---

Multi-cultural Britain

My Lords, I, too, thank the noble Lord, Lord Hastings, for initiating this debate and for a lively, intelligent and intellectual speech. It was a great start to this debate and set the scene for the way it developed and for the speeches that followed it. That was not easy because this debate follows hard on the heels of the debate promoted by the noble Baroness, Lady Howells, on 10 May. The noble Lord made an inspiring speech, and we must thank him for it. When we discussed this matter previously, the speeches were thoughtful, as they have been today. On both occasions, we had relevant discussions on the historical aspects of the abolition of slave trading through the great work of William Wilberforce and his Christian allies. It is notable that there were many women among them. They were not allowed to put their heads above the parapet but, as women always do, they provided the inspiration. As many speakers said, the abolition of slavery 20 years later was inspired by what William Wilberforce did. However, the aftermath continues. Various forms of slavery have continued, and many speakers have referred to them. It is hard to find a definition of slavery, although I am sure many have tried. It seems to me that it is forced service provided by people against their free will, usually under duress with the threat of physical abuse or death, in inhumane conditions. There are still many examples across the world including the trafficking of women as sex slaves, young children being kidnapped and forced to become part of guerrilla or terrorist armies, and, as we heard from the noble Lord, Lord Rana, exploitation of workers to provide cheaper labour to produce cheaper goods. The noble Baroness, Lady Cox, gave us many examples in the previous debate of the areas that I have touched on, and we still have a very active anti-slavery movement. During the recess, my husband and I had a short break in Barbados—I just wanted noble Lords to know that. It is a beautiful, welcoming island whose past is steeped in the slave trade. It was uninhabited for many centuries, but was settled, as I am sure noble Lords know, by the English in the 17th century and remained part of the British Empire until 1965, when it became a republic within the Commonwealth. It is now held up as one of the best examples of an effectively working parliamentary democracy, which is a good legacy of our influence there. Its increasing maturity as a nation is well demonstrated. However, it was founded on sugar plantations that needed a large number of workers, which resulted in its population being generated from slavery. Many of those who still live on the island have ancestors who were of African slave origin and who remained on the island when they became free men. All the harvesting of the sugar crop is now done mechanically. It originally had to be cut by hand by machete and carried, usually by women. Today the crop is only about 25 per cent of that planted in the 18th century, but when one sees the acres of sugar, one realises the enormous physical labour and the vast numbers that would have been required to maintain the trade. The terrible tragedy was that they had to be obtained by the capture and enslavement of thousands of African people who were transported in inhumane and degrading circumstances from their homelands to provide that labour. Three and a half million slaves were transported in British ships, travelling first from Africa to Britain and then across the Atlantic. George Washington briefly lived in Barbados. His house has recently been opened. It has a small exhibition on slavery, which graphically demonstrates, as do other current exhibitions, the awful nature of slavery—the neck yokes, the chains and the shackles—and the inhumanity of man to man. Speakers have drawn attention to European slavery. Ironically, there was considerable migration of slaves from Barbados to Virginia, so much so that 8 million African Americans can claim Barbadian ancestry. The emancipation of slaves in America followed long after Wilberforce and his allies had brought slavery to an end in this country. That occurred after the American Civil War, when Abraham Lincoln defeated the confederate army, but it was only really following the great civil rights marches of the 1960s that true freedom came. We would be proud today if, in addition to being able to claim that this nation brought slavery to an end in the 19th century, we could say that it had been for all time, but we know—speaker after speaker today has described this—that we cannot do that. History has far too many examples of people still being treated as property, to be bought and sold even though it is illegal to do so under international law. There are endless examples of well meaning efforts to bring exploitation and trafficking of people to an end; for example, the Council of Europe’s convention on action against trafficking in human beings of 2005, which the Government did not sign at the time, although they indicated they would do so by April this year, and the inclusion by this Government in the Sexual Offences Act 2003 of a new offence of trafficking someone in this country for exploitation. However, this debate is not about the past; it should be about the present and the future. Perhaps we can claim a better legacy than we have had when we recognise that this country has a proud record of rescuing people: those who have been oppressed by foreign regimes, who have found themselves under threat, who have sought asylum from terror, and indeed now those who seek asylum for economic benefit. I accept that to be welcoming is not sufficient, and that we now have a wide spectrum of the world’s nations together on an increasingly crowded island. But, as the noble Lord, Lord Hastings, reminded us, it is now truly a plural world. Even in my small part of London we have over 80 languages spoken in our schools and some 130 nations are represented within our boundary. It is in such areas that many organisations which represent particular communities work for them to try to bring them together into one national community. We have a very flourishing Muslim Cultural Heritage Centre, which looks outwards and tells us about and leads my part of London to understand better the nature of Muslims and the good work that they do. We want to be careful that we do not demonise particular parts of our community. We have a responsible to ensure that in the nation that we now have, and the nation that we have become, the people we have welcomed into our country and whom we value truly become one community. We will need to recognise and will want to recognise their cultures. The noble Baroness, Lady Young, talked about the dance, music, art and everything else that makes people who are different demonstrate that to us. It will enrich our heritage. The challenge for us is to ensure that that future is one in which everyone is happy to participate.