Strategic Defence and Security Review

Lord Bishop of Birmingham Excerpts

Friday 12th November 2010 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of Birmingham]

My Lords, I am most grateful to noble Lords and the support staff for the welcome and help that I have received from them since my recent introduction and I am glad to be able to participate in your Lordships' House so soon. I also pay tribute to the former right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Bradford, whose retirement caused me to receive the Writ summoning me to your Lordships' House. David James’s leadership of a diverse community and his expertise in the interfaith practice of presence and engagement is a model for those who seek to practise the elusive art of cohesion.

Although the diocese of Birmingham has a very different composition from that of West Yorkshire, we have similar aspirations in seeking greater understanding across a myriad of international cultures, languages and faiths leading towards our agreed aim: a better quality of life for all. Before returning to that theme in the context of the debate on the strategic defence and security review, I set the scene in a diocese of some 1.5 million people contained in only 300 square miles, covering the whole City of Birmingham, parts of Sandwell, Warwickshire, Solihull, and even a small part of Worcestershire. This intercultural urban and suburban heartland is accompanied by a variety of former mining and present-day greenbelt commuter villages.

As a priest and bishop who has already served in the distinctive cities and regions of Hull, Coventry and Birkenhead, I, like so many new leaders coming to Birmingham and the region, struggle to describe it in a line or two. “Global city, local heart” will not quite do. It is the largest city outside London and the largest local authority in Europe, with an annual budget of £3.5 billion. The city budget is £7 billion. Birmingham flies below the radar of popular imagery, yet those who live, work, play and visit there find world-class achievement and facilities.

Given the constraints of your Lordships' debate today, I will not list all the wonderful things that happen there, but with the encouragement of the noble Lord opposite, I will mention that we have the largest shopping centre in the country, in the Bull Ring, and the most popular conference venue. Those who come to it know it as a conference venue and those who do not might like to try it. Birmingham has the greatest groups of lawyers and other professionals outside London, and three great universities. The largest, Birmingham University, has the extraordinary ambition of becoming the world's greatest university. We have culture in the Symphony Hall and the Birmingham Royal Ballet at the Hippodrome. The region has four football teams in the Premier League. If noble Lords do not know what that means, I am available afterwards. In this extraordinary period of change, we are going to have a new library in the middle of the city. That will be another world-class item.

Looking ahead, we face all the challenges detailed in the comprehensive spending review. Our manufacturing base is not big enough, or perhaps not of the right sort. Our employment levels are far too low. Our housing needs renewing, and so on. However, perhaps uniquely in the context of this debate, we have a faith leaders' group drawing together the six great religions of the city in a friendship that enables us to understand some of the tensions and great difficulties that are faced not just in our own communities but around the world. Our community is about 14 per cent Muslim, 3 per cent Sikh, 2 per cent Hindu and so on. We are the youngest city in Europe in terms of the age of our population, which is expected to grow by some 100,000 in the next 15 years, and there are some 70 first languages on the local authority's register of necessary communications.

As the Minister mentioned in his introduction, most of us have been aware of the need for remembrance at this time of year. Only yesterday, as I chaired the Be Birmingham Local Strategic Partnership in a room that overlooked the Hall of Memory, we were all able, in our great diversity, to pause at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month and look over that hall and remember that there is no family in the country that has not been touched by war over the past century—and, as we have heard today, even immediately in our present communities. My first act as a new bishop in that hall was to have inscribed the name of a soldier who died in Iraq and stand alongside his Muslim mother and sisters in an act of remembrance.

Recruits from Birmingham still step forward proudly today from a wide range of our diverse communities. In 2009-10, for example, 1,375 people joined the Regular Army from the West Midlands area: that was 11 per cent of the total, from 9 per cent of the population. There are currently 3,281 army cadets and 605 adult instructors in the area. Only last night, at Bartley Green high school on an outer estate, I learnt that two of its pupils have joined the first Royal Marines cadet force in the country. More immediately, Birmingham supplies the superb medical treatment at the Royal Centre for Defence Medicine in the brand-new Queen Elizabeth Hospital. Here, survivors of the most severe wounds are cared for in numbers that increased from 261 battle injuries in 2008 to 467 in 2009. Some of them move on for rehabilitation at Headley Court, and many need a lifetime of support and care.

Birmingham has been intimately involved in defence and security for centuries. We have experience of every aspect of today's debate—a vigorous, patriotic history, with jobs dependent on the defence industry, recruits to the Armed Forces, weekly evidence of the ambulance helicopter flying over my house with the latest stretchered amputee from Camp Bastion, and a population from all over the world with huge knowledge of, and opinions about, our international relations.

I detect two themes from our diverse communities that I will refer to in the context of this debate. They will provide signs of whether the fruits of the sound policy that we are trying to establish for the country and the world will flourish. The first is whether, on the lawns of Edgbaston or even in the back streets of Alum Rock, there will be an understanding of what it costs to be free, and whether that understanding will make us redouble our efforts to get on with each other locally, so that all may live in peace and fulfilment. This is no soft option. What is now labelled being neighbourly or faithfully interactive requires huge intentional effort. The Feast—a joint Christian-Muslim youth work run by Andrew Smith—or the children's centre built into Springfield Church and serving local Muslim families, are examples of that cross-cultural adventure that makes a city whole and gives hope in an ideologically flawed world.

For the second and more pressing theme, I return to those who are wounded, physically and mentally. I echo the recent articles from the British Medical Association and the honourable Member for Edgbaston, arguing strongly for full, continuing help for these servants of freedom. May we, whatever we do in this review, ensure that they be fully supported both by government and the local community throughout their lives.

Birmingham, like your Lordships' House from my early experience of it, is both generous and welcoming. With a shared and fully resourced commitment to the defeat of wrongdoing and the vigorous promotion of peace, we shall together attempt to build a society that is bigger and better than we can all imagine.