Blair McDougall MP: speeches

Speeches

• 6 Jan 2025 · Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse · Hansard source

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  I warmly welcome the measures that the Home Secretary has set out to pursue perpetrators and to challenge the culture of cover-up, and I also welcome her strong statement that nobody should resist the urge to report child rape for fear of being labelled a racist. Does she share my contempt for those who weaponise the suffering of victims, particularly through online disinformation, to pursue their own hateful agendas? The attacks by Elon Musk on the Safeguarding Minister in the last few days crossed a line for me, so I deactivated my X account earlier. At what point does the continued presence of Government Departments on that platform legitimise a space that is now not only poisonous but dangerous?

• 6 Nov 2024 · Uyghur and Turkic Muslims: Forced Labour in China · Hansard source

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  I beg to move, That this House has considered UK supply chains and Uyghur and Turkic Muslim forced labour in China. Thank you for chairing this debate, Mr Dowd, and for the opportunity to highlight the issue. I thank the Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Lothian East (Mr Alexander), for being here to respond to the debate: in his last period in office and during his sabbatical from this place he was a consistent advocate for the dignity of people all over the world. That human rights have never been respected by the People’s Republic of China is a given, but the persecution of Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims since 2017 has been unprecedented even for the Chinese Communist party. More than 1 million Muslims have been imprisoned in an enormous network of camps; possibly as many as 3 million out of a population of 11 million Muslims have made their way through the camps at some time. This is the largest mass arbitrary detention since the second world war. Uyghur women face forced sterilisation, forced abortion, sexual violence in the camps, and forced marriage to Han Chinese men. Thousands of mosques have been demolished. Hundreds of Muslim graveyards have been bulldozed. Countless sacred Islamic shrines have been destroyed. Uyghurs are forced to consume pork, drink alcohol and eat during the Ramadan fast. These crimes are part of a deliberate effort to destroy the Uyghurs as an ethnic group with a distinct culture and religious identity. International organisations and human rights groups too numerous to list assess that crimes against humanity are taking place in Xinjiang, and this House of Commons has voted to recognise that what is going on is a genocide—an intentional policy that seeks to destroy a people. All of that provides context to the issue of forced labour in Xinjiang, but it is important to understand that Uyghur Muslim slavery is not a by-product of the attempt to destroy a people; it is an integral part of China’s project. Indeed, as the camps were built, factories for forced labourers were constructed alongside them. For those Uyghurs who are not inside the camps, the threat of incarceration is used to coerce them into the PRC’s wider labour transfer programme. There is a dark contradiction at the heart of all this. The atrocities are happening in a region that is increasingly closed to those who would testify to the crimes, the journalists and human rights groups who would document them and of course those who would flee to freedom if they could. However, at the same time that the region is closing down, it is increasingly open to and integrated into the global economy. Xinjiang mines, refines and manufactures for the world. Some of the best-known global brands are profiting from the destruction of a people. The scale of slavery in the region is enormous and is barely disputed: four years ago, official Chinese Government documents acknowledged that 2.6 million Uyghurs and other Turkic minorities had gone through labour transfer programmes. The scope of the industries affected is too large to cover in the time afforded to us today, so I will focus on three areas that especially expose the UK’s economy and that risk consumers being unwittingly complicit in Muslim slave labour: clothing, cars and climate change. Xinjiang produces a quarter of the world’s cotton. The idea of hundreds of thousands of slaves working in cotton fields evokes an image of slavery and forced labour from another era, but this is not historical practice. It is a well-documented economic reality in the Uyghur region today.

• 23 Oct 2024 · Paternity Leave and Pay · Hansard source

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  Thank you, Mr Pritchard, for calling me to speak in this debate. I want to talk about the vision for the role of fathers in society, which other hon. Members have spoken about, and about how achieving that takes not only personal choice by fathers, but cultural and economic change. I feel that point about personal choice very acutely: at a very young age, my father chose not to be part of my life, and I am determined that that should not be repeated in my own family’s upbringing. I am not unusual: for example, nine out of 10 dads will now go to antenatal scans and the birth. Fathers want to be part of their children’s life and they want to be better fathers, but the culture and the economics make that difficult. On the cultural point, when I was established in my own business, I made the choice to be a stay-at-home father for a period. However, such fathers are excluded from the coffee with the mothers after nursery pick-up and are not part of the “mum bus” WhatsApp chat. That culture continues, however, because of the economics behind it. The gap between average pay and statutory paternity leave is about £1,000, which is something that parents cannot afford. There is a class element as well, with nine out of 10 households earning more than £60,000 a year able to take their paternity leave, while only two thirds of those earning under £25,000 a year can do so. If we want the cultural change, and that personal choice, to be taken advantage of, we need to deal with the economics and create more generous arrangements for paternity pay. In particular, I agree with the suggestion of the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central (Gareth Snell) that, as well as looking at paternity leave, we also have to give people the ability to take crisis leave. This does not end with those first couple of weeks of changing nappies and going to the pharmacy; we need to have that ability as fathers throughout childhood.

• 9 Sept 2024 · Post Office Horizon: Redress · Hansard source

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  I thank the Secretary of State for his comments, and for his recognition that the issue is about more than redress; it is about the restoration of trust. It has cast a long shadow in constituencies across the country. In my constituency, after years of sub-postmasters desperately trying to keep post offices open in the face of programmes of closures, we now face a challenge to get people to go into them. What is his message to those people, and those wondering whether the culture has changed? What lessons are the new Government drawing, across the public sector, to ensure candour, and to make sure that the culture that we saw in the Post Office is not replicated anywhere else?