Charging for Access to Parliament

Debate between Robert Halfon and Lord Dodds of Duncairn

Thursday 15th March 2012 Commons Chamber

[Robert Halfon]

That is where I have a fundamental disagreement with my hon. Friend and with people who believe that we should charge for visiting Big Ben. I believe that Big Ben is central to the whole of Parliament, and the symbol of Parliament. If one asks anybody what is the one symbol of Parliament in the United Kingdom and across the world, they will say it is Big Ben. It is completely wrong to say that it is just a separate tourist thing.

[Mr Nigel Dodds (Belfast North) (DUP)]

I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on bringing this motion to the House. He is absolutely right to say that Big Ben is integral to the fabric of democracy and the institution here at Westminster. I know from personal experience that one of the first things that visitors coming from Northern Ireland say is, “Is it possible to visit Big Ben and go up the tower?” It would be outrageous to charge people to do that who have come all the way from Northern Ireland and paid their air fares; it would put them off coming to Westminster.

Anti-Semitism

Debate between Robert Halfon and Lord Dodds of Duncairn

Thursday 20th January 2011 Westminster Hall

[Mr Nigel Dodds (Belfast North) (DUP)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Ilford North (Mr Scott). I am sure that the sympathy of all Members across the House goes out to him for what he had to experience during the general election campaign. As someone who has represented an inner-city Belfast seat for many years, both at local level in the Northern Ireland Assembly and here at Westminster, I can empathise with the personal security issues he has experienced. The business of police protection is all too familiar to many of us from Northern Ireland who have been the subject of various direct attacks and threats. I therefore fully sympathise with the hon. Gentleman, and heartily endorse his call for a more explicit Government response on the election campaigns. I also endorse what the hon. Member for Bassetlaw (John Mann) said on that issue, and congratulate him and the other Members who secured this very important debate.

The hon. Member for Ilford North mentioned education, and I join those who have praised the work of the Holocaust Educational Trust, which is extremely important. This week, the opportunity has been afforded to Members in the House to sign the book of commitment, which honours those who perished during the holocaust and supports the sharing and safeguarding of untold stories so that we can learn from the experiences of survivors.

Like the hon. Member for Ilford North, I had the opportunity to visit Auschwitz-Birkenau recently, as part of a group from Northern Ireland involved in a project entitled “The thin end of the wedge”, run by the charity Forward Learning. I was greatly moved as I stood there with people from communities in Northern Ireland that have been ravaged by sectarianism, violence, indifference and hatred over the years. The project is designed to encourage community activists to get involved in what is a unique learning experience, and to positively tackle sectarianism, racism and anti-Semitism in Northern Ireland by learning from the past, including from this most extreme example of hatred against another people—the holocaust—on the very site of the worst atrocity that humanity has ever inflicted on a people.

The project, run by the tireless director and great worker, Frank Higgins, and by Drew Haire, who works with the charity, has been supported by the EU, and has received money from other sources as well. It was very moving for me to stand there with those folk, and very graphically see at first hand what racism and anti-Semitism can, and did, lead to. Education in schools and universities, and beyond that in communities, as exemplified by that project in Northern Ireland, is extremely important, and I heartily endorse the work that “The thin end of the wedge” does in my constituency, and in my community.

Before I deal with some wider issues, I want to say that in the United Kingdom we have not had the extremes of anti-Semitism that other countries have had. Nevertheless, it is there, and Members have referred to the role that this country now sadly plays as a hotbed of Islamist extremism. It unfortunately seems to attract an awful lot of that, and to export hatred and violence to a greater extent than other countries. In Northern Ireland, however, we have the unique experience of our troubled past and perhaps we have something to contribute. Organisations such as the British National party, which is trying to organise and recruit in Belfast in particular, feed on the usual grievances and try to use them to engender support, and it has been excellent to see the reaction of communities in Belfast to those attempts. The BNP made a recent attempt outside one of our main football grounds to get support, organise people and get them to sign petitions, ostensibly about an issue with which most local people would agree. However, there was a strong reaction from the football supporters, the club, the local community and elected representatives across the board, and it was greatly appreciated by Jewish representatives and others in Belfast.

On the other hand, a number of organisations associated with the extreme left and Hamas have issued pro-Hamas propaganda. Again, people have pointed out, not least in the Northern Ireland Assembly, that the idea of twinning local schools through the Hamas Ministry of Education risks poisoning the minds of children in Northern Ireland. There is little chance that those children will learn any Jewish narratives or the truth about life under the Hamas regime for women, Christians, homosexuals and others.

I will be brief, as I know that others want to speak. On a more general application of the issues that we are discussing, as the hon. Member for Harlow (Robert Halfon) said, Islamist propaganda and activity are the greatest threat today in terms of anti-Semitism. We know all about the far right, but there is almost a consensus that the far right is beyond the pale. However, Islamist propaganda and activities seem to be tolerated. People are careful not to say “Jew” or “Jewish” explicitly; instead, anti-Zionist or anti-Israel language and activities are substituted for what is effectively anti-Semitism.

[Robert Halfon]

The right hon. Gentleman makes a powerful point in his speech. One thing that has always astounded me is that, at demonstrations about the conflict in the middle east, people walk around in T-shirts that say, “We are all Hezbollah now”. It is, whatever one’s views about the conflict, a symptom that they are willing to associate themselves with extremism and fundamentalism.

[Mr Dodds]

That is absolutely right. The fact of the matter is that Hezbollah and Hamas are not just anti-Israel but exist explicitly to wipe out Israel completely and, by extension, Jews. People who associate themselves with that are making it clear that they are part of anti-Semitism. That needs to be said and exposed, but it is not said as clearly as it should be. Debates such as this are useful in highlighting that.

I reinforce the point that criticism of Israel, as the right hon. Member for Rotherham (Mr MacShane) said, is absolutely legitimate and perfectly acceptable. There are people within Israel and the Knesset who criticise Israeli policy and foreign policy all the time. What verges on anti-Semitism, though, is the disproportionate singling out of Israel for the sort of criticism that it gets, with no or disproportionately little reference to the faults, difficulties and problems of the other side. We have seen some examples recently. Unfortunately, some trade unionists from Northern Ireland went to the middle east and were vociferous when they came back in their condemnation of Israel in the most extreme terms. There was not a single reference to what Hamas was up to or what it stood for. When that was pointed out, it was of course said, “Oh, you can’t say anything against Israel, or you’re labelled an anti-Semite.” That is the accusation used against people who stand up against anti-Semitism.

Conscious of the time, I will leave my remarks there. Again, this is a timely debate, and I thank those responsible for bringing it about.

The Internet and Privacy

Debate between Robert Halfon and Lord Dodds of Duncairn

Thursday 28th October 2010 Westminster Hall

[Robert Halfon]

My right hon. Friend is a great defender of civil liberties and we are lucky to have him at the debate. I agree with him absolutely. Later in my remarks, I shall be able to give a more detailed answer to what he has suggested.

As Germany’s Interior Minister said in September 2010,

“If companies do not adopt satisfactory new rules, we will create more restrictive privacy laws. However, a voluntary code of sufficient strength and scope could make special regulations unnecessary, at least in part.”

In my meeting with Google to discuss Street View, it implied that blackening out houses in a street view would make things look “unseemly”. My answer to that is, so what? If aesthetics are sacrificed in the cause of liberty, that can only be a good thing. This is an important principle. Either our home is our castle or it is not. Google’s actions indicate an all-too-frivolous view of the rights of the individual against the advancement of internet technology.

However, as I stated in my opening remarks, we should not be worried just about Google. There are also reports that BT has been, allegedly, trawling people’s Facebook accounts to check for critical comments about the company. Again, that is totally out of order. There must be a limit to what these companies do. We may accept that, in the present day, most of these internet companies have good and honourable intentions, but we are setting a precedent. If we permit this invasion of privacy today, what might it be used for tomorrow?

A case in point is scraping, which I mentioned. Thanks to The Wall Street Journal, we now learn that the internet has given rise to thousands of data brokers and middlemen. They gather information from property records, social networking sites and telephone listings and by scraping data from websites where people post information about themselves. The point is not that those data are publicly available, but that they are being aggregated on a mass scale in a way that threatens individual privacy.

If we accept that civil liberties are being violated in the way that I have described, we must also acknowledge that something must be done about it. In some ways, what is going on is much more dangerous than state surveillance, because at least the citizen knows his rights and there is some possibility of legal redress. Also, it is possible to sack a Government if we are unhappy with them. We are familiar with the idea that there is a social contract between Government and citizen, but what is the social contract between a citizen and an internet corporation?

Street View affects everyone. Its impact is not limited to Google’s customers. When it comes to internet companies, the question of citizen rights is much murkier and less defined. That grey area has allowed firms such as Google to get away with what they have done. The reality is that a lot of privacy encroachment is going on that has yet to be uncovered.

Returning to the remarks by my right hon. Friend, I believe that there needs to be a robust inquiry, with teeth, into the role of the internet and its relationship to individual liberty.

[Mr Nigel Dodds (Belfast North) (DUP)]

I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on securing this very important debate and on the eloquent way in which he is presenting his very important case. Does he agree that one of the frightening aspects of all of this is that we depend for information about what is happening and what the companies are up to on the companies themselves? As he pointed out, none of this would come to light unless the information was presented by the companies. Therefore, we do not know exactly what is going on. That is a key point, in terms of people knowing what is happening.

[Robert Halfon]

The right hon. Gentleman makes the extremely important point that in some ways we are becoming so dependent on the internet companies that that allows them to do what they are doing. He is exactly right.

I am not against private companies—I am a Conservative, after all. As I mentioned, I use Google a lot to run my parliamentary business, but this time it has gone too far. Indeed, there is a danger that one day, no one will have any privacy whatever—and this time the threat is not from the state.

I accept that, despite what I have described, there are no easy answers. When it comes to the advance of the internet, it seems that the rights and responsibilities are still unclear. I accept that it is very difficult for a nation state to deal with what is in effect a transnational company.