Integration and Community Cohesion

Lord Griffiths of Burry Port Excerpts

Thursday 13th March 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port (Lab)]

My Lords, I am almost speechless at the quality of some of the contributions to this debate. As to the two maiden speakers, what fun we are going to have in the future—fun even in your Lordships’ House. I commend them on the quality of their wisdom and the manner of their delivery, to say nothing of a former stand-up comic sitting beside them. I also thank the noble Baroness, Lady Verma—I want to call her my noble friend—for giving us the opportunity to share these experiences and ideas.

The day before yesterday, I was in Paris attending the migration committee of the Council of Europe, where I was charged to be the rapporteur for a study of diasporas across the continent and their agency in shaping coherent societies. I rose to accept that on the grounds that this is an opportunity to build a counternarrative to the toxic debates that we have been having about migration, for those who were migrants not so long ago are now pillars of British society. I am looking forward to that, though it will take some time; I may be in the grave before I finish it.

I wanted the major part of my contribution to be somewhere quite different, in a university in London. Four teacher training colleges, one run by Methodists, another by Anglicans, another by Roman Catholics and another by a humanist organisation, had to face the fact that teacher training institutions were no longer the fashion of the day, so they formed the Roehampton Institute of Higher Education and eventually were given by the Privy Council degree-awarding abilities and research degree facilities.

We saw coming on to one campus four bodies representing traditions that had been at one another’s throats for so much of British history and, where they had a common objective, finding a common will and a readiness to be open and generous with one another. Although they have religious backgrounds, they accept students from all over, now as the University of Roehampton. I was privileged to be part of the engine that brought it into being and have benefited from one of its awards more recently—I do not think it was in direct payment; I have to say that in case it gets into the newspapers. Here we have evidence that integration, coherence and social cohesion can happen when, instead of looking at each other as opposites or different, people collaborate around an agreed goal and work towards it together.

Of course, I am not going to take my six minutes—I always count it when I do not; I keep an account of the minutes that I have in credit for future possible use. What I have tried to explain by way of the creation of the University of Roehampton reached its summit point when it appointed as its new chancellor the person who introduced this debate, the noble Baroness, Lady Verma. Methodist plus Anglican plus Roman Catholic plus humanist now have the coherent head of a Hindu who is helping us all to see even more than we saw before.