Safety of Journalists
John McDonnell Excerpts(2 years, 11 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
John McDonnell (Hayes and Harlington) (Lab) [V]
I speak as the secretary of the National Union of Journalists parliamentary group. I pay tribute to the work of the NUJ here in the UK, led by its general secretary Michelle Stanistreet and president Sian Jones, and to the work of the International Federation of Journalists to protect journalists across the world.
According to the figures we have received, there are at least 235 journalists in prisons across the world today, and 42 journalists have been killed for doing their job in the last year. It is strong and fearless journalism that makes press freedom worth defending, and we must protect it here and abroad against violence and suppression. I agree with others that the whole House should be condemning the bombing of media companies and the harassment and arrests of journalists operating in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, including the ongoing harassment of the al-Jazeera correspondent in Jerusalem, Givara Budeiri. We must also condemn the jailing of the 12 journalists in recent months in Belarus. We even hear that journalists have been threatened and arrested while covering the Black Lives Matter protests in the US.
We should not be complacent about press freedom on our own shores, either. I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds East (Richard Burgon) that it is a continuing stain on the reputation of this country that Julian Assange remains in Belmarsh prison. There are no justifiable grounds for keeping in prison a journalist who had the courage to expose the war crimes and abuse of human rights committed by the world’s leading military powers.
We also have a Government who just yesterday were forced by the courts to release documents detailing how the clearing house unit in the Cabinet Office has blocked freedom of information requests from journalists. I pay tribute to openDemocracy, which pursued this case. I quote the findings of the judge, who said that there was a
“profound lack of transparency about the operation”
of this unit that “might appear” even “to extend to Ministers”.
It also does not build confidence in the Government when a Treasury and Equalities Minister publicly attacks a young black journalist and makes false statements about her on social media, seemingly for simply daring to ask the Minister a question. That the Government have been found to be attempting to bully journalists should not come as a surprise when they are led by a Prime Minister who once offered his help to have a journalist beaten up.
In honour of World Press Freedom Day, I offer my thanks to journalists here and around the world who face obstruction, threats and intimidation simply for doing their jobs. We all pay our tribute to them.
Online Anonymity and Anonymous Abuse
John McDonnell Excerpts(3 years, 1 month ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
John McDonnell (Hayes and Harlington) (Lab) [V]
I am the secretary of the National Union of Journalists parliamentary group, and on behalf of the NUJ, I wish to refer to the particular vulnerability of journalists, and the unprecedented virulence and level of the abuse, threats and harassment that takes place online. Even after the experience of a tsunami of abuse in recent years, the violent, threatening nature of abuse can still shock and cause real fears.
Let me cite two examples. Patricia Devlin, an award-winning crime reporter who works for the Sunday World newspaper, received a threat by direct message to her personal Facebook account. The sender threatened to rape her newborn son. It was signed with the name of the neo-Nazi terror group Combat 18, which has in the past had links to loyalist paramilitaries in Northern Ireland.
It is not just journalists who work for national media outlets who are targeted. The political editor of the Liverpool Echo, Liam Thorp, has exposed the scale of threats against and abuse of journalists working in the regional media. A perpetrator was jailed for two and a half years over death threats made to Liam and another Echo employee.
The NUJ has broadly welcomed the “National Action Plan for the Safety of Journalists” that the Government published this month, which stated:
“That there is a problem is undeniable. Too many journalists currently working in the UK do not feel safe from threats, abuse and physical harm”.
The words of Reporters Without Borders are cited in the plan:
“Harassing journalists has never been as easy as it is now.”
The NUJ will work with the Government and other partners on this issue to ensure the safety of journalists and that the strategy is implemented swiftly.
The cornerstones of any strategy to ensure that we have thriving, high-quality national and local journalism to uphold our democracy have to be not only firm legislative protections but a fully resourced independent media. An effective online safety Bill will be a critical component, but so will the securing of a stable future funding source for quality journalism. That is why the NUJ has thrown itself into the debate about not only the contents of the new legislation but the new funding opportunities to secure for the long term the quality journalism that is so critical to upholding our sense of community and our current democratic system.
Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport
John McDonnell Excerpts(3 years, 1 month ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
John McDonnell (Hayes and Harlington) (Lab) [V]
Let me thank and congratulate the Chair of the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee and my hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff West (Kevin Brennan) for how they have jointly championed the sector on a cross-party basis. They have raised the issues of the lack of support for freelancers, the touring threat as a result of Brexit, and insurance. I fully support them in that. I urge the Minister and the Secretary of State to sit down with Equity, the trade union, to discuss a number of the issues, as the union has been developing solutions to them.
I am also a member of the PCS trade union parliamentary group. PCS represents members working in museums, the royal palaces, galleries and historical sites, and is now yet again faced with large numbers of job threats.
The Government have brought forward financial support, as we have heard, with £1.5 billion and an additional £400 million in the Budget, but as the Chair of the Select Committee has said, that is less than half what is needed. It is taking too long to arrive and too long to distribute, and as a result we heard this week that six out of 10 museums are fearful for their future. Charlotte Higgins, the chief culture writer for The Guardian, summed it up exactly right:
“the government has not exactly abandoned the arts so much as behaved in a hesitant, inconsistent and basically incompetent manner easily recognisable from its approach to Covid-19 as a whole.”
What we need now is a longer-term strategy, as a number of Members have said, because I am fearful.
Let us take the example of the National Gallery. PCS represents members there, and some of the services have been privatised. Securitas, the private company that provides security and front-of-house services at the National Gallery, has announced a 20% cut in staffing. Compulsory redundancies are not being ruled out, and this is an institution that has received Government support. That comes on top of redundancies that took place in 2019, when there was a restructuring. It is proposing the temporary closure of some of the rooms and putting an emphasis on paid exhibitions rather than free access. There is a view that when these cuts are rolled out, they will put the safety of the collection and visitors at risk.
What has also angered staff is that, as a result of the privatisation, it is the lowest-paid staff who are being laid off or having their pay cut, as well as a higher proportion of black, Asian and minority ethnic staff. In addition, the National Gallery spending several million pounds on extensive refurbishment of the front entrance to the building is not going down well with staff or supporters. It has to be remembered that those staff who have been privatised receive only a quarter of what they would have received in redundancy pay if they were employed by the gallery. The union will oppose those cuts and seek to negotiate them—of course it will—but this emphasises the need for a longer-term strategy.
We have all acknowledged in the debate so far that the recovery in this sector will take longer than originally expected—it will take the next few years, if not longer—so there needs to be a longer-term plan. We urge the Secretary of State to bring together all the stakeholders in this sector with the trade unions and management of the galleries, museums and sites to ensure that we discuss what is really needed, plan the investment that is needed and its roll-out and distribution, and ensure that it goes as rapidly as possible to secure this sector, which does not just bring income to this country but improves the quality of all our lives.
Budget Resolutions and Economic Situation
John McDonnell Excerpts(3 years, 2 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
John McDonnell (Hayes and Harlington) (Lab) [V]
This is a shameful Budget. On International Women’s Day, whether you are a mother in a food bank queue in Britain struggling to feed your children or a mother of a child in Yemen, this heartless Chancellor is turning his back on your suffering. It is shameful because of the hypocrisy of standing on doorsteps clapping nurses and now slapping them in the face by cutting the pay of our NHS heroes and heroines. It is especially shameful because at the head of this Government who are insulting our NHS workers is a Prime Minister whose life they saved. The ultimate irony is that the Prime Minister is riding high in the polls on the backs of the hard work and dedication of the NHS staff who are rolling out the vaccination programme so successfully.
Anyone voting for this Budget will bear a mark of shame for throwing another 500,000 people into poverty when the Government cut the £20 a week in universal credit from the poorest families in our community, a mark of shame for yet again failing to provide even that meagre uplift to disabled people living in poverty on legacy benefits, and a mark of shame for failing to tackle the low level of sick pay that is forcing many workers to put their health at risk by returning to work. I have tabled an amendment to the Budget resolutions calling for a distributional analysis of the Chancellor’s proposals to freeze the tax thresholds. The Chancellor said:
“Nobody’s take-home pay will be less than it is now as a result of this policy”.—[Official Report, 3 March 2021; Vol. 690, c. 256.]
The tax threshold freeze is a real-terms pay cut for millions of workers. The OBR estimates that this will mean 1.3 million more people paying income tax. Their take-home pay will be less. In 2019 the Conservative manifesto, like the Labour manifesto, pledged no rises in income tax, VAT or national insurance for basic rate taxpayers. This Budget breaks the pledge on which over 550 Members of this House were elected. Many low-paid workers are in rent arrears, in household debt or taking mortgage holidays, accruing more debt interest. We should not be legislating to cut their take-home pay.
I have seen it reported that in this Budget the Chancellor is stealing my policies. No, he is not. His Budget plagiarises the rhetoric but not the substance, with promises of corporation tax rises, but delayed and overridden by tax giveaways—tokenistic gestures to levelling up but contaminated by pork barrel politics. Taken alongside the fast-track award of crony contracts to Tory friends and donors, it is hardly surprising that many now refer to this Government as corrupt. The decisions to freeze fuel duties and to dig a new coal mine, and the pathetic scale of environmental policies, do not just pay lip service to the climate crisis we face but put future generations at risk. By any measure, this is a Budget to be ashamed of.
Covid-19: Cultural and Entertainment Sectors
John McDonnell Excerpts(3 years, 2 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
John McDonnell (Hayes and Harlington) (Lab) [V]
I pay tribute to Equity, the Public and Commercial Services Union, the Broadcasting, Entertainment, Cinematograph and Theatre Union and all those trade unions that have worked so hard throughout the pandemic to ensure that their members are properly represented and that the plight of the workers in the cultural sector has been exposed.
The majority of Equity’s members have had all or most of their work cancelled as a result of covid. Large numbers are now in debt and struggling. Although the vast majority of Equity members are self-employed and freelancers, over 40% have been unable to claim under the self-employed income support scheme. Many have had to fall back on universal credit. Because 40% have also not worked at all since March last year and many do not work for qualifying organisations, they have not benefited from the culture recovery fund. The overall consequence is that many are leaving the profession. Recent research has highlighted the large number of black, Asian and minority ethnic female workers and women who are parents or carers forced out of the sector. This is an immense loss of talent.
Equity has four simple asks: first, widen the support available via the self-employed support scheme grant to include new entrants with a 2019-20 tax return, those operating through personal service companies and the other excluded groups; secondly, when the fourth self-employed grant details are published tomorrow, continue to allow a grant based on at least 80% of average profits; thirdly, continue the suspension of the minimum income floor for universal credit beyond the end of April 2021; and fourthly, continue the £20 uplift in universal credit standard allowances beyond April 2021 as well.
In the longer term, Equity is looking at how to create jobs and, specifically, opportunities for marginalised groups in our society to enter into the cultural professions. It is calling for the introduction of a minimum income guarantee for creative workers as a long-term way to remedy low and often no pay and all those barriers to access for creative professionals. All the unions are now saying that the Government must pursue a strategy that ensures employment and job creation across the UK for a broad range of creative workers who do so much to enhance the quality of our lives.