#StalkingRegister
The Conservative Lord Jo Johnson, brother of the PM, and husband of Guardian “Windrush” Journalist Amelia Gentleman, has been voting in favour of the Government’s Domestic Abuse Bill and against a #StalkingRegister.
The bill will make it more likely that immigrant female victims of domestic abuse will get deported if they report violent crime to the police.
Technically Johnson, who is new to the Lords, is free to vote with his conscience.
But the mystery hinges upon, if he’s ever had one?
Jo Blocks
On April 21st Johnson voted to block proposed amendments that would have prevented sensitive data-sharing between the police, the NHS, Home Office, & the Border Agency.
Does this mean that Jo and his brother are data sharing ideologues? Maybe.
Stalking Horse
However Jo Johnson and his brother voted against data sharing in other proposed amendments that would have created a Stalking Register that would have allowed authorities to share data to protect women from those repeat stalkers who have been deemed to pose a threat to public safety.
Gaslights
The Women’s Minister Victoria Atkins has been pushing this stuff through in the Commons.
There appears to have been a U-Turn on stalking over the weekend.
But this has not come easy – and the Government simply cannot be relied upon to do the right thing at any stage of the way.
Here’s a selection of tweets from two weeks ago.
I will update these links later today, possibly adding further video.
Although they are likely to be always extremely busy, I admire the work of https://twitter.com/againstrape , if you need someone to talk to about experiencing any of these types of issues, they are the best I know.
Jo Johnson didn’t just take a paid position off Sir Jim Dyson straight after his brother Boris texted sweet nothings to the tax exile billionaire.
He’s since been appointed a member of the House of Lords.
The PM had promised via a series of personal text messages to Sir Jim that he would “fix it” that Dyson pay zero UK tax in exchange for Dyson inventing some Covid ventilators.
Within days Jo Johnson’s back was being scratched by his long term Conservative colleague Eric Pickles who heads up the “toothless” Advisory Committee on Business Appointments (ACOBA)
In her book on Windrush, Amelia Gentleman says:
“I’m married to a Conservative MP (Jo Johnson) who at the time was a minister in Theresa May’s government. As a news reporter, I have to be politically independent; I let him get on with his job and he doesn’t interfere in mine. Life is busy and complicated and mostly we’re focused on the pressing day-to-day issues around children. Clearly there are huge areas of disagreement but we try to step around anything too contentious for the sake of family harmony. But the fact did not go unnoticed. One Sunday morning he had to go on television to defend Amber Rudd, returning home at lunchtime to look after the children so I could talk on the radio about how the government had got things badly wrong. I can see why it looks weird from the outside; that weekend it felt very weird. I only had one brief exchange with his brother Boris, who was then Foreign Secretary, about the issue, at a noisy family birthday party later in the year, when he said: ‘You really fucked the Commonwealth summit.’
During a live interview with Jamaican radio, which the Guardian had organised to see if anyone who had[…]”
Excerpt From: Amelia Gentleman. “The Windrush Betrayal.”
Amelia Gentleman was emailed the following this morning:
There once was a time that Boris Johnson was in favour of amnesties re: immigration and asylum seekers.
But on this webpage Lord Jo Johnson is voting for victims of domestic violence to have their data shared with authorities in a way that increases the likelihood that they then be targeted and deported by immigration agencies.
Do you know why Jo Johnson is voting for domestic violence victims to be deported?
Here’s an excerpt from the debate:
The purpose of our original Amendment 40 was to protect victims of domestic abuse whose migration status is uncertain. About half of these victims are too afraid to report the crimes committed against them. Their perpetrators threaten that the victim will be detained or deported if they report the abuse. Irrespective of what their immigration status is, it is a very useful threat for perpetrators to use. The victims have good reason to be afraid because, at present, if the victim reports a crime of domestic abuse to the police, there is every reason the police may pass that information along to the immigration authorities. This is at a moment of crisis for the victim, when they have quite likely been made homeless, they may have been thrown out of their home and are completely vulnerable. The idea that the immigration authorities begin to look for them at that point is utterly inappropriate.
To make clear what we were trying to achieve: our amendment was intended to prevent information about the victim, or any witnesses, being passed from the police to the immigration services. I understand the reasons for the Commons’ rejection of the amendment. They argue that the Government have committed to the review that the Minister has referred to about the processing of migrant victims’ personal data for the purposes of immigration control and that the amendment would pre-empt the outcome of that review. I totally understand that.
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