Social Cohesion and Community during Periods of Change

Lord Griffiths of Burry Port Excerpts

Friday 6th December 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port (Lab)]

My Lords, I do not know what the odds would be for someone being asked to speak immediately after an Archbishop on two successive days, but here am I, with a mood change from yesterday to today. Yesterday was perhaps elegiac and today might even risk being euphoric—we will have to see about that.

I am delighted to have the opportunity to be here and to contribute to this important debate, for which I thank the most reverend Primate. As I stand here, behind and above the Bishops, I am reminded that on Friday morning debates like this—accustomed as I have been to sitting on the other side of the House where I can look them in the eye—I always want to test the biblical knowledge of the Bishops. I begin, therefore, in sermonic mood, although I promise that I will soon release you from the captivity of that mood. This is really to challenge the Bishops.

The Bishops will know pretty well the opening verse of chapter 13 of the Epistle to the Hebrews. They will probably know it in the King James version—I see one or two of them who might just be in touch with something more modern—but, in the Greek, the word “philadelphia” appears in that first verse: brotherly love. If ever there were one word to encapsulate what I think is the driving force behind and the hoped-for outcome of this debate, philadelphia might be it. Because we like philadelphia and can wed our thoughts to teasing out meanings from that word, we tend to stop short and spend our time luxuriating in whatever philadelphia might be made to mean. But if you go on in the verse, you will find another Greek word, and it is equally important. It is “philoxenia”, which is a love of strangers. That complementarity of ideas seems to me to bring to our attention dimensions of the subject we are debating which it is important not to forget.

At the moment, I am prepossessed every working hour with preparing for meetings that I will be at on Monday, in Paris. I am a member of the delegation from this Parliament to the Council of Europe. I sit on its migration committee. Since I have been on it, we have been taxed with movements in the interpretation of the United Nations convention on refugees that have embraced, shall we say, wide extremes. The erosion of the original ideals of the convention have preoccupied the migration committee. It has been rather difficult for me, as a Labour member, sitting through meetings of the migration committee when the Conservative Government were putting through this House three Acts of Parliament that were at odds, I felt, with the lofty ideals of the convention, but that is not where I want to dwell.

The committee has given me the supreme honour of chairing one of its sub-committees. For a humble Methodist minister to be the chairman of a sub-committee is probably as high as it gets. I have fought very hard, since achieving that summit, to win time on the agendas of migration committees for the considerations of the sub-committee to be adequately dealt with.

What is the sub-committee? It is for diasporas and integration, which I think bears particularly on the issues before us today. I have worked with diasporas in this country for decades—Bangladeshi, Zimbabwean, Fijian, Ghanaian and many others. I belong to a diaspora: the Welsh on Gray’s Inn Road. I have won an hour on Monday—just one hour. I am hoping to persuade people that this subject deserves adequate attention and that we move from looking at the edges of the convention that we have all been worried about to the positive role that diasporas might play in shaping communities, as well as being places where people can gather for safety, cultural identity or whatever it is. I have prepared a paper that we will discuss on Monday with that in mind.

I am sure noble Lords will all want to know about the byzantine ways in which the Council of Europe does its work—I can see the look of longing on their faces. If I win enough signatures for the proposal I put forward on Monday, it will then go to the migration committee itself, where I will again have to win the arguments and support before it agrees to send it on to the parliamentary assembly in its full plenary body later in the process. I am rather hoping I can catch a mood here, because all my work with ethnic-minority groupings and diasporas suggests that they can play a terrific role positively to reshape the way we think about the multicultural society that we live in.

They are not just residual bodies where people can find safety, community and all the rest of it—a kind of passive receptivity—but agents for change in society at large. They can bring points of view to the attention of a larger society; they can shape local communities; they can add to the thinking of the rest of us. That is my hope, but I have to contend with two radically opposed understandings of multiculturalism. I have heard the term used in two diametrically opposite ways.

First is the idea that multicultural means there are all these microscopic bodies that we call diasporas, and they sometimes put their own objectives at the expense of others and form separate entities within the larger community. We do not want to live in a country with that kind of episodic way of looking at the way we organise ourselves. The other way is to glory in multiculturalism, which does not satisfy itself with one kind of cultural entity. It is an entity that can be enriched, receive innovation and stir the imagination for greater and more glorious things that we could all enjoy, if only we found the way to release the diaspora from looking inwards to looking outwards. There is already a lot of that happening. I am working with the Catholic agency for development, which is doing some map-making for diasporas, and I want to put all this thinking on to an evidence base.

Think of me on Monday. I now leave the debate for others to take further, but I have rather enjoyed this moment that started with the Bishops, and I have looked at the lowering of attention among the rest of your Lordships as the minutes have passed by.