Paul Waugh MP: speeches 2025

Speeches

• 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?

• 9 Jan 2025 · Violence against Women and Girls · Hansard source

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  I thank the hon. Members for South West Devon (Rebecca Smith), and for Reigate (Rebecca Paul), the right hon. Member for Staffordshire Moorlands (Dame Karen Bradley), my hon. Friend the Member for Luton North (Sarah Owen), the hon. Member for Lagan Valley (Sorcha Eastwood), and my hon. Friends the Members for Lowestoft (Jess Asato), for East Kilbride and Strathaven (Joani Reid), and for Thurrock (Jen Craft). They have all made powerful and compelling speeches. It is such a shame that certain Members from some parties simply did not bother to turn up. I welcome the largely constructive tone from the shadow Minister, but I want to say something about the tone of the recent debate and how it has unleashed yet another tide of misinformation and lies. Overnight, Facebook groups have become a sewer of misinformation on last night’s vote. I proudly voted for the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill because it toughens the law to improve child protection and safeguarding. Anything else that is said about me or my colleagues is a lie. I have made it clear to my Rochdale constituents that I am open to a new inquiry into grooming gangs, if that is what is most helpful to the victims and survivors, and, crucially, if it can be done in a way that does not conflict with live police investigations and prosecutions. We must not forget—as people are forgetting—that the Jay inquiry had victims and survivors at its very heart. They were built into its process and consulted all the way along—at the start, during and after it. Many victims and survivors have said that they want that report to be implemented in full—that is their priority. Alexis Jay’s clear demand is to get on with it. That is exactly what this Government are doing. In Rochdale, a predominantly Pakistani-heritage grooming gang raped our local girls and tarnished our town’s good name. Andy Burnham’s independent inquiry into the council and police failures in Rochdale was published last year. Like the Jay report, the Rochdale report listened to victims and came up with recommendations. Crucially, the prosecutors and police have been able to get on and pursue further prosecutions as a result. That is what the public want. Their priority is locking up these paedophiles, and making sure that they get the strongest possible sentences and are brought to court swiftly. Telford is another excellent example of a local inquiry that builds on the survivors’ experience and makes sure that they are involved all the way along. They know what the flaws are, what the best solutions are and how they can be embedded locally and nationally. It is clear from the Greater Manchester inquiry that the central failure was working-class girls not being believed or respected, and the police thinking that their cases would not stack up in court. That was also the problem in the abuse of boys by Cyril Smith, which I had a role in exposing as a journalist more than a decade ago. Working-class youngsters were simply not believed by the authorities, locally or nationally. It was this Prime Minister, as Director of Public Prosecutions, who brought in real change to make sure that those working-class voices could be heard in court. The additional problem in Rochdale was delays in multi-agency working: social workers and the police not getting their act together, not getting the right specialist help and not spotting the patterns of organised abuse. We need specialists within police forces—rape specialists and child protection teams. We need to disrupt this wherever it happens and be tough on the sentencing. But what I loathe is the suggestion that this should be a political game. It sickens me that politicians can think that another party can be damaged or tarred by the idea of child abuse. I pay tribute to Theresa May for setting up the child abuse inquiry and to the former Prime Minister for setting up the grooming gangs taskforce. We should have cross-party consensus on this and maintain it at all costs. It is sad to see that certain Reform party Members are simply not here today. A responsible politician does not ride the wave of justified anger about child abuse; they do something about it. We can have a robust debate about policy, delays, action or inaction, but to suggest that someone who disagrees is somehow complicit in or endorses child abuse is completely unacceptable. The real danger in all this is that politics will suffer and the victims will suffer. I pay particular tribute to Sara Rowbotham, the former health worker in Rochdale who later became a Labour councillor. Her tireless work led to the exposure of the grooming gang in our town. Sara was played by Maxine Peake in the BBC drama “Three Girls”, the broadcast of which led to huge change and justice for many girls, not just across Rochdale but across the whole country. There is a remarkable effort in Rochdale—a collective movement that has long been at the forefront of protecting women and girls from domestic and sexual violence. Our town is not just a place of resilience, but a beacon of hope, support and empowerment of the most vulnerable in our society. I pay tribute to the exceptional individuals leading this work: Khaldha Manzoor, CEO of the Rochdale Women’s Welfare Association; Kathy Thomas, CEO of Rochdale Connections Trust; and Councillors Sameena Zaheer, Janet Emsley and Amber Nisa. They have all driven this work. Finally, I must pay tribute to the youngsters. Falinge Park high school’s white ribbon ambassadors and initiatives by the Rochdale Islamic academy girls school demonstrate how education can play a pivotal role in preventing abuse and changing societal attitudes. Rochdale stands as a testament to what can be achieved when individuals, charities, public institutions and political parties unite for a common cause. Let us honour their efforts not just with words, but with the continued support that they need to thrive.

• 7 Jan 2025 · Northern Gaza · Hansard source

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  Thank you for granting this urgent question, Mr Speaker. One of the most appalling aspects of this conflict has been Israel’s reckless disregard not just for civilian life but for that of medical practitioners and patients. Kamal Adwan hospital, the last major facility in northern Gaza, is now out of service, as Members have said. Patients have been moved to the nearby but non-functional and partially destroyed Indonesian hospital, and are unable to receive care because of a lack of necessary equipment and supplies. Will the Minister confirm that Israel’s actions have clearly breached international law, and that a consequence of that will be the continued suspension of weapons sales to Israel when it comes to Gaza?

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

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  In the last few days, my hometown’s name, Rochdale, has been exploited by some people who treat child rape as a political game rather than as an appalling crime that should be dealt with. The horrific abuse of children by grooming gangs, many of them predominantly Pakistani-heritage grooming gangs, was compounded by failures by my local council and the local police. All Rochdalians, whatever their background, want to see sex offenders prosecuted swiftly and punished harshly. I welcome the Home Secretary’s statement and ask her to leave no stone unturned in implementing all the recommendations of the Jay report—something the Opposition signally failed to do.