10. Debate: Progress On Tackling Hate Crime

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 6:20 pm on 3 March 2020.

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Photo of Jenny Rathbone Jenny Rathbone Labour 6:20, 3 March 2020

Thank you very much. I was listening to Mandy Jones's contribution outside, and thank you for calling me back. I just wanted to add, though, that there's no room for complacency in Wales. We know that the highest number of antisemitic searches on the internet was in Wales. It highlights that there's often a cross-over between those who are looking to confirm their antisemitic prejudice, along with their racist prejudice as well as misogyny, because it is a fact that Jewish female politicians have been far more bombarded by hate messages than Jewish male politicians. So, there's a rich cocktail of hatred that we need to be combating, and it's very important that we don't become paralysed by this hatred.

Indeed, in many cases, it is those who have been the butt of prejudice who are at the forefront of combating it and reaching out to others in similar situations. For example, the Community Services Trust celebrated National Hate Crime Awareness Week last October by remembering a Gypsy by the name of Johnny Delaney, who was murdered in Ellesmere Port in 2003 simply because he was from the Irish Traveller community. Nevertheless, the judge in the murder trial refused to accept the police verdict that this was a racist attack. And as chair of the cross-party group on Gypsies and Travellers, I'm well aware of the discrimination that this community regularly suffers from, not least by the failure of several local authorities to provide a single Traveller site in their area, in contravention of the Planning (Wales) Act 2015.

René Cassin was a French-Jewish lawyer, professor and judge, who co-drafted the universal declaration of human rights, which was adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1948. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his work. He said that

'There will never be peace on this planet as long as human rights are being violated in any part of the world.'

His work inspired the creation of a UK Jewish organisation in his name, and I was delighted to read that next week, René Cassin is hosting a women’s Seder to commemorate International Women’s Day. One of the speakers is Laura Marks, a founder member of Nisa-Nashim, the Jewish Muslim women’s network set up two years ago to combat ignorance and misconceptions about women in both communities. And Leanne mentioned the hatred that many women face simply because they dress differently to other people, and this is completely intolerant. As Mark Isherwood said, we need to explain to people, just because people are different from us, it doesn't mean to say that we want them to be assimilated and for everybody to look exactly the same. It is part of the wealth of our community that we have people from different backgrounds, and there is no room for complacency.

We know that Brexit unleashed the dark side in many people, and much of the debate was generated in the referendum by pointing the finger of blame to other people, simply because people were in economic distress and social dislocation. We really do have to work hard to ensure that we celebrate the goodness in people. For example, the people with very little who have reached out in solidarity to the people who have nothing as a result of the flooding they've experienced. That is just a wonderful expression of solidarity.

But we also have to be mindful of the fact that the coronavirus disease—if it becomes as serious as it might—could generate further hostility against members of the Welsh and UK Chinese community. In fact, a member of my own family who was travelling with his girlfriend to Italy the other day—the girlfriend was the subject of racist abuse simply because she happened to be of Chinese ethnic origin. So, we need to be constantly combating the fear that people feel when they are threatened, and we need to remember that Holocaust survivor Dr Martin Stern, who spoke at the Holocaust memorial event in Cardiff on 27 January, reminded us that it is simply not enough to commemorate the appalling crimes of the Nazis, but to reflect on the ordinariness of the people who did that, and the fact that there have been 50 Holocausts since the end of the second world war, including Rwanda and Srebrenica. There is no room for complacency. The world is in a terrible turmoil and we need to work very hard at community cohesion.