It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms Ryan, and to speak in this debate. I pay tribute to Katie Price and her work. It is fantastic to see her mother Amy in the Public Gallery— I know we are not supposed to refer to folk there, but I think it is okay to break the rule sometimes. It is also fantastic to see that we have a British Sign language interpreter. That language is one of the most beautiful in the world, literally bringing language to life. To see simultaneous interpretation here in the Westminster Hall Chamber is fantastic. I hope that the House authorities will consider it for all our debates, including in the main Chamber, and that the Minister will respond to that in due course.
I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Warrington North (Helen Jones). She and I are becoming season ticket holders, which is what one of my colleagues calls us regulars here in Westminster Hall. The reality is that while Brexit rages on, little else is in the public psyche or even in the main Chamber, so Westminster Hall is really the place where we are discussing and tackling the other big issues of the day.
Online harms, online bullying and bullying of people whether they are disabled, LGBT, women or from our trans community are totally unacceptable. The report produced by the hon. Lady’s Committee is outstanding and I hope that the Government take the recommendations seriously. She went through them in specific detail, but the statement that stood out for me was on the feelings of disabled people about their lack of representation—that we are not hard to find but we are easy to ignore—and it should shame us all that that is how so many disabled people feel.
Hon. Members have referred to intersectionality. The hon. Member for West Ham (Lyn Brown) made particular reference to it, and to the work of Seyi who worked in her office and of Seyi’s company, Glitch. That is particularly stark. I regularly meet members of the LGBT disabled community, and they say that women who are LGBT and disabled are some of the most marginalised people, not just online but offline.
The fact that the Committee consulted tech firms, police and disabled people—across the whole spectrum of stakeholders—is to be commended. The lack of response or the poor response of football teams and that sector in general gives me a sense of deep shame. As the SNP’s digital, culture, media and sports spokesperson, I care passionately about diversity in sport. I am a passionate football fan and occasional player, but it is clear to me that a lot of online abuse comes from football fans. Katie and Harvey have obviously felt that keenly, and it is so disgusting. We absolutely need to get to the heart of that; we need to name and shame those clubs.
To be fair, I know—in particular in Scotland but across the UK—that many clubs do a lot of positive work to tackle abuse and online harm, but we must do more. We must hold teams to account, because clearly many football fans hide behind the guise of their online profiles to spread vile abuse, driving many people offline. They give the vast majority of football fans a bad name—the reality is that the vast majority are peaceful, decent folk who just want to support their team, whether in the stadiums or online.
Poor responses from Government are disappointing, and I want to believe that the Minister and her Government can do better, so while I may disagree with them in many areas and feel let down by them on many counts, their White Paper on online harms was hugely ambitious and a massive step in the right direction. We in the SNP and in the Scottish Government very much support its intentions. We would like to see it go further, and the intentions and the suggestions in the Committee report are particularly significant.
I refer specifically to recommendation 18 of the report, about how
“social media companies be required to demonstrate that they have consulted and worked in partnership with disabled people themselves”.
The hon. Member for Warrington North spoke passionately about that. I suggest—I wonder whether she and the Minister will consider this—that we talk specifically to those tech firms about quotas in the jobs that do the monitoring and regulating online. I saw a piece in the media fairly recently about how moderators were having a particularly difficult time due to being harmed by the content that they were having to moderate. We all know that in police forces across the UK, people who deal
with online paedophilia, pornography and all those kinds of issues do those jobs for specific periods of time only.
I am not clear how much transparency there is about the profile of moderators and their range of backgrounds, but it stands to reason that if there are more people who are disabled, LGBT and from the BAME community, they will bring their specific perspectives to the moderation of content. That is the same principle that the Government brought forward to get companies to publish their gender pay gaps. Although the legislation had flaws, it has been quite effective from a societal perspective because it has made companies stop and think carefully about what they need to do and the profile of the people they employ. That would be a sensible way forward and something that perhaps we can encourage tech companies to get behind.
The right hon. Member for Arundel and South Downs (Nick Herbert) paid tribute to his constituents Katie and Harvey Price and Katie’s mother, Amy. Katie has put her head above the parapet. The notion that people in public life, whether celebrities, politicians or whoever else, should just suck it up is a piece of nonsense. As politicians, we deserve to be criticised and critiqued. We expect robust criticism and debate, but we do not expect—and neither should any celebrity or a member of their family—to be routinely abused and persecuted. There has been persecution of Katie and her son Harvey, which cannot continue. I commend her work, and we in the SNP and other across the House will do everything we can to help.
The right hon. Gentleman also referred to the inadequacy of legislation and policing resources. We have to look at police budgets and the resources that we allocate. The digital world has brought a massive change to the challenges of cyber-crime and the online world. People want police to be on the street. A close member of my family is a local bobby; we commend our police forces and officers, who do an incredibly difficult job, but we have to remember where the threats are and make sure that the police are properly resourced and supported.
Similarly, as I mentioned in my intervention on the hon. Member for Warrington North, legislation is piecemeal and all over the place. We need to take a holistic look at the legislative framework to make sure that it properly tackles the bullying of disabled people or anyone from any group online and offline. I hope the Minister will take the report seriously. It concerns me that, although Committees of the House do fantastic work and put a huge amount of time and effort into reports, quite often those reports are put on a shelf and left to gather dust. The actions suggested and all the work involved are not taken forward. For the sake of Katie, Harvey and every disabled person or anyone else who is abused online, I hope that this report will not be put on a shelf to gather dust. I hope that the Minister will take it very seriously and will enact the sensible recommendations in it.
5.34 pm