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Multi-cultural Britain

My Lords, I, too, add my thanks to the noble Lord, Lord Hastings of Scarisbrick, for bringing this matter before us. In the 360 seconds available to me, I shall make two very simple points. My noble friend Lord Parekh reminded us that a watered-down version of the legislation came before this Parliament in 1806. There had been several heroic attempts to get it on the statute book in the 1790s, and it was finally approved with a wrecking amendment by the then Home Secretary, which led to a delay that proved fatal. The regicide in France led to concern for security, lest similar things happened here, and there was a great black hole of 15 years during which nothing much seems to have happened. While I admire Wilberforce’s immense courage and his undoubted faith, I suggest that during that time he withdrew from the fray to some extent and prioritised other and more pietistic objectives because he subscribed to the mood then prevalent that national security should be the over-riding concern. When we become obsessed by issues of national security, potential mob rule and the subversion of the existing order, questions relating to civil liberties get put into the second league, the championship league. I draw from that the fact that we must be careful that when we become prepossessed with issues relating to national security, we must be vigilant on the question of civil liberties, and I surely do not need to spell that out. However, two very remarkable articles have caught my eye: Shiv Malik’s article in the current edition of Prospect about his researches into those who caused the 7/7 bombings and Tariq Modood’s Multiculturalism, citizenship and national identity. They both point us towards understanding that multi-culturalism is used as a whipping boy and is particularly used to justify oppressive measures and create oppressive attitudes towards minorities, particularly Muslim minorities, in this country at this time. National security is a great danger to civil liberties. My second point is that during the 15 years that I referred to, the greatest significant contribution towards the emancipation of slaves had nothing to do with our efforts to see that the slave trade was ended. That was only a partial objective, and it led to gross injustices of its own kind. It was on another continent, in the midst of the phenomenon of slavery, that the most significant happening occurred. It was the war for independence in the nation we now call Haiti, which was then Saint-Domingue. The greatest hero in this whole, rather tawdry, discussion is Toussaint L’Overture, who, in his writings, thinking and example, is the greatest black person I have ever encountered. The bicentenary of his death was shamefully overlooked and minimised just a couple of years ago. The 12-year struggle in the aftermath of the French Revolution, which saw this Parliament endorse a military intervention in Saint-Domingue that saw 20,000 British troops die on Haitian territory—a figure that is never referred to in our school textbooks and of which no one is really aware—as we sought to pick up the richest of France’s colonies during the disturbances in Paris. Later, when Napoleon came back into power in France, an expeditionary force was sent under General Maitland—our Army had ignominiously withdrawn by then—and an equal number of French troops were killed or died before General Napoleon Bonaparte’s brother-in-law was expelled with his tail between his legs. I mention this because the moment Haiti became independent on 1 January 1804, the international community decided to have nothing to do with it. The spiral into a pariah state that has continued ever since began on the very day of independence We should draw an important lesson from that. My daughter works with Cambodian victims of the sex tourism trade in Thailand. She speaks fluent Khmer, and I am immensely proud of her. She does civil rights work with those victims in Cambodia, and she is a married to a nice Cambodian boy. We are enormously happy with all of that. However, I look at places such as Cambodia and I have worked extensively with Haitian immigrants in the Dominican Republic and have seen the conditions in which they live, so I am aware of contemporary forms of slavery and the way that the international community is blithely ignorant of, and cares little for, the plight of such people. I look back to the parliamentary history for the legacy of Wilberforce and I see not just something that is undiluted light and progress, but lessons that desperately need to be learnt.