Kenneth Stevenson MP: speeches

Speeches

• 2 Jul 2025 · West Bank: Forced Displacement · Hansard source

  More

  It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Turner. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow North (Martin Rhodes) for securing time for Members to consider this important matter. Before coming to this place, I was an engineer and senior lecturer at Anniesland College in Glasgow. While there, I had the privilege of undertaking British Council work in Hebron, Nablus and Ramallah, and I have seen at first hand the challenges facing the Palestinian people. I have always supported the right of Israel to exist as a democratic, free and peaceful state. However, illegal settlement in the west bank and the associated forced displacement of Palestinians. The rights of Palestinian people to live and travel freely and not have their land occupied by often violent settlers must be central to any long-lasting route towards peace. I commend the UK Government for sanctioning Israeli Ministers who have repeatedly incited violence against Palestinians. The Foreign Secretary was absolutely correct to say that severe acts of violence by extremist Israeli settlers threaten a future Palestinian state. We must redouble our efforts to highlight a two-state solution where Israelis and Palestinians can live peacefully side by side. More widely, while focus has turned recently to the conflict between Israel and Iran, it must not be forgotten that Palestinians are being bombed in Gaza. They are dying in pain. They are being starved—thousands have lost their lives as a result of malnourishment. The treatment of the Palestinian people has rightly been called out by the UK Labour Government and we remain fully supportive of a two-state solution where Palestinians and Israelis can live freely and peacefully. I believe that recognition of Palestinian statehood is critical to achieving that. Illegal settlement in the west bank has been a serious issue for a long time. According to UN figures, the issue is as challenging now as it ever has been. Tens of thousands have been displaced from refugee camps as a result of intense Israeli operations and thousands more Palestinians have been displaced in recent months and years as a consequence of settler violence and demolition of housing. Ignorance will never be an acceptable response. Having been in the region and met Palestinian men and women who live with a genuine fear of settler violence, I will always be of the view that we must be unequivocal in our support for a free and secure Palestinian state. I again thank my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow North for securing this debate and look forward to the Minister’s update on the Government’s work to end illegal and violent settlement in the west bank.

• 27 Feb 2025 · Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill (Second sitting) · Hansard source

  More

  Q Listening today has been very interesting; I have written down some of the points. There were the points about organised crime, and about the Border Security Commander and the border post that he—or it might be a “she”, and I am not ultra-woke—would be in charge of. There is also the point about 2 million people coming over from Gaza, and that the tagging system has not worked, although I did not hear any evidence of that—I wanted numbers; as an engineer, I wanted to hear the background to that. I then heard that there were no magical solutions and that war was not easy to win—so we are in a “war” with migrants. We then spoke about unkindness to asylum seekers. I think that the most important words that I heard today were proactive, pre-emptive and disruptive— that is what the Government are trying to be. Do you agree that that has to start with the gangs who are starting this and are pulling—or pushing—people across? Dame Angela Eagle: Yes. There are many genuine asylum seekers, many of whom are granted asylum when they are finally processed, who have come in that way. There are also people who are trafficked, who are in debt bondage, who go into sex work in nail bars, say from Vietnam, or who end up—as the police chief told us—growing cannabis in hidden farms in all our communities or being involved in serious crime. Some of them are victims of modern slavery, and some of them are the perpetrators of all that kind of evil.