Protection of Welsh Speakers from Defamation Debate
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Kevin Brennan
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Protection of Welsh Speakers from Defamation
Kevin Brennan Excerpts(6 years ago)
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Liz Saville Roberts
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for raising something that I will raise anon. The two of us agree with the National Union of Journalists, which has raised that very point. Sadly, we live in a time when bigotry is increasingly acceptable. Hate words open the way to hate crimes.
Kevin Brennan (Cardiff West) (Lab)
The hon. Lady is being hugely generous in giving way. Does she agree that one way we could address this issue is by extending the use of the Welsh language in this place? It is currently restricted to the Welsh Grand Committee, but I wrote to the Leader of the House today to ask her to meet me to discuss permitting the use of Welsh in our debates in this Chamber and in the main Chamber. Does the hon. Lady think that that might be one way to raise the profile of the Welsh language and stop the bile of the bigots?
Liz Saville Roberts
Of course. We recently used Welsh for the first time in the Welsh Grand Committee, but allowing its use in the Chamber and here in Westminster Hall would be a clear statement about the status of the language.
IPSO acknowledges that hate crimes and hate words are connected by exhorting the media to avoid prejudicial or pejorative reference to an individual’s race, colour, religion, sex, gender identity or sexual orientation, or to any physical or mental illness or disability, but complaints to IPSO are turned down on the ground that the editors’ code does not apply to groups of people. As I mentioned, the NUJ has long campaigned for the press regulator to accept complaints about how specific groups are represented in the media, rather than confining its remit to comments relating to specific individuals.
The drip feed of mockery undermines the extraordinary success story of one minority language at a time when 97% of the world speaks around 4% of the world’s languages—mostly English, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin Chinese, Russian, Indonesian, Arabic, Swahili and Hindi—and only 3% speak the roughly 96% remaining languages. Wales’s Government have set a target of doubling the number of Welsh speakers to 1 million by 2050. The number of pupils in Welsh medium schools reached an all-time high last year of almost 106,000, and more than 1 million people learn Welsh on the language learning app Duolingo.