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.

Holocaust Memorial Bill

Lord Goodman of Wycombe Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 4th September 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Goodman of Wycombe (Con)]

My Lords, I shall ask three questions, if I may. First, does Britain need a new Holocaust memorial? Secondly, if it does, is this the right scheme? Thirdly, if it is the right scheme, is it in the right place? We must all answer these questions for ourselves, and my answers are as follows.

Does Britain need a new Holocaust memorial? As the Minister correctly said at the start, the present generation of survivors is passing away and I believe we need a new something. It might be a new memorial; it might be a new Jewish Museum; we might prefer to put resources into Holocaust education, which does not seem to be in a particularly good way; we might prefer to build on what we have already got in, say, the Imperial War Museum. However, all these considerations are somewhat theoretical, because the only proposal we actually have before us is the one pointed to in the Bill, so we must weigh that carefully.

Secondly, do we need this particular scheme? Here I pick up a concern originally aired in this debate by the noble Lord, Lord Mann, about the content. My concern is as follows. A learning centre can focus either on the Holocaust in the context of 2,000 years of European anti-Semitism and the story of the Jewish people, with its joys and sorrows, not forgetting the others who also died in the Holocaust, or it can range more widely through racism to, as the last speaker suggested, other genocides, such as the Rwandan one. I would have no objection, myself, to the Rwandan genocide being referenced in the learning centre, but here we run into a problem, which is that the idea of genocide is somewhat contested. There is a legal definition, a sociological idea, a political and policy idea and then finally there is a popular idea in which genocide tends to merge into crimes against humanity, which in turn tend to merge into war crimes. It is perhaps a feature of modern warfare that any war that involves a mass loss of civilian life risks incurring the charge of genocide, whether that charge is justified or not. In short, I am concerned, given that we appear to know so little about the content of the learning centre, that the unique horror of the Holocaust may be lost, though against this I have to weigh the expertise of the historians who will advise and the reliability of the committee that appointed them—although I have to add that it is not yet clear to me what the successor body to that committee will be and how subsequent appointments will be made.

Finally, is it in the right place? I can add nothing to what noble Lords have already said on that score. I feel, myself, that a learning centre does not necessarily have to be in the shadow of the Palace of Westminster, though I understand that other noble Lords feel differently, and their feelings about this may well be more important than mine.

In conclusion, it seems to me that where the Bill is going is that at Third Reading, the choice may well be between the proposal the Bill points to or making do simply with what we have. If that is the choice, I will cross that bridge when I come to it, but I hope and believe that the questions I have raised are good questions and I look forward to pursuing them in Committee and on Report.