Paul Waugh MP: speeches

Speeches

• 20 Mar 2025 · Fly-tipping · Hansard source

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  Rochdale council has removed 6,500 fly- tips this past year alone, the equivalent of 50 tonnes of illegally dumped waste every month, at a cost of £400,000 to local taxpayers. But my council tells me that there is a real failure in the courts issuing consistent and tough enough fines. Does the Minister agree with me that it is time to crack down harder on fly-tippers, put much tighter regulations on waste carriers and treat the fly-tippers like the criminals they are, by crushing their cars and putting points on their licences?

• 20 Mar 2025 · Fly-tipping · Hansard source

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  1. What steps he is taking to help tackle fly-tipping.

• 20 Mar 2025 · Conflict in Gaza · Hansard source

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  Of the 170 children killed in Israel’s deadly day of bombing in Gaza on Tuesday, three of them were brothers. They were sons of Karam Tafeek Hameid: Hassan, who was nine, Mohammad, who was eight, and Aziz, who was just five. Their father told the BBC: “They used to play around, have fun…They wanted to be doctors, teachers.” I am also the father of three sons, and it disgusts me that Israel’s actions seem to treat Palestinian children’s lives as somehow more expendable or less precious than those of Israeli children. Is it not time that we had a diplomatic coalition of the willing—maybe starting with the E3 countries of the UK, France and Germany—to call out Israel’s appalling crimes in Gaza, not just through words but through actions?

• 6 Mar 2025 · Business of the House · Hansard source

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  Today is, as the Leader of the House mentioned, World Book Day. It is also the day when I announce the winner of my World Book Day competition for the children of Rochdale. Will she join me in congratulating 10-year-old Harry Hodgkiss of Milnrow parish Church of England primary school on his brilliant review of David Walliams’s “The World’s Worst Monsters”, and in thanking local businesses Alf Recruit, I-Branded and Office Supplies Now for providing the prize of £375-worth of books for Harry’s school and personalised stationery for all the winners?

• 5 Mar 2025 · Jammu and Kashmir: Human Rights · Hansard source

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  It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Dr Allin-Khan. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Hyndburn (Sarah Smith) for securing this vital and overdue debate. As has been said already, while the world rightly focuses on the plight of the Palestinian people and the UN resolutions frequently broken by Israel, all too often there is too little attention on the plight of the Kashmiri people and the repeated violations of UN resolutions by India. From repeated denials of their self-determination to frequent attacks on their human rights, the Kashmiris are truly the Palestinians of south Asia. Seventy-eight years after Kashmiris were nominally granted autonomy by the creation of Jammu and Kashmir in India and Azad Kashmir in Pakistan, many are still crying out for the self-determination they deserve. We need to vigorously support the United Nations resolutions not just of 1948, but of 1949 and 1960, which upheld the right of the Kashmiri people to self-determination through a UN-supervised plebiscite. As has already been said, we the British owe the Kashmiri people an historic debt of honour. We need to fulfil the explicit commitment by Lord Mountbatten, the last Viceroy of India, to a direct say for the Kashmiri people over their own future. It is India’s most recent, ongoing breaches of UN resolutions that concern many of us today. Human rights groups have highlighted the repression of the media and freedom of speech in Jammu and Kashmir, the widespread use of detention without trial, and internet shutdowns—all of which have been criticised by the high courts in India itself. As a former journalist, I am appalled by the Indian crackdown on a free press. In September ’23, the BBC reported that journalists in Kashmir felt that the Indian Government were running a “sinister and systematic campaign to intimidate and silence the press in the region.” Only last month, police in Kashmir disgracefully raided dozens of bookshops and seized more than 650 books, many of them by Islamic scholars. I know that the UK Government’s position is that Kashmir is a bilateral matter for peaceful resolution by India and Pakistan, and obviously there needs to be diplomacy and a long-lasting peaceful solution, but the voices of Kashmiris themselves should be supported by the UK and the international community. The UK must do much more to call out the most egregious abuses of human rights in Kashmir. We must demand full investigations, real action and real justice. I stand in solidarity with the people of Kashmir in both India and Pakistan and pay tribute to their amazing resilience, but there is more we can do in the UK to help British Kashmiris. Research by the University of Manchester puts Rochdale’s Kashmiri population at nearly 15,000, but they are almost invisible in public policy terms, because they are not recorded separately in the census and are classed as Pakistani. We need to recognise the Kashmiri languages and ethnicity in the census. That would allow public services and other services to be properly directed to areas of need. Pahari, the mother tongue of many Rochdale Kashmiris, is not recognised on par with other community languages used by public bodies. Many in the community feel that this is one of the key factors that has led to their marginalisation. There is a democratic deficit too. Although we have many councillors and some MPs of Kashmiri descent—some are here today—not a single Member of the House of Lords is a Kashmiri. I pay tribute to Councillor Daalat Ali, the founding member of Rochdale’s Kashmir Youth Project and of the Kashmir Broadcasting Corporation, which caters for Indo-Aryan languages in the UK. He has repeatedly raised the issue of human rights abuses back in his homeland. The Kashmir Youth Project in Rochdale was founded in 1979, and every day it helps women and men, young and old, with crucial services. It shows the best of Rochdale and the best of our Kashmiri community. We should strive to improve the lot of Kashmiris in India and Pakistan and call out human rights abuses, but we also need to do much more here at home to help the Kashmiri community.

• 5 Mar 2025 · Courts and Tribunals: Sitting Days · Hansard source

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  In June 2024, in the dying days of the last Conservative Government and after 14 years of their rule, there emerged a shocking statistic: 60% of rape victims were withdrawing from the court process, mainly because of court delays. Is that not a damning indictment of all Governments who have taken power in this country? What is the Lord Chancellor doing to help reduce the number of rape victims taking that awful decision?

• 4 Mar 2025 · Palestinian Rights: Government Support · Hansard source

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  It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir John. I thank the right hon. Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh) for securing this important debate. Last month, I was with the Father of the House as part of a cross-party group of MPs who visited the occupied west bank and Israel. While in southern Israel, we also had the chance to look towards Gaza from a distance. We stood up high on a viewing platform that looked toward the Mediterranean and, through a telescope—and a close-up on an hon. Friend’s iPhone—what emerged was the stark image of the bombed-out buildings and smashed streets of a war-torn city. It was truly a vision of hell. Just this week, Israel has suspended aid deliveries to Gaza—a move that is all the more devastating during the holy month of Ramadan, when food has particular significance. The latest blockade confirms that the Netanyahu Government see humanitarian aid as a bargaining chip; it is a callous tactic of political leverage. It lays bare that this Israeli Government do not see aid as their legal duty to help the most vulnerable in a conflict zone. On our trip we visited the site of the Nova music festival—a very moving sight indeed—where nearly 800 young Israelis were murdered on that horrific night of 7 October. We also met Yotam Cohen, brother of Nimrod Cohen, who was taken hostage by Hamas and remains with them. Yotam Cohen’s cold anger at the Netanyahu Government was palpable to everyone who met him. He felt that the Government could have freed his brother, along with all the other hostages, much sooner—many months ago. But while the tens of thousands of deaths in Gaza rightly deserve our attention, on our trip to the west bank, as the Father of the House has just said, we became very conscious of the fact that a future Palestinian state is being slowly suffocated by extremist Israeli settlers enabled and protected by the Israeli police and armed forces. As the Labour and Co-operative MP for Rochdale, what heartened me was how the co-operative movement has deep roots in both the Israeli kibbutzim movement and the Palestinian economy. In Ramallah, I met the general union of Palestinian co-operatives, which shared with me video footage showing how, miraculously, amid the rubble of Gaza, the agricultural co-op is growing seedlings for strawberries, peppers and aubergines, and trying to rebuild an income for all those who have been devastated by the war. These are literally green shoots of hope amid all the darkness and despair. Our trip, organised by Yachad—a British Jewish group that campaigns for a political resolution of the conflict—allowed us to see the trauma on all sides, and talk to many Palestinian and Israeli peacebuilders who believe that there is still hope. We met Roni Keidar, a resident of Netiv HaAsara in southern Israel who, as the Father of the House said, had to hide in her house as Hamas fighters murdered 20 people in her village. When we asked her for a message to the British people about the state of Israeli and Palestinian relations, Roni said: “Tell them there are many people like me who do think there is room for both of us…If we keep saying ‘it is either us or them’, eventually there will be neither us nor them.” Throughout our visit, the resilience of the Palestinian people was evident. Arab Barghouti, son of the jailed Palestinian politician Marwan Barghouti, told us that his people’s very existence is itself an act of resilience and resistance. Mohammad Mustafa, the Palestinian Prime Minister, perhaps put it best when he told us, “Being hopeless is not a privilege we Palestinians can have.” It is our job in the UK and in this Parliament to make sure that we do everything we can, locally and nationally, to fuel that hope with practical action and diplomacy.

• 3 Mar 2025 · Town Centre Regeneration · Hansard source

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  I warmly welcome today’s announcement of £20 million in community regeneration partnership money for Rochdale. This money will further revitalise our town centre and the area around our train station, as well as expanding our brilliant Hopwood Hall college. Does this prove what can happen when we have a Labour Government working with a Labour council and a Labour MP to revive an area?

• 27 Feb 2025 · Business of the House · Hansard source

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  Colleagues will be aware that I am a former journalist. Old habits die hard, so I have some breaking news to announce: Rochdale has this morning been announced as Greater Manchester’s town of culture for 2025-26. Starting from April, the year of events will celebrate our international reputation as the birthplace of co-operation and the home to 35 thriving arts organisations. I know that the Leader of the House is a culture vulture, so will she congratulate everyone involved in the winning bid and maybe pop up the road to see our magnificently restored town hall and partake of the Rochdale renaissance?

• 27 Feb 2025 · Gaza: BBC Coverage · Hansard source

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  Along with several other Members, I visited Israel and the occupied west bank last week, but there was no access to Gaza for us. In fact, the closest we got to it was viewing the utter devastation of Gaza City through a telescope. Over the last year during the war, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, at least 162 Palestinian journalists have been killed in Gaza, and the BBC and other journalists have had no access to Gaza whatsoever. Does the Secretary of State agree that that is as unacceptable as any attacks on the independence of the BBC?

• 25 Feb 2025 · Illegal Israeli Settler Violence · Hansard source

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  As the Father of the House just referenced, I was in Israel, on the west bank, last week, and two things became instantly clear. There was widespread revulsion at the sickening desecration of the bodies of the Israeli hostages by Hamas, and there was widespread fear among Palestinians, particularly those in rural areas whom we met, who had first-hand experience of their children having stones thrown at them by settlers, their neighbours having their cars torched and their own windscreens being smashed every night. Will the Minister reassure us that those extremist settlers will be dealt with really thoroughly in our foreign policy?

• 24 Feb 2025 · Ukraine · Hansard source

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  This weekend, I joined Rochdale’s proud, long-standing Ukrainian community to mark the third anniversary of Putin’s illegal war and to remember all those who have lost their lives to Russian aggression. Our own Father Ben Lysykanych is today joining the Prime Minister in Downing Street. Does my right hon. Friend agree that President Zelensky is a democrat, not a dictator, and that the Ukrainian people can never again have their fate decided by other countries carving up their land, as has happened far too often in the past?

• 10 Feb 2025 · Biomass Generation · Hansard source

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  Drax has been a greenwashing con that has ripped off the British public for far too long, so I welcome the statement. The Minister and the Energy Secretary have done more than eight previous Tory Energy Ministers, and indeed one Lib Dem Secretary of State. I welcome the move to slash the subsidy for Drax and to enforce 100% sustainability targets on its supply chains. But when the Minister talks about a windfall mechanism, may I gently urge him to call a spade a spade? This is a windfall tax on Drax and we should be proud of saying so.

• 6 Feb 2025 · Business of the House · Hansard source

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  Like much of the rest of the country we have a housing emergency in Rochdale, with 22,000 people on the waiting list and many, many children living in temporary accommodation that is unfit for family life and costs the taxpayer a fortune. Does the Leader of the House agree that, while the £500 million of new funding in the Budget for affordable and social housing was very welcome and long overdue, we need a debate in Government time on the need for the coming spending review to ensure more stable, secure homes like the council house that I grew up in?

• 6 Feb 2025 · Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories · Hansard source

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  The television footage of many thousands of Palestinian men, women and children walking back to northern Gaza was a powerful reminder not just of the forceable displacement they have already suffered, but of the extraordinary resilience of that people. That is why there is real anger among Palestinians today that, yet again, the very existence of their homeland is being subject to the whims of another colonial power. I am pleased that the Minister has confirmed that the UK has an unshakable policy on the right of return of those Palestinians, to rebuild their homes and their lives, but would she agree with the UN Secretary-General, who said today that staying true to international law is “essential to avoid any form of ethnic cleansing.”?

• 30 Jan 2025 · Business of the House · Hansard source

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  Rochdale Get Together After Serving is opening a brand-new military veterans and community hub at R-KIX sports centre this Saturday. Will the Leader of the House join me in thanking all the local businesses and charities that donated computers, carpets and even new windows for this new hub, which will support job searches and provide skills help? Will she congratulate in particular Royal Navy veteran Adam Trennery on his excellent initiative, which will help all veterans in Rochdale?

• 30 Jan 2025 · Industrial Strategy · Hansard source

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  Andy Burnham’s Atom Valley mayoral development zone is creating a world-class supercluster for advanced manufacturing right across 70 million square feet in Rochdale, Oldham, Bury and Middleton. Rochdale’s Kingsway business park will be home to the SMMC—the sustainable materials and manufacturing centre—a world-class cutting-edge research centre. Will the Minister join me in supporting the SMMC, and perhaps arrange a visit either by herself or the Secretary of State to see what is happening with the jobs of the future in Rochdale?

• 30 Jan 2025 · Industrial Strategy · Hansard source

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  16. What progress his Department has made on developing an industrial strategy.

• 29 Jan 2025 · Growing the UK Economy · Hansard source

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  I warmly welcome the plan for growth, which stands in stark contrast to the low-growth, low-wage and low-investment economy of the last 14 years, but as welcome as the Old Trafford development is, the House will know that I am a Dale fan. May I therefore urge the Treasury and Chief Secretary to warmly support the Atom Valley mayoral development zone, which is being pushed by Andy Burnham to help advanced manufacturing in Rochdale?

• 23 Jan 2025 · Holocaust Memorial Day · Hansard source

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  I pay tribute to my hon. Friend’s own personal fortitude in standing up to hate, particularly at the last general election when she, along with many other Labour candidates, suffered abuse on the doorstep. There is a lot of talk today about combating hate, but many candidates turned a blind eye to their own supporters who used the phrases “genocide enablers” and “child murderers” in the last election, which was utterly disgusting. Will she join me in condemning that?

• 23 Jan 2025 · Holocaust Memorial Day · Hansard source

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  I, too, pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Hendon (David Pinto-Duschinsky) for his powerful and moving testimony. His grandparents would be truly proud. As many have said, 2025 marks 80 years since the liberation of the Nazi concentration and death camps, and that awful milestone means that this is likely to be the last landmark anniversary at which a significant number of Holocaust survivors will be present. Holocaust Memorial Day encourages us to remember, yes, the 6 million Jewish men, women and children murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators during the Holocaust, but also all those who were persecuted by the Nazis, including the Roma, the Sinti people, gay men, disabled people, political opponents and others. We remember, too, all those affected by subsequent genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, of which I will say more, and Darfur. When it comes to remembering, Elie Wiesel, the Holocaust survivor and scholar who has already been quoted by my hon. Friend the Member for High Peak (Jon Pearce), put it best when he said that “whoever listens to a witness becomes a witness, so those who hear us, those who read us must continue to bear witness for us.” Yesterday in Portcullis House, thanks to Mr Speaker, many of us did indeed bear witness as we heard the extremely moving testimony of two Holocaust survivors, Yisrael Abelesz and Alfred Garwood. We all know many old soldiers who, quite understandably, never recount the trauma they suffered in the war, often because they have blanked it out and moved on. However, many of those who were not soldiers but survivors of genocide have shown an extraordinary strength and perseverance to keep telling their story, however painful, through a need to keep their memories alive, and they do so again and again. Their testimonies are so direct and so powerful that when we hear them, we become part of that remembering process. Yisrael Abelesz, now aged 96, was just 14 when he and his family were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where his parents David and Haya and younger brother Aaron, aged just 11 years old, were sent to the gas chambers on arrival. That sense of the history books becoming all too chillingly real jumped out at us yesterday when Yisrael said he was greeted on arrival at the camp by the infamous Angel of Death, Josef Mengele. He said: “Mengele asked me, ‘How old are you?’ I understood a bit of German, and said, ‘I’m 14, it’s just my birthday’. And he replied, ‘That’s very good, very good’, and sent me to the right side.” As Yisrael said: “I didn’t know it at that time, but what he meant was, ‘Very good, you can stay temporarily alive’.” Alfred’s story, too, should show us all that, while hate is immensely destructive, there is strength in community. He told us how he was a blonde babe in arms carried by his father—a father who saved the life of another inmate in Bergen-Belsen by giving them bread across the barbed wire. It was so moving to hear him recall that, after the war, his father met that same fellow camp mate in the east end of London. It was moving, too, to hear how Alfred became a doctor and a psychiatrist to help other trauma victims, and how he said that hatred, even hatred of those who committed the genocide, was a corrosive force. That desire to rid ourselves of hatred was echoed by Muhammad, one of the pupils at Falinge Park high school in my constituency of Rochdale, who wrote this in a poem about the Holocaust: “Revenge is never sweet… It is a monster willing to prevail”. Falinge Park high school is a multicultural school that has legacy beacon status as one of the schools under the umbrella of the University College London Centre for Holocaust Education. Two years ago, it hosted Holocaust survivor Ike Alterman to deliver his testimony. Yesterday, those from the school again attended the Greater Manchester Holocaust commemoration, hosted by Andy Burnham. I am delighted that the Prime Minister has said that it will be a national ambition that every schoolchild should hear the recorded testimony of a Holocaust survivor, and the Chancellor announced a further £2 million for Holocaust education in the Budget. As the Minister said, the Holocaust Educational Trust’s innovative free digital education programme Testimony 360 will allow students to have a virtual reality conversation with a Holocaust survivor long after the survivors themselves are no longer with us. The prioritisation of Holocaust education in our schools has been praised across this House today, and rightly so, but the prevention of Holocaust denial cannot be left just to passing laws or to education. It must be a cultural or grassroots change that exists alongside formal education. Education does not begin and end in our schools. Some children will go back from a lesson to a home where parents and older siblings fill their heads with misinformation and unchecked sources from social media. Sadly, there is now a depressingly familiar routine of a sharp spike in attacks on synagogues or on mosques whenever news breaks about an atrocity—an atrocity that has no personal connection to the people worshipping inside those buildings. There is a well of simmering loathing that lurks unseen and is topped up by casual racism that formal education alone cannot fix. As the hon. Member for Brigg and Immingham (Martin Vickers) powerfully reminded us, 2025 marks the 30th anniversary of the genocide in Bosnia and the massacre at Srebrenica. The tragedy is that the story of what happened in Srebrenica 30 years ago is not being told in Srebrenica itself. The enclave went into Serbia as part of the peace deal, where denying the massacre is now official policy in and out of schools. The issue was raised by Baroness Helic in the other place, who is a fierce advocate for justice on the massacre. A Srebrenica Memorial Centre report last year identified prominent public figures involved in denial of the holocaust, including Republika Srpska President Milorad Dodik, and Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić, among others. Last year my former newspaper, the i , reported election posters in windows in Republika Srpska with the slogan “Genocide Didn’t Happen”. One billboard praised convicted war criminal Ratko Mladić, the Bosnian-Serb military chief known as the Butcher of Bosnia. His crimes included the massacre of 8,000 Bosniak Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica in July 1995. The bloodbath was the worst episode of mass murder in Europe since the second world war. I am proud to say that my wife was among the Channel 4 news team who exposed those horrific war crimes. Genocides do not come out of the blue. They depend on what Professor David Feldman has described as the reservoir of hate. He pointed out that the danger in the case of antisemitism is not just the virus of antisemitism that captures the minority of antisemites; the wider danger is “a widely diffused reservoir of stereotypes and narratives about Jews. This reservoir has accumulated over centuries and has become a part of our common culture.” That applies to Islamophobia, just as it does to antisemitism. When weaponised by extremists, the legitimate and proud celebration of one community’s identity curdles into the denigration of another’s. History is used and warped; territory and belonging are weaponised into separation and segregation. Dates are cited as battle cries, and the cycle perpetuates. Anger is a legitimate emotional response to atrocities, but hatred is not. Peace is hard, compromise is painful; violence, and the prejudice it relies on, are easier. But everyday racism can be countered only by everyday engagement, and disinformation by information. The Holocaust was the industrialisation of murder, but the difference was only one of scale from the many pogroms that Jewish communities have had to suffer over the centuries. In Soho this month, the National Holocaust Centre and Museum has devised a new touring exhibition called “The Vicious Circle”. It links five Jewish communities decimated by violence. Objects are on display to represent co-existence and integration into the host country before five particular pogroms: Berlin in 1938, Baghdad in 1941, Kielce in Poland in 1946, Aden in Yemen in 1947, and of course Kibbutz Kissufim on 7 October 2023. That is history, this is the present. The well, the reservoir, is there and it needs to be drained. I end, like many others, with another quote from Elie Wiesel: “Much depends on us, on our sense of justice and integrity, on our dedication to truth, on our willingness to share our innermost memories. And we survivors have promised that we shall try.” As the number of survivors dwindles, it is on us. It is our duty in this place to follow their heroic example and honour their memory every day.

• 21 Jan 2025 · Southport Attack · Hansard source

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  The barbaric murder of those three little girls in Southport is part of a growing problem of youngsters fixated on violence and gore, as the Home Secretary said. That worrying phenomenon has been fuelled by the rapid growth of websites and social media forums that promote and revel in such violence. Can the Home Secretary confirm that the inquiry into Southport will look into exactly that danger promoted by such websites?

• 16 Jan 2025 · Middle East · Hansard source

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  May I thank the Foreign Secretary, the Minister for Development and the Under-Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs, my hon. Friend, the Member for Lincoln (Mr Falconer), for all the hard work that they have done both in public and in private to secure today’s attempt at a ceasefire, to bring the hostages home, and to get as much humanitarian aid in as possible? Tom Fletcher, the UN under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs, has said today that the deal could have been done a year ago, and that the ferocity of the killing by Israel and Hamas has been “a 21st-century atrocity”. Does my right hon. Friend agree that there will be lasting peace in the middle east only if the Israeli Government and the international community treat all lives—a Palestinian child’s life and an Israeli child’s life—as equal?

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

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  Child sexual expectation and abuse are the most sickening, appalling crimes perpetrated against some of the most vulnerable youngsters in our communities. So I strongly welcome this comprehensive new national plan of action to put victims first, and I welcome the appointment of Baroness Casey to conduct a rapid review of the scale and nature of these grooming gangs. Can I also urge a cross-party consensus on this issue, rather than the game playing and misinformation we have seen over the past week? The Home Secretary, the Safeguarding Minister and I have all been consistent in saying that we should put the victims at the heart of everything we do. My constituents in Rochdale know that this issue is too important for political point scoring, and we should put victims at the heart of everything we do. That is not just for the victims of the past, but for the victims of the present.

• 9 Jan 2025 · Business of the House · Hansard source

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  Deeplish community centre in Rochdale has just celebrated 35 years of providing pre-school clubs, holiday playgroups and elderly lunch clubs, as well as jobs and training for people in the heart of Rochdale. The key thing is that it proudly retains its Sure Start status, as it did under the last Labour Government, and it is the family hub that helped rebuild the nearby Deeplish primary school, which I had the pleasure of welcoming to Westminster last year. Will the Leader of the House join me in congratulating Sohail Ahmad and all those who have built this fantastic community device over the last few years?