It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Ryan. I, too, congratulate Katie Price and her family on bringing forward the petition. I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Warrington North (Helen Jones) for an
outstanding speech to introduce the debate. It was brilliant because it was based on a thorough analysis of the petition. It is good to see the Petitions Committee working in exactly the way that it should.
I do not want to say too much, because our position on how to tackle this problem has been rehearsed with the Minister a number of times over the last year and a half, but there are three or four things that I want to put on the record. First, it is worth remembering that the scale of abuse is staggering. Three quarters of people with learning disabilities and autism say that they have been victims of hate crime. That is a comprehensive failure as a society and a country to keep our neighbours safe. God knows what sacrifices we have made over the last 50 or 60 years in the defence of democracy and free speech. We live in a country where some of our neighbours are hounded out of those privileges; we have to look at ourselves and conclude that we have so much more to do.
The policing environment for online hate is failing comprehensively. There is a very old concept in policing known as keeping the Queen’s peace. Online, the Queen’s peace is simply not observed. I disagree slightly with the right hon. Member for Arundel and South Downs (Nick Herbert) because it is simply inconceivable ever to expect a police force to police this waterfront. Some time ago, people started producing memes of what goes up online every 60 seconds. As far back as 2017, the statistics were half a million tweets, 500 hours of video and 3.3 million Facebook posts. There is no way any police force on earth will police that waterfront and keep it safe and sound to protect and preserve the Queen’s peace throughout that space. Therefore, we have to put the onus back on some of the most profitable companies on earth.
In the last reported quarter, Facebook made something like £5 billion of net earnings. That means that in the course of this debate, it will have made more than £3 million of profit. It is one of the biggest and most valuable companies on earth, yet it gets away with supporting—not orchestrating or colluding in, but certainly enabling—the abuse of fellow citizens of our society. The time has to come when we say to the wealthiest titans on earth, “Enough is enough.”