Integration and Community Cohesion

Lord Goodman of Wycombe Excerpts

Thursday 13th March 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Goodman of Wycombe (Con)]

My Lords, I declare my interest as a senior fellow at Policy Exchange. I congratulate the noble Lords, Lord Raval and Lord Rook, on their two very engaging maiden speeches, and wish them every joy in the House. I also commend my noble friend Lady Verma on securing this important debate. Each of us will have our own idea of what integration looks like. Mine took place two years ago: namely, the King’s Coronation. The Coronation was what has been described, in a very different context, as a demonstration of traditional values in a modern setting. I want to examine both of those themes in turn.

First, the modern setting. As other speakers have pointed out, the Britain of the future will be less white, older and less Christian. Other faiths will grow, especially Islam, which by 2050 is likely to be followed by some 15% of the population. Therefore, when we talk of integration, we must not assume that others, who are neither white nor culturally Christian, must somehow integrate into the rest of the country that is, because the country is changing. As the noble Lord, Lord Rook, said in his maiden speech, integration is a two-way street.

However, though Britain is changing, much of it is unchanged—which brings me to the traditional values. Although many of us are neither white nor culturally Christian, more of us still are. Our country has been shaped not by so-called British values—I have always been perplexed as to what these are—but by British institutions that, in turn, were shaped by enlightenment values which, in turn, were shaped—as Tom Holland argues in his brilliant book, Dominion—by Christianity.

What did all this produce? I answer: constitutional monarchy, democratic government, freedom under the law, an independent judiciary, strong civic institutions and a free press. All of these are explicitly western in origin, although now global in application, as expressed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. These are the foundations of our culture and I have no hesitation in asserting that some cultures are better than others. It is these things we must integrate into if we are to be as great in the future as we have sometimes been in the past.

In the very brief time available to me, I will sketch how these foundations can be strengthened. In a nutshell, we have the balance wrong. There must be some policing of private space in relation to, for example, support for terror, child abuse or incitement to violence. Integration is not enhanced, and nor are the police well served, by the thinking behind or the recording of non-crime hate incidents, as too often happens. Similarly, there must be free expression in public space in relation to, for example, events in the Middle East.

However, liberty is not licence, and there can be no room in the public square for support for terrorist organisations such as Hamas and Hezbollah, or for anti-Semitism or anti-Muslim hatred. On that score, I agree very much with what the noble Lord, Lord Katz, said earlier in the debate. In that context, organisations that use criminal action to force change should face a fundraising and communication ban—as recommended by the noble Lord, Lord Walney, who I see is in his place—and the criteria under which protests are permitted should be tightened, as recommended by Policy Exchange.

Finally, we need to radically reform the practice of equality, diversity and inclusion which, at their best, are all about fairness. In the words of Dr Raghib Ali, who advised the last Government on ethnicity and Covid,

“the primary factor in health and educational inequalities is deprivation, not race”

and

“there is now no overall ‘White privilege’ in health or education (and especially not for deprived Whites)—or overall ‘BAME disadvantage’—and these categories are now outdated and unhelpful”.

Just as we need to rethink equality, so we need to think very carefully about diversity and inclusion. It is said that diversity is a strength: this is usually true, but it is not always true that inclusion is a strength. For example, no one in this Chamber would think it would be a strength to integrate the grooming and rape gangs into the Britain of the future. Andrew Norfolk, the journalist who led the reporting for the Times, has said the root causes of the abuse have not been properly examined, which is why many of us on this side of the House have argued that a full national inquiry is essential.

Some believe in equality of outcome, some in equality of opportunity, but the equality that all of us can and do sign up to is equality before the law, the primacy of which should once again be established in public policy if the practice of integration is to be realised, and the promise of the Coronation is to be fulfilled.