 Merharu tyfaint. Fel ffrindio! Welcomes to the first lecture of the Cambridge Proponent Project. We are very, very honoured to have Martha Spourer here with us. Martha is the Director of Liberty, which she joined in 2016 and she arrived there from low district chambers ie ffordd a'r cymaint o bob cyffer a'r wasbwysig, ni'n gweinio'r nettwys a'r brawn gweinio'r gweinio i'r fantasol yn nicerio'r syniadau, yn gweinio'r gweinio'r gweinio wedi gweinio i'r gweinio'r gweinio, yn 2015 mae'r debyg mawr yn ysgolfannau gan y Gweinio, ond mae'r gweinio'r gweinio'r gweinio'r gweinio'r gweinio'r gweinio, phasio'r gweinio ac os y gallai across the country, telling the stories of men, women and children who had used the Human Rights Act when things went wrong in their lives. Marta was previously a lawyer at the Mental Health Charity Mind and at the Public Law Project. Please join me in welcoming Marta. Thanks very much for having me. It's very strange. I haven't been back here for some years but I studied here and I didn't do law, I did history. It's a lovely and also quite scary nostalgia that you feel when you walk back into the citric site. Anyway, it's really nice to be here. I'm a bit of an interloper. I didn't study law but I transferred to law and was a Human Rights Barrister for some years before taking this role that I now do at Liberty. I was going to reflect a little bit on Liberty's work on some of the things that we are facing at the moment and then I think we'll have time for Q&A. My watch is broken so I'll probably do that Barrister thing of just rambling for ages and having no idea so stop me if you get bored. So just in case you don't know, Liberty is the UK's oldest human rights campaigning organisation. It was founded by a group of activists and thinkers, people like HG Wells and George Orwell and Clement Attlee in the 1930s and 1934, in response to very brutal policing tactics in hunger marches that were starting in the north of England and coming down to London to present a petition to parliament. At this time, obviously the UK was in the grip of the Great Depression and people were starving. Liberty was founded because there was a tendency on the part of the state and on the part of the police to quash these marches and to prevent people and it was whole families of people coming down to London to express themselves to their political representatives. So a bunch of people got together at St Martin's in the Fields in London and set up this organisation and they wrote a letter to the Manchester Guardian saying that Liberty was there to stand vigil. And that's kind of still what Liberty does, it's a watchdog and we try and hold the powerful to account and stand up for people who otherwise may not be able to stand up for themselves. We are completely independent, so unswayed by party politics or profit or public opinion. And really what our job is, and there's just 30 of us at Work at Liberty, it's a small office, a very dedicated ordinary people, but our job is to challenge intolerance and abuse and injustice wherever we find it. But the thing that makes Liberty very powerful and I think has always made Liberty powerful and given it a real authentic voice is that it's a membership organisation. So as well as the 30 people in that building, as well as all the people that have worked for Liberty over many decades, we have 12,000 members and 32,000 supporters. And really it's one thing that unites all those people, a pretty simple and basic belief, although often the tabloids would have you think differently, that everyone in this country is equal and deserves to be treated with dignity and respect. And it's nothing more complicated than that. One of the reasons that I was a member of Liberty for many years before I joined was because I always liked the idea, even though actually I'm not much of a joiner. I always liked the idea of being part of something that was bigger than me or my family or my community and adding my voice to something that seemed to stand for values that I believed in. And I still really believe that adding your voice, particularly at extraordinary times like the ones we live in at the moment, is an incredibly important part of being an active and engaged citizen. I think it's pretty trite. I mean, I would have thought every talk you go to at the moment is people saying, gosh, we live in terrible times. It's very unpredictable. But really they're terrible times and they're very unpredictable. And over the last sort of year, 18 months, it really feels like pollsters have been put out of business in what we have just careened from one surprise result to another. Whether that was the election of Donald Trump, whether it was the outcome of the EU referendum, whether it was then the snap election in June, the minority government, the deal with the DUP. It feels like the news has moved thick and fast and stuff that would have stayed on the front pages perhaps for weeks a few years ago maybe gets a few column inches on page seven and then disappears the next day. At times I think that political rhetoric has really plumbed new debts. I think polarising moments like referenda are pretty good at creating a race to the bottom for politicians on all sides of the debate on issues like immigration. And I think for me, one of the really troubling things, one of the things I reflect on quite a lot at the moment, particularly now I work at Liberty, is this sense of despair that I have when the people who make the rules start to break them. And I've always had this motto, which is quite tragic, which is that there's no fun without rules. And I've had that since I was a child, so I was a very tragic teenager, but quite a good lawyer as a result of my love of rules. And I think it has been for those of us who are rule lovers, it has been a very challenging time, because you have a sense that the rules are there to enable us to speak truth to power, for example. When you are confronted with a wall of fake news, it's very difficult to know how to speak truth to power. It's very difficult to know how to champion protest when dissent is seen as something disloyal. It's very difficult to know how you give voice to marginalised people, of course that's what human rights is all about, when really populism is the name of the game. And it's very difficult to know how you can try and test and interrogate and dismantle those old and tired dichotomies like freedom versus security, or like the innocent have nothing to fear or the innocent have nothing to hide. And I think that it can feel like pretty dark times, you know, pretty dark times if you believe that there should be such a thing as privacy, and I think even more so than me you'll be part of a generation, many of you, growing up with a very different idea of what privacy means in the social media age than the one that I grew up with. I think it's a difficult time if you believe that the accident of nationality should not expose you to discrimination, and I think it's a difficult time if you believe that politics should be about aspiring to the better sides of people's nature. It can certainly feel as though some of the battles that we thought had been fought very hard by our forefathers and foremothers and decisively won and consigned to the rubbish bin of history have come back round. And I think my most sort of alarming example of this was around the time when Theresa May went to visit Donald Trump, which you'll remember. And you will also probably remember that at that time torture was back on the table. Lots of people were talking about torture. Donald Trump was refusing to condemn it. Theresa May was refusing to condemn Donald Trump's failure to condemn it. And I woke up one morning, as I'm sure many of you do, or maybe you don't get up this early, I woke up to the political interview on Radio 4 in the morning, which is about quarter past seven. And in no doubt in the pursuit, admirable pursuit of neutrality, the BBC had one person on who was very against torture and then they basically had someone on who was sort of in favour of torture. And it was one of those sort of paradigm shifting moments because you wake up and you're drinking your tea, listening to the world's most genteel radio station. And all of a sudden something that you really thought was off the table, genuinely off the table, had been off the table since the 1950s, was kind of creeping back into the discourse. And it felt a bit like waking up and hearing slavery talked about and one person saying, well, it's really terrible and it really destroys lives and someone else saying, yeah, but it does save quite a lot of money. In those moments, coming back to the rule lover that I am instinctively, in those moments I reach for the architecture of civilised nations and so I reach for things like the Human Rights Act. I reach for the European Convention on Human Rights, for the Modern Slavery Act and the Equality Act, all the things that a whole movement of civil liberties and human rights over hundreds of years really has been able to build. The scary thing at the moment, and I don't think it's an exaggeration to say it, is that we have to fight to keep that architecture standing. I think we have to fight particularly as we move through and then come out the other side of the Brexit negotiations. We have to fight very hard to hold the line on things like our membership of the European Convention on Human Rights and the hard one equality protections that we got from the European Union. Having said all that, I do feel quite optimistic and that's partly because if you don't feel optimistic in this job, you wouldn't get out of bed in the morning and you wouldn't do the work. But even in spite of my natural optimism, I do think there are real reasons, little green shoots of the last 12 to 18 months where there is very good reason to feel quite hopeful and quite inspired. People are, not everybody, but there are people joining liberty in their droves. Amnesty are having the same thing. There are people joining political parties. People are becoming more active, they're signing petitions, they're joining campaign groups, taking shifts at food banks. Volunteering is becoming more popular and I think that perhaps suggests that maybe you do need a time, a moment of great change for people to then become a little bit more engaged in the things that are really important. And for me, and like I said, I did history here about a decade ago, about 12 years ago, and I don't have any religious faith of my own and I'm not very into dogma. I've always been a bit skeptical of it. When I was doing history here, I mainly did political thought and I specialised very much in things like feminism and 20th century political thought. And I alighted upon human rights as this kind of thing that had emerged into the global order really after the Second World War. And in that framework of human rights was the first time that I thought this is something, this is a value system that I can really sign up to. I actually think human rights aren't very dogmatic, but I think intellectually, academically, sitting in this room, in this university, you can understand why a set of values designed to protect individuals from the overweening state, designed to be dynamic so that they can work in the context of policing or military combat, designed always to be balancing individual interests with collective interests. I think it's really obvious to an inquiring mind why that's an interesting value system and one to set some store by. I love the fact that human rights are political but never party political. I love that they are secular but have no problem with coexisting with faith. And I love the way that they evolve with changing social attitudes, doing things now that in the 1950s the draughters of the convention would never have imagined things like transgender rights or gay rights, things that people we now accept are norms, emerging norms, progressive norms. And I think that all of those reasons are more than persuasive enough to make anyone really committed to human rights as a framework. And certainly for me, those are the light bulb moments sitting in lecture halls like this where I thought this is something I'm really interested in and something that I want to pursue professionally. What was interesting for me on my journey was then becoming a barrister and realizing that there was a much, much more potent and profound reason for signing up to human rights, that actually there is something instinctive about these values, which even though you might not have a law degree, you might not have letters after your name or an office in Westminster, you might not even be able to read. In spite of all of those things, if you sit down in a room with someone one-on-one and explain what these rights are about, I would say 99 times out of 100, you will find that that person gets it, really, really gets it on a human level. And that's what I learned as a legal aid lawyer. I learned that I could walk into any room and meet any client, whether that was a prisoner or an immigration detainee or a mum who wanted respite care to help her look after her disabled kids. Whatever it was, there was always an ability to connect over that very fundamental sense of every human being having some rights against the state. I had many really formative conversations during my time as a lawyer and one of them I will just relay to you because I think it shows you so clearly why these things are so important and why it's perhaps easy to forget if you are lucky enough never to have suffered a human rights violation and that is a position of privilege. No-one wants to be the person that has had a human rights violation. It's not a nice place to be, but you should spare a thought for the people that have. And this example I think brings it to life. So I did a lot of inquests when I was at the bar. Inquests are for those who don't know investigations into deaths. And the reason that lawyers get involved is when those investigations are into deaths that take place in state custody or care, so prisons or immigration detention, police cells, psychiatric hospitals, things like that. And because human rights requires access to justice, in those situations where there are lessons that need to be learnt, where the state might have done something wrong, you have a right to have a lawyer and so you have a right to someone like me or somebody else to turn up and ask questions of witnesses. I was representing, when I was about three years into my job, a family of a young girl, a 19-year-old girl called Gemma who died in psychiatric care, a very vulnerable young woman, been in and out of psychiatric care really all her life. And she turned up one evening at this new hospital, she'd not been there before, and she went on to a new ward. And again I suspect many of you have been on to a psychiatric ward, but they're pretty clinical places as you can imagine, they're not the most warm and inviting places. They're places that most people would feel frightened and ill at ease if you were in a mental health crisis, you would feel even more frightened and even more ill at ease. And Gemma wound up in this ward and the CCTV footage of her arriving and she goes and sits on a chair in one of the corridors and the CCTV camera is trained on her and she looks very small and very fragile and very hunched over. And she sits there for three hours and not a single person talks to her. People walk past doctors, nurses, other patients, no one turns to look at her or ask her her name or how she is or what she's doing there. And you can sort of watch as she slowly, slowly diminishes in her capacity for feeling dignified and in her ability to stay with us basically. After three hours she was taken to her room and left alone briefly. She shouldn't have been left alone, one of the many things that went wrong, but left alone briefly, during which time she managed to tie a ligature around her neck using a pair of tights. And when she was found and the staff on the wing, on the wing, on the ward turned up in her room and started to try and resuscitate her, they called the paramedics as you would expect. And when the paramedics arrived they rushed into the room and there were four members of psychiatric staff standing around in this room and the paramedic turned to them and said what is this girl's name and not a single one of them even knew. And we did that in quest, we did it for three weeks, you know, the jury were I think as shocked as the coroner and as me and as many of the other people in the room about the many failings that could be kind of written down, medication missed, checks not done. All those things that lawyers latch onto and juries then make findings about. But actually it was the fact that no one had known Gemma's name at the time when she was being resuscitated, which I think for me showed what dignity is and what dignity is when it is lost and what it looks like when you treat human life very cheaply and you waste it. And in one of the breaks promised a formative conversation and this is what it was, in one of the breaks you have a lot of these breaks as a lawyer, you sit with these families, these extraordinary personal times for them and they are going through extraordinary grief and you sit there, you know, pretty ill qualified to have a lot of these conversations but anyway and you drink a lot of tea as you'd expect. And Gemma's dad worked on the railways and mum used to be a social worker and brother was trained to be a police officer and they articulated what human rights are in this incredibly instinctive cellular way. So they said the thing that gets us every time is that we thought that because Gemma was really vulnerable and really sick, we thought that she had a right to be protected. And I said she did. Like if you look at Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights brought into domestic law by the Human Rights Act, in Article 2 is contained a right of vulnerable people to be protected. And then they went on to say when Gemma first died the hospital contacted us and they said we're going to do an investigation into Gemma's death so don't worry, we'll look into everything that happened, everything that went wrong and they put the phone down. And then sitting around the family dinner table that evening they thought it just doesn't feel right that it's the very same hospital where Gemma died undertaking the investigation into how Gemma died. It just didn't sit well with us. It felt like it should be someone else. It felt like they're marking their own homework. Doesn't she have a right to have an independent investigation? And again I said yeah actually she does. In Article 2 of the European Convention in the Human Rights Act you have a right if you die in state custody or care to have a full and fearless investigation into what went wrong. And I could talk all night about moments like that with clients when they articulated to me the values that I had come to from a very academic and legal perspective and that in the end drives the work, drives my work, drives Liberty's work because this is the stuff of humanity. This is the stuff of if you care about this you have a capacity for compassion and if you're interested in it then you're interested in relationships of power. And I think what's very sad very often is that politicians mostly not exclusively played pretty fast and loosed with some of those principles and I don't think that they've met very many of these families and I don't think that they have spoken to them about why these rights are so important. And actually really unglamorous and boring. And when I first started this job lots of people used to ask me like what's your vision for human rights, what's your vision for Liberty, it's a real kind of NGO sector word vision. And I used to say and still do although I think funders maybe don't find it very inspiring that my vision for human rights is to make it like health and safety legislation. That it's not anything to really talk about very much that it's not something that we need to have arguments about. It's not something that needs to be on the front page of a newspaper because someone gets to stay here because they have a cat, which is a lie anyway. It's just what you need in any functioning democratic state. And just like I challenge anyone who calls health and safety legislation red tape or bureaucracy to ever work on a building site or live in a tower block. So to I challenge people who are critical of human rights to be in a situation very often marginalised, very often poor, very often demonised to live in that situation and not recognise really profoundly why human rights are important. So right now at this moment in this nation's history we are of course undergoing this enormous change, the biggest constitutional change since the glorious revolution. A shake up of our laws like no lawyer ever dreamt of and no lawyer can get their head around. And one of the things that I feel hopeful for and I think is incredibly important is that as part of that process we are able to have a very vibrant conversation about rights and freedoms and that we are able to make it very clear that just because we are leaving the EU and say liberty was neutral on the outcome of the referendum, this isn't about being Eurosceptic or a Eurofile, but that no one was voting to leave their human rights behind. That wasn't the terms of this vote and that an agenda to try and diminish human rights protections, an agenda for deregulation is one that is being, is a hijacked agenda, it's not a real agenda, it's not reflective of a democratic mandate. But of course Brexit is taking up a lot of oxygen, I don't know about you but it's sort of tiring and boring where we often to even talk about it because it's everywhere and the domestic agenda doesn't stop. You'd think it had because we don't read very much about the housing crisis or the crisis in our prisons and there is a crisis in our prisons or immigration detention or victims rights or all the things that two years ago were front and centre of every single political party and were pressing things to have on the legislative agenda. All of that has gone because Brexit now is everything. And one of the things that I think is really important and that if you go away thinking about anything tonight, think about the causes that you are no longer reading about. Think about the things that definitely haven't stopped since Brexit happened. And think about the tragedies that we barely think of. So Grenfell Tower, which I've alluded to, Liberty's office is not so far from Grenfell, I live not so far from Grenfell, grew up not so far from Grenfell and the burnt out monument of that tower block stands as a real icon of the inequalities that still run very deep in this country, not necessarily in this room, not necessarily in this university but people just like you. And it's very easy to think that human rights are for other people and that's very often what's at the heart of things like migrants not deserving human rights or prisoners not deserving human rights. But the reality is when you strip it all away we would do very well to remember that we are beneficiaries of these rights too. That you might hold a different passport or pray to a different God or live in a different postcode but that fundamentally your hopes and your fears are probably very, very similar to mine, very, very similar to the people who died in Grenfell Tower, very similar to the people who flee persecution and seek refuge in this country. And that I think is really fundamental if you want to hold on to your humanity in any time of change. And I think it's really fundamental to remind our elective representatives that that is what we demand of them as well and that they only earn our votes if they can demonstrate a capacity for compassion which I think has very often been lacking recently. So I talk about immigration because immigration for a long time has not really been the mainstay of big human rights organisations. I think like so many people migrants rights have been siloed. There's a really interesting moment, a great moment in liberty's history where liberty campaigned against 90 day detention which you may not remember you may be too young but after 9-11 when the rules of the game changed there was a proposal by the Labour government because of course this is any government, any government who is in power will do this stuff, it's not party political. There was a proposal by the Labour government to hold terror suspects without trial and without charge for 90 days and there was a big campaign about it, very successful campaign, with civil libertarians across the spectrum joining forces to stop this very, very regressive, very pernicious, dangerous policy, successfully stopped, great victory. It is interesting to me though that in this country, the only country in Europe, we detain immigrants indefinitely. Now the ask for us, for those who work on this issue, is to have a 28 day time limit on immigration detention. To be honest, if we were offered 90 days we would take it, you know, and we would be grateful for that, that would be so much better than where we are right now. And these are people detained in a very similar way, detained on the administrative say so of the government so it's the only type of detention in this country where you don't need any judicial authorisation. If you're in a police cell, if you go to prison, if you get put on a psychiatric ward, if you're in a care home because you have dementia, all of those forms of imprisonment require a judge signing off that you can be deprived of your liberty. If you are a migrant, you just need a politician, all in the name of immigration enforcement. And there are people in immigration detention and we detain 30,000 immigrants every year and no one is moved by statistics, but I think that's quite a moving one. That's a third of the prison population, it's huge. 30,000 people every year, often detained for months and sometimes detained for years. So I had clients who had been in immigration detention for three or four years, who had gone into detention, healthy young men and women, and who were broken by it, completely broken by it. So broken that by the end they couldn't be returned to their home country because they would require constant care from the NHS because their mental health had been wrecked by the experience of waiting to be released with no end point at all. And these removal centres are like prisons and I've been to many of them and you may have seen panorama documentaries about them and the various bits of investigative journalism that over the last couple of years has lifted the lid on these places. They are warehouses for immigrants, there are often six to a room, they have barbed wire all around them, you're not allowed a phone, you don't have internet access, you have segregation units, it's the same or very often worse than prisons. I did a lot of prison law and I did a lot of immigration detention law and very often when I was doing immigration detention cases I would find myself standing up in front of high court judges saying if only this person could have had medical treatment like he could have expected in a prison. If only, if only he could have had the same fair treatment when he was segregated like he would have had in a prison. You found yourself bizarrely holding up the prison system as a beacon of fairness compared to what immigration detainees are put through. And the biggest group of people in immigration detention are people who have claimed or are claiming asylum, there are victims of torture, there are victims of trafficking, there are victims of rape, there are children. In 2015 you may remember that the coalition government pledged to stop putting children in immigration detention but they didn't stop and last year 128 children were detained. One investigation report found someone in an immigration removal centre and very often this is what happened, they will be in the corner somewhere, never talking to anyone, not speaking English, not knowing what their rights are. They found someone who had been in immigration detention for nine years, which is longer than a sentence for murder. So the question is why do we tolerate it? This is the thing that always occurs to me. I go up and down the country, I go to party conferences, I speak to people all the time, I speak to right thinking, left leaning people who read the Guardian, who care about prisoners rights, who care about women's rights and who don't even know that we are detaining immigrants on this scale. And I think one of the answers, one of the reasons why we are allowing ourselves at best to turn a blind eye and I think that's the most generous way of putting this situation, one of the reasons we allow ourselves to do that is because very fundamentally we don't see migrants as people like us who have the same rights as us. One of the indicators of this, I think, is a government policy called the Hostile Environment Policy and that, whenever I say it, I always think it sounds like a campaign name but it's called, the government called it the Hostile Environment Policy, they called it that in 2012. And the purpose of the Hostile Environment Policy is to set up as many structures as you can, legal, rhetorical, policy-based, to make it impossible for undocumented migrants to live in this country. Now of course you might agree, you might say, I don't want undocumented migrants in this country, I want them gone and therefore they should face some kind of system to remove them. The problem with that argument of course is this system is pretty undignified and pretty disrespectful, so it's ugly, immigration enforcement in this country is pretty ugly, but of course the wider problem is that just by looking at someone you can't tell whether they're an undocumented migrant. And so what actually happens is that these are policies that demonise and marginalise and isolate anyone who doesn't look British or sound British or hold British values, whatever they mean, no one's ever been able to define them. So what we have now, as I say, is a whole raft of policies and those are policies which bring the border further and further in country and co-op ordinary citizens to do border enforcement. So for example, there are now secret, and I say secret because they literally were done behind closed doors, exposed only through Freedom of Information Act requests, secret deals between government departments requiring data sharing in the name of immigration enforcement. So what that means is that the Department of Education now have a memorandum of understanding with the Home Office which says that if it comes to their attention that they have a foreign child in their classroom, they must pass that child's data to the Home Office. The census now, the school census, has a question on nationality for the first time and that the data gathered on nationality goes straight to the Home Office. The effect, some people are being unintentionally caught up in immigration enforcement and some people are keeping their kids away from school because they're so frightened of being caught up in that web. The same thing is happening with landlords who are now required to only let their properties to legal immigrants. Again, of course, you can imagine what's happening if you don't even have an English-sounding name, you don't even get to come and look round the house, bearing in mind that this is a country where we still have big problems with racism and this is not making it any better. If you are a doctor or a nurse or a midwife, you now have to share nationality data about your patients. The first time that we have an institutionalised breach of patient doctor confidentiality, if you are a lawyer, they are exploring options for sharing data on your client's nationality. Yesterday, a new provision was brought into force which requires people at the beginning of their trial in a magistrates court to declare their nationality at the beginning of their trial. You may be aware of the David Lambie review which came out a couple of months ago which found that our justice system is still very inherently racist, that outcomes for anyone of colour are really, really bad across the system. The idea that you would now have to stand up in court and in front of a judge say that you are not from the UK before you've been tried, what that will do to fair trials, to access to justice, to self-incrimination, of course, if you're being tried for an immigration offence, is pretty unthinkable. And that's a change that came in through secondary legislation that no one really noticed because it was buried and we only realised when magistrates got a letter yesterday rolling it out. So there are shocking things that are parts of this hostile environment policy. If a police officer stops you in the street, it's a criminal offence not to declare your nationality. There are other countries in other times where these kinds of policies indicated something very troubling indeed about the state of the society that they were living in. And one of the most telling moments of all was after the EU referendum when you'll probably remember that there was a spike in hate crime. Hate crime rose by almost 100% and overwhelmingly those hate crimes were against people from BAME communities. We don't record hate crime based on nationality, there's no such thing as xenophobic hate crime in this country. So when they're recorded as race hate crime we don't know whether that's because someone thought well that's a black person and I'm going to attack them or whether someone thought that's a foreign person and I'm going to attack them. Anyway, it rose by 100% and Amber Rudd, the Home Secretary, was compelled to put out a statement condemning the violence. And in her statement she said, I condemn the hostile environment that migrants and people of other nationalities are facing on our streets and I thought, you reap what you sow, you do not get to be a government that has a hostile environment policy and then when that trickles down and when people start feeling like they can act on their worst impulses you do not get to be the one that condemns the hostile environment on our streets. So next year we will have an immigration bill because one of the things that has to happen because of Brexit is we have to rewrite in large part our immigration system. The government already are planning to make that immigration bill very narrowly drawn so that it can't be amended with any ease. And that's a tale as old as time in politics. But what this means is that there is an opportunity to reset the conversation around immigration. There is an opportunity to do a campaign which Liberty will be doing to put a time limit on immigration detention to dismantle the hostile environment policies and to advocate whatever you think about the number of people that should be allowed into this country to advocate for policies which are humane and compassionate and fair. Going back to that very simple principle that I started with, that everybody is equal and has a right to be treated with dignity and respect. So that's, I think, a kernel of hope. I think there really is a moment here where we might be able to affect some change. In the last election all the political parties except the Conservative Party had in their manifestos putting a time limit on immigration detention. There is some groundswell in Parliament on this issue and I think the greater the public groundswell the more chance there is of achieving change because what we find is if you can turn up the volume outside Westminster MPs and MPs right now who are feeling very vulnerable indeed, they will feel the heat and they will be more compelled to make change. So, as I say, despite the bleakness and whenever I talk I'm always talking about bleak things. There's not a lot of good stories in human rights. But despite that, I do think there is reason. We've had 18 months of people waking up a little bit and we have next year when there is real possibility of achieving some real change on these issues. And so what I would urge you to do, whether you like rules or don't, is put your head above the parapet to defend the ones that keep people safe and put your head above the parapet to challenge the ones that make us unsafe and divided. Join something, join Liberty, join Amnesty, join a political party, join a local group, do whatever it is that activism means to you because this is a moment and I think for young people in particular this is a moment when you get to set the agenda for what this country should be like and your votes really count because politicians are very anxious indeed right now and they are hungry for young people and make them work for it. Vote with your feet, vote with your voice and hold them to account every single step of the way or join an organisation that can do that in your name. Thank you.