Contribution
It is clear that extremists will capitalise on the anxiety, fear and frustration that people feel in the country, and on the everyday problems they face. People are facing difficult circumstances now when trying to get a house that is affordable and secure, keep a job that can provide a good standard of living for themselves and their family, and feel safe in the community they call home where they are raising their kids—those are real issues that people face—and it is the oldest trick in the book to blame thy neighbour rather than the real cause of the problem.
I remember doing a kind of test at secondary school— I am not sure whether this is still done—in which the classroom was divided by the eye colour of the children in the class, with the blue-eyed kids on one side and the brown-eyed kids on the other. I was on the side with the blue eyes. We were given a handful of sweets to share among ourselves—a much bigger group of kids—while the brown-eyed kids were given a big bowl of sweets. There was more than enough for everybody in that group—they were stuffing their face and enjoying themselves. Within seconds, we had stopped looking at where the bigger bowl of sweets had gone and started squabbling among ourselves over the few sweets left on the table. Of course, the message was that when people are left to fight for scarce resource, they fight the person nearest to them, who is trying to fight for the same resource; the lesson was to look where the resource had been taken before it got anywhere near our table.
I say that because in a town like Oldham, people from every background are working hard, but there are not enough sweets to go around the community to give people a good standard of living and to make them feel safe in the communities where they live. I hear it from the white community and I hear it from the Muslim community. I hear it from people from every background, because we are all part of the same place, with the same hopes, fears and concerns about the future. It poses a real question for the Government about the economy and the fact that the wealth that we are creating is not being fairly distributed among society. The workers who are creating that wealth are fighting for scarce resource in a society that is, frankly, still setting working people against other working people.
The fact that race, religion or however many generations someone happens to have been British are dividing lines in an argument makes me really fearful. When it comes to matters of asylum and refugees, my town has a strong history of supporting people fleeing persecution. I have always thought that when looking into the eyes of a child in such a situation, we must think to ourselves: there but for the grace of God go I. If that was my child, what would I want as a response to protect the child I love? I expect our country to provide what it would for my child for children who are fleeing war.
Let us be honest, though: our asylum and immigration system is not working for people who are fleeing war and persecution any more than it is for anybody else. We have to get a grip of the system. It can be a bit too easy in politics to talk firm without outlining what is fair. We need to make sure that there is balance and equity in that debate. If we do not, those divisions will be exploited.
Oldham has had to literally rebuild itself and its community from the ashes of riots in which the town set itself on fire. Looking at our history, I think we can be a bit too complacent in our assumption that the malign forces might suddenly go away and we can regulate the online world better and sort out the algorithms.
By the way, we should not allow Members of Parliament to be paid by platforms for their insightful posts. Parliamentarians should, of course, post on social media, but they should post in the public interest. They should not be doing so for the financial kickback they get. I do not know whether this is the case, but they certainly should not be using paid parliamentary staff to post content online in order, ultimately, to get paid a fee through the back door on these platforms. We should all be driven by public service and by wanting to represent our constituents.
What we learned in Oldham was that every politician in every party has to take responsibility. It is the one thing that I feel we have lost in some of this debate.
I also want to reflect on David Amess. We are here reflecting on a decade passing since Jo passed away, but many of us were also affected by David being killed in his advice surgery.
My final words are not for the people in this Chamber—we speak about ourselves quite a lot. Instead, I want to thank the families of Members of Parliament for allowing their loved ones to serve in politics. I am sure that when Members set off on a Monday morning to head to this place, or when they go out on a Thursday or Friday or on the weekend in their constituencies, there will be times when their family members wonder whether the person they love will return. Our politics have to be better than that, but we should not underestimate what families who support MPs offer.