Member

When I say we need to remove this as a thing the police do, I cannot express how important it will be because you will be making sure that almost an entire generation of young people cannot join our system, cannot become part of what it is to be British, just because of a cultural relationship they have and from which, in the mind of someone who does not understand it, they have no way of disassociating themselves. Bearing that in mind, I believe this is something we should get behind and support. If anybody doubts me, find a 16 or 15 year-old Black boy and ask him to tell you about Parliament in the way he would speak to his friends. It will sound like a gunfight. I do not know whether you have ever been to Parliament, but I have never witnessed a gunfight. The point I am trying to make is that young people live in a separate world, this music is another separate world, and we must be very careful about demonising and villainising them before we have any real evidence.