-term users.

However, those looking to use cannabis recreationally often have little to choose from and have no idea what their cannabis, acquired on the street from drug dealers, has in it. Legalisation and regulation would allow consumers to access less harmful forms of cannabis with lower levels of THC and higher levels of cannabidiol, or CBD, giving the desired high, in just the same way as drug users of tobacco and alcohol can be assured of the regulated quality and provenance of their products, together with the health warnings and all the necessary restrictions on advertising and sales that a properly regulated market can deliver.

Licensing and regulation proportionate to the risks of each type of drug and signposting users to services when they get into trouble would be the right place for public policy if we followed the evidence of what works. At a stroke it would deliver the massive good of eliminating the huge costs associated with criminal possession and supply. By permitting a legal but regulated market, we would decouple hundreds of millions of consumers around the world—millions in the UK alone—from funding and facilitating a world of criminality.

Just as prohibition in 1920s America provided a financial basis for organised crime to flourish in American cities, so our policy of prohibition has gifted an industry worth half a trillion dollars a year to serious and organised criminals producing and supplying untested substances. Their interest is hardly the health of their consumers, but far more to produce the addiction that will sustain a vastly lucrative business model.

Alongside the addiction, we then have to deal with the awful consequences of drug market violence as gangs and dealers vie for control of the trade, quite apart from the enormous amount of the lower-level criminality of burglary and other acquisitive crimes as addicts seek to fund their addiction. As well as keeping criminals, many of them young people, out of drug supply, licensing and regulation allows us to tackle the health-related harms associated with drugs and drug addiction that my hon. Friend was right to draw attention to. Criminalisation means that users are hidden from health practitioners, and there is a lack of guidance about how to find and access services. Taxation of sales by licensed retailers would pay for better prevention, treatment and public health education, available at the point of purchase—a dispensing pharmacist, for instance.

Colorado has raised half a billion dollars in state taxes and fees since it licensed recreational cannabis in 2014. The right hon. Member for North Norfolk referred to the the Home Office evaluation of its own drug strategy, which states:

“There is, in general, a lack of robust evidence as to whether capture and punishment serves as a deterrent for drug use”.

If we translate that out of bureaucratese, that means we know current policy does not work. Since we have been fighting the war on drugs for more than half a century, it might now be an idea to examine the evidence. So I say to my hon. Friend the Member for South Thanet, instead of doubling down on a failing policy and demanding yet more higher sentences for particular parts of the supply chain—in the example he gave, the failing policy has led to the highest level of opioid drug deaths since records began—we should learn from decriminalisation and public health approaches in other countries.

In Portugal, for example, where the possession of small amounts of drugs has been decriminalised since 2001, a step well short of licensing and regulation, usage rates are among the lowest in Europe, and drug-related pathologies, such as blood-borne viruses and deaths due to misuse, have decreased dramatically. Compare the drug mortality rate of 5.8 per million in Portugal with Scotland, where it is 247 per million. The Portuguese state offers treatment programmes without dragging users through the criminal justice system, where it becomes harder to manage addiction and abuse. I can tell my hon. Friend, drawing on knowledge of the effort to establish drug-free wings in prisons, that it is not easy to do. I accept that it is a perfectly sound policy objective, but do not think for a minute that there is a magic wand to deliver a part of the prison system that will be proof against drugs getting in.

In the criminal justice system, as I can testify from my own experience, it is hard to manage addiction and abuse. The reshaping of our drugs policies should be informed by the growing body of evidence that will come in from the legalisation of cannabis sales in several US states and, from next July, in Canada. We will be able to learn, too, from the Netherlands, Switzerland, Germany and others with drug consumption rooms, an example of the kind of regulation we could deliver around heroin consumption in supervised, safer environments where, as the right hon. Member for North Norfolk said, no one has ever died of an overdose. So we must listen to the Global Commission on Drug Policy, which seeks a balanced, evidence-based approach. The UK could have a royal commission to make evidence-based policy recommendations free of politicians’ trite response, “Drugs are bad; they must be banned.” That can give us a route to reframing the debate on drugs and finding evidence-based policy approaches that will truly reduce the costs of addiction, both financial and human.

Psychoactive Substances Bill [Lords]

Debate between Jim Shannon and Crispin Blunt

Wednesday 20th January 2016 Commons Chamber

[Crispin Blunt]

Indeed. I suppose I have advertised the fact that I may be vulnerable to that. I therefore plead with the House to make sure that I do not find myself caught in this particular situation. Given that the issue relates to my personal experience, as well as to my experience as a Justice Minister with responsibility for offenders and offender management, I implore my colleagues at the very least, if they do not want to be seen voting against the Government, not to be associated with putting the Bill on the statute book. It is a real mistake, and it would be sensible to do anything possible to ensure that amendment 5 is accepted, with our looking at and considering the matter again in due course.

[Jim Shannon]

I am not alone in having a constituency that has been blighted by the use of legal highs. I do not like the term “legal highs” because, unfortunately, the very words attract young people to them. I have been concerned about that for a long time.

I commend the Government on introducing very strong legislation for us to consider in the House. The Chair of the Home Affairs Committee, the right hon. Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz), referred to the Minister as his “favourite” Home Office Minister. When he brings such legislation before the House, the Minister is the favourite of many Members. My constituents will be grateful to him for the proposed changes. I am not at all in favour of liberalising drug use, so it is quite clear where I am coming from. I think the Government have the same stance, which I welcome.

I welcome that stance because, just last year in my constituency, we saw an example of the heartbreak, illness and trauma that results from legal highs. A young man, Adam Owens, a constituent of mine—I know his father and stepmother quite well—was found dead in the town of Newtownards in my constituency of Strangford as a result of his addiction to legal highs. The case shocked not just my constituency, but the whole Province. It left the family devastated, and they told me the very nature of their concerns. Adam’s step-mum Dawn said:

“Legal highs are a major problem around here and something has to be done about it.”

I welcome the fact that the Government are now doing something about it.

Commonwealth Day

Debate between Jim Shannon and Crispin Blunt

Tuesday 24th March 2015 Westminster Hall

[Crispin Blunt (Reigate) (Con)]

I am delighted to follow the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon), who emphasised the importance of youth within the Commonwealth, as did my hon. Friend the Member for Pendle (Andrew Stephenson) in an intervention on my right hon. Friend the Member for Saffron Walden (Sir Alan Haselhurst). I want to return to the role of youth, perhaps with a glancing reference to Cakegate in Northern Ireland, the meaning of which may become clearer in respect of the main issue that I want to raise.

First, I pay tribute to the leadership that my right hon. Friend the Member for Saffron Walden has given to the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association. I do not know whether his speech was circulated beforehand—I had not seen a copy—so it came as a delightful surprise to discover that we had crossed paths in 1968 in Singapore. At the time, I was seven years old and attempting to learn to swim at the Tanglin Club. My father was stationed as a colonel on the staff in Singapore, trying to organise the withdrawal of United Kingdom forces from their permanent base station.

I was particularly impressed by my right hon. Friend’s leadership of the CPA at the Commonwealth parliamentary conference last October. Although I was elected in 1997, I had not taken the opportunity to attend the Commonwealth parliamentary conference until last year, when—having been freed of the responsibilities of ministerial office by the Prime Minister in 2012—it struck me that the Commonwealth and its institutions provided a suitable vehicle through which to identify and work for one of the causes that I intended to use my parliamentary position to pursue: the protection of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender rights around the world.

Within that nexus, I was happy to become chair of the parliamentary friends of the Kaleidoscope Trust, a non-governmental organisation dedicated to advancing the cause of rights for LGBT people around the world, and to use the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association as a safe place where it ought to be possible to have difficult, sensitive conversations with fellow parliamentarians from the 41 of the 53 Commonwealth jurisdictions where LGBT people are criminalised. That is one of the unhappy legacies. One of the things that brings the Commonwealth together is the British legal system. Many states have on their statute books legislation that was in place in the colonial era, reflecting some of the less attractive Victorian values that were imposed on their societies in a period of British Administration.

In international terms, the Commonwealth is an organisation dealing in soft power rather than hard power and a place where we can bring this extraordinary range of countries and peoples together to discuss issues. As part of that soft support, the CPA is a place where it is possible to speak to one’s fellow parliamentarians to explain the journey that the United Kingdom has been on—from active enforcement of the laws in the 1950s, to a review of them in the Wolfenden report of 1957, to decriminalisation and then to equality in most of the United Kingdom, with the delivery of same-sex marriage.

The organisation is also about making clear to one’s fellow parliamentarians that we are not expecting them to change—it took 60 years in the United Kingdom—in one smooth movement, given that they have to operate within the popular views of societies where the strongly embedded religious organisations and Churches take a very didactic view of these issues. It is reasonable for us to use the CPA to educate, at least in that sense, our fellow parliamentarians and illuminate their experiences.

I commend the leadership given on that issue, not only by my right hon. Friend the Member for Saffron Walden in the CPA, but by the serving secretary-general of the Commonwealth. Only three weeks ago, Kamalesh Sharma addressed the high level segment of the United Nations Human Rights Council in its 28th regular session in Geneva on 3 March. He represents an organisation three quarters of whose jurisdictions outlaw people such as me in their statute books. He said:

“Mr President, a 2011 report, requested by the Council and prepared by the Office of the High Commissioner, documented discriminatory laws and practices and acts of violence against individuals based on their sexual orientation and gender identity, and how international human rights law can be used to end violence and related human rights violations in this area. In September last year, this Council adopted a new resolution on the subject, once again expressing grave concern and requesting the High Commissioner to produce an update of the report with a view to sharing good practices and ways to overcome violence and discrimination. We look forward to the publication of the report. We will be encouraging Commonwealth member states to reflect and act on its actionable recommendations in order to give effect to our shared commitment to dignity, equality and nondiscrimination.”

I salute the secretary-general for the leadership he is taking.

I thank the Royal Commonwealth Society and the Kaleidoscope Trust for their work. They have jointly produced a report called “Collaboration and consensus: building a constructive Commonwealth approach to LGBT rights”, which I commend to all those interested in the advancement of LGBT rights internationally. I particularly commend it to the Minister who has responsibility in this area.

I know that all the Ministers in the Foreign Office have taken a leadership role on this issue. Only last week, I met the Under-Secretary of State, my hon. Friend the Member for Rochford and Southend East (James Duddridge), to discuss informally how to advance the agenda. I met the Minister of State, my right hon. Friend the Member for East Devon (Mr Swire), to discuss the issue before the conference last year that the previous Foreign Secretary, my right hon. Friend the Member for Richmond (Yorks) (Mr Hague), held on the wider human rights agenda. That conference got significant attention, as it deserved.

During his term in office, the previous Foreign Secretary was prepared to meet such activists as Dr Frank Mugisha, from Sexual Minorities Uganda. Uganda has been at the centre of the debate. The issue is about giving that level of moral support by being prepared to meet the activists, who are being unbelievably brave. Their predecessors in these countries have been murdered; that has happened not only in Uganda, but in Jamaica. It is about understanding the courage of people standing up for the rights of LGBT people in conditions where popular sentiment is in a very different place from here and violence is incited against them. That demonstration of moral support was welcome, and I thank my right hon. Friend for giving that signal.

There is an extreme set of positions on LGBT rights in Commonwealth countries. In such countries as the United Kingdom, New Zealand and Canada, the legal battle for equality has pretty much been won. Aspects remain, although they are perhaps minor in terms of the whole United Kingdom. In Northern Ireland, for example, there is controversy over the same-sex couple who wanted to buy a cake to celebrate their wedding and have something that they thought appropriate written on it. If someone is in the business of selling services, they should be absolutely clear that they cannot discriminate against people who buy those services. That should be utterly straightforward.

[Jim Shannon]

The hon. Gentleman mentions a legal case that will be heard shortly—at the end of this month. It may go on for about four weeks, but it would be remiss of me not at least to make a statement on Ashers bakery and the stand that it took. It believes that it exercised freedom of expression and that it had a right to do so. I stand strongly behind the Ashers bakery, as do others.

[Crispin Blunt]

The hon. Gentleman is entitled to take that position. However, I hope that he will reflect, as the case plays out, on what it means when someone wants to buy a service freely available to everyone else but is told that they cannot have it because they are gay.

[Jim Shannon]

That is not what I said. That is a misrepresentation.

Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

Debate between Jim Shannon and Crispin Blunt

Tuesday 1st November 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Blunt]

I will deal with the amendments tabled by the hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell), who has quite properly raised concerns in this area, and I will go into some detail to give the hon. Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn) a proper answer to his question.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Chatham and Aylesford (Tracey Crouch) said, there are others who will say that any new offence should extend to squatting in commercial premises. As I said to her, I remain concerned about squatting in those properties and will work with other Departments and the enforcement authorities to see whether action against existing offences such as criminal damage and burglary could be enforced more effectively in those cases.

The Metropolitan police acknowledged, in response to our consultation, that a lack of training and practical knowledge regarding the law on squatting may be a barrier to effective enforcement. My officials will work with the Home Office and the wider police service to address these issues and fill any gaps in current police practice. We will keep the situation under review in relation to non-residential property and are not ruling out further action in the future if it is needed.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

Will the legislation provide for co-operation or contact with services—electricity, water and so on—to those houses as a method whereby people can be taken out of those houses to ensure that the squatting does not continue? Will that be covered by the legislation?

Squatting

Debate between Jim Shannon and Crispin Blunt

Wednesday 30th March 2011 Westminster Hall

[Jim Shannon]

Is there a role for the UK Border Agency here, alongside the police? I am not saying that this is always the case, but I am aware that in some cases squatters might be in the country illegally.

[Mr Blunt]

I certainly hope that if there were any reliable evidence that the people involved were in the country illegally, the UKBA would be engaged in initiating appropriate proceedings to remove them from the United Kingdom. I had not considered that angle in preparing my remarks for the debate, but the obvious answer is yes, one would expect the appropriate authorities—in this case the UKBA—to be properly engaged in exercising their responsibilities, in the same way as they would be in any other circumstance.

We will want to examine the existing squatting laws to see whether they can be appropriately strengthened because, having listened to my hon. Friend the Member for Hove, the issues that were raised at Justice questions yesterday, and the conduct of the whole public debate, it is pretty clear to me where the public are on this issue and I am confident that measures to strengthen the law would have significant support.