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Multi-cultural Britain

My Lords, it is a pleasure to be able to speak in support of my noble friend Lord Hastings of Scarisbrick, who opened today’s debate in such a thoughtful and challenging way. I shall talk about the achievements of the abolitionist movement and adduce some contemporary lessons. Recently, I took my children to see the excellent new film ““Amazing Grace””. Its title is drawn from the hymn composed by the Liverpool slave-trading ship’s captain, John Newton, whose change of heart and mind and first hand accounts of exposing the cruelties of the trans-Atlantic trade gave impetus and momentum to the abolitionist cause. If I have a criticism of the film it is the use of the phrase, ““one man’s battle against injustice”” to describe William Wilberforce. Remarkable man though he undoubtedly was, the slave trade was not—as we learnt in today’s debate and the earlier debates in May and December—the achievement of one man alone. It took the creation of a nationwide grass-roots movement to enable Wilberforce to persuade Parliament to enact change. And it would take persistence and the uprisings of slaves in Haiti, Jamaica and elsewhere over the following 26 years—as we heard from the noble Lord, Lord Griffiths, and others—before slavery itself would be outlawed. In parenthesis, let me add that it is to our continuing shame that slavery persists in many guises and many parts of the world today. The composition and achievements of the anti-slavery coalition are not simply of arcane historical interest. Though the original inspiration came from the Quakers, it was a Cambridge University divinity student, Thomas Clarkson, who became the indefatigable organiser who would spend more than 60 years of his life addressing meetings, collecting petitions and tramping the length and breadth of the country. The remarkable coalition that he assembled included Olaudah Equiano, who bought himself out of slavery and whose books describing his captivity sold in their thousands; Granville Sharpe, who used his formidable lawyer’s skills to take the fight to the judiciary; the poet and polemicist, William Roscoe; and Josiah Wedgwood, whose potteries produced lapel badges and hair braids in their millions declaring the simple truth: "““Am I not a man and a brother?””." It is sometimes said in your Lordship’s House that those who have religious beliefs should keep them to themselves. Clarkson, Equiano, Sharpe and Wilberforce were all Christians who passionately believed that their private beliefs should animate public concerns. As we consider the nature of multi-cultural Britain, it is surely worth stating that the suppression of religious faith would have suppressed the very impulses that were the motivation and the lifeblood of the abolitionist movement. Doubtless religious adherents are guilty of all the same faults and sins of omission and commission as the next, but a secular intolerance that seeks to suffocate religious opinion will not help to create a tolerant or respectful Britain. Last December, the Prime Minister gave a lecture entitled ““Our Nation’s Future—multiculturalism and integration”” at an event hosted by the Runnymede Trust. I agree with a lot of what he says about past mistakes and the time for a new approach to diversity. Where I part company with him is with the implication that it should be the objective of the state to privatise faith out of the public square. He draws a distinction between what he says ““defines us as citizens”” rather than ““as people””. If the implication of this is that we can be Christian or Jewish or Muslim people but not Christian or Jewish or Muslim citizens and that British values cannot really be Christian values, in a country where 71 per cent in the 2001 census declared themselves to be Christian, it will lead to systemic alienation and greater fragmentation, not to cohesion. Aggressive secularists too often fail to recognise the constructive and enriching role that religion can play in shaping culture and national identity. Religion is too often blamed for man’s failures—a sentiment brilliantly summed up by our British Chief Rabbi, Sir Jonathan Sacks, who says: "““Don’t ask where was God at Auschwitz, ask where was man””." Abolitionists asked the same sort of question when they found men avariciously selling and degrading other human beings. By the 1850s, 12 million people—some historians put the figure at 40 million—had been sold into bondage. Motivated by their faith, the abolitionists launched a nationwide campaign to do something about it. All over the country, Clarkson exhibited manacles and implements used to torture slaves that were purchased in Liverpool, and roused the conscience of the nation. Every time you put your name on a petition, take part in a boycott, wear a lapel badge or a wristband, join a grassroots movement, read a report by an investigative journalist or are encouraged to combine a religious belief with practical action, you can trace the origins of that action to this first human rights campaign. With 27 million people enslaved today—including 8.4 million children—with trafficking, debt bondage, forced labour, child labour and racially and caste-based slavery, there is no shortage of contemporary dragons waiting to be slain. There are many other causes, too. Perhaps if our political leaders were identified more with great causes and less with narrow party interests, it would inspire a new generation to enter our civic life. I end with one brief observation. Two years ago an 18 year-old black Christian boy, Anthony Walker, died in a Merseyside hospital after a gang of four white youths mounted a racially motivated attack and set upon him while he waited for a bus at a bus stop in Huyton with his white girlfriend. The gang hacked him to death with an axe, which they embedded in his skull. In contrast to the case of Stephen Lawrence, the Merseyside police immediately named this as a racially motivated murder and arrested and convicted those responsible. Few who heard the dignified and forgiving remarks of Anthony’s mother, Gee, could have been left unmoved. That evening I could not but think of the abolitionists and their logo: "““Am I not a man and a brother””?" It is surely that belief in a common humanity and a common good—a belief which counters and resists pernicious racism and which replaces violence with mutual respect and tolerance that holds the key to our country’s future.