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Tag: Jonathan Gullis

  • Jonathan Gullis – 2022 Speech on Employment Agencies and Trade Unions

    Jonathan Gullis – 2022 Speech on Employment Agencies and Trade Unions

    The speech made by Jonathan Gullis, the Conservative MP for Stoke-on-Trent North, in the House of Commons on 11 July 2022.

    The hon. Member for Glasgow South West (Chris Stephens) talked about my alleged withdrawal of labour last week. The only withdrawal of labour that the people of Stoke-on-Trent North, Kidsgrove and Talke are seeing is 70 years of failed Labour Governments, failed Labour MPs and a failed Labour-run council. By not investing in high streets, investing in heritage, building the new homes we need or creating the new jobs, the Labour party once again shows it is out of touch and is forgetting the people of Stoke-on-Trent North, Kidsgrove and Talke.

    I am fully supportive of the specific SI on trade unions. I welcome the Minister to her place and congratulate her on an excellent opening speech. I spent eight and a half years teaching in state secondary schools in inner London and inner Birmingham. I was also a trade union shop steward for the NASUWT in that time, and there was many a time when we came close to potentially having to ballot on strike action, but only as a last resort, after negotiations had failed, freedom of information requests had not been granted and there was a breakdown of morale in the school. It is the absolute last resort.

    What we have seen from the RMT is a politicisation from the communists and Putin apologists who want to use this opportunity to bring this country to a halt and make sure, very clearly, that tourism to the great city of Stoke-on-Trent is destroyed, that people cannot get to work and earn a salary, and that those uni students who travel in by train to Staffordshire University cannot sit their summer exams.

    Then we have the “not education union”. Hansard always corrects me when I say the “not education union”, but that is its name. I do not want to hear its official name, when it is obsessed with bringing these silly 120-point plans for when schools can reopen during covid—one of which was somehow about reforming the welfare state, which had nothing to do with education—and when it has the audacity to tell kids that it will potentially have teachers out on strike at the start of the new term, further damaging the education of children who have been affected by covid. The Labour party is silent about that. Labour does not have it in it to stand up to those trade union barons on their six-figure salaries, in most cases earning more than the Prime Minister of this country, because it simply wants to make sure those donations keep coming in to its party coffers and its constituencies as well.

    This Government are trying to take action to ensure that if the service level is being lowered and agency workers want the opportunity, or wish to choose—it is a choice—to cross the picket line, they should have that right. It is deeply Conservative to allow people to choose. I know that the Labour party, or the socialists opposite, are obsessed with us having one set standard for all, but that is not what the people of Stoke-on-Trent North, Kidsgrove and Talke want.

    The people of Stoke-on-Trent North, Kidsgrove and Talke want to see a party that is on their side, helping to get their schools open and ensuring that hospitals are running and public sector workers are working. They want to see the very best, world-class services. It is under this Government that they have already seen £56 million from the levelling-up fund, £31 billion from building back better, 500 brand new Home Office jobs, £29 million from the transforming cities fund and £17.6 million in the Kidsgrove town deal, which means that Kidsgrove sports centre, which Labour closed—they did not want to save it for £1 back in 2017—will be refurbished and reopened.

    That is the record of this Government. That is why this Government want to make sure that areas such as Stoke-on-Trent North, Kidsgrove and Talke have people on their side. I welcome the Minister for all her fantastic work and I hope the socialists opposite will realise the error of their ways.

  • Jonathan Gullis – 2022 Speech on the Public Order Bill

    Jonathan Gullis – 2022 Speech on the Public Order Bill

    The speech made by Jonathan Gullis, the Conservative MP for Stoke-on-Trent North, in the House of Commons on 23 May 2022.

    The people of Stoke-on-Trent North, Kidsgrove and Talke warmly welcome this important legislation, because it is doing exactly what they want to see: holding those criminals accountable for their criminality. No one is standing here seriously suggesting that, when the people of Stoke-on-Trent go to Hanley town centre to stand together to protest for the rights of the Kashmiri people—I have attended in person—the police will come in heavy-handed while we stand peacefully and speak through a microphone to constituents and residents from across the area to raise concerns about the human rights abuses happening to the people of Kashmir.

    No one is saying that, when certain trade unions want to stand peacefully outside my office in protest, to demonstrate against some cause, I am expecting the police to come in and round those people up. I am not. I welcome them coming outside my office. I am more than happy to hear their cause, and engage with them in conversation and debate. Even if we end up agreeing to disagree, no one in their right mind is saying that the police are going to prevent that action from happening. No one in Stoke-on-Trent North, Kidsgrove and Talke believes for a second that that would be appropriate. If that were the case with this legislation, I would stand up to oppose the Bill. But I am supporting it because it is doing something: tackling criminal behaviour.

    People gluing themselves to the M25, where people are traveling at 70 miles an hour—women and children in cars that could easily crash, ending up with loss of life —are apparently willing to sacrifice their own safety and their own lives for a cause. However, they are not even able to stand up for their beliefs and values. The hypocritical nature of those campaigns is what drives people berserk in Stoke-on-Trent North, Kidsgrove and Talke.

    For example, Liam Norton from Insulate Britain says he “doesn’t care” about insulating homes—his words. He does not even insulate his own home. He has no insulation in the walls and has single pane glass. People simply do not like hypocrites. He even called himself a hypocrite. We are talking about individuals who are running campaigns—some crusty eco-woke warrior wanting to make some sort of point on Twitter, so they can get lots of likes from the far left that make that particular social media platform vile and abusive. Thank God I am not on it; great for my mental health. Then we see their actions. Gail Bradbrook from Extinction Rebellion drives a diesel car and takes an 11,000-mile round trip to Costa Rica, contributing 2.6 tonnes of carbon footprint, which is a quarter of a Brit’s yearly average.

    Practice what you preach. Do not stand up and virtue-signal for the sake of it or try to pontificate—as the Labour party regularly does—in order to make a point that will get a few more likes in woke London or on Twitter. Instead, stand up for people of this country who want to see an end to criminal behaviour by those jumping on top of tube trains or blocking lorries, for example, some of which are carrying cooking oil or carrying oil at a time when we have a global fuel crisis. Those are the type of mad things that people are sick of seeing.

    Sir John Hayes (South Holland and The Deepings) (Con)

    My hon. Friend is right that these are largely deranged members of the bourgeoise making working people’s lives difficult, but, actually, the situation is more serious still. In the case of the demonstrations and protests that he describes, the action meant holding up an ambulance on its way to an emergency and stopping a woman getting to the home of her 95-year-old mother who had had a fall. It meant that the people protesting were wholly and completely disregarding the horror and pain that they were causing. That shows the sort of people they are. This is about not hypocrisy, but carelessness and heartlessness.

    Jonathan Gullis

    My right hon. Friend makes a fantastic point. Let us think about the people who were not able to get to their cancer screening appointment; the children who were not able to be in school because of lockdown and who are having their education in the classroom—with their expert classroom teacher—further delayed; the emergency services trying to go about their jobs, having to deal with protesters; and the police from as far away as Scotland coming down to London, meaning that they are not on the streets of the local areas that they should be serving, allowing criminals potentially to run wild there because of some selfish individuals.

    Anne McLaughlin

    The hon. Gentleman keeps going on about criminals, saying “We’ve got to get rid of these criminals” and “We’ve got to do something about these criminals.” He is characterising an awful lot of people as criminals. If they are already criminals, that means that they have committed a crime and have already been charged and found guilty—or he thinks that they should have been, so why have they not been? Incidentally, the Bill creates an awful lot of civil offences. Those are not criminal either, so why and on what basis is he calling such people criminals?

    Jonathan Gullis

    I thank the hon. Lady for that intervention. She says that I talk about criminals. She referred earlier to the Black Lives Matter protest, and I have absolutely no issue with having that important debate about racial inequality in society and looking at what more can be done. However, when a particular individual went up on the Cenotaph and tried to set alight the Union flag, as though it was somehow making some sort of demonstration—this is a memorial to our glorious dead who made the ultimate sacrifice and gave their tomorrow for our today—that was criminal behaviour. That is why that needs to be called out and why I introduced the Desecration of War Memorials Bill, which was accepted by the Government and became part of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022. I did so despite the sniping from the Labour party, which claimed that I was more interested in protecting statues—it was not statues; it was war memorials to the glorious dead and war graves so that every village, every town and every city of our country remembers those who made those important sacrifices. I am someone who lost a friend when he was serving his nation in Afghanistan. That is why I felt so incensed by those disgusting, vile scenes that I saw up on the Cenotaph.

    That is why any Opposition Member who does not understand why this Bill is important is seriously out of touch with the people of this country. It is the silent majority, time and again. The problem is that the Labour party is obsessed with Twitter being somehow the mouthpiece of Britain, or with any other woke, virtue-signalling thing such as Channel 4 that Labour seems to believe must be right on every single issue. That is the problem with the Labour party and why it was so overwhelmingly rejected by the people of Stoke-on-Trent—in Stoke-on-Trent North, Stoke-on-Trent Central and Stoke-on-Trent South, for the first time.

    If Labour Members want any more proof, they should look at the May local elections in Newcastle-under-Lyme. Labour was touted to take control of that council in every single national poll and every single national newspaper. The Labour party was openly briefing that it would win that council. The Labour leader of the group at that time openly said at the count that that was their No. 1 target council, and that Labour had thrown all the extra money and resources at it. What happened? The Conservatives took that council with seven gains. They took it from no overall control to being Conservative-led for the first time in that council’s history, while Labour went backwards. If that is not a wake-up signal, I do not know what is.

    Lee Anderson

    It is very pleasing to see that my hon. Friend has finally come off the fence in support of this very important Bill. With the Opposition—especially the Labour party—continually voting against the measures that this Government are introducing to protect the people of this country, does he think that it may be a good idea for those Labour MPs to come to Stoke-on-Trent North, Ashfield, Dudley or Ipswich and speak to some real people in real places?

    Jonathan Gullis

    I could not agree more. I think we do need to organise a trip round the red wall so that Labour Members can actually understand why the Labour party lost those seats. [Interruption.] I hear the sniggering from Opposition Members when I mention Stoke-on-Trent. The only Stoke that the Labour party is aware of is Stoke Newington. They have not gone any further north than that in the last number of years, which is why, again, we have a Conservative-led Stoke-on-Trent City Council, a Conservative-run Newcastle-under-Lyme Borough Council and a Conservative-run Staffordshire County Council. Under Tony Blair, a man who actually used to win Labour elections, it used to have six of the 12 MPs for the local area. Labour ran the county council at one stage, had control of Stoke city council and ran Newcastle borough council. Those are the facts.

    Marsha De Cordova (Battersea) (Lab)

    I do not even want to thank the hon. Member for giving way to me, because frankly, his speech is becoming quite insulting. He is talking to Members of Parliament who were elected by the people—in my case, by the people of Battersea—to represent them. I am really grateful that, finally, the people of Wandsworth decided to vote for Labour and kick the Tories out after 44 years of rule to elect a Labour council. We know what the people of London need and we do not need to take lessons from the hon. Member.

    Jonathan Gullis

    Well, Croydon spoke quite loudly, if I remember correctly, by deciding to elect a Conservative Mayor and upping the amount of councillors in Croydon. We had places like Bromley holding on, and Old Bexley and Sidcup, and Harrow going towards the Conservative party. And there is now mass opposition to the mental plan of the Mayor of London, who wants to expand the ultra low emission zone across the whole Greater London area, smashing 135,000 drivers in the pocket with a daily charge and killing small businesses. If this is Labour-run London, God forbid a Labour-run United Kingdom. It would be absolutely terrifying to see what could happen to our community. [Interruption.] It is lovely to see you in the Chair now by the way, Madam Deputy Speaker.

    This Bill is so important because it is about making sure that action is taken if someone wants to glue themselves to a train, risk their health and wellbeing, and delay people going to work to earn their money at a time when we are facing a global crisis with inflation, a global crisis with the cost of energy, and a global crisis of food prices, because of events happening in Ukraine, as well as the fact, obviously, that we are coming out of a global lockdown—I know that Labour Members seem to want to pretend that that did not exist. Ultimately, all those things put together mean that, when people are not able to go about their daily lives because of a mindless minority of morons who want to act in an inappropriate way by blocking the road, stopping the trains, stopping oil tankers and smashing up petrol stations, this Bill is necessary.

    Finally, I appreciate that the shadow Home Secretary, the right hon. Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper), is no longer in her place, but I thought that, when she stood at the Dispatch Box today, she gave a very passionate and good speech about why the actions of Insulate Britain, Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil were unlawful. She made a fantastic point about why action needs to be taken, so the House can imagine why the people of Stoke-on-Trent North, Kidsgrove and Talke are simply baffled that Labour Members will not join us in the Lobby this evening and will instead vote against a Bill that they seem in principle to support. However, because of certain Back Benchers, they just do not want to face that rebellion and stare it down. It is a shame that the Labour party has a long way to go.

  • Jonathan Gullis – 2022 Comments on Sending Migrants to Rwanda for Processing

    Jonathan Gullis – 2022 Comments on Sending Migrants to Rwanda for Processing

    The comments made by Jonathan Gullis, the Conservative MP for Stoke-on-Trent North, in the House of Commons on 25 April 2022.

    The people of Stoke-on-Trent North, Kidsgrove and Talke are delighted with this groundbreaking economic and development partnership with Rwanda, which will help to break the business model of vile people smugglers once and for all. Does my hon. Friend share my concern and that of my constituents that the Labour woke warriors are quite happy to stick with the status quo, meaning that more people are going to leave safe mainland France, risking their lives and putting thousands of pounds in the hands of smuggling gangs, which will mean more death in the channel and illegal economic migrants continuing to enter the United Kingdom?

  • Jonathan Gullis – 2022 Speech on Foster Carers

    Jonathan Gullis – 2022 Speech on Foster Carers

    The speech made by Jonathan Gullis, the Conservative MP for Stoke-on-Trent North, in the House of Commons on 21 April 2022.

    It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship in Westminster Hall once again, Mr Robertson. I warmly congratulate the hon. Member for Jarrow (Kate Osborne) on securing this important debate and sharing her personal experience. As Members from across the House have said, it is truly inspiring.

    My partner and I hope one day, when our children are slightly older, to offer a home and an opportunity to young people. For eight and a half years before entering this place, I worked as a head of year, dealing with behavioural and pastoral issues in the secondary education sector, and I had direct contact with some of the fantastic foster carers of the children I was proud to look after. It was an enlightening and warming story. Looking at how to spend money from the budget to invest in those young people and give them exciting opportunities outside the school gates, as well as pushing their learning and educational outcomes, was something that I thoroughly enjoyed.

    I want to focus on the great work that is being done in the constituency I am proud to serve, Stoke-on-Trent North, Kidsgrove and Talke, and across the wider city of Stoke-on-Trent. Since 2019, Stoke-on-Trent City Council has made it very clear that children and young people need to be its No. 1 priority. A complete overhaul is needed, as the challenge in 2019 was, quite frankly, immense. Children’s services in Stoke-on-Trent have never been rated good or outstanding. An Ofsted inspection in early 2019 showed that the situation was dire—that is the only word I can use to describe the quality of services available to more than 1,000 of the most vulnerable young children in our city, who required us to look after them. Children’s services received the worst possible rating of inadequate from Ofsted, and inspectors uncovered multiple failings, which left youngsters at risk of harm.

    Since May 2019, Councillor Dave Evans, who was appointed to the children and young people portfolio, has been working with Councillor Abi Brown, the leader of Stoke-on-Trent City Council, and has made big strides to improve fostering services across the Potteries. Ably assisted by team manager Kate Bailey and recruitment officer Marie Plant, Councillor Evans and his team have radically changed the council’s approach. The council has been pushing hard to get as many organisations signed up to the fostering friendly scheme, the Fostering Network’s programme to encourage employers to support fostering and, in particular, foster carers. Stoke City Football Club, Bet365, Staffordshire police, Stoke-on-Trent City Council and health groups are all now signed up to the scheme. That effort is part of the team’s new approach to running family services.

    To be recognised as a fostering friendly employer, the council has had to demonstrate support for employees, make the workplace friendlier for foster carers to benefit the children in their care, and also make it easier for people to consider fostering. In 2020, the council launched a new fostering friendly policy for all its employees, setting out benefits for any staff member who decides to come forward to become a foster carer. They include flexible working arrangements and paid time off for those going through the foster care approval process. Councillor Evans and his team are urging organisations and businesses across Stoke-on-Trent to become fostering friendly, as part of the push to become recognised as the first fostering friendly city in the United Kingdom.

    Part of the new approach that Stoke-on-Trent City Council is taking is making fostering more visible and spreading the word. Social workers now go to events across the city such as Stoke-on-Trent Pride and the Better World Festival, and they hold coffee shop drop-in sessions. I am pleased to say that the new approach that the council has taken is paying off. Recruitment of foster carers is up, with 33 recruited last year compared to 30 the year before, and the council is now the fifth biggest recruiter of social workers in the country.

    As well as getting more organisations signed up to the fostering friendly scheme and boosting recruitment, Councillor Evans and the team have worked to improve retention of foster carers, which is important as there are more than 1,000 cared-for children in the city of Stoke-on-Trent. Fosterers have been given a stronger voice, with increased representation on the corporate parenting panel to give them a say on key decisions across children’s services in the city. All of this progress has been reflected in Ofsted’s latest monitoring report

    Even the Stoke Sentinel has had to be positive about the turnaround. As Councillor Evans has said, the clearest sign of improvement is that Ofsted has found that children in Stoke-on-Trent are now safe—Ofsted had previously found that they were not. Of course, there is still a long way to go. As I said earlier, the council has never been ranked as good or outstanding for children’s services, but that is the goal, and I am 100% confident that thanks to the new approach adopted by Councillor Evans and his team, when Ofsted carries out its next full inspection this autumn, that goal will be achieved.

    Before I close I want to give the fostering team a shout-out for running the Potters ‘Arf marathon last year, and again this year. This is something I know my hon. Friend the Minister will be proud to hear. Having seen and walked the hills of Stoke-on-Trent, I will not be anywhere near that race, apart from standing on the sidelines and cheering with a cheesy oatcake in my hand. I warmly congratulate all those taking part to raise awareness and money for good causes, and I look forward to cheering the team on.

  • Jonathan Gullis – 2020 Speech on Free School Meals

    Jonathan Gullis – 2020 Speech on Free School Meals

    The speech made by Jonathan Gullis, the Conservative MP for Stoke-on-Trent North, in the House of Commons on 21 October 2020.

    Unfortunately, I will have to start by referring to the comments made by the hon. Member for City of Durham (Mary Kelly Foy). I have high regard for her, but I found her moral superiority quite distressing. I spent eight years of my life working as a secondary school teacher, the overwhelming majority of which was as a head of year, working in some of the most disadvantaged parts of London and Birmingham, seeing the impact of child poverty and child hunger but also of not having a stable family and good role models and of crime and drugs in a local community. I refuse to be lectured by Opposition Members who have not walked in my shoes and seen the things that I have had to witness in my career. I hope the hon. Lady will reflect on those remarks. [Interruption.] I will not be lectured by those on the shadow Front Bench who have not worked in the schools I have worked in or seen the things I have seen. I refuse to be shouted down and treated in this manner.

    Let us be very clear about this extension. This is not a one-off extension—this is about free school meals being permanently provided outside of school time. First, who is going to fund that—the school or the state? Do schools provide the meals on-site, or do they have to deliver food parcels? If so, do they have to renegotiate their contracts? Have the unions supported that? Is there understanding of the voucher system, and are they being used in an appropriate and responsible manner? I have had supermarkets, parents and schools contact me directly to say that they have grave concerns about the way in which those vouchers have been used.

    This Government have done remarkable work on holiday programmes. I want to mention the Hubb Foundation and its “Ay Up Duck” campaign, run by Carol Shanahan, the co-owner of Port Vale football club, and Adam Yates, a former professional footballer. The Hubb Foundation is providing thousands of meals across the city and providing hundreds of children and parents with the opportunity to participate in activities that not only improve their physical and mental health but ensure that they are fed and that the local authority and schools have health and wellbeing checks done on a regular basis over the holiday.

    If we were to have a serious discussion about how to tackle this issue, one way to do that is to reduce the summer holiday from six weeks to four weeks. Childcare costs £133 a week on average. If we redistributed those two weeks, with one in the October half-term and one in the May half-term, we could bring down the cost of the ​summer holiday for parents and help them to be better able to access the food that they need. Free school meals are indeed important, but it is the role of the school to educate, not to be the welfare state.

  • Jonathan Gullis – 2020 Speech on Desecration of War Memorials

    Jonathan Gullis – 2020 Speech on Desecration of War Memorials

    Below is the text of the speech made by Jonathan Gullis, the Conservative MP for Stoke-on-Trent North, in the House of Commons on 23 June 2020.

    I beg to move

    That leave be given to bring in a Bill to create the offence of desecrating a war memorial; and for connected purposes.

    I find myself in the unique position of standing here presenting this Bill, with the Government in support of the cause and aims behind bringing such legislation before the House. It is the week of Armed Forces Day, and I say to all our servicemen and women: I salute you.

    My hon. Friend the Member for Bracknell (James Sunderland) and I have had constructive discussions with our right hon. and learned Friend the Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice, and my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary about the potential for this Bill to be put into statute. Such a Bill should not be contentious, and I and my hon. Friend the Member for Bracknell, my “co-sponsor” of the Bill, are delighted to have support from across the House for our ambitions.

    I stress that this Bill should not be perceived as a knee-jerk reaction to recent events, as some in the media have suggested. Back in 2009-10, the former hon. Member for Enfield, Southgate, David Burrowes, introduced a similar Bill, with the same intention of protecting our war memorials. My hon. Friend the Member for Bracknell and I wish to place on record our thanks to him for his efforts, and for having reached out to us and thrown his full support behind our work. We also wish to thank Lewis Fielder and James Clark, members of Conservative Friends of the Armed Forces, for their efforts in researching, drafting and aiding my hon. Friend and I in putting this Bill to the House.

    Every war memorial in every village, every town and every city across our country is sacred and serves to remind us of the immeasurable gratitude that we must afford to our armed forces, both past and present. The passage of time always presents the danger of dimmed collective recollections. Let us not forget the sacrifice and bravery of those who paid the ultimate price: young men and women who gave up their futures, loves, lives and dreams to ensure that the freedoms they once knew were protected from tyranny—for us, the unborn generations, who now sit idly by as monuments dedicated to their eternal memory are desecrated. I will not sit idly by, and neither will I be silent.

    A lack of comprehensive reporting on vandalism of this nature means that it is difficult to ascertain the exact number of incidents each year, although the War Memorials Trust does an excellent job of documenting such incidents. It reports that seven memorials have suffered from criminal activity since April, including the Cenotaph in Whitehall which has been graffitied and climbed on, and recently the Union Flag was nearly set alight. In 2017, a woman was arrested for urinating on a war memorial in Essex for the second time. During her arrest she became abusive towards emergency workers, and was sentenced to one month’s imprisonment for the first count of outraging public decency, three months for the second count, and three months for assault and abusive language. How that punishment fits the crime, I do not know.​

    The Bomber Command Memorial in Green Park has been attacked four times since Her Majesty opened it in 2012. In 2013, it was desecrated with graffiti that referenced the murder of Fusilier Lee Rigby. The perpetrator was sentenced to just 12 weeks’ imprisonment. Those who vandalise and abuse these monuments do not have the capacity to comprehend the strength, courage and bravery that it must have taken for, in this case, teenage boys to overcome the terror of midnight missions across occupied Europe in a tin can thousands of feet in the sky. More than 50,000 British, American, Canadian and Commonwealth young men lost their lives under Bomber Command to preserve and protect the liberties of democracy. Had the allied forces not been successful in their mission, let us make no mistake: we would be living under the tyranny of totalitarian, fascist insanity.

    The price of war is immeasurably high. I saw that first hand when a young man from Stratford-upon-Avon, Private Conrad Lewis, lost his life in Afghanistan back in 2011. The pain felt by friends and the community stays with me to this day. Those of us who value freedom of thought, speech and expression know that we can never repay the debt we owe to these men and women; all we can do is immortalise their memory, and display our gratitude for their sacrifice.

    Memorials stand in great, solemn, eternal remembrance of the glorious dead. We cannot bring back those lives, or erase the grief of families and communities, but the least we can do is ensure that memorials are adequately protected, and punish those who would deface, urinate on, spit on, defile, or graffiti them. Such actions, which have included swastikas spray-painted on statues, and Nazi salutes in 2020 before the Cenotaph, are the price we pay for ignorance and inaction.

    A blessed bond is formed between our present and our past through memorials. We see ourselves in the names and images of our fallen heroes, and perhaps we pause to reflect whether we would have had their courage and their nerves of steel in the face of evil itself.

    My great-great-uncle Allan Gullis, who still lives today, is a D-day veteran. I could not possibly speculate whether I would have had the sheer guts and bulldog spirit that he and his brothers in arms embody so fully, but the least that I can do is stand before the House today and try to secure the protection of their memory. My grandfather, Terrence Gullis, served in the Royal Marines during the Suez canal crisis, and my grandfather on my mother’s side, William Beacham, served in the RAF, undertaking his national service in Egypt. It is an honour to have such brave and committed men in my family. I would have liked to follow in the footsteps of those heroes but, alas, due to deafness in one ear, it was not my destiny.

    I am delighted, however, to represent the great town of Kidsgrove, where the Royal British Legion, on its own initiative, has set up a beautiful war memorial garden that is used every November to lay wreaths and remember our fallen. It has been an undoubted pleasure to attend the veterans breakfast club in Smallthorne, run by Martyn Hunt and Paul Horton, which serves all veterans across Stoke-on-Trent as a way of bringing our heroes together to share their stories and lend support to one another. Dotted across this country are extraordinary examples of individuals and community groups banding ​together to honour the dead. Every year, as I don my poppy, it brings me a great sense of pride and joy to see so many others doing the same.

    I am asking the House to do the respectable thing—the right thing—and back this Bill to create an explicit offence, distinguishable from damage to public property. Let us join our friends in Australia, the United States and Canada, and pay the respect that we owe to those who died in the freedom fight against tyranny. Although there is provision in existing legislation to hold criminals to account for damage to property, and offenders have been successfully prosecuted, relatively few are held to account for the severity of the aggravating circumstances that come with criminally damaging something as sacred to the nation as war memorials.

    In addition to the designation of a specific offence relating to unlawful damage to a war memorial, the Bill proposes the exemption of damage to war memorials from the £5,000 damages threshold required under the Criminal Damage Act 1971; the removal of a maximum fine in favour of an unlimited fine; and the establishment of a maximum custodial sentence of 10 years’ imprisonment. Despite some media reports, we are not calling for all offences to be met with 10 years’ imprisonment; we are enabling our judiciary to use their discretion over whether the offence is worthy of being moved to a Crown court, without the £5,000 threshold barrier blocking its way.

    Finally, I take the opportunity to praise my partner in this proposal, my hon. Friend the Member for Bracknell. He has an outstanding record as a public servant, with 27 years of military service under his belt. In this House, he serves as chair of the all-party parliamentary group on the armed forces covenant, and he remains unrivalled in his passion for veterans, the Commonwealth and remembrance. It is a privilege to know him and work with him as a fellow member of the 2019 intake. My hon. Friend will perhaps be blushing at such unreserved praise, but it is certain that he is cut from the same cloth as those whose memories I stand here advocating to protect and preserve. I thank him wholeheartedly for his service and for his help in laying the Bill before the House.

    I want to see the deterrence of criminal damage to the memory of our glorious dead. I hope that the House will support me in that endeavour.