---

Anti-Slavery Day Bill

My Lords, I thank those who have initiated this debate in the other place and here this afternoon. It is important that we are reminded of, and do not go to sleep forgetting, some of the tremendous horrors that this world has faced and is still facing. We shall at some point in the next two years present a pageant of Parliament, which will show all the achievements of Parliament over so many centuries. We can see how Parliament can either create nightmares or turn dreams into reality. This House has the opportunity to turn nightmares into dreams. A little while ago, the Watoto children’s choir were singing in Old Colwyn in north Wales. The Minister smiles, perhaps because he has heard me on this subject before. They are from a community in Kampala of about 1,600 orphans of AIDS victims. Often they are children who have been found on the rubbish heaps of Kampala and the most unexpected places. They have been taken into the community and given some form of hope where before there was none. I have heard this choir many times. At the end of one performance, I asked these small kids from six to 13 years of age, "What would you like to be when you grow up?". They were lovely little children. One of them said—remember, they had just got off an aeroplane—"I’d like to be a pilot". Others said, "I’d like to be a lawyer", or perhaps, "I’d like to be a doctor". No one said that they wanted to be a bishop or a Methodist minister, but they had their dreams. The last child I asked was a 10 year-old, a sturdy little lad, who said, "I want to be President of Uganda". What a wonderful dream. This Parliament can help those dreams become a reality—this is our big opportunity. William Wilberforce has been mentioned, as have Thomas Clarkson and those others who, two centuries ago, removed such a tremendous barrier to freedom. This work continues. I know a little of Africa. I have not travelled there very much—only in the north. There is so much poverty and need there. People there dream their dreams, but they have little chance of realising them until we step in. It is in the power of this House, this Parliament and the Government of the United Kingdom to help make those dreams come true. Poverty, as has been mentioned, leads to slavery and a feeling of total worthlessness. We can turn that around. What is slavery? I recently read this passage about its various forms, which states that someone enslaved today could be, ""forced to work—through mental or physical threat … owned or controlled by an ‘employer’, usually through mental or physical abuse or threatened abuse … dehumanised, treated as a commodity or bought or sold as ‘property’"." We are even told, although I find this very difficult to accept, of women and children being auctioned in the lounges of our airports. A further definition of a slave is that he or she is "physically constrained" or has, ""restrictions placed on his/her freedom of movement"." That includes bonded labour, trafficking, forced labour, children being forced to work as soldiers, domestic labourers and commercial sex workers. I was astonished at the figure of 179 million children in the worst forms of child labour in the world today. Many children have entered forced or early marriages. Girls and women are sentenced to a life of servitude, while others are enslaved through bondage of one sort or another. We can and must continue to act, and on a global scale. Article 4 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states: ""No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms"." We and the nations of the world have signed up to that. The United Kingdom can still take the lead in turning those nightmares into dreams. One way, as so many have said today, is to continue the battle against any form of trafficking or slavery in the 21st century.