Labour Party MP for Wirral West since (elected). An MP continuously since .
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| Party | Office | Area | Period | Began | Ended | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Labour | MP | Wirral West | – present | elected | — | Party history |
Parliament's party history for this member: Labour ( – present).
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<Question HRSContentId="{50B5D8B9-9602-4FD1-B167-9A3881C6B51C}">13. <QuestionText HRSContentId="{1E476842-481C-4F3F-8CB9-6975C2937516}">Whether she is taking steps to support the work of the RNLI.</QuestionText> </Question>
I thank the Minister for his answer and for his full-throated support of the RNLI. He will be delighted to learn that five of the brilliant volunteers at West Kirby and Hoylake RNLI stations in my constituency have been awarded long service awards. However, they and the whole RNLI family are having to deal with a disinformation campaign run by cowards hiding behind a balaclava or a keyboard. I ask the Minister how he will give the RNLI his support and whether he could show some of that Wirral spirit, because Wirral is backing the RNLI every step of the way.
I support this Bill for victims and veterans. I support this Bill for truth, justice and the rule of law. I support this Bill for Northern Ireland, the United Kingdom and peace. I welcome the amendments from the Government. I know they have come about following deep and constructive engagement with many people in the House and outside it, and I think they strengthen what we have before us. The Good Friday agreement is rightly one of the proudest achievements of the last Labour Government. It changed the course of history. While praise is understandably lavished on the politicians who negotiated its terms, they would be the first to tell us that its success is not theirs to own, but that it is owned by the people of Northern Ireland, who, day in and day out, make that progress possible. They do so without fanfare and they embrace it. It is not that they have forgotten the pain and suffering—how could they?—but they chose a different future, and in so doing they wrote a different story for Northern Ireland. What a story the people are writing! The economy is exciting, and the creative industries, the defence sector and technology are booming. They have the lowest unemployment in the whole of the UK and the highest growth. Excellent schools are helping to equip the next generation—a generation not growing up knowing the sound of a bomb, and not growing up to fear a Protestant or a Catholic. Brilliant charities and community groups are helping a generation to see that they have more in common with one another. I believe that, if we are to protect that progress, we need a legacy process that commands confidence, and I think that is helped by these amendments. None of that, of course, is to pretend that there are not problems in modern day Northern Ireland. Recent weeks have shown us that the peace we have is not a replacement for the pain, and it has not changed what happened in the past—that can never be changed, and we should never ignore it. Let us be clear: that pain will also be known by those who served in Northern Ireland, whether in the Army or the police, and by their families. The amendments that I support, including stopping repeat investigations, matter a great deal to them, and I <span id="849" class="column-number" data-column-number="849"></span>will always be in admiration of those who stood in harm’s way to keep people safe. They lost far too much; the way they were tested in their service of our country, I would wish on no person. Whenever the issue has been debated before in this House, there has been a contingent of veterans in the Public Gallery. Each time, I have learnt so much by going to speak to them. I have learnt about the horrors they encountered. I have learnt how rightly proud they are of their service, and how frustrated they are about the injustices that they, their friends and their comrades faced. Our conversations often turned to whether they would want immunity for that period; they do not. They told me that they fought to defend the rule of law, not to be above it. They simply want equality before it. Surely, we in this House agree that it is all those people—those who have helped to make Northern Ireland what it is today and to make peace possible—who we should put first. If the Bill helps a father in his late 80s end the torture of not knowing what happened to his daughter in her final moments, can we say that he is not worth our support? Should we tell him how glad we are that he never allowed his grief and devastation to stop his commitment to a peaceful Northern Ireland, but we cannot pass those provisions for him? If the Bill helps a widow of a veteran murdered by a terrorist group get the justice that she has been denied for decades, can we say that that is not worth our support? Should we tell her that her pain and anguish—her children having to grow up without knowing their father—is really awful, and we are sorry, but we cannot do this for her? It is clearly not right that those brave veterans who helped contain the worst of the violence should be forced into the dock to relive the worst day of their life, when they have already been cleared by an investigation that looked into all of the evidence. They were asked by our state to act; they do not deserve to be tried again and again until a different result is found. That is precisely why the protection from repeat investigations is so important. It is why I welcome the amendment set out by the Secretary of State that strengthens that very protection. That is how we honour the sacrifice of people who went out to defend the rule of law, without cruelly and needlessly making them relive the very worst moment of their lives. I do not think this Bill will be as totemic as the Good Friday agreement. It will not go down in the history books in quite the same way. But it can deliver with fairness for all those who I mentioned at the start of my speech. This Bill might bring answers—maybe even justice—to people who have lived with very deep pain for many, many years and put their country first. They put peace first. Those are the people who make progress possible, each and every day. I am proud to support them, and I am proud to support the Bill.
I thank the Minister for her statement and the actions she is taking. It seems clear that climate change is playing its role, but, in her assessment, what else is contributing to this problem and what long-term steps are the Government taking to ensure that we are building up resilience to deal with the consequences of climate change for all of us?
This weekend was Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year. Jewish families wished one another “Shana Tova”. They dipped apples in honey, in the hope that the new year ahead will be sweet. As Rosh Hashanah closed, families started a 10-day journey through to Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement. It is a day when we seek forgiveness for our failings and vow to do better. Today is the first of those 10 days. It is a period of profound seriousness, and a chance to reflect on the past and to ensure that the future is brighter. Last year, on the high holy day of Yom Kippur, Jihad al-Shamie went to Heaton Park synagogue armed with a knife to murder Jews. As he stabbed one worshipper, he shouted, “This is what they get for killing our children.” It is no wonder that this is a sensitive time and a sensitive debate for the Jewish community, because as Mr al-Shamie’s actions show, there are those who would cloak their antisemitism in concerns about the actions of Israel—those whose murderous intent and racist ignorance is dressed up as a moral crusade. I choose to reflect on the past year, and I hope to use that to help build towards a brighter year ahead, because surely that is what each and every one of us in this House is here to do—to chart a way forward. Our job is not to amplify grievance, or to give in to hopelessness, but to do the hard yards of understanding, and the perhaps even harder yards of playing our role in getting us to a better place.
My hon. Friend makes a powerful point. Twinning offers an important opportunity to hear that dialogue and to make sure that we are not shutting out the people who are directly impacted. I certainly support that. At next year’s Yom Kippur, I dearly hope that we have an opportunity to look back on a year of progress. I hope that the threat of E1 settlements has ended, and with it, the violent expansion of settlements across the west bank that terrorise Palestinians. I hope that extremism no longer has any influence on the Government of Israel. I hope that the everyday leadership of Israelis and Palestinians, and of Jewish and Muslim communities, inspires people towards peace and towards love.<span id="1512" class="column-number" data-column-number="1512"></span> I hope that the Palestinian Authority, often considered the best hope of leading the Palestinian people, end once and for all the abhorrent practice of paying terrorists each and every month based on the level of destruction and death they wreak upon the Jewish people. I hope that the Palestinian people and Palestinian children are not taught using textbooks that say I am to be hated because I am Jewish. I hope that those children are not brought up to believe that hating Jews is as necessary a life skill as learning maths or science. I hope that Hamas, an evil who have inflicted untold damage on the people of Israel and the people of Gaza, are no more. I hope that in their place is a leadership who see aid as an opportunity to feed their people and to build out infrastructure that might make the everyday life of Gazans better. I hope, as I have called for in this Chamber many times in the past, that Israel has increased the flow of aid into Gaza so that people have no worry about from where they might find their next meal or dose of medicine. I hope that those in Gaza who have stolen more than £1 billion of public money to build an underground terrorist tunnel network and ply it with weapons become marginalised voices, recognised for the malign influence that they are. I hope that the current Iranian regime, which exports terrorism right across the globe, including here in Britain, and without whom this conflict could never be sustained, is over. I hope that in its place are a Government who treat all the people of Iran—man or woman, gay or straight, Jew or Muslim—as equal people deserving of love and respect. I am an optimist. I cannot give up on the idea of a two-state solution, but—it is difficult to say this—I understand why some people have. I have spoken to lifelong peace activists in Israel who decided that the depravity of 7 October, and the celebrations that followed it, showed them that they would be fools to believe they could share peace with people who want them dead. I also understand that someone growing up in Gaza knowing war, hunger, destruction and death similarly might not see an alternative path. They may not see their neighbours as partners towards peace. However, my optimism does not dismiss these views, or simply wish that they would go away; my optimism is a belief that we can change course. It has been done before. In this House, we are rightly proud of what we achieved in Northern Ireland through the Good Friday agreement. That was anything but easy. Prejudices ran deep. Terrible injustices were inflicted upon people, and hurt reached into every corner and every community of Northern Ireland. More of the same was not an option, but that required change and courage. It placed a demand on those who wanted peace—an uncomfortable demand to see and pursue an alternative that hardly seemed possible. We can learn from them. It starts with us here, with understanding, with compassion, with humanity and dignity in everything we do. It requires us to listen, sometimes to views that we do not always like, and sometimes to people who are not “on our side”. It starts with ending a culture, here in the UK and around the world, in which we take sides on this issue as if it were a football match. That is not a path to peace. If we fail to start from the idea that even in the most intractable and bloody conflicts, children and non-combatants should be kept safe, we will never find that path. If we want to play our role, in this place, <span id="1513" class="column-number" data-column-number="1513"></span>in building a two-state solution, we must not see this as a debate needing more heat, but as one needing more light. Where there is anger—understandable, justifiable anger—we must work to ensure that the words we speak do not entrench that anger and, in so doing, block any future chance of progress. The UK and our allies owe that to the people of Israel and Palestine, those who are doing the hard work of trying to find peace in the most difficult of circumstances. We owe them our solidarity. The alternative is that we risk looking back, in a year, at another missed opportunity.
I know that my hon. Friend speaks with great experience, and I am sure that those on the Front Bench have heard what he has said. Any opportunity to fund the people who, day in day out, are making the future of peace still possible is one that we must take. As I was saying, we owe them our solidarity, because the alternative is to look back, in a year, at more missed opportunities with more anger and more hate, and with peace ever further away. I do not want that on my conscience, so I commit myself to learning those lessons.
I take every opportunity to champion Northern Ireland’s brilliant manufacturing sector, and whether it is Denroy, Airbus or Thales, or even Harland & Wolff, which has just announced that it is bidding for a major UK-Dutch shipbuilding deal, there is a lot to champion.
I certainly agree with my hon. Friend; many opportunities are arising from the defence growth deal, on which I have worked closely. Many businesses, small and large, across Northern Ireland have dual-servicing capability and they have a real opportunity here. We are supporting them every step of the way.
I worry that the hon. and learned Member is in danger of talking down Northern Ireland and its incredible business opportunities. We are here to champion it. If issues arise from the Brexit that he and others championed, we do our very best to ensure that trades flow smoothly.
Held . Recorded result: Lab Hold. Majority 9,998. 49,951 votes cast from an electorate of 72,838. Parties are as each candidate stood at the time.
| Candidate | Party | Votes | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| Matthew Patrick | Labour | 23,156 | 46.4% |
| Jenny Johnson | Conservative | 13,158 | 26.3% |
| Ken Ferguson | Reform UK | 6,422 | 12.9% |
| Gail Jenkinson | Green Party | 4,160 | 8.3% |
| Peter Reisdorf | Liberal Democrat | 3,055 | 6.1% |
| Seat | Dates |
|---|---|
| Wirral WestElected 1 time | – present |
| Post | Dates |
|---|---|
| Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Northern Ireland Office)Northern Ireland Office | – |
| Committee | Dates |
|---|---|
| Sporting Events Bill | – present |
| Football Governance Bill [HL] | – |
| Foreign Affairs Committee | – |
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