My hon. Friend is absolutely right.
Now, as in the 1980s, some of the leading Brexiteers are the ones who talk forever about red tape. I call that workers’ rights. When they say, “Trust us”, I reply, “What? Trust the same people who ran a disreputable campaign?” They promised £350 million a week for the national health service, when they knew damn well that there was no possibility of delivering it.
My third and final point is on the very difficult debate about immigration. I must say that the way that some in the Brexit camp played the race and immigration card in the referendum campaign was nothing short of shameful with, on the one hand, that infamous poster with Nigel Farage, and—dare I say it?—on the other hand, the current Foreign Secretary talking about the tens of millions of Turks who might come to our country. The consequences have been very serious. There has been a rise in hate crime in my constituency. Poles in Erdington High Street have been told, “Go back home.” An Afro-Caribbean man who has been here for 40 years was told, “Go back home.” So was a Kashmiri taxi driver who has been here for 35 years. An Asian train guard was threatened by a large aggressive white man. The guard was shutting the doors when the man told him to hang on because his mates were five minutes away. The guard said that the train had to go. The white man pointed his finger an inch from the guard’s nose and said, “Oh no you don’t. We make the rules now.”
I thought that that kind of brutish behaviour was something of the past. Forgive me for raising this. My dad came from County Cork to dig roads, and my mother came from Tipperary to train as a nurse. I was 13 years old when my dad told me for the first time—and I could not believe this, because I adored him, but he could not look me in the eyes, and was looking down at the floor—about what it was like, when he arrived, looking for lodging houses in Kilburn and Cricklewood and seeing those infamous signs: “No dogs. No Irish.” I thought that we had fundamentally changed as a
country, but this country has been scarred by the way the referendum campaign was conducted.
I recognise that during the next stages there will be a difficult debate. On the one hand we have the needs of the economy and the national health service, but on the other we have to listen to the voice of the millions who, from discontent, voted Brexit. We have to ensure that no one in our country is left behind. Getting that balance right will be immensely difficult. I hope all parties—certainly this is what we in the Labour party will do—will make sure that we do not have a repeat of the shameful, divisive rhetoric. The consequences of that rhetoric for the people we represent are very serious indeed. When I go into a local secondary school to meet a diverse group of 16 and 17-year-old pupils and am told that on the day after the referendum they were asking whether they would be sent back home, and that the following week some of them were racially abused in the street, it is clear to me that we have to stand together and say that while we must absolutely have a debate about the future, it must never again be a debate scarred by racism.
4.16 pm