[Youngian]

"A rising star," according to Her Majesty's press.

[Andy McDandy]

Translation: posh totty* and not obviously crackers.

*Yes, yes, I know, but this is the RW media who are mainly writing for an imagined male audience.

[Oboogie]

More publicity for racist crank Katie Lam.

James O'Brien was berating the media for the lack of coverage of her remarks which O'Brien reckons are worse than the Rivers of Blood speech.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Not many senior people fancy chairing the Grooming Gangs inquiry, perhaps in no measure due to the shit they'll get from lunatics like Katie Lam if they assign any blame at all to people who aren't politically correct social workers and Labour politicians.

Katie Lam is very unhappy with this situation.

[Tubby Isaacs]

I've been looking at Lam's written/ spoken questions. They're pretty shit, lots of stuff about "are you using British paper/ office furniture?", doubtless looking for cheap gotchas to post online. Perhaps Katie can supply us with a list of everything her family have purchased since she's been an MP, so we can check her authority on this matter? That would of course all be funded from Katie's doubtless substantial household income, whereas the Government is using taxpayers money. When does "buying British" become "Government waste", I wonder?

And of course she expects the government to have data for her constituency on everything, and she's interested in the Church of England paying slavery reparations. eg

The funds that have been committed to projects via the Church of England’s reparations project are in fact for the upkeep of parish churches and the provision of salaries for the clergy. I know that the Second Church Estates Commissioner is dedicated to our parish churches and would not support anything unlawful, so will the hon. Lady please provide the grounds on which the Church Commissioners are authorised to allocate this money to aims for which it was not intended? What details can she share of the conversations that she has had with the Charity Commission to determine whether they can do this, as it seems to be unlawful?

I thought the Tories were the anti-bureaucracy, get the lawyers out of the way party? Funny how the Church looks at some reparations and suddenly Katie and all purport to spot these legal problems. Perhaps these lawyers are the same ones who don't like solar farms and railway lines in Tory constituencies. "In fact", eh?

Marsha de Cordova replies that the money actually comes first out of the overall endowment, not some particular ring fenced pot for repairing parish churches. Doubtless Katie gets marked down as cerebral by The Telegraph for this stuff though.

[mattomac]

Lam was educated at her local comprehensive, Guildford County School, where she was head girl [citation needed]. Her paternal grandfather's family is of Dutch Jewish descent and her paternal grandmother's family were from Germany and included a left-wing senator representing Saxony. Her grandmother's family moved to England to escape political persecution. Most of her grandfather's family was killed in the Holocaust. Her father's parents met while delivering leaflets for the Labour Party in the 1940s.[3] Lam read classics at Trinity College, Cambridge. While at Cambridge she was elected president of the Cambridge Union and chairman of the Cambridge University Conservative Association.[4]

This does often make me wonder.... its from her Wikipedia. Someone with this kind of background can turn so vile, and who knows how far back we can go with this stuff, while we are turfing out all those who are here legally, at what point do we stop?

[Tubby Isaacs]

She doesn't intend going back at all for people from Hong Kong with ILR, they're exempt. Funny that. She claims it will save hundeds of billions of pounds, because minorities are all workshop dumbos, rather than people who outperform white British in education.

She's a huge bullshitter across the board.

Conservative MP Katie Lam insists the assisted dying bill proposed by fellow MP Kim Leadbeater has been “weakened” by changes. Lam suggests a clause in the bill which says it has to come into force in four years’ time is “very dangerous".

Four years sounds like a long enough time to me. And there's zero to stop the government later saying it needs more time. I thought people on the Kipper right were big on "Parliament can't bind its successors" (usually when they're trying to pretend that they can unilaterally withdraw from the Good Friday Agreement or whatever.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Katie shows up here, in a debate on the new Victims and Courts Bill. As you'd expect she just uses it to saw "grooming gangs" a lot.

https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/2 ... 2E0BEF29E5

Many of the steps taken in the Bill will be welcomed on both sides of the House and by victims across our country. It is right, for example, that we restrict convicted sex offenders’ access to their children, and it is right that we give victims more information about their offenders’ release. However, the calls for justice for the victims of grooming and rape gangs grow only louder. Across this country, people are rightly horrified by these crimes and the subsequent cover-up, which represents the biggest national scandal in our history, yet the Government have failed to use this opportunity to deliver real justice for those victims and survivors.

Am I missing something but have lots of these cases been investigated and prosecuted a decade or more ago or more? What can a bill in 2025 do about that? She seems to be talking about historic cases specifically.

A Labour MP (Elsie Blundell) gets fed up with this stuff and asks her what the previous government did. Katie doesn't answer that one.

And there's more.

Just last week, the Court of Appeal revisited the case of three men who were convicted of raping a teenage girl in Yorkshire. Ibrar Hussain and brothers Imtiaz and Fayaz Ahmed were convicted in January for committing unspeakably evil crimes against a 13-year-old girl. In the first instance, they each received sentences of less than 10 years. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Newark mentioned, he and my hon. Friend the Member for Keighley and Ilkley (Robbie Moore) referred this case to the Attorney General. In this instance, the court rightly ruled that these sentences were far too short. This Bill should have made it easier for victims to seek such redress. It does not.

Who knew the MPs for Newark and Keighley and Ilkley had the right to do this? It's the Solicitor General who did it. And the sentences were increased. Isn't that the system working already?

[Youngian]

Why haven't any no-nonsense Tories asked where were the parents of these underage girls were when they were out late? Perhaps Edwina Currie could be wheeled out on breakfast TV.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Yeah, that used to be a line of theirs. Can't expect the state to make up for bad parenting, wasn't it?

[Tubby Isaacs]

Quite satisfying that the minister (Alex Davies-Jones) did a special section of summing up aimed at Katie Lam.

I know that we are short on time, but I want to turn to the comments made by the hon. Member for Weald of Kent (Katie Lam) about the IICSA. I will put it on the record again—I think it needs to be said—that the Government are absolutely focused on delivering meaningful change for victims impacted by these horrendous crimes. Earlier this year, we published our plan for responding to the recommendations of the independent inquiry into child sexual abuse through the Crime and Policing Bill, on which I am proud also to be a Minister. We are strengthening the law by introducing a mandatory reporting duty to make it an offence to fail to report or to cover up child sexual abuse. We are also legislating in that Bill to make grooming a statutory aggravating factor in the sentencing of child sexual offences to ensure that that behaviour is reflected in the sentencing of perpetrators.

We also plan to legislate to remove the three-year limit for compensation claims and shift the burden of proof from victims to defendants in the civil courts, as well as amend the law of apologies to encourage employers to apologise to people wronged by their employees. A legislative vehicle is currently being identified for that measure. I stress again that the Government are getting on with the job of delivering for those victims and survivors. We are not delaying; we are actively working at pace to ensure that justice will be served and support is available.

I'm sure she'll take these on board next time she launches into "Labour covering up and not doing anything".

[Tubby Isaacs]

This saving "hundreds of billions" by deporting people with ILR then. Lots of that expense is going to be in old age. Seems like a pretty unconservative approach to see it in those terms. And what does she make of people who are not net contributors who work in low paid jobs? Are they to be chucked out? I'd guess Sajid Javid's Dad wasn't very well paid. Does a modern version of him get the chop? Or Sayeeda Warsi's stay at home mum, who she credits with making sure her kids all did well? Aren't the Tories the party of stay at home mums?

[Tubby Isaacs]

Katie Lam lied about her proposals on Peston, and wasn't pulled up on it. Labour haven't responded to Lam, whereas Ed Davey has. I think they need to as well.

[Tubby Isaacs]

He says this now he's out of office? Your regular reminder that Philip Hammond was trying to get rid of it in 2017, but "populist" Labour opposed, just like opposed an attempt to make house prices pay for lots of the cost of care.

[Tubby Isaacs]

2017 seems to have been, in retrospect, a chance for that thing retired politicians and journalists love- a "frank conversation with the electorate". Just today, Chris Mullin is claiming that Labour uniquely running on whacking up National Insurance to undo Jeremy Hunt's cuts to it was such an opportunity. Because every other party wouldn't have opposed and claimed it either wasn't necessary or somebody else/some genius wheeze would raise the money instead. (The Lib Dems are still getting away with opposing every tax rise because they'd negotiate a customs union the EU probably isn't interested in).

But 2017, with much larger vote share for the two main parties, that does seem like a missed opportunity

[Tubby Isaacs]

Another chance for a "national conversation" was in the early Coalition days, when Cameron put Ken Clarke in the Justice Department and told him to reduce the prison population and sell off some jails standing on expensive land. Ed Milliband and Yvette Cooper attacked strongly, and Cameron had to U turn. I'm not as anti-prison as lots of people, but I think we could have (and still could) do some modest cuts to prison numbers.

I haven't checked Chris Mullin's diaries to see what he thought of this chance to pass up this national conversation.

[Andy McDandy]

The issue with prisons and prisoner numbers is that if you propose anything that can be shown to reduce offending and doesn't involve slamming them up, you're painted as "soft on crime". So what if you've got some numbers from Norway, my poor granny etc.

As Stephen King put it, too many people want more cops, more prisoners, and higher walls. So what if they don't work?

[Tubby Isaacs]

That's what happened to Ken Clarke at the hands of the Labour Opposition and the media.

My skepticism of "prison doesn't work at all" comes from looking at the previous convictions of people whose cases we dealt with. By no means was it a case of people being banged up for one off failures to pay the tv licence or whatever. There were typically a load of previous convictions, including for violence, before they got a custodial sentence. But some of the fixed term sentences could probably do with a bit more room for judicial discretion. And my disdain for "bang more up, don't build any prisons" politicians knows no bounds.