Citizenship and Civic Engagement (Select Committee Report)

Lord Judd Excerpts

Monday 19th November 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Judd (Lab)]

My Lords, I join those who pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, his colleagues and their staff for a very interesting and good report. It seems to be a mine of insight and common sense. It is a report we should all take seriously. Overarching everything we have been discussing tonight is the urgency, the imperative, for effective action. Why is that? It is because it is becoming manifestly clear that we can no longer take the effectiveness or acceptability of existing institutions and methods of conducting our democracy for granted. They are being challenged. The huge debate that rages about whether we should have another referendum on Brexit is a very good example of this because it is clear to anyone who knows the first thing about the British constitution that you cannot have a system in which referenda and representative parliamentary democracy or representative local government sit side by side. That is the road to authoritarianism.

What I found disappointing in the Government’s response to the report was that it did not seem to grasp the implications and depth of the analysis that lay behind it. Nowhere was this clearer than on the issue of the use of the term, “shared values of the British people,” instead of “fundamental British rights”. It really disturbs me that the Government do not see that the present situation is provocative. It is also ill informed because many of those values are shared right across the world, and part of interdependence with the world involves recognising that the values that we hold dear as central to our system are also the values of other people and that is why we have to learn to work together in making sure that those values are applied. It is also there in the failure to take really seriously or meaningfully the issue of English for speakers of foreign languages. How on earth can we make a successful and integrated multicultural society unless a priority in public expenditure is ensuring that people not only have access to such facilities but are actually being positively encouraged to take advantage of them? Those facilities are not there, though, and that is the problem.

My third point, which underlines the failure of the Government to respond, is the issue of the cost of becoming a British citizen or securing registration in this country, which is a disgrace in a country that says it wants to make a success of its multicultural society. How on earth can it not be seen that there should be positive incentives and encouragement for people to become full citizens, rather than disincentives?

We have been talking about citizenship education. I thought the speech by the noble Lord, Lord Norton of Louth, about the qualifications for so-called citizenship teaching and the reality that they are just seen as a formality that must be fulfilled rather than a meaningful and purposeful enterprise, was a powerful contribution to the debate. However, I believe we have to take the issue of our education system as a whole as highly relevant to our anxieties. We are deliberately pursuing a road that is leading to the acceleration of a quantitative approach to education as distinct from a qualitative one. There is a confusion between education and training; we need lots of good training in particular spheres, of course we do, but training is not education. Education is about encouraging people to think, analyse and become self-confident, critical members of society. If we are not getting that right in our education system as a whole, there is very little hope of being able to do it by patchwork in this particular area. We have to get back to the concept of education being about education.

We need citizens who ask questions. I am told quite often by my friends in management consultancy and that sort of business that I am out of date because people have never been asked more frequently to express their views on questions that are put to them. However, I think that is an indication of how far we have drifted because it is not a question of how people respond to questions that, for whatever motivation, people are putting to them; it is a question of people themselves asking questions and deciding what those questions should be. It is therefore not just a matter of integrating new citizens who have come from elsewhere: it is about how we encourage our own traditional citizens to see the meaning of life. In this, of course, the relative neglect of the humanities in our education system now is a disaster. We are getting better and better at science, technology and mathematics—and of course all these things matter; I take second place to no one on that—but for what? What is the society that we are trying to create? What is the dream of the society that we are trying to establish? That is where the humanities are indispensable.

Before I came to this debate, I was talking to a great friend and colleague of mine, my noble friend Lady Corston, because we share an office, about some of the things that were troubling me in this context. We began to talk about the English football team and Southgate. He seems to be a superb role model for those we should be appointing to motivate society as a whole. My noble friend made the very interesting remark—I said, “May I pinch it for my speech tonight?”; she said, “Of course you can”—“He has emotional intelligence”. That is what we are lacking. It is not just a task. It is not just how we fix it, how we manage things to get them right; it is how we have empathy, how we can relate, inspire people and support them.