Ugandan Asians

Lord Bilimoria Excerpts

Thursday 6th December 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bilimoria]

My Lords, over the over the centuries communities have had to flee persecution, drop everything they owned and the connections they had built up, and flee. Over 1,000 years ago my own community, the Zoroastrian Parsees, had to flee their homeland of ancient Persia and settle in India. Fast forward to today and I would say that the Parsee community, in terms of per capita achievement, was one of the most successful communities in the world, in spite of the way in which they had to leave their country.

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Popat, for initiating this debate. Forty years ago, as we have heard, Ugandan Asians had to drop everything and flee due to the cruel actions of a brutal dictator, Idi Amin, and came to this country with nothing. Fast forward 40 years and look at what they have achieved. There is the Madhvani family, of whom the noble Lord spoke; Anuj Chande, my friend, who is a member of that family, is a senior partner in Grant Thornton. The noble Lord, Lord Popat, himself has been an enormous success himself, and then there is my friend Shailesh Vara in the other place, and the Jatania family. I could go on with the numerous examples of Ugandan Asian business people who have been successful in this country, all in the space of a few decades.

When I first imported Cobra beer to the UK, I knew that Indian restaurants were going to be my base, but the first case I sold was to my local corner shop, owned by east African Asians. Today I am a senior independent director of Booker, the largest wholesale company in Britain, and we supply over 70,000 independent retailers, many of whom are east African Asians. I have seen first-hand how hard these families work and how every member contributes to the success of their businesses. I know so many stories of children coming home from school to work in their parents’ shop, who then work late into the night on their homework. This embodies for me what it is like to be an Asian in Britain.

When I am asked about Asian values, I say that it is very simple—it is down to the importance of hard work, of family and of education. The noble Lord, Lord Popat, also spoke of these values. Nobody embodies these Asian values more or better than the Ugandan Asian community. I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Popat, on securing this debate and highlighting the achievements of this wonderful community. However, the success of the Zoroastrian Parsees in India was possible only because the Indians, starting with the Gujaratis on the west cost of India, allowed the Parsees to come in and settle, practise their religion and keep their culture and customs—and not just exist but co-exist with the local Indian community. Similarly, the success of the Ugandan Asian community has been possible only because of the generosity of this great country that took them in and gave them the opportunity to flourish. The noble Lord, Lord Popat, has thanked this country; I always thank it for giving me and the Asians here that opportunity.

Let us put this in perspective. As the noble Lord, Lord Janner, said, in the 1970s this was a country full of prejudice, when the glass ceiling was not just still there but was double-glazed. Even when I came from India as a 19 year-old in the early 1980s, Britain was a very different country from what it is today. Today, we have improved in leaps and bounds as a nation that is not just an opportunity-for-all country but a multicultural country and a meritocracy, where people from any religious or racial background can reach the top in every field. It is a country where entrepreneurship was looked down upon three or four decades ago. Today, entrepreneurship as demonstrated by the Ugandan Asian community is celebrated in this country.

In fact, those corner shops started by this community are the cornerstone of our economy—the entrepreneurial success stories of these individuals, who went as complete strangers to every high street of this country, opened up their shops, won customers, made friends and, more often than not, put back into their local communities. To this day, in spite of the proliferation of the giant supermarkets, the Ugandan Asians who own the two corner shops near our house know the names of all of my children, as they know the names of the children of all their customers, and they work really hard.

This country has been built on good immigration, the kind that we have seen from the Ugandan Asians, but the way in which this Government are dealing with immigration, with their immigration cap, is crude and blunt—they are using a carpet-bombing technique. The Government’s policy is not just addressing bad immigration, it is also stifling the good immigration that, quite frankly, this country has been built on over the centuries. The immigration cap is affecting businesses, not only in the signals that it is sending out in general but in very practical terms. For example, as I mentioned earlier, the foundation of my business is the Indian restaurant industry, where I know from the Bangladesh Caterers Association—the leading industry body—how much the industry is suffering because it cannot bring in the skilled staff, and chefs in particular, that it desperately needs. I am all for “curry colleges” being set up in Britain in the way that the University of West London, where I was proud to be chancellor for five years, is doing. However, these initiatives take time to produce the skilled individuals that the industry so badly needs. In the mean time the restaurants, which are already suffering a huge recession, are, on top of that, being deprived of skilled staff by the Government’s ill-considered Immigration Rules—and we as consumers are suffering because we are a nation of “curryholics”.

I have spoken many times about how the Immigration Rules are affecting higher education. Britain has the best universities in the world, alongside those in America. Now the Government have removed the two-year postgraduation visa for students, which was such an attraction to foreign students, who brought some £8 billion of revenue into this country. Quite apart from that, foreign students enrich our universities; they enrich our home students, giving them wonderful experience of interacting with international students as well as building generational links across the world. I am the third generation of my family to have been educated in this country.

We have seen a dramatic fall in the number of applications from students around the world, particularly from India, because the Government are sending out signals that Britain does not want foreign students. I know that this is not the case but that is the perception that has been created. Some 30% of academics at Oxford and Cambridge, for example, are foreign. Even they are suffering in terms of getting the brightest and the best because of what I believe is a retrograde government policy.

I have spoken before about the UK Border Agency abruptly taking away the licence from London Metropolitan University to sponsor visas for foreign students and telling the existing students that they had 60 days to find another university. It claimed to have found irregularities but the vast majority of those 2,500 to 3,000 students were completely innocent of any wrong-doing. This is without regard to the finances of the university, which will be short of £30 million a year. Not only does this jeopardise the university but it sends a signal to foreign students around the world that if they come and study in Britain there is no certainty that they will be able to complete their studies at their institution. That is damaging and short-sighted. Again, I ask the Minister if she will request the Government to remove student figures from the immigration figures, just as the United States, Canada and Australia have done. Why do we have to include them?

In conclusion, we are a tiny country of 60 million people and we are rightly worried about excessive immigration. We need to clamp down on illegal immigration, but why are we doing it in a way that is harming our economy, our universities and our competitiveness—the very fabric of our nation? As the noble Lords, Lord Popat and Lord Janner, said, the Ugandan Asian community has shown the wonderful way that it has integrated. The Asian community makes up 4% of the population of this country and yet is contributing more than double that percentage to its economy. The Ugandan Asian community has shown clearly and brilliantly that good immigration always has been, and always will be, great for this country.