PARLIAMENTARY DEBATE
Violent Disorder - 2 September 2024 (Commons/Commons Chamber)
Debate Detail
I call the Home Secretary.
With permission, Madam Deputy Speaker, I will now make a statement on the violent disorder that occurred earlier this summer. Just before the parliamentary recess, I made a statement to this House on the horrendous attack that took place in Southport on 29 July. Five weeks on, our hearts still ache for the three precious little girls who lost their lives, for their loved ones, and for the other children who were injured or endured unspeakable horror that day. The House will know that a suspect has been charged, and the investigation into the attack is ongoing. Those grieving families, the Southport community and the country will need answers, but, for that reason, the legal process must now take its course.
That day in the House, all of us came together in sorrow and in solidarity with the families and the people of Southport, and I spoke of the bravery, compassion and distress of the police, the paramedics and the firefighters I had met that morning, who were first on the scene. It is truly appalling that within hours of that statement, the same Southport police were facing the most disgraceful violent attacks from criminals and thugs. Police officers were pelted with bricks and bottles. The local mosque—a place of worship—was subjected to violent attack. While millions of decent people across the country were praying for bereaved families, a criminal minority of thugs and extremists saw only an opportunity to hijack a town’s grief. The Merseyside chief constable, Serena Kennedy, spoke at the funeral of Alice da Silva Aguiar, where she said she hoped that anyone taking part in the violent disorder was
“hanging their head in shame at the pain”
that they had caused the bereaved family.
In the days that followed, we saw further disgraceful violent disorder in a number of towns and cities. There were repeated attacks on the same police officers whose job it is to keep communities safe, and over 100 officers were injured. In Sunderland, a citizens advice branch was set alight. In Liverpool, a library and vital community hub was torched. In Hull, shops were looted and a mosque was targeted. In Rotherham, a hotel used as asylum accommodation was set alight when people were inside. In Bolton, clashes between rival groups involved fireworks and bottles being thrown. And we saw people targeted on the streets because of the colour of their skin. This disgraceful disorder and racist hatred, included that whipped up by a hateful minority online, was an insult to those grieving over Southport.
Let us be very clear: those violent and criminal attacks were not protests. They were not about grievance. They were thuggery, racism and crime. Plenty of people across the country have strong views about crime, policing, immigration, asylum, the NHS and more, but they do not pick up bricks and throw them at the police. They do not loot shops or attack places of worship, and they do not set buildings alight knowing that other human beings are inside. There is a lot to debate on all kinds of policy issues, but no one should make excuses for violence or thuggery that risks public safety. This was brazen criminality, perpetrated in many cases by those with existing criminal convictions.
The Prime Minister and I made it clear that criminals would pay the price for their violence, and we meant it. The Prime Minister announced a new national violent disorder programme to bring together the best policing capabilities and enhance intelligence sharing across forces, and Ministers worked daily with the police and criminal justice partners to ensure that there was a strong and determined response. The National Police Co-ordination Centre operated a national mobilisation plan to ensure that strategic reserves of public order officers were ready to be deployed in support of different police forces. More than 40,000 officer shifts were worked by public order officers over 10 days, with over 6,600 public order officers deployed on one day alone. Rest days were cancelled and additional hours were worked.
The Crown Prosecution Service deployed over 100 additional prosecutors, boosting its 24-hour charging service with additional advice from the Director of Public Prosecutions so that they could move swiftly to charge. The Ministry of Justice accelerated the work on new cells to bring 500 more prison places on stream earlier, and the Lord Chancellor made it clear that the courts stood ready to hear all the cases coming through. The Home Office established a new rapid procedure for security support for mosques to ensure that communities felt supported and safe. In total, around 1,280 people have been arrested, around 800 charges have been made and over 570 individuals had been brought before the courts for offences such as violent disorder, assaults on emergency workers, arson and encouraging violent attacks online. This robust and swift response from the Government and the criminal justice system has provided a strong deterrent and shown our steadfast determination to keep people safe. Most importantly, order was restored.
I want now to update the House on some of the next steps we will take. First, we will take forward positive policing reform to build on the important work done by the National Police Co-ordination Centre this summer. I want to particularly thank the chair of the National Police Chiefs’ Council and the public order lead for the mobilisation work that they did, but the reality is that the co-ordination infrastructure and systems that they had to work with were too weak. I am therefore asking His Majesty’s inspectorate of constabulary and fire and rescue services to work quickly with the NPCC, the College of Policing and the national lead for public order, to review the lessons from this summer’s events so that we can ensure that strong co-ordination and intelligence systems are in place and that there is sufficient public order policing for the future.
Secondly, as well as ensuring that there is proper punishment for those responsible for this disorder, we will be pressing forward at pace with this Government’s mission to take back the safety of our streets and restore respect for the police and the rule of law. We will put thousands more neighbourhood police officers and police community support officers back on the streets, reversing the collapse in community policing and rebuilding the relationship between local communities and forces. This Government are very clear that wherever and whenever violence and disorder emerge—whether in Hartlepool or Harehills, Sunderland or Stoke—we expect crimes to have consequences and perpetrators to face the full force of the law. The criminal violence we saw after the Southport attacks was not the only violent disorder this summer. We also saw disgraceful arson and attacks on the police in Harehills. In that case, 32 people have been arrested and in the past week three men have pleaded guilty to arson and violent disorder after a bus was set alight.
Thirdly, I have been concerned for a long time that not enough is being done to counter extremism—including both Islamist extremism and far right extremism—as there has been no proper strategy in place since 2015. I have ordered a rapid review of extremism to ensure that we have the strongest possible response to the poisonous ideologies that corrode community cohesion and fray the fabric of our democracy. Alongside that, the Deputy Prime Minister is overseeing cross-Government work to consider how we support our communities and address issues of cohesion in the longer term.
Fourthly, the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology will strengthen the requirements for social media companies to take responsibility for the poison being proliferated on their platforms with the roll-out of the measures in the Online Safety Act 2023, and we will continue to be clear that criminal content online results in criminal sanctions offline. Fifthly, we stand ready to support the police through the special grant for policing, and the Home Office will work with police and crime commissioners to ensure that the Riot Compensation Act 2016 works effectively in the areas that are affected.
The country recoiled in horror at the scenes of violence and disorder in some cities and towns earlier this summer, but let there be no doubt: the minority of criminals and thugs who sought to cause havoc do not represent Britain. Instead, across the country we saw decent people coming together to support each other, to clean up the damage and to rebuild communities: the bricklayers who repaired the wall of the Southport mosque; the residents who donated funds and books to restock the Spellow library; and the volunteers in Sunderland who found a new site to offer community advice. There are many more examples, and those small, unassuming acts of selflessness should serve as a message to the criminals and extremists that they do not speak for Britain and they never will. I commend this statement to the House.
I wish, once again, to pay my respects to the victims of the Southport attacks. The murder of three young girls in Southport was horrific, and our thoughts are with them, their families and friends, and of course the local community.
My thoughts are also with the families and friends of those who were killed at the Notting Hill carnival. The Government and the Mayor of London must do more to end the criminality and violence that too regularly mar this event, and they must bring forward credible plans to improve safety well ahead of next year’s carnival.
I pay tribute to the bravery of our police officers across the country who put themselves in harm’s way to deal with the violence perpetrated by thugs this summer. There is not, and never can be, any excuse, justification or rationale for the violent disorder that we have seen. We cannot and will not let rioting thugs or extremists win. The Government must always back our police officers to do what is necessary to maintain law and order. Attacks on the police by any group must not be tolerated, and intimidation of the public or the media cannot be allowed.
Does the Home Secretary now see that the comments made by one of her Ministers at the time of the riots, seemingly making excuses for armed thugs who intimidated the media, undermines the Government’s credibility, reinforces the accusations of bias, and puts people, including police officers, at increased risk?
Does the Home Secretary now also recognise that the Labour leadership kneeling in the immediate aftermath of the Black Lives Matter disorder, when violent protestors attacked police officers, makes it look like her party takes some forms of violence less seriously than others? Does she accept that any perception whatsoever of treating the same crime differently, based on the race, religion or community of the perpetrator, increases tension rather than reduces it? Does she accept that, at times of heightened tension, Ministers must be, and must be seen to be, even-handed and demand even-handedness of others?
Does the Home Secretary also recognise that the delay in holding a Cobra meeting until almost a week after these events started was a mistake, that it created a vacuum and that it delayed the actions that could have brought this disorder to an end more quickly? At the time of the disorder, the Prime Minister claimed that he would create a “standing army” of public order police officers. What progress has been made in the intervening weeks to make that claim a reality?
After the murder of the three young girls in Southport, the right hon. Lady and I discussed across the Dispatch Box the impact of misinformation and disinformation online. When I was Home Secretary, I travelled to the United States to deliver this message directly to the leadership of the tech firms and to make clear what the British Government expected from them in this regard. Has the Home Secretary had any similar conversations with the social media platforms about their responsibilities? And can she inform the House whether her Department will continue the review into police use of force, instituted by the Conservative Government of which I was a member, to ensure that the police are able to take firm action and clamp down on crime with all the force that the law allows, without fear of being strung up for years in endless investigations?
In government, we recruited 20,000 new police officers, but their work will be hampered if they do not feel supported by the Government when they take the firm action needed to keep the people of this country safe. Violence has absolutely no place on our streets. Anyone who engages in violent disorder or commits violent crime must face the full force of the law, no matter who they are. We will continue to hold the Government to account to ensure that they deal with disorder swiftly, effectively, fairly and even-handedly.
He asked about the strategic reserve—the “standing army”. We set up the strategic reserve and it was in place for the second weekend; we had thousands of police officers who were ready. We did not use the old arrangements that we inherited from him, where mutual aid had to be on call and stood up in a rush when it was called for. We got the police public order officers ready and deployed at strategic locations around the country, so they could move fast and be where they were needed.
That goes to the heart of the problems we inherited from the shadow Home Secretary and his predecessor. The central co-ordination that he had left in place was far too weak. The chief officers involved in trying to get mutual aid in place and to co-ordinate intelligence had very weak infrastructure and systems in place. They had not been supported over very many years. In fact, some of his predecessors had tried to get rid of a lot of the work of the National Police Coordination Centre. Instead, our approach is to strengthen it. We believe that we should strengthen central co-ordination and we will work with the police to do so, which is why I have asked the inspectorate to operate.
Secondly, the shadow Home Secretary referred to the issues around social media. Seriously—his party delayed the Online Safety Act 2023 for years. The Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, my right hon. Friend the Member for Hove and Portslade (Peter Kyle), has already been working closely on putting more pressure on the social media companies, but the shadow Home Secretary’s party did nothing for years. It is far too late for Members of his party to try to call for action. And the review into police use of force is important and will continue.
Finally, I have to say that the shadow Home Secretary is playing games, undermining the credibility of the police. He is trying to blame the Prime Minister for something that happened four years ago—saying he is somehow responsible for the violent disorder on our streets this summer—and undermining the credibility of police officers. Each individual officer takes an oath to operate without fear or favour. May I remind the right hon. Gentleman that his predecessor as Home Secretary, the right hon. and learned Member for Fareham and Waterlooville (Suella Braverman), tried to undermine and attack the credibility of the police in the run up to Armistice Day? That is why we ended up with a bunch of thugs trying to get to the Cenotaph to disrupt the service and launching violent attacks on the police. The only reason the right hon. Gentleman got the job of Home Secretary in the first place was because everyone condemned his predecessor for her behaviour. I am so sorry that he has decided, in a leadership election, to follow her example—I really thought he was better than that.
This a moment for everyone in this House to make it clear which side they are on. It simply is not credible for people to talk about two-tier policing and then, in the next breath, say that they also support the police. The Home Secretary is correct to call out the disorder we have seen for what it is: thuggery, racism and crime. We on the Liberal Democrat Benches support the steps that she has announced, but does she agree that this renders urgent the need to appoint an independent adviser on Islamophobia, a post that has been vacant for the past two years, and to have a formal definition of Islamophobia, in order to underpin and inform Government policy across the board and across all Departments?
One of the most appalling aspects of the disorder we saw across the country last month was that we continually heard the claim from the thugs involved that they had been driven to commit their acts of violence by the killing of little Bebe, Elise Dot and Alice. That claim is a grotesque lie. No one is more furious about that lie than the people of Southport, who wanted to just be allowed to deal with their grief and anguish in their own way, and to support the families of those who had been killed.
It is no surprise to me that some of the targets of the violence were places of worship, a citizens advice bureau and a library. These are the places where communities go to heal, and when they are driven to improve each other and themselves. The thugs who attacked those targets set their faces against community self-improvement, so it is no surprise that those were the targets they attacked.
For those who continue to propagate the lie that the thuggery we saw came from justifiable concerns or that the actions of the mob are somehow justified, will the Home Secretary reiterate that what happened in Southport provides no justification at all for anyone throwing bricks at the police, attacking people in their own cars or burning down buildings with people inside them? For anyone to pretend otherwise is too horrific for words.
I agree with the Home Secretary’s condemnation of violence. Indeed, I suspect her unwillingness to open up this statement is because she wants the voice of this House to be one of condemnation of violence. She is right about that, and she will know that the streets of Northern Ireland faced the same difficulties as those in England over the course of the summer. Almost 20 PSNI officers were injured on our streets. They benefited from the mutual aid support from Police Scotland during that time.
The Home Secretary is not responsible for policing in Northern Ireland, but she is responsible for immigration policy throughout the United Kingdom. May I ask her at some stage to indicate to this House and to the country what steps she will take to repair the damage wrought by the last Government through the Illegal Migration Act 2023 and the Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Act 2024, which, for the first time, specifically do not apply in Northern Ireland, following court judgment, because of the Windsor framework. We no longer have a uniform immigration policy in this country, so may I ask her as Home Secretary to tell us what steps she will take to address that?
Equally, we have also made it clear that what is criminal offline is also criminal online. There is an important responsibility on those posting online and also on the social media companies to make sure that criminal content is taken down.
My hon. Friend is also right: we should be able to have a serious debate about issues around immigration, asylum, and the stronger border controls that this Government want to introduce, but that is separate from the kind of violent disorder that we saw. Nobody should use policy issues around crime, policing, or any other issue as being an excuse for violence on our streets.
As much as we are grateful for that solidarity, we in Walthamstow know that the fear endures even after the immediate threat has gone. That is the challenge that we have to deal with in this place: those people who promote anger rather than answers to the challenges that we face in our society. The Home Secretary talks about a review. Can she set out what she actually means by far-right extremism and such terms, because those details matter in being able to have these debates and give confidence to the communities that are targeted that we stand with them, as we did in Walthamstow that day, and as we will do every day?
There has been a definition that the Home Office has used for a long time around “extreme right-wing” extremism, and some of the issues online, but we also know that there are changing patterns, particularly with online radicalisation. That is why the review is so important. The last countering extremism strategy was set out in 2015. So much has changed since then, especially around online radicalisation. We need to tackle all forms of extremism and violent hatred. It is so important to our wellbeing as a democracy and who we are as a country. We have always stood against that kind of extremism, and we must continue to do so.
With regard to community tensions, it is essential that everyday people who have legitimate concerns about illegal immigration are not drawn into situations that become less about the right to display disapproval and protest, and more about violence. How will the Government seek to ensure that those with legitimate concerns are heard, and that those whose intent is simply to disrupt and destroy are dealt with appropriately?
There is a whole series of proper issues around immigration that we should debate. Most people want to be part of that debate; the overwhelming majority do not want to go anywhere near this kind of violence and thuggery, because that is not the kind of country we are. Those are not the values that most people in this country have. As the hon. Member says, most of us want to come together to support each other, and to have serious debates, not attack police officers and communities.
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