---

Queen's Speech

My Lords, I have been heartened to hear so many of your Lordships address the subject of Europe. I intend to address that subject and to make one point, and one point only, in its midst. I was greatly helped by some of the remarks made by the noble Lord, Lord Howell, when he talked of the need for us to come to terms with the diversity of Europe and to make Europe less remote. Those are important themes. Your Lordships will be aware that the Church of England has strong and growing links with churches right across Europe. We are in full communion with the four major national Lutheran churches in northern Europe. We have deep formal relationships with the Reformed churches in France and Germany. Your Lordships will be aware of the growing bonds of affection between his Grace the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury and his Holiness the Pope. Alongside that are our deep and historic bonds with our Orthodox brothers and sisters in the eastern part of Europe. My diocese has a formal link with the Swedish diocese of Karlstad and with the Romanian Orthodox metropolitical diocese of Jassy. We know that Europe today is a meeting ground for many cultures and faiths. We are sometimes prone to forget that it has always been like that. Europe has a significant Jewish history, which the 20th century brought so brutally to the surface, and an important Islamic history, which we are growingly aware of in the 21st century. In its midst, there is a strong secular thematic culture that arises from classical antiquity through to the Enlightenment, with its strong and passionate demand for liberty, equality and fraternity. Sometimes, both intellectually and actually, those cultures have fought one another. Every so often, even in our time, resurgent nationalisms tempt us back to old hostilities. The price of those, which can be seen in many of the graveyards of Europe, urges us to pursue peace, mutual affection and the guarding of the rights and integrities of all. One of the great challenges of our time and our world is how we live well with diversity of history and culture. As has been evidenced in this debate, in many parts of the world we are struggling. My good friend the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Winchester has, with his usual commitment, taken us to the DRC in Africa, where tribes, cultures and diverse histories are in mortal combat. We heard from the noble Lord, Lord Ahmed, about the Middle East, Palestine and the Gaza Strip in particular. There is Arab and Jew; the tribal battles in Afghanistan and Pakistan; Sunni and Shiite; Chinese and Japanese; and, closer to home, Georgia and the Russians and the vexed question of how Europe relates to Turkey and its internal struggle over the meaning of its secular history in the 20th century. In our society, as we all know from the various places from which we come, we are not without our own tensions. These are many issues, but they draw us to the one agenda of how we find the values and the cultures that bring peace and mutual respect. This is the level at which Europe needs to engage. We use the word ““Europe”” in our debates as if it were simply a set of institutions and functions. No wonder people are turned off and complain of distant and bureaucratic powers a long way away that are uninterested in their lives. If Europe is simply a set of pragmatic political and economic functions and programmes, it has no future. Its future lies only in renewing the deeper themes of its cultures. Of course it is possible to see European institutions as essentially secular. Indeed, many do, but that would ally these institutions to one particular intellectual tradition in European history, which would be disastrous. We recently read in our newspapers about the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Chief Rabbi going on a pilgrimage to Auschwitz, but they did so as public figures, not as people making a private journey. They were therefore engaging in the intellectual, spiritual and cultural politics of Europe. If we are to engage the people again in Europe beyond the level of finding some warm sunshine in winter, which is very attractive at this point in our weather system, European institutions and our leaders need to be seen to be drawing on these rich streams of cultural and faith history that make us what we are and that have the potential to shape our future. Politics, faith and culture need to re-engage with each other in Europe. The churches are beginning to make that journey, but the journey needs to be widened to embrace the whole of our life in this diverse and changing environment. This is a new way of living well with diversity. I say gently from these Benches that we should not go down the narrow secular route of thinking that we can cope with faith and its cultures only by keeping them on the margins and failing to draw on the wealth of them all. The task is to build bridges across historical divides and to create new unities and opportunities where there has been division and conflict. I would be interested to know from Her Majesty’s Government and the Minister today what energy there is in government and in Europe for tapping into these deeper sources of life and energy in the traditions that have shaped our past and that have so much potential for the future. Our rich inheritance of both faith and the Enlightenment offers us real possibilities and our divided world needs us to engage in these things in our own time.