Melanie Ward MP: speeches

Speeches

• 10 Jun 2026 · Engagements · Hansard source

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  Happy birthday to you, Mr Speaker. Let me associate myself with the Prime Minister’s remarks about the situation in Northern Ireland, and about the Scottish football team. [ Laughter. ] The existence of Israeli settlements and settler violence against Palestinians is a major and deliberate impediment to peace. By working with Israeli human rights researchers, I have uncovered 32 British charities that are funnelling money to Israeli settlements on Palestinian land. Last week, I submitted a formal complaint to the Charity Commission about them. In the last five years, they have sent over £28 million to illegal settlements, with a likely taxpayer subsidy through gift aid of more than £5 million. Our constituents will be appalled by this. Does the Prime Minister agree that funnelling money to Israeli settlements is extremist activity, not charitable activity, and will he be clear that it is banned?

• 8 Jun 2026 · Digital Safety: Children · Hansard source

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  To test Instagram’s claim that its teen accounts provide age-appropriate content, I set up a teen account as a 17-year-old boy called David. Without searching for anything, it took just 11 minutes of scrolling for David to be shown antisemitic conspiracy theories. Does the Minister agree that that is a disgrace? That is just one example of why it is time to stop asking social media companies to make their products safe and instead start requiring them to do so through regulation.

• 2 Jun 2026 · Preparedness for National Emergencies · Hansard source

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  It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Barker. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Dunfermline and Dollar (Graeme Downie) on securing this debate. Before I was elected to this House, I served as a humanitarian aid worker and spent time in a number of war zones, so I know the importance of preparedness for emergencies and for scenarios that one hopes will never happen. In a country like ours, the role of the state is crucial in this. As my hon. Friend set out, foreign aggressors threaten our country, along with a whole range of new and emerging threats. My hon. Friend also spoke about Storm Éowyn, and we know that, as the rate of climate change increases, the effect of such storms will be exacerbated. When Storm Éowyn hit my constituency, more than 15,000 people across Fife lost power in freezing conditions, and it brought to light flaws in the preparedness for the storm at many different levels, including failures in the priority services register. People’s phone batteries ran out and they had no signal or way of contacting anyone. There were also failures in how the Scottish Government and local authorities planned to get resources to vulnerable communities, including those in areas served by independent distribution network operators, such as Fordell Gardens in my constituency, which was completely left out. It took me more than a year of follow-up to get any kind of action on that issue. We need more joined-up thinking to prepare for such events in future, but we must also be prepared for the international threats that we face. I have to say that we lag behind our European allies in this kind of national preparedness. Our peers such as Sweden and Finland are much further ahead than we are, because of the threats that they have faced historically from Russia. We have the new strategic defence review and the resilience action plan, but we must speed up that work so they are not just frameworks on a shelf but the culture of our country, where individuals, communities and agencies work together to prepare for the threats that we may face in future.

• 21 May 2026 · Business of the House · Hansard source

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  There has been some talk about football. I think we should all be celebrating the glorious victory of Raith Rovers in the Challenge cup. Results from a survey of Burntisland residents that I conducted suggest that 87% of people experience difficulties using Burntisland station, due to the lack of step-free access. For railway users across my constituency, including those in Cowdenbeath and Kinghorn, who face similar barriers, that is unacceptable. It makes life harder for those with mobility issues, luggage, buggies and bikes. Does the Leader of the House agree that Network Rail should prioritise accessibility upgrades at those stations, and will he make time for a debate on railway accessibility?

• 19 Mar 2026 · Online Harms · Hansard source

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  It is an understatement to say that the internet and social media have changed everything. The early optimism of internet pioneers was that we would all benefit from a world in which all information was at our fingertips. In many respects, they were not wrong, and rapid technological advancement has massively improved our lives, whether that is significant developments in healthcare and easier communication with friends and family or online banking, which is a real benefit to many people here in the UK. We have also seen the benefit across the world—in humanitarian crises, for example, where cash transfers are increasingly used as part of the humanitarian response. It is much safer and easier to make those happen from a laptop or someone’s mobile phone, rather than having to helicopter huge sums of cash through war zones or refugee camps, which is what happens without that ability. The fact that the online world has amplified everything means just that: almost everything, no matter how sinister or extreme, is available to us and, most distressingly of all, to our children. Not only is it available to us, but algorithms designed to push extreme content mean that violent, misogynistic, racist, antisemitic, Islamophobic and other hateful content is winning the battle for our attention and causing real harm. It is no longer just in ideological echo chambers. Algorithms and the introduction of suggested content that is pushed at the user mean that such content has permeated youth culture and taken over many of the spaces where young people communicate with each other and the language that they use. It is now just as easy—if not easier—-to tune in to extremist content online as it is to watch cartoons, go to the park or go to a house party, and that has real-life impacts in our constituencies. In Cowdenbeath in my constituency, antisocial behaviour is a real issue. Tomorrow, I will hold a second meeting on antisocial behaviour, following an antisocial behaviour summit I held in December. We have found that social media is having a real impact by encouraging more extreme behaviour between young people, because it is filmed and shared online. Local headteachers also report the impact of apps like Snapchat as a real factor in bullying between schoolchildren. We know that this is a global problem. Radical and violent groups profit from the recruitment to their online causes of young men in particular, pushing violence and very real threats to our democracy, including ISIS in the middle east, the Proud Boys in the United States and Yoon Suk Yeol, whose misogynistic platform was a factor in his election as President of South Korea and the attempted insurrection in 2024 for which he is now serving a life sentence. The truth is that the big tech companies are so obsessed with outdoing each other to profit from the attention of our children or other vulnerable people that they have ignored their responsibility to keep them and our communities safe, and to prevent people from being exposed unwittingly to the most horrific material. Madam Deputy Speaker, I am about to mention another hon. Member, who is not present, and I just want to confirm that I have notified him in advance. Too many people have been prepared to sacrifice the safety and cohesion of our communities for the right price. This week, an investigation showed that the leader of Reform has been paid to take extreme political positions on the Cameo app. According to The Guardian , the hon. Member for Clacton (Nigel Farage) took money to call for the release of P. Diddy and of a Honduran drug trafficker, to support a rioter, to repeat extremist slogans and to endorse a neo-Nazi event. Members of the public will be able to draw their own conclusions from that kind of behaviour. Too often, action to prevent harmful content is too slow. In March last year, when new powers in the Online Safety Act came into force, I wrote to Ofcom requesting that action be taken, using that Act, against a website that actively encourages its users to die by suicide—I will not name the site for obvious reasons. Ofcom launched an investigation of the site, but it had still taken only a provisional decision against that site last month. I promise hon. Members that spending five minutes on the site would tell them immediately that it has no place in our country and no place online at all. It is shocking that action has not been taken. Tragically, since the illegal harms code came into force last year, the death of two more people have been linked to that site. Does the Minister agree that Ofcom is far too slow in responding to sites like this, and will he please take that up with Ofcom? There are so many reasons why I am glad that our Government are taking steps to consult on a social media ban for under-16s. To be clear, I support such a ban.

• 19 Mar 2026 · Online Harms · Hansard source

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  I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention. I would add that I was recently at a primary school in my constituency, and I asked the young people how many of them were on social media—a class of 10 and 11-year-olds—and almost all of them were. However, when I talked to them about how social media work, I found that everybody had different rules for what they are allowed to do and when they are allowed to go on social media. It was clear that their parents are trying really hard to regulate their children’s access to social media. Among the reasons why I want us to act by banning social media for under-16s are not only the impact on young people, which I have tried to lay out, but the job parents are struggling to do because social media companies cannot behave properly. I saw a survey showing that one third of parents had cried because of the stress of trying to manage their children’s access to social media and online content. To me, this is about backing parents as well as about keeping our young people safe online and in the real world. We banned the sale of alcohol to under-18s in 1923, and when we banned the sale of tobacco to those under 16 in 1908. I very much hope that future generations will look on our Parliament as the Parliament that finally took action to prevent the public health risk and the real-life harm that is addictive social media and extremist content in the hands of children, as well as in the hands of so many vulnerable young people. We must act now. The safety and wellbeing of our children is at risk.

• 12 Mar 2026 · International Women’s Day · Hansard source

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  I congratulate the hon. Member for Gorton and Denton (Hannah Spencer) on her first speech, and welcome her to this place. I do not know whether she has noticed, but the Palace of Westminster is in need of some maintenance, so it is entirely possible that both her plastering and plumbing skills will come in useful in the very near future. I rise to speak in my first International Women’s Day debate. I have followed these debates since before I was elected, so it is a true privilege to take part today. I have to say, if the composition of the Chamber were like this more often—by which I mean the number of men and women relative to each other—we might have different kinds of debates. Today, we celebrate women in our communities, across the country and throughout our world. We celebrate extraordinary women who achieve incredible things for the good of humanity. In that context, it is a great but sad honour to sit opposite the coat of arms of my late dear friend Jo Cox, with whom I served on the board of the Labour Women’s Network. I think of her every time I come to this place and see her coat of arms. We miss her and her contributions dearly. I have previously mentioned Jennie Lee, a proud Fifer who grew up in Cowdenbeath in my constituency and served two spells as a Labour MP. As well as having been the first ever UK Minister for the Arts, and the creator of the Open University, it is less known that Jennie served in the Ministry of Aircraft Production during world war two, keeping aircraft factories running during the blitz. She was called on to do so because of her no-nonsense attitude and ability to get things done. I take inspiration from that. I am proud to follow Jennie as the 595th woman—among many thousands of men—elected to this Parliament, together with an unprecedented number of women MPs. Our Labour Government have important plans to advance women’s equality, from halving violence against women and girls to transforming women’s experiences of maternity care—a subject I discussed with the right hon. Baroness Amos just this week. Beyond the women who are recognised for extraordinary achievements, we must be clear that the unseen work that women across the world do every day does not receive the recognition it deserves. According to the UN, women and girls do 16,000,000,000 hours of unpaid care work every single day. Their work is the very glue of families, communities and economies—countries could not function without it—yet it remains largely invisible, undervalued and unequally distributed. Today, I want to sound a warning. We know that violent struggles are being fought for global power, but around the world, and increasingly at home, the struggle for power is being expressed as a struggle for control over women and our bodies. My hon. Friend the Member for Aylesbury (Laura Kyrke-Smith) and I have written about that together this week. There are many shocking examples of the battle to control women’s bodies. As my hon. Friend the Member for Erith and Thamesmead (Ms Oppong-Asare) mentioned, the oppressive regime in Iran has been desperate to prevent women from dressing in the way they want to, despite the incredibly brave protestations of amazing women there in the wake of Mahsa Amini’s death. As the hon. Member for North East Fife (Wendy Chamberlain) said so eloquently, in Afghanistan, the Taliban have tested the limits of whether the world will stop them enforcing gender apartheid, by forcing women out of schools and workplaces and into the home. They looked for, and found, the answer they wanted: that the world does not care enough to stop them. In Sudan, which is suffering the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, rape and sexual violence is routinely used as a weapon of war. At the recent Munich security conference, which I attended, my right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary spoke powerfully about her visit to Sudanese refugee camps and the horrific accounts that she heard there, including of the systematic rape of girls as young as eight. I am proud to be a former chair of The Circle, the global feminist organisation founded by Annie Lennox. Only this morning it shared with me data showing that sexual violence in conflicts worldwide has increased by 25% in the last year. In conversations about a shift in the global order, there is an increasing subtext of the need to control women’s bodies. We see that in some of the attacks on the legitimacy and funding of the United Nations. I worked with the UN in my previous work. Let us make no mistake: the UN would benefit from many reforms, but starving its institutions of funding to do work that no one else will do, for people no one else will help, is a grave error. That work includes providing contraception to women in war zones and refugee camps, so that they have some basic control over their bodies in situations where they have control over almost nothing else. In the context of domestic cuts to our own aid budget—a source of concern to many of us—we must do everything possible to preserve support for women and girls. I know that the Foreign Secretary is doing important work on that. We must not content ourselves by believing that such misogyny only exists abroad. Matt Goodwin, the Reform candidate in the Gorton and Denton by-election, said that women who do not have children should be taxed more, and that young women need an education in fertility—as if “The Handmaid’s Tale” was something we should aspire to. He seems to believe that women who choose not to have children, or who cannot, are somehow failing in their duties. Reform has said that, were they in government, the Equality Act—the basis for much of the progress we have made on women’s rights in the UK—would be repealed. Shame on them. Online, British women are stripped of the agency we have over our own bodies, exemplified by Grok weaponising women’s bodies through nudification. Our Labour Government are right to crack down on such apps. My hon. Friend the Member for Lowestoft (Jess Asato) had the truly awful experience of someone using that technology to make a fake video of her being chloroformed and “prepared for rape”. That makes the comments by the Opposition spokesperson, the hon. Member for Weald of Kent (Katie Lam), in the previous statement all the more unacceptable. The intended humiliation of women online is not simply cruel or misogynistic, although it is certainly both. It is intended to instil fear, to signal that some violent men believe that they are entitled to dominate women and to normalise such abhorrent behaviour. Last week, ahead of International Women’s Day, I met members of the Fife violence against women partnership. We discussed the more than 5,000 incidents of domestic abuse and the more than 1,100 crimes of indecency reported to the Fife police last year. We know that many more will have gone unreported. They also shared with me their concerns about social media and the misogyny spread online by so-called male influencers. I heard shocking reports about some of the things that local schoolboys have said to female teachers—comments that they have learned online. They included female teachers being told by boys that they teach, “You’re so ugly, I wouldn’t even rape you.” Male influencers online also seek to spread the idea that the role of the tradwife is what girls and young women should aspire to in life. This is the idea that women belong only in the home, and that we should all take our fulfilment simply from cooking meals for our husbands and rearing children. This online misogyny is spread by the likes of Andrew Tate, the late Charlie Kirk and far too many others, and it is aided by harmful algorithms. Perhaps it should not surprise us that a new global survey has found that younger men increasingly believe that a wife should obey her husband, and that men are expected to do too much to support equality. That is not an accident; transnational organisation is making that happen. The European Parliamentary Forum for Sexual and Reproductive Rights has found that $1.18 billion was pumped into European movements dedicated to rolling back women’s rights between 2019 and 2023. That funding came from 275 different actors, including church-run non-governmental organisations and far-right populist parties. Russia was the biggest source of donations, and the United States the second biggest—especially from American Christian nationalists. That American funding is now accompanied by financial help from the US Government, who have set aside $200 million to support MAGA-friendly think-tanks in Europe. Let us be clear: this is designed to spread their ideology, including here in the UK. When we, the decent majority, both in this House and outside it, confront the grassroots arm of the far-right—local groups acting in our communities—we must be clear that they are not just isolated local groupings of people; they are the grassroots arm of a well-organised international effort to reverse women’s rights. Our Government are doing a huge amount to drive forward women’s equality on closing the pay gap on childcare, on tackling violence against women and girls, and so much more. I am proud of that work. But we face a dark threat to the fabric of our society from the organised misogyny that I have described. We must defeat it, and we have much to do.

• 5 Mar 2026 · Local Museums · Hansard source

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  It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms Lewell. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Thurrock (Jen Craft) for securing this debate on local museums. Local museums play a crucial role in our constituencies. They not only bring people to visit from all corners of the country and, indeed, the world, but strengthen the ties that bind us to where we live, giving us pride in the contributions that our homes have given to the world. Nowhere is that more evident than in the Kirkcaldy Galleries and War Memorial, which celebrated their centenary last year. They were the gift of John Nairn, whose family’s linoleum-making business helped to make Kirkcaldy the linoleum capital of the world. He paid for the construction of the galleries, in memory of his only son, Ian Nairn, who was killed in the Somme in 1918. The galleries building is one of the first things that people see as they leave the train station in Kirkcaldy and head to our town centre. The award-winning art galleries have a large collection of paintings by William McTaggart and Samuel Peploe, and have hosted exhibitions by Diane Arbus and Fife’s very own Jack Vettriano, who was heavily influenced by the works on display in the galleries. As it is World Book Day today, it would be remiss of me not to mention the excellent children’s library that is there, too, which my own kids spend many a happy hour in, usually looking for one particular Mr Men book or another. The galleries also contain a first edition copy of Adam Smith’s “The Wealth of Nations”, which celebrates its 250th anniversary this year. The father of economics was born and grew up in Kirkcaldy; there is a commemorative plaque on the high street marking his mother’s house, where he completed writing that book. Adam Smith’s titanic legacy has been preserved by the excellent work of the Adam Smith Global Foundation, which manages the heritage centre and Adam Smith Close, where the stones mark significant events in Smith’s life, by the Old Kirk where Smith was baptised. The Minister will be aware of concerns that Church leaders have expressed about the closure of the listed places of worship scheme; I wonder whether he might address those concerns in his response. While I have him here, I must also take the chance to give my utmost support to Kirkcaldy’s bid to be UK town of culture 2028. I am sure that all hon. Members present will agree that it would be a worthy winner. The bid has been led by the Lang Toun Partners, formed by the Adam Smith Global Foundation and other fantastic organisations from our town. Our town has so much going on, but it is a well-kept secret to too many outside the Lang Toun. It is time that we shouted louder, so I am delighted to support the bid to cement our position on the cultural map and make Kirkcaldy the UK’s town of culture for 2028. I would also like to mark the important contributions of Burntisland Heritage Trust, who do so much to celebrate Burntisland and preserve its important history, as well as the excellent Museum of Communication in Burntisland. Finally, with International Women’s Day taking place this weekend, I end by recognising the work of Jennie Lee, who grew up in my constituency, in Cowdenbeath. Jennie was the UK’s first ever Minister for the Arts. She trebled Arts Council funding, was a strong supporter of regional and national arts, and founded the Open University. Jennie’s legacy is truly one to be proud of. Perhaps the Minister finds her as much of an inspiration as I do. Her picture hangs in my office and I take inspiration from her important work every day that I sit in this place.

• 4 Sept 2025 · Business of the House · Hansard source

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  At the peak of summer this year, at the height of tourism season, beaches in Kinghorn and Burntisland were closed because sewage spills made the water unsafe to enter. My constituents have been let down by the SNP Government’s failure to invest in our sewerage network and by publicly owned Scottish Water, whose chief executive said—astonishingly—that concerns should not be overblown. Does the Leader of the House agree that clean water is the least that the people of Fife deserve, and will she make time for a debate on this subject?