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Multi-cultural Britain

My Lords, I begin by thanking the noble Lord, Lord Hastings of Scarisbrick, for introducing this debate with great passion and clarity. It is important to bear in mind that William Wilberforce had spent more than 20 years trying to abolish the slave trade. The Bill to abolish it was introduced by him and his colleagues 11 times and it failed each time with an increasing majority. In 1804, he wrote in a private letter: "““It was truly humiliating to see in the House of Lords four members of the Royal Family come down to vote against the poor, helpless, friendless slaves””." In 1806, a much weaker version of the Foreign Slave Trade Abolition Bill was introduced by no less a personage than the Prime Minister, Lord Granville, and it was eventually passed with the overwhelming majority of 283 votes in favour and 16 against. I mention that only because I want to highlight two important lessons. The fight against injustice and evil is always protracted and always difficult, especially if it involves taking on vested interests. But it can succeed if you are able to appeal to people in idioms with which they are familiar—in other words, if you can appeal to them in terms of their own tradition—and also if an enormous amount of economic and political pressure is mounted from outside. Those are the two lessons that we need to learn in our struggle for a multicultural society. It is also important to remember that, once slavery was abolished, slaves became part of British society and they married local women. On a recent calculation, one out of six British citizens—men and women—carries some genetic inheritance from those slaves. It is also important to bear in mind, therefore, that Britain has been a multicultural society not of late but for hundreds of years, and certainly after the abolition of slavery. The first Muslim Peer was Lord Stanley of Adderley, in 1884, and he was followed by Lord Headley, who converted to Islam in 1913.So there have been Muslim Peers for more than100 years. We had Hindu Peers—Lord Sinha, for example. We also had Members of Parliament from different communities. We also had Indian sailors, traders, missionaries, servants, doctors and entertainers over the centuries. I say all that simply to indicate that there is a tendency to think that multicultural society is new to us; it is not. Today Britain is firmly and irrevocably a multicultural society. Our food, music, sports, literature, business, professions, economy—all these areas of life—bear the fingerprints of our ethnic diversity. And it is not the result of immigration only; it is a result of globalisation and people making different individual choices. Immigration is only one factor. That is also worth bearing in mind because there is a tendency to think that if all the immigrants were to disappear, somehow Britain would be able to return to the halcyon days of cultural homogeneity. Diversity is a fact of life and will continue to remain so. It is not only a fact of life but also an important value, because cultural diversity brings new sources of imagination, new talents, new ideas and new ways of solving problems. I have always seen multiculturalism as a matter of collective self-renewal. It is through the interaction with other cultures, other groups of people, that a society renews itself. The tremendous success of the United States is a classic example of this, and I could think of other immigrant societies, such as Canada and Australia, that have periodically renewed themselves through cultural diversity. Integration is already taking place in our society, as the marriage statistics indicate. Two-thirds of Afro-Caribbean men and women have married across the racial boundary; 15 per cent of Asian men have white wives, and 8 per cent of Asian women have white partners. Of course, some ugly practices remain but they have been fought with a great deal of consensus. We are told by dubious opinion polls that people are not integrating. These polls ask such absurd questions as, ““Are you British? Do you feel British? Are you more British than Muslim, or more Muslim than British?””. It is not clear to me what is meant. If someone asked me, ““Do you really feel British?””, then, after having been here for 47 years, it would take me a little time to spell out what the question was supposed to mean. Sometimes the interviewer has one meaning in mind but the interviewee has another, with the result that such questions do not deliver any kind of reliable data. More importantly, when the same people are asked, ““Do you feel British?””, although they might say no, when they are asked, ““What about being in Bradford?””, they will say, ““I couldn’t imagine myself outside Bradford. That’s my home””. So the question is: are people not locally rooted and do they not define their identity in civic or local terms? These data on national statistics cause considerable panic because people say, ““Only 5 per cent of Muslims feel fully British. How can that go on?””. It causes a sense of panic which leads to further panic and further alienates people. The fact that some young Muslims were involved in 7/7 does not indicate that our multicultural society has failed or that our model of integration has run into crisis. What happened had other factors: our foreign policy, and intergenerational discontinuity within the Muslim community as a result of which the young Muslims are in many cases rootless. We need to foster a common sense of national identity and belonging, but that comes through lived experiences. I become a part of society and feel British—or French or American or Indian—because I feel accepted; this is where I have struck my roots. This is the society of which I feel a part and where I am treated justly and equally. In other words, national belonging or national loyalty comes from a lived experience. You cannot produce that by a checklist of British values, because those values are difficult to list. More importantly, they are picked up as one grows up and are not taught. Equally importantly, national days and citizenship oaths, ceremonies and tests have at best a symbolic value. They can be no substitute for a genuine policy of tolerance and justice.