My Lords, on Monday 29 July this year, just before 11.50 am, police officers were called to a property in Southport, where children attending a dance school had been appallingly and ferociously attacked by a man with a knife. Three of the children—Elsie Dot Stancombe, Alice Dasilva Aguiar and Bebe King —died. Many others sustained terrible injuries, and a whole community and many families were devastated and traumatised.
Understandably, horror and anguish convulsed not just Southport but the whole country. Rumours quickly circulated on the internet that the man to blame for this attack was an asylum seeker who had arrived in the UK illegally and was on the MI6 watch-list. This was not true. As a reporter put it a few days later, once lit, the torch paper of disinformation burned quickly. Although this rumour was quickly debunked, in the days that followed, as we know, riots broke out all over our country.
In Rotherham, close to my diocese, a hotel housing migrants was set alight. In France, the Libération newspaper called Britain a “Disunited Kingdom”. What do we make of this? How do we respond? What does it tell us about ourselves? I hope that this debate will be an opportunity to reflect on these things and on our common identity, of which our communities and institutions are such a vital part. I am very grateful to the usual channels for allowing us on these Benches to have this debate and to give this important issue space before your Lordships’ House.
The work needed to build stronger, more supportive and more socially cohesive communities must involve us all. Although the summer’s riots were fuelled by hideous extremist rhetoric, which came from mysterious places online, what happened took place on our streets and in our communities. While there were extremist forces at play, we also need to face the uncomfortable truth that, although the rhetoric was extreme, many of the people involved in the riots were not. We know from the courts that more than half of those charged with offences such as violent disorder came from the country’s most deprived 20% of neighbourhoods. This means places with the worst health outcomes, with lower levels of qualifications, where employment is at its lowest and where the impacts of austerity, the pandemic, a cost of living crisis and rising inflation have hit hardest, intensifying those feelings of being left behind. That was made all the worse by social media’s wildfire of disinformation, and has been fed by years of hard and soft extremist rhetoric.
I recognise and praise the years of important work done by reviews carried out by Dame Sara Khan, the noble Baroness, Lady Casey, and the noble Lord, Lord Walney, as well as the ongoing work being carried out by many organisations, including the Together Coalition, British Future, Belong and many more. On policy, there is much expertise to draw on, and as such, many of the policy elements are known, but the deterioration of public services is a causal factor in the ignition of violence over the summer, and their revitalisation is essential reparative work.
My Lords, I do not know what the odds would be for someone being asked to speak immediately after an Archbishop on two successive days, but here am I, with a mood change from yesterday to today. Yesterday was perhaps elegiac and today might even risk being euphoric—we will have to see about that.
I am delighted to have the opportunity to be here and to contribute to this important debate, for which I thank the most reverend Primate. As I stand here, behind and above the Bishops, I am reminded that on Friday morning debates like this—accustomed as I have been to sitting on the other side of the House where I can look them in the eye—I always want to test the biblical knowledge of the Bishops. I begin, therefore, in sermonic mood, although I promise that I will soon release you from the captivity of that mood. This is really to challenge the Bishops.
The Bishops will know pretty well the opening verse of chapter 13 of the Epistle to the Hebrews. They will probably know it in the King James version—I see one or two of them who might just be in touch with something more modern—but, in the Greek, the word “philadelphia” appears in that first verse: brotherly love. If ever there were one word to encapsulate what I think is the driving force behind and the hoped-for outcome of this debate, philadelphia might be it. Because we like philadelphia and can wed our thoughts to teasing out meanings from that word, we tend to stop short and spend our time luxuriating in whatever philadelphia might be made to mean. But if you go on in the verse, you will find another Greek word, and it is equally important. It is “philoxenia”, which is a love of strangers. That complementarity of ideas seems to me to bring to our attention dimensions of the subject we are debating which it is important not to forget.
At the moment, I am prepossessed every working hour with preparing for meetings that I will be at on Monday, in Paris. I am a member of the delegation from this Parliament to the Council of Europe. I sit on its migration committee. Since I have been on it, we have been taxed with movements in the interpretation of the United Nations convention on refugees that have embraced, shall we say, wide extremes. The erosion of the original ideals of the convention have preoccupied the migration committee. It has been rather difficult for me, as a Labour member, sitting through meetings of the migration committee when the Conservative Government were putting through this House three Acts of Parliament that were at odds, I felt, with the lofty ideals of the convention, but that is not where I want to dwell.
My Lords, it is a daunting privilege to follow both an Archbishop and a Methodist preacher, but I participate in this debate because it is one of the few occasions in the year when we can hope to hear from the Lords spiritual—I welcome in particular the most reverend Primate’s contribution—some spiritual guidance based on the gospels, rather than on the Labour Party manifesto and the latest progressive critique of the last Government.
I hope to achieve a positive response and some answers from the Lords spiritual to the sort of questions that engage me as both a Christian and a Conservative, which are rarely addressed because it is assumed—I hope to challenge this, but not in an aggressive way—that if you are a Conservative you cannot be a Christian, and if you are a Christian you cannot be a Conservative. I want to think particularly about the political implications, if any, of our Lord’s injunction to love our neighbour as ourselves. When Christ asked that question, “Who is my neighbour?”, he told us the parable of the Samaritan. I do not need to repeat it, but we can all agree that one thing that shows is that there can be no discrimination between Samaritan and Jew, between Christian and Muslim, between any different people, on the basis of their colour. That is a clear lesson of that parable, but some conclude that our obligations must therefore extend to the whole world, and that our job to love our neighbour as ourselves means that we must love everybody throughout the world equally. Dickens parodied that in Bleak House, in a chapter on telescopic philanthropy, in which he had the characters Mrs Jellyby, who devoted herself to the Tockahoopo Indians, and Mrs Pardiggle, whose “rapacious benevolence” was directed towards the tribes of the Borrioboola-Gha in Africa, to the detriment of the people of their own country and even their own families.
At the other extreme are those who interpret the parable as meaning only that we should help those we personally come in contact with, and that if we meet someone wounded by the wayside we should help them, especially if others are passing by. But even in a community where everybody was motivated by genuine, generous, Christian charity, leaving that philanthropy and charity to anarchically express themselves would mean that some people get a lot of help and others get no help.
I really like the idea of speaking in this debate about community. I will start with a model that I invented and applied in a city—a town, actually, because it does not have a cathedral—in 2018. I had a conference in this town with the Big Issue and a number of other people, and we went and did something which we called an MCM, a “mercenary community model”. It was completely mercenary: there was nothing about love, kindness or community; it was all about mercenary concerns.
What did we do? We went to this town, which was stricken at the time because it had run into problems—I think the local government had been bankrupt or almost bankrupt. We chose the town randomly. We called the conference, got the biggest employer and other people to pay for part of the conference, and we did something mercenary. One of the things we did was contact some estate agents who had buy-to-lets—I think one had 150 of them. Every month, he had to cut the grass or pay someone to do it, and he had to do all sorts of other things: repair fences, fix windows and all that. We went to him and said, “We’re going to get you to buy the services from a local housing association who are trying to expand the number of their tenants who work”. I do not know whether noble Lords know but, on average, a housing association will have 70% of its tenants unemployed or economically inactive. This housing association wanted to expand its grass services and repair services and to take on staff from the people who were its tenants. Brilliant—we put somebody who had a social mission with somebody who wanted to look good. And, let us be honest: if anybody really needs to be looking good today, it is an estate agent.
We went to the local NHS. I do not know whether they all have this, but this one had this person—it is normally a doctor—who was responsible for social relationships in the community. We said to them, “You know what? There’s a bakery that employs largely women who have had many disasters in life: they’ve married the wrong guy, been beaten and thrown out, all sorts of things like that. They may have drink or drug problems”. This was a social bakery. We said to the NHS, “Wouldn’t it be a good thing if you bought your bread from them?” So it did: it bought nine thousand loaves a month. We did a number of things like that. I am sorry: this may sound as though I am making a joke—I am a devout ex-Catholic, so maybe I am allowed to say this —but I did not go there and say, “Isn’t it lovely”, and, “Let’s be nice to each other”; I kept looking for ways in which I could award people what I called a “social echo”.
My Lords, I am delighted to speak in this debate, which always has a particularly important place in the calendar. I look back fondly at our debate this time last year on families and the really wonderful work that the outgoing most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury did on Love Matters, helping people accept families as they are in the present world. These are not always wonderful—we remember RD Laing and the schizophrenogenic mother—but, for the most part, families are the building block of society. That seems to me to be the right place then to move into social cohesion, such a critical issue.
I am alienated by the Library briefing referring to the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe to give me my definition of social cohesion. Social cohesion goes back to Durkheim, the French sociologist and founder of sociology, 150 years ago; to Max Weber and Karl Marx trying to understand how societies would operate in the face of declining social and religious factors and the change in the workplace. They talked about social cohesion and the outfall of suicide, delinquency and deviance if social integration was not properly respected. Of course, in today’s world, social cohesion is even more difficult.
One reason I became Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, when my boss had asked me to take a much chunkier department, was because my observation, as a social scientist, was that the framework that held people together was increasingly disintegrating. People were held together by the docks, the steelworks, the mines: that was the drumbeat of communities. In a world where people work from home, those common causes are no longer there, and it is the DCMS responsibilities that hold people together. Going to the Last Night of the Proms is an act of social cohesion. Going to the cup final at Wembley is an act of social cohesion: people are there together, regardless of their class, their background and so on. Museums, sport and galleries are all ways of creating social cohesion in a world where it is not always the Church that provides that cohesion. I regret that.
My Lords, I declare my interests as set out in the register, particularly as a commissioner on the National Preparedness Commission. I am glad to be taking part in this debate today. It is a privilege to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Bottomley, and I look forward to the maiden speech of the noble Lord, Lord Sharma, who has much to offer this House. I have the privilege of being Bishop of London, and I can assure the noble Lord, Lord Lilley, that London is full of great diversity of political views. I extend an invitation to him to come and see where we wrestle with some of our Christian faith and politics.
The riots over the summer were a wake-up call to us all to prioritise community cohesion. There is much to be said about this, and I echo much of what my friend the most reverend Primate has already said. I am going to focus my remarks on two issues which are central to this topic but are particularly related to health, although they have a much wider application, and those two topics are trust and partnership.
First, on trust, as the most reverend Primate indicated, we have much to do to improve trust within the Church of England. Not least, we must ensure we have a greater survivor focus and introduce independent safeguarding and mandatory reporting. I join my friend the most reverend Primate in apologising for the shocking failures that the Makin report highlighted.
Moving wider, the pandemic was a world-changing event that impacted on all of us differently, but I am sure that everyone in your Lordships’ House was horrified by the high death rate. We know that those from ethnic communities were more likely to have caught Covid, to have been hospitalised and to have died from it. According to ONS data, the Bangladeshi population faced a death rate five times higher than the white British population. The Pakistani population’s rate was three times higher. Even within these brutal statistics, we cannot properly communicate the extreme and severe loss that some communities experienced. We know that there were unequal health outcomes before Covid, but in some ways Covid demonstrated the scale of them.
My Lords, it is an honour and a privilege to speak for the first time in your Lordships’ House, and it is a pleasure to follow the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of London. I start by thanking your Lordships for the incredibly kind welcome that I have received. I have genuinely felt that I have been enveloped in a blanket of good will, and I sincerely hope that that is going to continue for some time. My supporters at my introduction, the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, and my noble friend Lord Gascoigne have offered wise counsel over the past few weeks. I also want to put on record my thanks to all the House staff for all the support they have given over the past few weeks, particularly the doorkeepers, who have quickly worked out that I am not going to win any prizes in an orienteering competition and will gently point me in the right direction when I am going down the wrong corridor.
I know that convention dictates that new Members speak a little bit about their own background, but I hope your Lordships will forgive me if I keep that bit mercifully short because I want get to on to the substance of this debate—as they say in government, I will get into the detail of that in due course during my time here. To summarise, 14 and half years ago, I arrived in the Commons after a career in investment banking, proudly representing a constituency in my hometown of Reading. I served in a range of junior Minister roles before I entered the Cabinet as Secretary of State for International Development and then Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy and subsequently as president of COP 26, the UN climate change conference in Glasgow. I can tell noble Lords that they were all really quite interesting perches from which to observe an incredibly tumultuous few years over the past few decades.
Let me turn to today’s debate. As other noble Lords have noted, we are living through an era of increasing uncertainty and change. One of the biggest changes the world is facing, with profound impacts for social cohesion, is climate change. As I speak on this subject, I refer your Lordships to my entry in the register of interests. In particular, I serve as co-chair of the Rockefeller Foundation’s climate advisory council and I am an adviser to two finance firms: SEB and EQT.
My Lords, I welcome my noble friend and congratulate him on his maiden speech. He has done so much in 14 and a half years, serving as a Member of Parliament and as a Minister and Secretary of State. Above all, as president of COP 26, he did the impossible, uniting nearly 200 countries to commit to the Glasgow climate plan. His experience and dedication will be invaluable in this place. I look forward to his future contributions and the impact that he will undoubtedly have on our thinking, particularly on climate change. I sincerely hope that the blanket of good will does not cool down in the meantime.
I declare my interest as a board member of More in Common. I welcome this vital debate, as social cohesion matters. It is not merely an abstract ideal; it is the very fabric of our national unity and resilience. It embodies our ability to pull together, rely on one another and foster a stable and prosperous society. Today, we face unprecedented pressures on social cohesion. According to research by More in Common, Britons increasingly feel that the United Kingdom is divided. Since January, the proportion of people who describe the United Kingdom as divided has increased from 57% to 78%. The main divisions people identify are between the rich and poor, between immigrants and those born in the United Kingdom, and between left and right.
Britons view the UK as atomised and individualistic. When asked to describe the sense of solidarity in the UK, 71% selected “It’s everyone for themselves” while 29% said “We’re all in this together”. Furthermore, 43% believe the United Kingdom is more divided now than at any time in their lifetime. Three-quarters of Britons are concerned about racism, Islamic extremism, far-right extremism and religious divisions. A broad majority are also concerned about anti-Semitism, at 62%, and Islamophobia, at 71%.
From geopolitical turmoil and global pandemics to economic crises and technological innovation, including migration, our societal bonds are being tested like never before. This reality demands our attention and action. I argue that neither the right nor the left of the political spectrum has all the answers. The centre might. That is where we must seek common ground before the sense of division and fragmentation is entirely hijacked by those who claim to be the only ones to understand British people and the only ones who can speak for them.
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Education, housing availability, employment and the state of the health service have all been further impacted by the cost of living crisis, and the well-being of communities and individuals is closely tied up with them. The housing crisis and unemployment, among other things, as we know, are most pronounced for young people, which is so significant when we consider issues of civic engagement. One in five councils is facing bankruptcy, which is an extraordinary challenge, given that they are such critical local agents for cohesion at a time when all our communities are changing.
The impact of the pandemic on each of these things was unprecedented, and I hope that noble Lords with expertise will explore this further. It gives me no delight to say that amidst all the public service challenges, the aftermath of Covid has put a strain on trust—and trust is critical; it is not an unlimited resource.
Perhaps most important of all is that we are living in an increasingly digitised world. When the pandemic struck, most of our gatherings and meetings went online. That was an important lifeline for us all at the time, but as a result, the changes in how we were already beginning to understand and relate to each other in a digital world accelerated. Now, there is an increasing reliance on AI and automated decision-making, despite a lack of ability to regulate sufficiently the technology we depend on so much. This cannot continue. The rise of misinformation on social media is undermining trust in democracy itself and in the rule of law. The Khan review found that freedom-restricting harassment is on the rise, and while the online world offers us so much, we have serious work to do to mitigate the impacts it will continue to have on our hearts, our relationships and our mental health.
Why should platforms be allowed to continue to call themselves platforms? We are in danger of losing the philosophical debate, for surely, they are public spaces and should be regulated accordingly, especially those where children are likely to go. Of course, I recognise, support and have worked in this House for the things we are seeing in the Online Safety Act, but more is needed.
All these things shape our relationships with one another and with the world around us. According to this year’s Woolf Institute diversity study, one in 10 people in England and Wales do not know anyone well enough in their local area to ask them a favour. We know the names—well, maybe not all of us here, but some of us —of those who live in Coronation Street or Albert Square, but we do not know the names of our own neighbours. This is a tragedy, for the very best of British history is built on neighbourliness, and the loss of what is sometimes called “the economy of favours” is one we should all feel deeply: a culture where we look out for one another, not because we are told to but because it would never occur to us to do differently. But these actions, which build cohesion, flow from values that need to be taught and cherished.
From a Christian point of view, I would therefore dare to add that values are best protected and communicated by beliefs, customs, rituals and practices: the very things that are the lifeblood of faith communities. The soft power, the stuff of social capital that builds communities, is what might be measured by the social fabric index. This takes into account a range of measures, including employment rates and civic infrastructure. As I have already indicated, reports tell us that 23 out of the 27 places that experienced disorder last summer had a well below median social fabric score. We therefore face the challenge of healing and rebuilding. Many expert reports and reviews call on the Government to work on a social cohesion strategy. I look forward to hearing from the Minister about the Government’s thoughts and plans, especially on a cross-departmental national social cohesion strategy, and I welcome the inquiry on community cohesion by the Women and Equalities Committee recently announced in the other place.
Of course, all this is related to the policy areas I have mentioned. Without equitable access to housing, education and healthcare, social cohesion will not happen; nor will we be able to preserve a democracy in which everyone participates. Yet fewer than half of 18 to 24 year-olds exercised their right to vote in the last election, compared to three-quarters of people aged 65 and above.
Across the globe, many other democracies face fragmentation, driven by increasing disillusionment and division. Time series data in the UK shows that trust in government has decreased over the last four decades, alongside continuing low voter turnout and decreasing confidence in political parties and, of course, other institutions, not least the Church. Participation in civic life is therefore essential, and it is clear that if someone does not feel they have a stake in the governance of where they are, they will not engage. I believe that one part of the solution to this is devolution. I am therefore thankful for the work of successive Governments to make this happen.
I recently had a very substantial cooked breakfast—no kippers, unfortunately, but it was a very good breakfast—with the recently elected mayor of the York and North Yorkshire Combined Authority, the first of these new bodies to combine rural and urban communities. What did we speak about? We spoke about values: where they come from, how they are nurtured, what happens when you lose them and how you get them back; and how it is shared values, shared story, shared belonging, and belief in a shared future that create cohesion and well-being across what can so easily seem to be insuperable difference.
These things are often best nurtured at a more local level, where people have a greater stake in the decisions that affect their lives. We need to be clear about this. Difference is a gift. We know from our observation of the natural world that it is biodiversity that creates mutual flourishing and the lack of diversity that can destroy the whole system. Our society is growing in diversity, especially ethnically and religiously, and we must embrace, celebrate and be curious about our differences, not scared of them. We will better understand those differences through governance at the local level, and this could be taken more seriously by government.
Having got this far through much my speech without really mentioning God, let me say again that these values, not least the values around our belonging to one another and the mutual responsibilities that go with it, are rooted in the Jewish and Christian scriptures that have formed so much of our national understanding, including the rule of law and the inherent and equal value of each person under the law.
The opening word of the Lord’s Prayer, which some of us say each time we come to this Chamber, is “our”, not “my”. Everything else follows. I might add that, in the New Testament, Jesus never asks us to love everyone. Loving everyone is sufficiently abstract and therefore relatively easy to do. Jesus asks us to love our neighbour. What that means is to love that very particular person who is sitting next to you—or perhaps in this place I should say opposite you—right now. Any vision of cohesion and well-being that is about the security of self at the expense of neighbour is not only insufficient for flourishing but doomed to miserable failure and economic stagnation, for we belong to one another in all our glorious diversity.
The local parish church and other faith communities provide a presence in every neighbourhood. The particular genius of the parish church and the parish system is that it preserves and communicates meaning, value and belonging in places where people can serve and be served, and discover fresh perspectives on what it is to be human and to be a human community.
In its report published this week, Theos notes that owing to their deep connection to and understanding of place, parish churches were central to the emergency response to the riots. The fruit of their relational work is seen, of course, in other faith communities. With others, the Church of England must continue to build and nurture these connections. This is happening up and down the country. I am inspired by, for instance, the peace walk that took place after the riots in Sunderland, the interfaith friendship that is happening in Smethwick, and the things I am learning from Muslim and Jewish groups that I work with in York.
“Social cohesion” is almost a verb: it is a process—something we work on and must continue to work on—and it requires active participation from us all. I hope experts and those with experience of interfaith work in the Room will be sharing their thoughts in this debate. It is incumbent on us in this place to articulate a vision of what it means to belong to one another, to build social cohesion and to nurture the values that will sustain us. I look forward to listening deeply to the experiences, contributions and examples of others.
Let me be clear: it is not just faith communities that shape this. There are so many community groups and others who give themselves to serving and building community. I am extremely grateful to everyone who has come today, on a Friday, to participate in this debate. I particularly look forward to hearing the maiden speech of the noble Lord, Lord Sharma, and to draw on his experience of the global factors at work, including climate change. If the generations growing up feel that there is no future for the planet, how on earth will they feel they have a future in their local community?
Finally, with all that has been happening in the Church of England in recent weeks, I felt that I should end on a more sobering note. Unless institutions are safe spaces for children, families and vulnerable adults, the things that we all long for and believe in will not come to pass. It is often said of government that security and safety is the first priority. The recently published Makin review has again revealed shocking failures within the Church of England to safeguard children, and, in this case, vulnerable young adults. I pay tribute to the victims and survivors who came forward to disclose the horrors that they experienced. My heart goes out to them and I apologise for these shameful failings. Moreover, I pledge myself to work purposefully for independent scrutiny of safeguarding in the Church of England and greater operational independence. These are the next steps that we must take, and we have much to learn from others.
I hope that this debate will be an opportunity for all of us to reflect, discuss and explore policy, to offer what we can as representatives of different places and different perspectives, to commit ourselves and to work across this Parliament to build trust and hope and, in so doing, build socially cohesive communities and institutions. I beg to move.
The committee has given me the supreme honour of chairing one of its sub-committees. For a humble Methodist minister to be the chairman of a sub-committee is probably as high as it gets. I have fought very hard, since achieving that summit, to win time on the agendas of migration committees for the considerations of the sub-committee to be adequately dealt with.
What is the sub-committee? It is for diasporas and integration, which I think bears particularly on the issues before us today. I have worked with diasporas in this country for decades—Bangladeshi, Zimbabwean, Fijian, Ghanaian and many others. I belong to a diaspora: the Welsh on Gray’s Inn Road. I have won an hour on Monday—just one hour. I am hoping to persuade people that this subject deserves adequate attention and that we move from looking at the edges of the convention that we have all been worried about to the positive role that diasporas might play in shaping communities, as well as being places where people can gather for safety, cultural identity or whatever it is. I have prepared a paper that we will discuss on Monday with that in mind.
I am sure noble Lords will all want to know about the byzantine ways in which the Council of Europe does its work—I can see the look of longing on their faces. If I win enough signatures for the proposal I put forward on Monday, it will then go to the migration committee itself, where I will again have to win the arguments and support before it agrees to send it on to the parliamentary assembly in its full plenary body later in the process. I am rather hoping I can catch a mood here, because all my work with ethnic-minority groupings and diasporas suggests that they can play a terrific role positively to reshape the way we think about the multicultural society that we live in.
They are not just residual bodies where people can find safety, community and all the rest of it—a kind of passive receptivity—but agents for change in society at large. They can bring points of view to the attention of a larger society; they can shape local communities; they can add to the thinking of the rest of us. That is my hope, but I have to contend with two radically opposed understandings of multiculturalism. I have heard the term used in two diametrically opposite ways.
First is the idea that multicultural means there are all these microscopic bodies that we call diasporas, and they sometimes put their own objectives at the expense of others and form separate entities within the larger community. We do not want to live in a country with that kind of episodic way of looking at the way we organise ourselves. The other way is to glory in multiculturalism, which does not satisfy itself with one kind of cultural entity. It is an entity that can be enriched, receive innovation and stir the imagination for greater and more glorious things that we could all enjoy, if only we found the way to release the diaspora from looking inwards to looking outwards. There is already a lot of that happening. I am working with the Catholic agency for development, which is doing some map-making for diasporas, and I want to put all this thinking on to an evidence base.
Think of me on Monday. I now leave the debate for others to take further, but I have rather enjoyed this moment that started with the Bishops, and I have looked at the lowering of attention among the rest of your Lordships as the minutes have passed by.
The Church itself recognised at an early stage that it had to create an embryonic welfare state. It pooled resources and helped both its own members and others in the society around it. The earliest Church, in due course, became a sort of welfare state through the churches and the monasteries. Then, after the abolition of the monasteries, the state began to take over with the Poor Law and, ultimately, the modern welfare state. As a result, we have moved a long way from the original Samaritan, who acted voluntarily. We, as members of the welfare state, contribute compulsorily. The Samaritan did not say, “Oh, there is someone in need. I will pluck some money out of the Levite’s wallet and some out of the priest’s wallet and give it to him and claim virtue”. He did it himself with his own means. We have to participate in the welfare state, and we cannot attribute to the welfare state the same moral virtue as we do to the Samaritan. If we did, I would be the most generous person in this place, because as Secretary of State for Social Security I distributed £200 billion of your money, in modern money, to the poor, the needy and so on. But it was not my virtue: I was simply doing what society had decided.
Ultimately, the welfare state exists; we agree to do that, with compulsion on ourselves to contribute, because of a sense of national solidarity. Here, I think we get to some questions that are often ignored. Most of us feel a hierarchy of obligation: to our family, to our immediate friends, then to our nation—of course there is an obligation to people outside our nation, but it is primarily to our nation. I ask the Benches opposite this: is that okay? Is it reasonable that we have a hierarchy of obligation, feel more obligation to those in our own country than to those in others, and feel that other countries should themselves have their welfare states and look after their own people according to the means they have?
Well, I suggest that we have to, because we cannot be open to the whole world; we cannot because our welfare level is greater than the norm, or median, income in many of the countries in the third world. My first career was working in developing countries on aid and development programmes, and the level of incomes then was dramatically below what people on welfare in this country got—so we cannot, for that reason.
Anyway, if we do, to the extent that we do, we find that generous-minded people in this House, who all have their own homes, start allocating housing that would have gone to people on the housing list to people from abroad. That is why there is resentment if there is an excessive influx from abroad—and not illegally: I mean, over the last 18 months, we have allowed a net inflow into this country of the population of Birmingham. Where are we going to build another Birmingham before we can build a single extra house for the people already here? We rarely hear about that from those who find any criticism of mass migration to be improper.
That raises the question: should we accept anybody who manages to get here? It is apparently legitimate that we try to stop them getting here—we try to stop the boats and smash the gangs, and no one has ever criticised Starmer for wanting to do that, but it is a bit odd that, when people manage to get here nonetheless, they are then effectively awarded prizes, very often at the cost of the least well-off in this country. Matthew Parris equated it to a rugby match: you can try to stop people getting across the line, but as soon as they get across the line and touch down, they are granted the prize of five points and can try to convert it into a goal. That is a funny business.
Anyway, it is always the least poor who get here. When I worked in Africa and Asia, none of the poor people I was working among ever talked of the possibility of coming to Europe: it was beyond their comprehension, the costs of travel were so much greater, and the knowledge through media was so much less that they did not. Now, the people who do get here are those who have access to a few thousand pounds, perhaps £10,000, which is an enormous amount of money in those countries—and we are saying, “Oh, well, we’re generous. We’ll allow them to stay. We mustn’t try to stop them”. I simply ask the question: why is it reasonable to try to prevent them coming here but not fair to try to deter them from coming here, as we did through the Rwanda programme?
There are lots of issues that we—and I—have to wrestle with, and I would like the bishops occasionally to wrestle with them. Is it reasonable that we have national solidarity or is that an evil and wicked thing? Is it reasonable that we give priority to the poor in our own country while recognising that charity, although it begins at home, does not end at home? We may have to offer help to countries that are overwhelmed by some disaster, but then, normally, we should expect people in other countries to look after themselves and our duty is to the poor, needy and vulnerable in our own community.
What happened when Covid came was that we had managed to stitch together a community. I even produced a magazine for it, which I called Darning Street—sewing together the community. When Covid came, we had managed to do this, we had already laid the ground and done the work for old people who were on the edge of society, so to speak, and needed food. We knew who was in the community, and it all started from a mercenary desire to get people together and look good. I really believe in the power of getting people to look good. If Rio Tinto-Zinc wants to come and give me £5 million to spend for the benefit of the most disfranchised people in Britain, I am going to make them look good. That is how I got my money. I got the money to start the Big Issue from a large multinational company called the Body Shop. I went into business to make it look good, that is where I am.
I want some more grown-up thinking. I want to see Social Echo reformed. The problem with Social Echo, the reason it fell to pieces, was because it was all based on personalities, and if you change a few personalities, you fall to pieces. I have come just to give noble Lords an optimistic view of how we could rebuild communities if we started looking at who is in the community and what business functions in the community. Rather than a situation where you knock on someone’s door because you want to get a few bob from them to build something or other, what we really need is to find a way for people to trade with each other and by trading with each other, transform the community and build a better community.
There was a time when political parties created social cohesion. Anybody who went to my constituency, when I was first an MP, joined the Tory party not because they were Tories but because they would meet nice people. I know that it was the same in a lot of Labour constituencies, but it is not like that any more. The work of the Church, and all faith groups, is enormously important because it gives meaning to life, it helps the needy, it helps the lonely and it helps people through the life cycle. The great thing about faith groups—religious, Muslim, Hindu, Christian—is that you celebrate birth, you celebrate adolescence, you celebrate marriage and you prepare for death. This is how we create communities that care for each other and understand each other. It was shocking, the most reverend Primate’s comment about people who are so obsessed with being online, they do not have a friend. How often do we see that with children? Their friends are their online friends. How dangerous and sinister is that?
I want to talk about this new development, articulated by Dame Sara Khan as “freedom-restricting harassment”. That is a rather fancy name, but we see it in the cancel culture in schools and universities—the idea that people are not free to speak the truth as they see it. The joy of the House of Lords is that we cannot be intimidated; we can say what we like without even having to be afraid of our constituents getting at us afterwards, as those who have been in the Commons will understand. I have spent many years in universities, as have many, and my message to graduates getting their degree is always, “University is the place where you have created your values, you decided who you are. It is not just about facts and knowledge, it is about wisdom, trust, values and what you believe to be right for the future”. The fact that our universities are particularly international in nature is all the more important, because the stranger factor is so sinister and dangerous, but if you have learned together, you work together and understand different cultures—how important that is for the economy.
Those of us who are followers of McKinsey will recognise that diversity is one of the critical factors in successful businesses. I applaud employers and I think we should say more about them in terms of social cohesion, and the work they are doing on diversity and inclusion. It sounds very woke but it really matters. Can you be yourself at work? Can you be the best possible person you can be? Can you give 110% of your effort? Because if you are feeling insecure about being of a different ethnic group, sexual orientation or whatever, you are not able, you are not liberated, to do the best you can in your economic enterprise.
How much more important is this now too, with all this working from home, which I have viscerally opposed? Except for women, or men, with childcare purposes, I will not believe that working from home is a healthy thing to do. We are social people. We need to go to work. Young people need to go to work to see grumpy old women like me at work, and grumpy old people like me need to see young people who will explain to them about TikTok. This is how we share values and how we change. The sooner we move away from thinking that working from home is a wonderful thing, I shall be delighted. I accept that it has transformed life for many women, and I will allow it there, but otherwise nothing will convince me.
On democracy, the most reverend Primate made really serious comments about people failing to vote, their alienation and disinterest. I get very angry when I hear people say, “All politicians are in it for themselves”. If you want to do it for £80,000 a year or whatever it is, working seven days a week, you try. I meet a lot of people in the business world who sneer at politicians, and that really winds me up big time, but there is an issue about the effect of social media. This is familiar. When we all went to political meetings when we were young—long ago—people would argue and debate. You would never leave a political meeting thinking it was 10-0 or 8-2, everything was divided, but social media is about assertion. There are no facts, no evidence, no logic; there is assertion, and this vulgarises and polarises debate.
I commend the most reverend Primate particularly on his presidential address at the York Diocesan Synod last March. He quoted Jonathan Sacks, with whom I used to work a lot, talking about the temptation for religious leaders to be confrontational, like politicians. He said, “I am trying to resist this temptation, please pray for me. And please resist it yourself”. He also said that with this divisive mindset:
“Choices must be set out as stark divisions. Not to condemn is to condone … A prophet hears not one imperative but two: guidance and compassion, a love of truth and an abiding solidarity with those for whom that truth has become eclipsed”.
It seems to me that that is what we have to do. I want to draw attention to the English-Speaking Union, which encourages young people to debate, to take each other’s sides in an argument, to speak with logic and rational purpose—to become the citizens we need.
The noble and learned Baroness, Lady Hallett, reminded us in the introduction to the first report of the Covid inquiry that the state has a responsibility to protect its citizens. It is easy to see how the pandemic has damaged our communities’ trust in institutions, including the health service, and how that damage worsened during the events over the summer. We have already heard how important it is for us to celebrate and recognise our differences, and it is true that one of the greatest strengths of this nation is, in fact, our diversity, but the experiences of some receiving care with a lack of cultural competence tells us that we have a way to go. Part of this is a lack of understanding and celebration of difference for patients and staff. It is vital for us to understand our ethno-religious identities because they change our experience not just of health but of communities.
My Christian belief that we are all made in the image of God motivates me to ensure that we can do better here, but trust is key. Although having sufficient GP appointments available is important, what is more important is feeling confident that you will be listened to and understood. As we will no doubt be aware from our own communities, there were moments of brilliance throughout the pandemic in which faith groups demonstrated neighbourliness and commitment to service, even when people’s day-to-day lives were really restricted. There are lessons to be learned from their ingenuity in building support for their communities and about how to build trust out of a crisis situation. It is important that we recognise the huge amount of work carried out by faith groups while respecting the difference in values that we may have.
Partnership that utilises diversity is key to ensuring cohesion. Working for the good of a place that you live in and seeing a difference is one of the most important and fulfilling parts of our citizenship. We tend to have a greater appreciation and support for something we have helped to build, and it is good to see this encouragement being prioritised on my doorstep with the new City belonging networks established by the Lord Mayor and others across London. We saw wonderful examples of partnership working across local communities, faith groups, the NHS and voluntary and community groups where people in the midst of the pandemic worked together to provide community cohesion.
We are here to reflect on a moment of crisis over the summer, as is right. Indeed, the cumulative impact of previous moments of crisis in our nation and abroad, including serious conflict, mean that a time of fear and uncertainty, and even bereavement for some, is what they experience in the midst of their community. That makes it important that we work together. It is difficult but important work.
However, partnership and engagement with groups and people different from ourselves, particularly on the part of government, cannot be sought only during times of crisis or in reaction to a crisis. Sustained involvement that involves local communities over the long term is required to combat the short-termism of electoral cycles and funding periods. Some faith groups have been serving their communities consistently for generations. When this goes unrecognised, it is detrimental to trust. Indeed, building relationships over the long term and working in partnership are what will build resilience so that, when a crisis occurs, we are better able to cope.
We are encouraged by God in Jeremiah 29 to,
“seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the LORD on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare”.
I hope that this will be an opportunity for us to seek the welfare of our nation, communities and those who are different from us, for it is there that we find our own welfare.
I want to take your Lordships back for a moment to COP 26 in November 2021. That conference, resulting in the Glasgow climate pact, was agreed by almost 200 countries. Frankly—I say this not immodestly—it achieved more than many had expected when we started the whole process. We saw increased emission reduction targets from countries. We saw more finance put on the table from developed countries to support developing nations, particularly to help them adapt to the changing climate. We managed to go from less than 30% of the global economy covered by a net-zero target to over 90% by the time we got to Glasgow. Just about every G20 country signed up. For the first time, in 26 of these annual meetings, we managed to get the world to agree to phase down the use of coal.
COP 26 was also the first business COP. It was the first time in these meetings that we had the business community coming in real force and making commitments of its own. These included $130 trillion of private capital through the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero, committed to accelerating the decarbonisation of the global economy.
Despite that progress in Glasgow, at the time I described COP 26 as a “fragile” win. I said that the goal that the world agreed in Paris in 2015, to limit average global warming to 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels, was on “life support”. I said that because, although commitments are difficult to extract from countries—I can tell your Lordships, they are really difficult—getting those countries to implement those commitments on time is even harder.
Yes, there has been some progress on commitments made. In 2017, for instance, one in 70 new cars sold in the world was an electric vehicle; this year it will be one in five. On current trends, renewables sources are on course to generate close to half of global electricity by 2030. That is vitally important, as 75% of global emissions are energy related. But the reality is that the world is not doing nearly enough to cut global emissions and arrest global warming. Last year was the hottest on record. That record is expected to be broken this year, with 2024 set to be the first year to breach the totemic 1.5 degrees limit. Just about every day, we see the terrible impacts of the changing climate on millions of lives and livelihoods around the world—many billions of dollars of costs to infrastructure and business, all of it testing social cohesion. Ultimately, climate change does not recognise borders.
We also know that climate change exacerbates existing risks—water security, food security, migration risk—further testing social cohesion. In 2022, millions more people in the world were displaced due to climatic events than conflicts. Yes, many of them moved within their own countries or regions, but can we imagine what might happen if parts of the global South eventually become uninhabitable because of climate change? Where will these people move to?
But, just as the science has become starker and the risks posed by climate change have become clearer, countries and businesses have very much recognised the economic opportunities offered by pursuing a net-zero agenda—for jobs, for growth and for inward investment. However, one of the key constraints has been deploying finance at the scale that is needed; this was a key topic of discussion at the COP we have just had in Baku. Public finance is important, but the reality is that much of the finance required will need to come from the private sector. There is a shortfall in how much is being deployed annually, particularly in developing economies, where last year we saw cash outflows, not inflows.
With the right policy stimuli—planning reform, a green skills revolution and financial incentives for individuals and communities to take up green technologies and accept infrastructure locally—I remain confident that we will win the battle for net zero in the developed countries. But my concern is that we risk losing the climate war in developing nations unless we can significantly scale up the private finance needed to transition those emerging economies. There are ways to do this. I do not have time now, but I hope that this will be the subject of a future debate in this House.
Leaders around the world face many immediate challenges: war, trade conflicts and an increasingly fractured geopolitics which is picking at the very seams of the current world order. But, among all of this, the chronic threat from climate change continues to get worse. We need to treat this for what it is: a climate emergency. If we get it right, we can transition to a cleaner, greener and more prosperous world, with stronger and more cohesive societies. I look forward to advocating for that kind of world during my time in your Lordships’ House.
I will focus on three issues: migration, integration and foreign policy. Migration is an unavoidable and undeniable feature of our times, and as a nation of immigrants we must recognise the indispensable contribution that migrants have made to our economy and culture.
However, we must also face some hard truths. The surge in immigration has placed immense pressures on public services, creating an environment where social cohesion begins to erode, fostering an “us versus them” mentality that, as we know, stirs division and resentment. While there is no evidence that refugees pose a political, social, economic or security threat, polling shows that people are concerned. Those concerns should not be dismissed outright. This places a particular responsibility on Governments to find the resources to address the domestic implications of migration, while those not in government must respond responsibly.
The responsibility to help is determined not by geography but by adherence to universal human rights and values. It transcends religion, culture and ethnicity. We need not to be reaching for the lowest common denominator in our response to the refugee crisis, but to strive to live up to the highest ideals and our highest standards. Every country in the world—not just in Europe, not just here—must be part of solution.
We should also be mindful of the distinction between economic migrants who are escaping extreme poverty and refugees who are fleeing immediate threats to their lives. All people on the move in these tragic circumstances must have their human rights and dignity respected. We should not stigmatise anyone for aspiring to a better life, but refugees face immediate danger, persecution and death, and their rights are enshrined in international law. Effective reception and screening are crucial to ensuring that claims are assessed and protection is extended to those who really need it.
Secondly, integration must be a fundamental part of our immigration policy. Failing to integrate new citizens creates parallel communities divided not just by geography but by culture and identity. Effective integration goes beyond the English language. It requires bridging social and cultural gaps through comprehensive educational programmes that instil core British values of justice and fairness and promote community engagement through participation and volunteering.
We must not be shy about expecting a reciprocal relationship between new citizens and their new homeland. It is a two-way relationship. It is not only about accepting what Britain has to offer, such as security and opportunity, but about giving back. As someone who has experienced this process personally, I can say that being a citizen is not just about holding a British passport. It is about contributing to society, respecting and upholding British laws and values and strengthening those values through our individual and collective example.
On our foreign policy, we must reflect and strike a balance between the national interest and global responsibilities. I believe that in some cases, we have fallen short on both. I welcome the Prime Minister’s recognition at the Lord Mayor’s banquet that global problems increasingly manifest as local challenges. When it comes to the Middle East conflict, the impact on social cohesion in the United Kingdom is staggering. According to More in Common, 49% worry about the rise of anti-Semitism in the UK, 47% worry about the rise of Islamophobia, 55% are concerned that it will lead to increased tensions between religious groups and 58% are worried about the potential for increased Islamic extremism. I ask the Minister: what comes after the Prime Minister’s recognition of the impact of foreign policy on domestic policy and cohesion? What will change after that recognition?
We must recognise the pressure on our social cohesion, not only in migration and foreign policy but as a part of a wider crisis in global governance. Over the past 15 years the number of forcibly displaced people in the world has surged. The crisis is unsustainable and beyond the capacity of international humanitarian organisations or countries like ours to manage alone. It is driven by a systemic failure to resolve conflicts. Nothing tells us more about the state of the world than the movement of people across borders. We must look for long-term solutions. We cannot donate our way out of these crises, nor can we bomb our way out of them. We cannot solve the problem simply by taking in refugees. We need to find diplomatic solutions to end those conflicts.
Our historical commitment to defend freedom has often strengthened our national cohesion. We must continue that legacy as a source of collective pride and use it as a foundation to tackle the challenges of the day.