Safety of School Buildings

Debate between Rosie Winterton and Yasmin Qureshi

Wednesday 6th September 2023 Commons Chamber

[Yasmin Qureshi (Bolton South East) (Lab)]

I am glad that Salford has no schools with RAAC problems, but in Bolton we found out on Friday that St William of York, St Andrew’s Church of England and St Bernard’s were affected. St Bernard’s was not even on any list, and St Gregory’s is still awaiting the result. Do you agree that the Government should publish the full list, not the half-baked one that they published this afternoon?

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

Order. The hon. Lady knows that she must not address her hon. Friend as “you”; otherwise, she is addressing me.

[Yasmin Qureshi]

I apologise.

[Rebecca Long Bailey]

I completely agree with my constituency neighbour. I stress that not just schools are affected by this crisis; it extends to public buildings, and concerns have been raised in recent days by the building industry that certain residential properties, particularly social housing, could also be affected. On hospitals alone, a report by the National Audit Office in July this year said that structurally unsound RAAC was present in at least 41 hospitals. The Turnberg building at Salford Royal Hospital is reported to be one of them.

Despite this clear national building safety crisis, there is no detail from Government on what action will or will not be taken, no detail on the urgent funding and support that will be provided to remediate and no assurances so far that the costs will not come out of existing school, NHS and local authority budgets. Worse still, there appears to be an emerging message today from Government that this crisis is stand-alone—that it is simply a sad indictment of less-regulated old building practices that are now outdated.

That is not the true story. The real culprit here is the unashamed pursuit of austerity by this Government and the coalition before them. Let us not forget that, to start with, the coalition ripped up Labour’s Building Schools for the Future programme in 2010 and never adequately replaced it. Worse still, between 2009 and 2022 the Department for Education’s capital spending declined by 37% in cash terms and 50% in real terms. That is in addition to NHS and local authority budgets being slashed on a similar basis, with the effect that most ongoing public sector estate upgrade programmes were torn to shreds.

Sadly, as the Institute for Fiscal Studies states:

“The current crisis illustrates just how costly failing to keep on top of necessary investment in buildings and infrastructure can be.”

How much money was actually required, had the Government taken action on schools when it should have? The National Audit Office in 2017 published a report on capital spending that stated that it would cost £6.7 billion to return all schools to a satisfactory or better condition. That report was also clear that there is a significant risk of major costs arising from deterioration of the estate.

Action was needed in 2017, but in November 2020, in the Government spending review, they allocated only £3.1 billion—less than half the amount of investment required just to keep buildings ticking over safely. Then the story becomes even more absurd: in March 2022, realising that there was a problem, the Department for Education sent a questionnaire to all schools asking if they had RAAC on their estate, but later told schools not to spend any money on surveys to find out.

Even after that, in May 2022, when Government documents were leaked to The Observer showing that school buildings could be a risk to life—causing great alarm in schools up and down the country—half the schools then applied for funding to remediate and did not get a penny from Government. In June 2023, the National Audit Office said the condition of school buildings was “declining” and warned that 700,000 pupils were learning in buildings that it described as unsafe or ageing. It stated clearly that the DfE had received significantly less funding for school buildings than it estimated it needed between 2016 and 2023.

The Government knew that this crisis was coming, and the causes of this crisis were very deliberate. Austerity is, was and always will be a political choice, but it is both immoral and economically illiterate. The only political choice the Government should have made was to ensure the safety of their people. Sadly, if they had made that choice, the cost borne then would be a mere shadow of the cost required today.

Illegal Migration Bill

Debate between Rosie Winterton and Yasmin Qureshi

Committee stage
Monday 27th March 2023 Commons Chamber

[The First Deputy Chairman of Ways and Means (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

Order. The hon. Lady needs to be quite careful with her language when she says “your Government” and so on.

[Yasmin Qureshi]

Thank you for reminding me, Dame Rosie.

The Conservative Government have had control for the last 13 years, but they have not been able to deal with this. Instead of making proper constructive proposals, they have gone for the best headline in the Daily Mail—or should I say the “Daily Hate”? They do not think it is worth it. This legislation is absolutely horrendous. I am really sad that we are here again. A few years ago, we had the Nationality and Borders Bill and others. With every such Bill, it is said that we are going to control illegal migration. But guess what: nothing happens. It is all hot air; it is all smoke and mirrors. It is trying to fool the people of this country that you are trying to deal with something when you know you are not doing—

[The First Deputy Chairman]

Order. I call Wera Hobhouse.

[Yasmin Qureshi]

May I finish, Dame Rosie?

[The First Deputy Chairman]

Yes, but the hon. Lady needs to stop referring to “you”, which means me.

[Yasmin Qureshi]

I am sorry, Dame Rosie.

Many Members have spoken about various safe routes. Many suggestions have been made about how to deal with the small boats. Colleagues have spoken about the legal side of it. If there is any humanity in this Government, they should think about withdrawing the Bill and actually dealing with the small boats, and will they please stop trying to appease populist sentiment?

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Rosie Winterton and Yasmin Qureshi

Wednesday 15th June 2022 Commons Chamber

[Madam Deputy Speaker]

I think this is becoming a continuation of Prime Minister’s questions, so we will leave it at that.

[Yasmin Qureshi]

On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker, in Prime Minister’s questions the Prime Minister said that the Leader of the Opposition was a supporter of people traffickers. I think that should be taken out of the record.

[Madam Deputy Speaker]

I thank the hon. Lady for her point of order. Frankly, the level of noise during PMQs meant that it was not possible for the Chair to hear everything, but I understand that the Prime Minister did say, as she says, that the Opposition were on the side of people traffickers. That seems to me—and, I have to say, to the Speaker—to fall well short of the good temper and moderation that should characterise our debates. I say to the Prime Minister and to all Members here that we need to refer to each other in this place in more respectful terms, and I am sure that that spirit will be adopted in the statement to come.

Definition of Islamophobia

Debate between Rosie Winterton and Yasmin Qureshi

Thursday 16th May 2019 Commons Chamber

[Yasmin Qureshi (Bolton South East) (Lab)]

It is an absolute pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Bradford West (Naz Shah). I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Ilford North (Wes Streeting) and the right hon. Member for Broxtowe (Anna Soubry) on securing this debate, and I commend them and their colleagues in the all-party group on British Muslims for making history by putting together the first definition of Islamophobia. This definition is the culmination of almost two years of consultation and evidence gathering. It is a concrete definition that takes into account the views of organisations, politicians, faith leaders, eminent academics, victims of hate crime and communities up and down the country. I hope that the Secretary of State will have listened to the comments made by the right hon. and learned Member for Beaconsfield (Mr Grieve), who has also urged the Government to adopt the definition.

To tackle Islamophobia, we need to address a number of different issues, one of which is the role of the media. In Australia, where the Christchurch killer was born, raised and possibly radicalised, there has been a lot of debate on the extent to which the media—particularly that owned by Rupert Murdoch—contributed to sowing the seeds of hate that were unleashed in Christchurch. A study published in Sydney tallied up the number of negative stories that five Australian newspapers owned by Rupert Murdoch produced in 2017. It found that almost 3,000 such stories referred to Islam or Muslims, alongside the words “violence”, “terrorism” or “radical”. Authors of the study reported that

“once every second day in 2017 there was a front page that demonised and spoke negatively about Muslims”.

Yes, it was on social media where the killer spread his ideology, but we need to recognise that white supremacy and other ideologies of hate predate the internet. So while we are right to pay attention to the sheer speed and global reach of the internet, we need to talk about how hateful ideologies come into being and what allows them to flourish.

The print and broadcast media are not without their share of responsibility. Recently, in an open letter to a newspaper, Neil Basu said:

“The reality is that every terrorist we have dealt with has sought inspiration from the propaganda of others, and when they can’t find it on Facebook, YouTube, or Twitter they only have to turn on the TV, read the paper or go to one of a myriad of mainstream media websites struggling to compete with those platforms.”

He cited the 2017 terror attack in Finsbury Park as an example of where a man was

“driven to an act of terror by far-right messaging he found mostly on mainstream media”.

It is time we accepted that a large proportion of the British press incites hatred against Muslims to millions of people every day. This is not about freedom of speech; it is plain, downright lying published in our media, day in, day out. For example, a Daily Express front page has proclaimed: “Muslims tell British: Go to hell”. The Daily Star printed the headline: “UK mosques fundraising for terror” then later apologised. Or let us consider the front page of The Sun, which declared that “1 in 5 Brit Muslims” had sympathy for jihadists, accompanied by a picture of “Jihadi John” wielding a knife. Months later, it acknowledged that its claims were misleading, but such retractions are always just two sentences occupying a tiny space at the back of the newspaper.

Such inaccuracies are not restricted to the tabloid press. The Times, for example, claimed Muslims were “silent on terror”. On another occasion, it issued a correction for a story headlined “Christian child forced into Muslim foster care”, which turned out to be a complete bag of lies. The Daily Mail then picked up on that story and showed a picture of a woman wearing a veil, suggesting that this was the lady who had adopted the child. That was a lie as well, because although the woman in question was a Muslim, she did not wear a veil. The Spectator published a piece claiming that

“there is not nearly enough Islamophobia within the Conservative party”.

It is not just misleading stories that are the problem. We consistently see articles that conflate Islam with criminality: “Muslim sex grooming” or “Imam beaten to death in sex grooming town”, for example. The latter resulted in the chief constable of Greater Manchester police writing an open letter criticising the newspaper.

A study from Lancaster University highlighted that for every mention of “moderate” Muslims in the media, there are 21 references to “extremist” Muslims, and that Muslims are collectively homogenised and portrayed as a threat to the “British way of life”. A study conducted by the University of Alabama found that Muslim extremists received 357% more coverage than non-Muslim extremists; by contrast, far-right terrorists are rationalised, understood to be lone wolves, or excused because they are suffering from poor mental health, instead of recognising the hatred that actually drove their atrocious actions. We saw that in the Daily Mirror’s coverage of Christchurch, describing the killer as an “angelic boy” in an attempt to humanise him and focusing on Muslims as victims. I do not think we have seen such a description given to any terrorist who happens to be Muslim.

In opinion pieces, the problem is even more apparent. The Sun’s Trevor Kavanagh ended one column with the question:

“What will we do about the Muslim problem then?”

We all know what that means. In July 2016, Fatima Manji reported on the Nice terror attack for Channel 4. Kelvin MacKenzie attacked her in The Sun, asking why a woman in a headscarf was reporting on a terrorist incident. Musing on why Channel 4 chose Manji for the slot, MacKenzie asked,

“Was it done to stick one in the eye of the ordinary viewer who looks at the hijab as a sign of the slavery of Muslim women by a male-dominated and clearly violent religion?”

Those are just the tip of the iceberg of lies in the media about Islam.

That should lead us to ask why this is happening. The answer is simple: stories that play on public fears and feed prejudices are popular, especially in times when, according to polls, more than half of British people see Islam as a threat to western liberal democracy, and others may not see Muslims as threats but feel softer dislike and that Muslims and Islam are not compatible. The fact is that most people in this country have probably never met a Muslim person and know nothing about Islam, but their reading and understanding of Islam are derived from the media. That is why so many of them, when surveyed, express views that clearly show that they have been affected by what they read.

Research by Cambridge University showed that mainstream media reporting on the Muslim community was contributing to an atmosphere of rising hostility toward Muslims in Britain, corroborating the findings of an Islamophobia roundtable in Stockholm. Do the Minister and the Government accept that the media have played a role in the growth of Islamophobia and that that is no longer tenable?

This is not a matter of freedom of speech; it is about the choice of editors to tolerate, if not encourage, bigotry in our papers. We live in a country that rightly cherishes freedom of the press, and that must be respected, but freedom comes with responsibility, which must be upheld. To publish inaccurate stories helps the rise of the far right; the othering of Muslims has real-world consequences. The National Union of Journalists understands that and has demanded an inquiry into Islamophobia in the media. Done properly, that could have the impact that the Macpherson report had on the police and encourage a sea change in attitudes. Will the Minister commit today to set up a Government inquiry into Islamophobia in the media?

These are not just my concerns. Respectable academics and think-tanks are concerned about what is happening. Last year, in the Home Affairs Committee, the new owner of the Daily Express said:

“Each and every editor has a responsibility for every single word that’s published in a newspaper. Cumulatively, some of the headlines that have appeared in the past have created an Islamophobic sentiment which I find uncomfortable”—

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

Order.