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Multi-cultural Britain

My Lords, I, too, congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Hastings, not only on having secured this debate, but also on his eloquent and compelling introduction. I must say that there have been several other notable contributions to this debate. Isaac Newton famously once said, "““If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants””." That phrase applies not only to great scientists or great philosophers, but also to great reformers. It also applies to William Wilberforce, who was famously diminutive of stature, so he may have needed to stand on something to see further anyway. However, it is true in a much more profound sense, to which a number of other speakers have alluded. What Wilberforce achieved was magnificent and a tribute to his persistence and determination, but it also depended on the efforts of many others. In this country, we think of the campaigning endeavours of Thomas Clarkson or the former slave Olaudah Equiano, who has already been referred to. He gained his freedom from his owner, Robert King, who taught him to read and write and educated him as a Quaker. He then became an abolitionist who worked with Clarkson. There are many others across the country. However, I take the point made by my noble friend Lord Griffiths. Bringing an end to slavery was the result of worldwide movements—not just in what is now Haiti, but in Africa, Jamaica and elsewhere. Indeed, some of the critics of the commemoration days established for Wilberforce have made the point even more forcefully than did my noble friend, and I fully back it up. The noble Lord, Lord Taylor, expressed regret that we have to delve back into our own history to discover the many strands in it, but it is important to do so. An example of that is the work of local historians on the Black History in Dorset project. Dorset is not one of the counties that we associate with the slave trade, because most of the history concentrates on cities and the large ports in the north, but slaves came directly to Dorset ports and their descendants have lived in Dorset and the surrounding counties ever since. Moreover, the wealth of Dorset came in substantial part from slave plantations overseas. Dorset also had its abolitionists, such as Thomas Foxwell Buxton. A lot of history is still to be resurrected, and the work of local historians is important to this. We have always lived in a mongrel country, the term used by two or three authors of histories of Britain. It means that diversity, cultural difference and what social scientists in their odd way call ““hybridity”” are part of mainstream British history and are not marginal to it. But when we fast forward to the present, we see that these things are now even truer than they were in the past, as many speakers have said. We live in a society of cultural diversity. The term ““multi-culturalism”” has been widely applied, but at the moment the notion of multi-culturalism is under something of a cloud. People on both the right and the left are declaring multi-culturalism to be dead and arguing that we have to move beyond it. I want fiercely to contest that idea, which is based on a false understanding of what multi-culturalism is. Modern thinking about multi-culturalism has its origins, especially in Canada, in the writings of distinguished philosophers such as Charles Taylor and in the approach to migration and diversity that successive Canadian Governments have taken. If you understand it in this sense, multi-culturalism has never meant what its critics here and elsewhere often say; it has never meant cultural or historical relativism. It has always meant the primacy of law, especially of international law, and the primacy of common laws of humanity over individual cultural difference. It has never meant the denial of national identity. The present Government have in some part derived their ideas from Canadian schemes of migration. Canadahas always stressed citizenship ceremonies and the primacy of national identity, and it has forged a place for cultural difference in relation to that. Multi-culturalism has never meant the separation of communities. On the contrary, the whole literature of multi-culturalism, which is very sophisticated, has always advocated fostering connections between communities; it has alwaysbeen about contesting the separation of communities, not endorsing it. We have many ways of furthering that. In conclusion, I should like to claim that this country is probably the most successful multi-cultural country in Europe. Contrary to what people say, indices of segregation between ethnic groups show that segregation is reducing rather than increasing, as is reflected in individual studies of communities. While many people might say that multi-culturalism is dead, I say, ““Long live multi-culturalism””.