It is a pleasure to be in this debate with you in the Chair, Ms Cummins. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff South and Penarth (Stephen Doughty) for securing the debate on hate crimes against LGBT+ people as part of National Hate Crime Awareness Week.
I recognise that there is a rising trend of hate crime across the board, as our society becomes more divided. Those politicians who seek to peddle the politics of blame and division have a great deal of responsibility on their hands. We have seen a rise in that kind of politics across the globe, and sadly in some areas of our country. Today at Prime Minister’s questions, the Prime Minister said that
“the words we say here have an impact beyond this House.”
We have seen that sometimes global issues have an effect on levels of hate crime for other reasons, and we are conscious of that today.
We are also conscious of some others. Problematising members of the community, particularly trans members of the LGBT community, othering them, and perpetrating discourse that casts them as a threat and a danger to children—the usual tropes that many who are old enough and have been involved in politics as long as I have remember from the 1980s—can end only with one effect. It is the effect that my hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff South and Penarth outlined effectively in his speech, and that we have heard about in other contributions: a massive increase in hate crime on the basis of sexual orientation in the past five years, up 112%. Hate crime against trans people is up 186%. In Merseyside, where my constituency of Wallasey is, hate crime based on sexual orientation is up 162%, and against trans people it is up 1,033%.
I ask the Minister what the Government are planning to do, given that six Cabinet Ministers took to the podium to rail against the trans community and so-called gender ideology and wokeism at the recent Conservative party conference? The Home Secretary’s speech was
“a signal to people who don’t like people who are LGBT+ people.”
Those are not my words; they are the words of the Conservative chair of the London Assembly as he was being thrown out of that conference. Let us get a grip. Let us remember that real people are involved. When hate crimes rise it ruins lives. Let us do something about it and let us unite to do so.