argyrotsipi/train-dataset huggingface dataset:
Antisemitic Attacks — House of Commons, 2021-05-17
Topic: Civil Rights
Charlotte Louise Nichols (Labour, Centre-left): Last night, Jewish communities across the country began our celebrations for the festival of Shavuot, and I wish all of those marking it a chag sameach. The scenes of antisemitic and misogynistic abuse yesterday have been incredibly disturbing and have caused significant alarm and distress, coming off the back of a rise in hate crime incidents both online and in physical attacks on and desecrations of our places of worship. I have been heartened by unequivocal condemnations from across society, including by the Muslim Council of Britain and the Palestinian ambassador in the UK, as they recognise that all forms of racism and oppression reinforce one another, that they cannot be fought in isolation from each other and that we all have more in common than that which divides us. What support, therefore, will the Secretary of State provide to interfaith initiatives such as the Warrington Ethnic Communities Association and the Muslim Jewish Forum of Greater Manchester to help us build solidarity and co-operation across our communities, where a minority of extremists seek to divide us?
Antisemitic Attacks — House of Commons, 2021-05-17
Topic: Civil Rights
Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi (Labour, Centre-left): Antisemitism, and any other form of racism, is utterly abhorrent and must be swiftly dealt with. Many of us are strong advocates for the Palestinian people, to stop them being evicted from their homes and to demand an immediate end to the current bloodshed, but for racists who parade as allies of Palestine to use this tragedy to fuel antisemitism and misogyny is utterly condemnable. Is the Secretary of State concerned about the possibility of far-right organisations using this to stir further community tensions? If so, what steps will the Government take to address it?
Antisemitic Attacks — House of Commons, 2021-05-17
Topic: Civil Rights
Tulip Rizwana Siddiq (Labour, Centre-left): Yesterday, racists drove past the amazing Jewish community centre JW3 on Finchley Road in my constituency shouting antisemitic hate speech. I am very proud to represent an area with a sizeable Jewish community and several synagogues, but my Jewish constituents are now feeling unsafe in their own homes. Will the Secretary of State commit to ensuring that these hate crimes are punished, and will he provide additional resources to protect community centres like JW3, Jewish schools and synagogues?
Antisemitic Attacks — House of Commons, 2021-05-17
Topic: Civil Rights
Karen Patricia Buck (Labour, Centre-left): I am glad that Westminster North is home to a large Jewish community. It is also home to the largest Arab community in Britain. Many people, across party, work very hard to ensure community cohesion. That work was undermined desperately by the events yesterday: the spewing of vile misogyny and antisemitism by the convoy that drove through Westminster North, among other areas. The police have acted swiftly with arrests and reassurance patrols, but can the Secretary of State reassure me that that support will continue over the long term, not just over the coming days and weeks? Also, will he urgently review the capacity we have in local government and our civic institutions to build on the work of community cohesion and education, so we can ensure that nothing as vile as the events we saw this weekend will ever happen again?
Covid-19 Update — House of Commons, 2021-05-17
Topic: Immigration
Emma Louise Lewell-Buck (Labour, Centre-left): Thanks to the Prime Minister’s delaying travel restrictions, an estimated 20,000 people arrived in the UK from India before restrictions were put in place. Can the Secretary of State inform the House how many of those arrivals were covid positive and were subsequently quarantined, and if not, why not?
Covid-19 Update — House of Commons, 2021-05-17
Topic: Mixed Topics
Yvette Cooper (Labour, Centre-left): People will understandably feel angry that all the progress that everyone has worked so hard for by supporting the vaccines and following restrictions is now being slowed or potentially put at risk because the Government’s border measures have failed to prevent the spread of a new variant. Can the Secretary of State tell me whether it is true, as reported, that even by 7 April, 5% of people arriving from India had covid, apparently 50 times higher than the rate here; what that figure had risen to by 19 April; and how many of the 2,323 already identified new variant cases are people who travelled directly from India, and how many are people who caught it through onward transmission that was not prevented by the border measures?
Covid-19 Update — House of Commons, 2021-05-17
Topic: Mixed Topics
Deborah Angela Elspeth Marie Abrahams (Labour, Centre-left): The wider the gap between the rich and poor, the bigger the difference in our life expectancy and healthy life expectancy. That has been laid bare over the last year: the UK’s high and unequal covid death toll has been driven by the rampant poverty and inequality that successive Conservative Governments have allowed to go unchecked. In January, the Prime Minister promised to implement Professor Sir Michael Marmot’s recommendations to address that and to build back fairer, so what discussions has the Health Secretary had with the Prime Minister on that, and will investigating the UK’s structural poverty and inequality be part of a covid inquiry?
Safe Streets for All — House of Commons, 2021-05-17
Topic: Civil Rights
Yvette Cooper (Labour, Centre-left): I am really concerned about voter ID—I am. I do not think that it is the right way forward, because it will disenfranchise people. The differential impact on older women has not been properly taken into account or considered. Women could end up having to produce ID in order to get a free ID card. Where will they get that ID from? From my constituency, they will have to travel all the way over to Wakefield—we are talking about older women over 70—to meet the electoral returning officer to try to get an ID card. All sorts of additional hurdles will be put in the way of their right to vote Finally, I am surprised to find myself in partial agreement with the hon. Member for The Cotswolds (Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown) and the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Sir Iain Duncan Smith) over the planning Bill. There are concerns about taking power away from local communities I hope that the Government will come forward with proposals on social care, particularly on valuing social care workers who have been on the frontline of this crisis and who are, too often, undervalued and underpaid. To do something positive about those workers would be an important way to take forward the legacy of the covid crisis.
Safe Streets for All — House of Commons, 2021-05-17
Topic: Mixed Topics
Karen Patricia Buck (Labour, Centre-left): So much of the legislation and policy that we discuss in this House is experienced by people through the filter of local government: it is experienced locally rather than through a national framework. Councils, which are at the forefront of dealing with so many of the challenges that we face, have stepped up, particularly in this last year of covid, and delivered on everything from supporting the vaccination programme and vulnerable people shielding to the Everyone In homelessness programme and so much more It is depressing to see that once again the Queen’s Speech reinforces the existing trend that councils are not rewarded for the service that they provide to their local communities. They are treated with indifference, stripped of the resources that they need and increasingly stripped of the vital defensive functions that they can fulfil in supporting their communities. They have lost core funding of more than £16 billion over the past decade; 60p out of every £1 that the Government provided a decade ago is no longer provided We have heard many times, from Conservative Members as much as from the Opposition, that councils’ defence of communities through their planning role is being seriously undermined, as we have already seen with permitted development, and will be undermined further. Where we want swift action from the Government, we have seen delays in everything from the protection of leaseholders to building safety four years after Grenfell, with no progress on social care at all—and so much more I want to spend a minute on community safety. Again, local government is very much at the forefront, from community cohesion in the light of the appalling events that we saw over this weekend to supporting safety on our streets and working with our local police. Sadly, county lines gangs and serious youth violence do not get the attention in this Chamber that I think they deserve. I am pleased that the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill will place a new statutory duty on local authorities and partners to prevent serious violence. I hope that the widest possible approach will be taken and that it will be fully funded, given that youth services, with their vital preventive role, have been stripped of 70% of their funding over the past 10 years However, despite all these unmet needs, the Government are giving priority to dealing with a problem that we all know hardly exists through the proposals to introduce a new layer of bureaucracy for voting that will cost councils tens of millions of pounds. I say to the Minister that this is not a problem that deserves our attention, and it is certainly not a problem that deserves the resources of local government. Can that money instead be devoted to where it belongs: community safety, and supporting young people into the diversion and prevention activities that we need to keep our streets safe?
Safe Streets for All — House of Commons, 2021-05-17
Topic: Mixed Topics
Stephen Creswell Timms (Labour, Centre-left): I first want to deplore the loss of the employment Bill. It was announced in the December 2019 Queen’s Speech but entirely omitted this time. The Work and Pensions Committee report on the Department’s response to coronavirus recommended last June that the Government should bring forward the employment Bill as soon as possible to increase legal protection for people in low-paid work and the gig economy, so last Friday, with the Chair of the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol North West (Darren Jones), I wrote to the Secretary of State asking whether the Government still plan to legislate in this area, and, if so, when In opening the debate the Home Secretary spoke about the online safety Bill, but there is a gaping omission from that Bill. In our pension scams report of last month, the Work and Pensions Committee recommended legislating against online investment fraud, but it appears that the Bill will address only user-generated content. We understand that online scam adverts are to be dealt with in a separate initiative, which, so far as I can tell, has made no tangible progress at all since it was announced two years ago. It will take perhaps a further two or three years before it delivers anything Campaigner Mark Taber gave evidence to the Select Committee. He found the compare-uk-bonds.co.uk fake comparison site on Google and reported it to Google in May. It stayed up until December. He has just heard from a recently bereaved woman who lost over £200,000 after finding that fake site on Google in September. Google should have acted in May, but did not. People think that if a site is on Google, it must have been vetted, but it will not have been. Google takes money from scammers and then also takes money from regulators to warn about the scammers we find on Google It is not just my Select Committee saying this: industry is saying it, and the Governor of the Bank of England and the Financial Conduct Authority are saying that this Bill must legislate to deal with this problem. Martin Lewis, the money saving expert, said that "the Government has stumbled at the first fence, by not including scams in the Online Safety Bill." In letting crooks and scammers continue to ruin people’s lives, Ministers are being abjectly soft on this appalling crime. They could still do the right thing and legislate in this Bill, and I urge them to do so In September 2018 I moved an amendment to the Offensive Weapons Bill in Committee to ban the purchase online of weapons that cannot lawfully be bought in a shop in the UK. I am pleased that that at least is in the online safety Bill this time.
Safe Streets for All — House of Commons, 2021-05-17
Topic: Housing
Siobhain Ann McDonagh (Labour, Centre-left): I would like to raise the issue of the planning Bill. I do so not to exacerbate the problems with the Bill on the Government Benches, but to merely point out that it will not achieve the Government’s intention to build 300,000 properties each year. The last year in which 300,000 properties were constructed was in the mid-1960s, when half those properties were being built by councils and housing associations. Without a real effort to build social housing, those numbers cannot be achieved. If we continue to rely on one of the most expensive forms of production in the world, reliant on crumbs from the developers’ table to get that number of units, then the hopes and aspirations of hundreds of thousands of people in this country will not be met There is a connection between the lack of social housing and the exponential increase in the number of people living in temporary accommodation. We have 100,000 children living in temporary accommodation right now. What does temporary mean? To me, it means maybe six months or a year. To the families in my constituency placed in temporary accommodation, we are talking about four, five or maybe six years, and possibly longer for those families entering such accommodation now Many people will have heard me mention that there is a code of guidance, which states that temporary accommodation should be provided to families who are homeless, that it should be provided in their home borough, and that it should allow people to continue in their work and children to continue at their schools. But as constituency MPs, we know—particularly those of us in London—that that is not happening. People are being sent hundreds of miles away, breaking their families, their support structures, their work and their education, with enormous social impact I say to the Government, not as a partisan message: please consider introducing a formal legal regulator for temporary accommodation—an Ofsted of housing, if you like, that will ensure that local authorities live by the existing code of guidance. Only if councils know that there is a regulator about to come in will they try to address the problem that they have. If we wish to support those families, but also to reduce the spend and the consequences of the shocking temporary accommodation that families are currently living in, we need a regulator to be there to watch.
Safe Streets for All — House of Commons, 2021-05-17
Topic: Civil Rights
Dawn Petula Butler (Labour, Centre-left): This Queen’s Speech was supposed to be part of levelling up. Instead, I am sure that it has come as a shock to many that this Government are intent on destroying our democracy. In the time available to me, I want to focus on just one aspect of the Queen’s Speech, as highlighted by the United Nations. On 6 August 2018, the UN stated in its report on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance: "Once they are in government, nationalist populists often deploy a range of tactics to disenfranchise groups…These might include, for example…imposing specific photo identification and other requirements that disproportionately exclude marginalized groups from voting." It is clear for all to see that this Tory Government’s plans for voter ID will result in voter suppression, and it is incumbent on us as a country and as a Parliament to take back control. The public are not blind to this Government’s attempts to roll back democracy, and they are challenging them at every opportunity, whether it is the proroguing of Parliament so that a few Ministers can make decisions, or giving themselves Henry VIII powers to limit the powers of the courts, or even the recent Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, which includes draconian powers on where, when and how people can protest. This Government have rolled back democracy at every step, but people have still been on the streets fighting them. And let us not forget the procurement contracts awarded without parliamentary oversight This is all happening in plain sight, but be assured that, slowly but surely, we will take back control from this authoritarian nationalist Government. Even those on the Minister’s side of the House have spoken out. The former Brexit Secretary, the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis), has said that this is a "solution in pursuit of a non-existent problem" We are currently faced with a Government who seek power just so that they can give their mates millions of pounds of public money. The Government want to make millions for their mates while those who are just about managing have to go to food banks or are fired and then rehired on worse terms and conditions. This is not a fair way to live; it is unfair We should be modernising voting and expanding the franchise. We should allow votes at 16, enable people to vote at train stations and other places of convenience and explore online voting. It is time to start including, not excluding, the electorate. Britain’s democracy belongs to all of us, not just the rich and the millionaires. We must take back control and defend our democracy.
Safe Streets for All — House of Commons, 2021-05-17
Topic: Other
Rosalie Winterton (Labour, Centre-left): A number of people have withdrawn from this debate, so, unusually, I am going to increase the time limit to four minutes. I know that normally the time gets shorter for people at the end, but on this occasion there will be a little longer for them.
Safe Streets for All — House of Commons, 2021-05-17
Topic: Civil Rights
Andrew Francis Slaughter (Labour, Centre-left): This Queen’s Speech displays a hostility towards democracy and the rule of law, with a planning Bill that shifts power from elected local government to developers, which is a recipe for poorer-quality homes, the ruination of townscapes and fewer affordable homes; a voter registration Bill that aims to disenfranchise millions because, in the Conservative party’s opinion, they tend to vote the wrong way; a freedom of speech Bill that will curtail and proscribe the freedoms of universities; a proposal to hand the power to decide the date of the general election, for party advantage, to the Prime Minister; a renewed attempt to prevent public bodies considering human rights and international law in purchasing, procurement and investment decisions; and, four years after Grenfell Tower burned, a building safety Bill that does not begin to address the malpractices that tragedy exposed. Three Bills in particular subjugate the individual to the state: the police Bill, the judicial review Bill and the borders Bill. We are familiar with the police Bill—the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill. Parts 3 and 4 are a sustained attack on civil rights, curtailing free assembly and free speech, and criminalising a way of life and the ethnic groups who pursue it. This weekend, The Times carried a provocative article that advocated ending both the requirement for local authorities to create Traveller sites and the ethnic minority status of Gypsies and Travellers. That just encapsulates the policy of this Home Secretary The borders Bill seeks to create two tiers of asylum seekers, the lower of which—those with temporary protection status—will have fewer rights and harsher treatment than now. That is likely to be in breach of the 1951 refugee convention, but this is a Government who do not worry about obeying the law. The recent Faulks inquiry into judicial review saw little to criticise in the system of legal MOTs that has developed over decades, and which mature Governments see as a means of road testing their decisions and powers. The Lord Chancellor spurns the judgment of his own independent review and presses on with a far more aggressive attempt to clip the judges’ wings. He wants to change the law before he has even seen the outcome of his review of the review There are shocking omissions here, too: no proposals for social care and no Bill to end no-fault evictions. Areas such as Hammersmith are in the bottom league for levelling-up funds, despite having some of the poorest communities in the country and having suffered the deepest austerity cuts in the past decade. There is nothing here to stop private companies such as the greedy US conglomerate Centene having free rein to buy up GP practices across England. These are examples of bias, self-interest and neglect at the heart of Government policy, but it is the trampling on civil liberties and constitutional rights that will make this otherwise forgettable Queen’s Speech notorious.
Financial Support Schemes: Equitable Access — House of Commons, 2021-01-26
Topic: Civil Rights
Rachael Helen Maskell (Labour, Centre-left): The Chancellor has let the financial burden of covid-19 fall on women. They have undertaken twice as much home schooling as men. One in five have had to cut their hours. Some 78% of working mothers have not been offered furlough and 71% of those who asked for it have been refused. Will the Chancellor recognise that once again women have disproportionately paid the price of the inequality in his policies? Will he undertake an immediate equality impact assessment and set out in his Budget how he will offer redress for these widening gendered inequalities?
Covid-19: Regional Economic Disparities — House of Commons, 2021-01-26
Topic: Mixed Topics
Graham Eric Stringer (Labour, Centre-left): It is good to hear that the Government are still committed to levelling up, but all the academic studies that have been done have shown that covid has disproportionately affected the regional economies, with Greater Manchester the third most badly affected region in the country. Those regions need more support, but Transport for the North and Northern Powerhouse Rail are being cut; is that not going in exactly the opposite direction?
Topical Questions — House of Commons, 2021-01-26
Topic: Domestic Commerce
Christian John Patrick Matheson (Labour, Centre-left): The pubs and hospitality sector so far has done everything that has been asked of it during the pandemic, but so far 46% of pubs have not received local restrictions support grants for November, let alone December, and 74% of pubs have yet to receive the Prime Minister’s Christmas bonus of £1,000, so what will Ministers be doing to speed up these payments and when will the pubs and hospitality sector get its money?
Topical Questions — House of Commons, 2021-01-26
Topic: Domestic Commerce
Virendra Kumar Sharma (Labour, Centre-left): Some small businesses in my constituency cannot access the support they need to continue to employ staff and survive. The Government’s incomplete guidance to local authorities has left that gap in support. Will the Minister fix that flaw in the system and commit to help small businesses today?