Social Cohesion and Community during Periods of Change

Lord Lilley Excerpts

Friday 6th December 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lilley (Con)]

My Lords, it is a daunting privilege to follow both an Archbishop and a Methodist preacher, but I participate in this debate because it is one of the few occasions in the year when we can hope to hear from the Lords spiritual—I welcome in particular the most reverend Primate’s contribution—some spiritual guidance based on the gospels, rather than on the Labour Party manifesto and the latest progressive critique of the last Government.

I hope to achieve a positive response and some answers from the Lords spiritual to the sort of questions that engage me as both a Christian and a Conservative, which are rarely addressed because it is assumed—I hope to challenge this, but not in an aggressive way—that if you are a Conservative you cannot be a Christian, and if you are a Christian you cannot be a Conservative. I want to think particularly about the political implications, if any, of our Lord’s injunction to love our neighbour as ourselves. When Christ asked that question, “Who is my neighbour?”, he told us the parable of the Samaritan. I do not need to repeat it, but we can all agree that one thing that shows is that there can be no discrimination between Samaritan and Jew, between Christian and Muslim, between any different people, on the basis of their colour. That is a clear lesson of that parable, but some conclude that our obligations must therefore extend to the whole world, and that our job to love our neighbour as ourselves means that we must love everybody throughout the world equally. Dickens parodied that in Bleak House, in a chapter on telescopic philanthropy, in which he had the characters Mrs Jellyby, who devoted herself to the Tockahoopo Indians, and Mrs Pardiggle, whose “rapacious benevolence” was directed towards the tribes of the Borrioboola-Gha in Africa, to the detriment of the people of their own country and even their own families.

At the other extreme are those who interpret the parable as meaning only that we should help those we personally come in contact with, and that if we meet someone wounded by the wayside we should help them, especially if others are passing by. But even in a community where everybody was motivated by genuine, generous, Christian charity, leaving that philanthropy and charity to anarchically express themselves would mean that some people get a lot of help and others get no help.

The Church itself recognised at an early stage that it had to create an embryonic welfare state. It pooled resources and helped both its own members and others in the society around it. The earliest Church, in due course, became a sort of welfare state through the churches and the monasteries. Then, after the abolition of the monasteries, the state began to take over with the Poor Law and, ultimately, the modern welfare state. As a result, we have moved a long way from the original Samaritan, who acted voluntarily. We, as members of the welfare state, contribute compulsorily. The Samaritan did not say, “Oh, there is someone in need. I will pluck some money out of the Levite’s wallet and some out of the priest’s wallet and give it to him and claim virtue”. He did it himself with his own means. We have to participate in the welfare state, and we cannot attribute to the welfare state the same moral virtue as we do to the Samaritan. If we did, I would be the most generous person in this place, because as Secretary of State for Social Security I distributed £200 billion of your money, in modern money, to the poor, the needy and so on. But it was not my virtue: I was simply doing what society had decided.

Ultimately, the welfare state exists; we agree to do that, with compulsion on ourselves to contribute, because of a sense of national solidarity. Here, I think we get to some questions that are often ignored. Most of us feel a hierarchy of obligation: to our family, to our immediate friends, then to our nation—of course there is an obligation to people outside our nation, but it is primarily to our nation. I ask the Benches opposite this: is that okay? Is it reasonable that we have a hierarchy of obligation, feel more obligation to those in our own country than to those in others, and feel that other countries should themselves have their welfare states and look after their own people according to the means they have?

Well, I suggest that we have to, because we cannot be open to the whole world; we cannot because our welfare level is greater than the norm, or median, income in many of the countries in the third world. My first career was working in developing countries on aid and development programmes, and the level of incomes then was dramatically below what people on welfare in this country got—so we cannot, for that reason.

Anyway, if we do, to the extent that we do, we find that generous-minded people in this House, who all have their own homes, start allocating housing that would have gone to people on the housing list to people from abroad. That is why there is resentment if there is an excessive influx from abroad—and not illegally: I mean, over the last 18 months, we have allowed a net inflow into this country of the population of Birmingham. Where are we going to build another Birmingham before we can build a single extra house for the people already here? We rarely hear about that from those who find any criticism of mass migration to be improper.

That raises the question: should we accept anybody who manages to get here? It is apparently legitimate that we try to stop them getting here—we try to stop the boats and smash the gangs, and no one has ever criticised Starmer for wanting to do that, but it is a bit odd that, when people manage to get here nonetheless, they are then effectively awarded prizes, very often at the cost of the least well-off in this country. Matthew Parris equated it to a rugby match: you can try to stop people getting across the line, but as soon as they get across the line and touch down, they are granted the prize of five points and can try to convert it into a goal. That is a funny business.

Anyway, it is always the least poor who get here. When I worked in Africa and Asia, none of the poor people I was working among ever talked of the possibility of coming to Europe: it was beyond their comprehension, the costs of travel were so much greater, and the knowledge through media was so much less that they did not. Now, the people who do get here are those who have access to a few thousand pounds, perhaps £10,000, which is an enormous amount of money in those countries—and we are saying, “Oh, well, we’re generous. We’ll allow them to stay. We mustn’t try to stop them”. I simply ask the question: why is it reasonable to try to prevent them coming here but not fair to try to deter them from coming here, as we did through the Rwanda programme?

There are lots of issues that we—and I—have to wrestle with, and I would like the bishops occasionally to wrestle with them. Is it reasonable that we have national solidarity or is that an evil and wicked thing? Is it reasonable that we give priority to the poor in our own country while recognising that charity, although it begins at home, does not end at home? We may have to offer help to countries that are overwhelmed by some disaster, but then, normally, we should expect people in other countries to look after themselves and our duty is to the poor, needy and vulnerable in our own community.