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Community Relations

I join other noble Lords in thanking the noble Baroness, Lady Falkner, for initiating this debate, which we are all agreed is a very timely one. This country is very fortunate in having Mr Trevor Phillips as the head of the Commission for Racial Equality, for here is a man who sees the subject of immigration in its broad historic and very British context. In the now famous interview with the Times last April, he said:"““we have to remember that migrants have become British in an incredibly short space of time. Lombardy bankers, Jewish tailors, Afro-Caribbean bus drivers and German kings are as British as you and me””." He might have included all those who have passed through Spitalfields, as the noble Baroness, Lady Ludford, said. The noble Baroness said what I was going to say. I do not think that we quite agree with the noble Lord, Lord Parekh, about what is British. My view is that it is not a nationalistic term. Britishness is an amalgamation of values built up over many centuries by the population of this country—largely assisted, I think, by our island state. One must never forget that it is a very mongrel population in this country, mongrel well before the immigrations of the past 60 years. I was particularly impressed by the statistic he produced of the high rate of interracial relationships, which I understand is the highest in Europe. I think that that is a very British thing in itself. We have certainly made our mistakes, and recently too. I was watching a documentary on BBC 4—for me a recent discovery of a veritable mine of quality documentaries. This one was on 50 years of large-scale immigration from the Caribbean. I was shocked to see how real colour prejudice was rampant right up to the 1970s—““No dogs, Irish or Blacks”” was not a joke. But that is one instance of how through a lot of effort, not least from the leaders of the calibre of Mr Phillips, we have, I hope, made great progress in redressing this blot on our nation. There is still much to be done. The problem rears its ugly head in subtly different ways: witness the recent intercommunal riots in Birmingham between the Afro-Caribbean and Indian communities to which reference has been drawn. And, as several speakers have said, the current challenge for us all, which really after the 7 July outrage and the near-miss on the 21st dwarfs all others, is the need to come to terms with Islamic extremism. It is a challenge first of numbers but also of the diverse origins of the Muslim community in this country—from Bangladesh and Pakistan in the sub-continent, from south-east Asia and from Africa, and of different sects within Islam as we are seeing so tragically in Iraq, with the Kurds, the Sunni and the Shias. A further problem in understanding Islam is posed to those outside the faith, and that is the effective autonomy possessed by the imam. It is therefore not surprising that there are certain imams who occasionally use this freedom to give a very inflammatory lead. This subject is very pertinent in the context of the Terrorism Bill currently before Parliament. Let me turn to the points specifically addressed by the noble Baroness, Lady Falkner, in her opening speech. As to the segregation of communities—or, possibly, put round the other way, failure to integrate—obviously there are more problems with some communities than with others. Language is so often the barrier. It can ring fence a community and inhibit its relations with the outside world—and, indeed, it can have a similar effect the other way round. This inevitably has an effect on employment. There are few things which drive communities into ghettos more forcefully than a lack of command of the local language. It is really a form of mutual self-protection. It is not surprising, therefore, that the 2001 census recorded an unemployment rate of 22 per cent among Muslims, compared with 11 per cent among those describing themselves as Christians, 5.4 per cent for Hindus, 6.9 per cent for Sikhs and 7.9 per cent for Buddhists. The position is further aggravated for Muslims by the cultural position of women where, in a UK population of 347,000 Muslim women over the age of 25, only 99,000 were found to be economically active—an unemployment rate, therefore, among Muslim women of 71 per cent. It emphasises the importance for candidates for British citizenship to have an elementary grasp of the English language. I was very heartened by the statistic produced by the noble Lord, Lord Parekh, that all the factors which can broadly be described as British aspirations are held by 90 per cent of the Muslim population, particularly the ones relating to the place of women in society. The Prime Minister, in a remark of great candour at a press conference in August, said:"““I never know, though I use the term occasionally, quite what people mean when they talk about multiculturalism””." All I can say is that that makes two of us. However, the Prime Minister continued:"““If they mean people living in their separate cultures and never integrating at any point together, I think that’s actually certainly not what I mean by the word””." That puts the matter honestly and realistically. The place of a community within the nation is determined by a kind of swingometer: at one end, as the Prime Minister said, living an isolated communal life and, at the other, a tradition of possibly forced integration at the expense of any sub-culture. It is the challenge to, I suggest, the flair of this nation to find a mean point. It has been done already. Look, for example, at the vigorous sub-cultures flourishing in the Jewish, the Sikh, the Hindu and the Chinese communities, to name but a few. The noble Lord, Lord Williamson, is not in his place, but I usually find him a useful informant on France. I was in France last week and found that that country is currently engaged in an agonising and admirably honest self-appraisal after the happenings of the past two weeks. People refer to the pride which was shown at the soccer World Cup when only two of the French team were, shall we say, Caucasian, and cite it as an example of the integration they have achieved. They feel that they were very self-deceived. I detected more than one envious sideways glance at what they call—possibly to the irritation of some of our American friends—the Anglo-Saxon model. We take a superior line at our peril, especially after the events in London in July. We do not have the problems historically of the large Algerian and North African populations which have so swelled the Muslim numbers in France. But to revert to what I said at the beginning, this country, with its history of successful and one might say non-coercive integration, is well placed to meet this latest challenge, but there is a huge amount of work to be done. We shall succeed and it will be to the benefit of all communities.