Cultural and Education Exchanges

Lord Parekh Excerpts

Thursday 22nd July 2021 Grand Committee

[Lord Parekh (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, an exchange has benefits of all kinds, both tangible and intangible. Among the tangible benefits, it increases the employability of the individual concerned, makes them familiar with the international markets and tastes of other societies and gives them the capacity to imagine new products and relationships. It also increases their contacts.

However, the intangible benefits are far more important. An individual grows up in a particular culture. We are able to see its strengths and limitations, but they can do so only if they are able to step of their country. However, they cannot step out of their country because there is no cross-cultural Archimedean standpoint from which they can look at their culture and observe its strengths and limitations. The only mini-Archimedean standpoint is another culture. If you look at your culture from the standpoint of another, you get to see its strengths and limitations. In so doing, you acquire a new pair of eyes, a new pair of ears and new sensitivity. This is why I think the word “exchange” is quite appropriate. You exchange—you give up your old self and acquire a new one. For all these reasons, an exchange creates a new individual, a new self. Through him, it has an impact on his family and on the social environment in which he lives and functions. It has a transformative effect on the entire community of which he is a part.

I end by asking two or three simple questions of the Minister. First, exchanges are not limited to university students, although they have tended to be thanks to Erasmus+. Exchange can be a lifelong activity, beginning at the age of 15 or 16 and going on for a long time. Secondly, we could change our visa rules and regulations; we cannot afford to be too stuffy about them. Thirdly, of course, there are the ethnic minorities. There will be a temptation to send them to their own countries of origin, which would be counterproductive. We need to devise more imaginative ways. Fourthly, and more importantly, we will need to think of a variety of countries and cultures to which individuals can be exposed. They cannot simply be sent to countries like their own. A variety of civilisations is just as important as a variety of communities.

Skills and Post-16 Education Bill [HL]

Lord Parekh Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 15th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Parekh (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, the problem that the Bill addresses has been with us for a very long time. Our education system has long been guided by a single model of human excellence: you start your education in a school and keep progressing until you get to a university degree. If you are smart enough and have the resources and inclination, you might do post- graduate work and end your education with a doctorate. But that is not important; what is important is that you must have a university degree—you must be certified by the university to have acquired a certain body of knowledge and skills. If you are not good enough to go to university, what do you do? You turn to technical education, to the polytechnic, and if you cannot make that, you walk out of the education system altogether.

In short, there has been a deep divide between university and technical education, between higher and further education, and between successfully negotiating the obstacles to higher education and failing to do so. This divide has had some profound consequences for our society and economy. Since university education is the only marker of success and the basis of individuals’ self-respect, everyone wants to go for it, with the result that there is inflation in the pursuit of degrees. Secondly, just as a GP thinks of himself as a failed consultant, the person who fails to make it to university thinks of himself as a failed university graduate. This leads to a tremendous amount of bitterness and sadness, and a lack of self-worth on the part of the individual. The system also means that practical intelligence, being good with one’s hands and mechanical skills are treated as inferior and not valued at all.

Obviously, there is no movement from university to technical education; they are parallel universes and you are confined to one or the other. This has been our problem for the last 150 years. Various attempts have been made to tackle the problem; this Bill is a very sincere and profound attempt to do so. It has some very good ideas—I do not need to spell them out—and the idea that individuals who are interested in higher education would have lifelong access to resources is one that levels up opportunities and is to be greatly welcomed.

Before ending, I want very briefly to point out three or four limitations of the Bill, and I very much hope that the Minister will take account of them. First, it concentrates on technical education and treats it as wholly separate from university education. As in the present system, there is no movement from one to the other; each is encapsulated in its own little stream.

Secondly, and this worries me even more than the first point, technical education is seen and justified almost entirely in instrumental terms. There are skills that a society or region needs, and the question is how you persuade students to go for those skills. What is now suggested, therefore, is a kind of industrial fodder—like parliamentary fodder perhaps, but in the case of industrial fodder students will become not so much respectable individuals trained in the art of thinking for themselves but rather individuals who are masters of certain skills, which they are able to sell.

This has a very important consequence, which I must emphasise, on the regional or local orientation of the education system. Each locality, area or region must indicate its employment needs, but how is this to be done? By employer representative bodies providing a list of skills. That, in my view, is to give employers an enormous amount of power and influence. They will suggest which skills are to be produced, and we know what the limitations of that will be. They are not democratically elected, and so the result will be that you create almost a kind of corporate state, where the state works hand in glove with large employer organisations. I fear the consequences of that.

Finally, in order to execute a system of this kind, the state obviously has a tendency to become heavily bureaucratic. This is one noteworthy feature of the Bill that many of your Lordships has pointed out. It gives the Secretary of State the power to indicate which employer representative bodies to recognise and which to withdraw recognition from, and to ask whether the sector is functioning properly and which provider institutions are not satisfactorily run. Again, this gives the state an enormous amount of power in the field of education, the like of which we have not seen in this country before—not even under Mrs Thatcher. So, while the objectives are valuable, I very much hope that the means to realise them will be just as civilised and humane.

Queen’s Speech

Lord Parekh Excerpts

Wednesday 12th May 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Parekh (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, every event that has occurred in Britain during the past two years must be seen through the prism of the coronavirus, and the Queen’s Speech is no exception. The virus has highlighted certain deeper facts about our society, some of which were known but ignored while others were unknown or half-known.

One of those important facts pertains to ethnic disparities in health and other areas. The first 10 NHS doctors to die belonged to the ethnic minorities. Sixty-eight per cent of the NHS staff who have died came from within the ethnic minorities. I could go on producing statistics, but they are too well known to be rehearsed. Why is this so? The reasons, again, are fairly straight- forward and have been commented on. They include the fact that many from within the ethnic minorities are front-line workers; they work in high-risk places; they had no or inadequate PPE; they live in cramped houses; and they do not enjoy positions of power and influence, so their complaints go unheard or are unattended to. These are many of the factors which have led to the kind of disparity that I talked about. The Government took some time to recognise their importance, but when they did, they did not do enough, and the ethnic minorities continue to pay a disproportionately heavy price for the disaster that struck us.

It is therefore important that drastic steps be taken not only to level up people but to create a society in which there is a sense of solidarity and common belonging. It is important that the ethnic minorities should not feel that they are under the sufferance of the wider population, or that their problems are only their own and nobody is going to help them.

In that context, we are going to need a massive investment of resources, not only to deal with the ravages of the virus but for those things which have been left undone because of our obsession with it. The backlog of surgeries in our hospitals is enormous and will call for unimaginable sums of money. Therefore, taxes will have to rise. The rich will have to pay far more than they have done so far. But are tax rises enough? Are there other ways in which we can raise resources?

I want in passing to emphasise two points. First, the NHS, which obviously has to have money, should find ways of reducing its expenses. Secondly, it should find ways of increasing its income. Reducing its expenses is important. There are lots of ways in which it can be done, some of which have been talked about earlier, but one way would be to look at schemes such as the merit award, which consultants get. I have raised this issue in the House from time to time and do not quite understand why the award is given. If I as an academic am awarded the Nobel prize, I do not get a penny more from my vice-chancellor. Let us not give merit awards, with all the attendant disadvantages and resentment caused among those who consider themselves equally good but do not get them.

Likewise, on raising revenues, I do not understand why we have not developed a culture of philanthropy—I may be wrong, but I think I am not—in relation to hospitals and the NHS. When people die, they bequeath large sums of money to their schools and their universities, but I am told that the amounts given to hospitals or medical-related institutes are comparatively small. This is not the case in Germany, and I wonder why. Why do we not leave much money to hospitals? Why do we not even think it proper to express our gratitude in these and other ways? I am not saying that the NHS should start charging people. Of course, it depends on two principles: that the Government are responsible for the health of their citizens and that medical services should be provided free at the point of delivery. Those are unchallengeable principles, but consistent with that, a culture of monetary contributions to hospitals should be encouraged.

The last point I want to raise in this connection is the adult dependent relative visa rule, which states that doctors and others in this country are not allowed to bring their parents from overseas unless they meet certain very strict conditions. In the light of this, some of our doctors are leaving the country, or they tend to come here and then migrate elsewhere. The result is that we tend to suffer from the absence of their contribution. I therefore suggest that we take a second look at the proposals from BAPIO, especially the ones that Professor Keshav Singhal and Dr Ramesh Mehta have made, not accepting them in their current form, but with some modifications—

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

My Lords, I am sorry to interrupt the noble Lord, but I draw his attention to the fact that he has been speaking for six minutes now and we have an advisory limit of five minutes. If he would not mind bringing his remarks to a close, it might be appreciated.

[Lord Parekh (Lab) [V]]

My apologies.