Ugandan Asians

Lord Parekh Excerpts

Thursday 6th December 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Parekh]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Popat, for securing this debate. He is himself an excellent example of the subject of our discussion. He came to this country traumatised and penniless, and is now a successful businessman and a member of your Lordships’ House. Over the centuries, Britain has welcomed and given a home to many persecuted minorities. It is striking that Ugandan Asians have come to occupy a special place in our national narrative. Indeed, they have become a term of art for referring to all east African Asians. That has to do with the way in which the Ugandan Asians came and settled, and the way in which British society responded to them.

There were about 75,000 Asians in Uganda, constituting about 1% of the population. Around 35,000 of them had British passports. They became a target of hostility and tribal politics and were subjected to expropriation and brutality. About 8,000 families, numbering about 28,000 people, arrived in Britain over a period of 90 days. It is important to bear in mind that, unlike the way in which we have dithered about responding to Kenyan Asians, Britain welcomed them, honoured their British passports and made provisions for their settlement. Enoch Powell moved a motion at the Conservative Party conference condemning government policy but the Young Conservatives and the Federation of Conservative Students saw to it that the motion was defeated by 1,721 votes to 736.

The Heath Government were unbending; not only that, they gave leadership to British public opinion. It is very striking that this was more or less the first time since the Second World War that ordinary British people had offered their homes and hospitality to people whom they had never seen, as they did with the Ugandan Asians. In the first three months, 2,000 private individuals had offered their homes, and within about a year that figure had risen to 5,000. Among them, several political and religious leaders had offered their homes. I gather that one Member of this House whom I know quite well—the noble Baroness, Lady Bottomley—and her husband Peter Bottomley were among those who offered their home to a Ugandan Asian family.

Of course, there were cases where some local authorities panicked, not being quite sure what was in store for them. The fine city of Leicester was one of them; it put a notice in a Ugandan newspaper saying, “Please do not come here”. To its credit, it must be remembered that that notice—I have a copy of the advertisement—referred to the fact that they should not come, as advised by the Uganda Resettlement Board—in other words, the decision was taken by the URB, not by the city of Leicester on its own. The city acted in that way because it was not quite sure how many of the 75,000 people would be going there or what the central Government’s policy would be. It was only a few months later that central Government introduced Section 11 of the Local Government Act 1966. To its great credit, Leicester—in spite of that advertisement, which in a historical context is fully understandable—welcomed them and provided them with a home where they could flourish. That was Britain at its best, and it goes to show how immigration, if wisely handled, can become a source of great public support and strength.

To their credit, the Ugandan Asians reciprocated in the same spirit of gratitude and self-help. Many of them refused to accept the help that the Government were extending to them, while some who accepted financial help returned it. Within 15 years, all 28,300 of the Ugandan Asians who had come here had settled down. Never before in British history has a persecuted group established itself so well in such a short time, without recourse to public resources. That is a wonderful example to all minorities and that is the Ugandan Asians’ first contribution—one to be measured not in terms of their monetary and professional contribution but in terms of the historical example that they have set to other minorities.

The second contribution is no less important. I hope you will forgive me if I concentrate on non-tangible aspects of their contribution; after all, I am a philosopher by training. This contribution has to do with the fact that in spite of being persecuted and harassed, they did not bear a grudge against the Ugandan Government. They did not become an anti-Ugandan lobby, as they could have easily done. They blamed Amin but not the country and its people. As the noble Lord, Lord Popat said, they took great pride in returning to the country from time to time. That spirit of forgiveness and reconciliation is their second great contribution.

While many Ugandan Asians came to Britain, some of them went to Canada, Australia, the United States and even India. Family members were scattered all over the world and formed a vibrant trans-national network. As a result, there is hardly a Ugandan Asian family that does not have one branch in Canada, one in the United States and one in India. This not only makes them a transnational network; it also gives them a unique global and cosmopolitan consciousness. That is the third great contribution: a way of looking at the world that is grounded in global interconnectedness.

The fourth great contribution of the Ugandan Asians is at the level of culture. They have built temples and community centres. Sadly, not many noble Lords can read or write the language, but many of them have written wonderful short stories and poetry in their language, which also happens to be my language—namely, Guajarati. In fact, they are the only minority I know who have produced a rich, vibrant literature on their experiences in Uganda and in Britain.

They have also profoundly transformed our shopping culture, living on top of the shop, opening until late and serving exotic items, with all family members joining in to look after the shop, ranging from the grandfather to the grandchild of seven. They provide a kind of shelter—a lively, vibrant place—in inner cities.

They have also thrown up a prosperous middle class, giving the utmost importance to the education of their children. It is very striking that their children tend to be high achievers at GCSE and A-level; many of them are finding their way into some of our great universities.

The third generation of Ugandan Asians—and they are what we are now talking about—has continued this trend. Ugandan Asians, in short, are continuing to make an invaluable contribution and to provide a great pool of commercial and professional talent. I join the rest of your Lordships in saluting this country and in welcoming and celebrating the contributions made by Ugandan Asians to this country.

Lord’s Resistance Army

Lord Parekh Excerpts

Monday 26th March 2012 Grand Committee

[Lord Parekh]

My Lords, I begin by thanking the noble Lord, Lord Alton of Liverpool, for securing this debate and for introducing it with such passion and understanding. The crimes of the LRA and Joseph Kony are horrendous and well known. Atrocities against civilians have been considerable, and children have been used as soldiers and sex slaves. They have also been turned into drug addicts so that even when they stop being soldiers they remain condemned to a certain kind of life all their lives.

Arrest warrants have been issued by the ICC since 2005 and very little has happened. There is no doubt in anybody’s mind that Kony and his cronies must be brought to justice, but I want to approach the question from a slightly different angle. What would happen if they were arrested and brought before the ICC? The trial would drag on; evidence would be degraded by the time of the trial, as has happened in several other cases before the ICC; or the evidence would fail to measure up to the very high standards required by the ICC for evidential justification. There would be considerable costs involved and the world would eventually lose interest in the trial and what the LRA had been doing. Painful memories of the victims would be revived and, within the countries involved, permanent problems that gave rise to the LRA and other things would remain unresolved.

While I agree entirely that we ought to be doing everything within our power to arrest Joseph Kony and others, we should be paying attention to two important things that are in danger of being neglected. First, we should be looking very carefully at the ICC. It demands standards of proof which are too high. In its conception, it has been modelled on domestic courts of justice and tribunals. That does not work at the international level. It also tends to be heavily cumbersome and dilatory. Proceedings of domestic courts cannot, as I said earlier, be models for what goes on at the international level. Again, the ICC is concerned not with ordinary crimes of rape, burglary and murder, as domestic courts are, but with multiple atrocities. How are cases involving multiple atrocities, in a context where the international law is not entirely clear, to be dealt with? It is also important that the judges should have some experience of dealing with cases involving multiple atrocities of this kind. So we should reflect a little more carefully than we have done so far upon the way in which the ICC has proceeded. It is dilatory and enormously costly. Judgment does not come until quite a few years later, and, more importantly, memories get revived when victims would rather forget.

The second important question we should be looking at is this: justice is absolutely important, but peace and domestic reconciliation are equally important. Once upon a time, the LRA had domestic support and was funded. The question that we should therefore be asking is: how can we create a situation in which domestic issues can be satisfactorily resolved before they get out of control or are hijacked in the way in which the LRA and Joseph Kony have hijacked such issues? It is also important, as many people have pointed out, that we should be looking not merely to the ICC to provide an answer, but also to domestic justice mechanisms. For example, in the Acholi tribe in Uganda, to which Kony belongs, there is a very conventional way of dealing with situations of this kind, which is called mato oput. It involves admission of guilt, asking for forgiveness and paying compensation. This is not enough, because things will go wrong, but nevertheless it provides one important way in which a traditional society is able to deal with crimes of this kind. While the ICC is necessary, we ought also to try to integrate traditional mechanisms of justice, restoration and reconciliation into the ICC procedure.

Christians in the Middle East

Lord Parekh Excerpts

Friday 9th December 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Parekh]

My Lords, I congratulate the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury on securing this debate and on introducing it with the great wisdom and compassion that we have come to expect of him.

There are 14 million Christians in the Middle East, which is roughly equal to the number of Muslims in the European Union. In recent years, they have been subjected to discrimination, harassment and violent attacks. We know all this. There is insufficient emphasis on the fact that many Muslim converts to Christianity have also been suffering very quietly because they are not recognised as Christians. In fact, conversion to Christianity is frowned upon, with the result that Muslim converts to Christianity continue to be treated as Muslims and subjected to Sharia law.

Rather than rehearse what has been said about violent attacks on Christians, I shall address two questions. First, why is this happening and, secondly, what should be the nature of our response to it? By and large, Islam has been tolerant, even respectful, of Christianity. For hundreds of years, its record in the Middle East has been fairly good and in some respects even better than the record of Europe with respect to Muslims. Why, then, have these things begun to happen during the past 30 or 40 years?

There are four or five factors which are largely responsible for it. First, in many Middle Eastern countries, there is a deep concern to unite the country and secure its stability by adopting a particular view of national identity. That view is that the country belongs to its majority. Therefore, the national identity is defined in ethno-nationalist terms. It is argued, for example, that only an Arab can be a true Egyptian or Syrian and, further, that only a Muslim Arab can be a true Arab. As a result of that, minorities—Christians and others—get excluded and come to be seen as an alien wedge because they are not part of the national identity.

Secondly, religious minorities in the Middle East, as in every other part of the world, tend to align themselves pretty closely with the established regime for protection, for status and for other obvious advantages. When that regime is challenged, as it is challenged when democracy arrives, minorities become a target, even a scapegoat. That is why democracy sometimes takes an anti-minority orientation. This is not peculiar to the Middle East; it is also to be found in south Asia and, in some respects, is also a part of our own European history.

The third factor responsible for the rise of violence has to do with—let us be frank about it—our own foreign policy. Riah Abu el-Assal, a former Anglican Bishop of Jerusalem, recently said that he had warned Mr Tony Blair a month before the invasion of Iraq in 2003 that if he continued with what he was contemplating:

“You will be responsible for emptying Iraq, the homeland of Abraham, of Christians”.

The fourth factor has to do with the fact that some of these acts of violence have been provoked by Governments. We saw that in the role played by the Ministry of Interior in Egypt when Mubarak thought that he was under threat. By creating conflict and division of this kind, it becomes possible for a Government to pretend that they alone stand between stability and anarchy.

The final factor has to do with our old friend al-Qaeda carrying on its crusade from God-knows-where it was left off last and talking in terms of civilisational conflict. Its anti-Western and anti-Christian propaganda, although limited to a few, continues, sadly, to influence a large number of people. I could mention many other factors, but these are some of the important factors that have played a role in violent attacks on Christians.

How should we respond to this? Here, the most reverend Primate set absolutely the right tone. There is always a danger of thinking in terms of Christians versus Muslims—us identifying with Christians against them, Muslims. Once we begin to think along those lines, we are already storing up trouble for our future. I suggest that we need to bear four or five important things in mind as part of our normative strategy. First, we should speak for all minorities and not just Christians. There are three good reasons for this. First, if we speak only for Christians, we get identified with a particular religion and forfeit our claim to impartiality. Secondly, Christians in the Middle East for whom we speak come to be identified with a foreign power and their loyalty to their country of origin is questioned. Thirdly, if we say we speak only for Christians, we create tension in our own society because we give other religious minorities the impression that we are essentially a Christian country standing up for Christians abroad and not for others.

The second thing that we should bear in mind is that Christian leaders in the Middle East should not ask or expect their followers to think of themselves in exclusively religious terms or act as a homogeneous bloc. Christian leaders in the Middle East, for example, like to say, “We Christians should be standing up for this or that”. That is a language to avoid, because it has certain obvious dangers. It implies that they should not interact or work with their fellow citizens who happen to be non-Christians. It also reinforces religious consciousness, of thinking of Christians in the Middle East only as Christians, and does not allow them to transcend that consciousness by thinking of themselves as fellow citizens. This became particularly clear in Egypt. The Coptic Orthodox Church has been ambiguous in this respect. Pope Shenouda III urged Copts to vote for the best candidates during the run-up to the parliamentary elections irrespective of their religious affiliations. That was fine. Later, it transpired that the Alexandria churches were producing lists of recommended candidates based largely on religious considerations. This rightly provoked an outcry from Coptic activists, many of whom were secular liberals, and eventually a denial from the church’s ecclesiastical council.

The third thing that we should bear in mind is that we must trust democracy and not make the mistake that we made in Algeria several years ago, or were almost tempted to make in Egypt, of supporting the army as the only way to stem the tide of religious fundamentalism. Democracy has a paradoxical logic. It encourages populism, panders to religious passions and gives salience to religion, because that happens to be the fact that weighs with the majority. At the same time, it also works in the opposite direction. It exposes internal tensions within radical and moderate Islamists. When these parties come to power, they are not able to deliver and therefore get exposed. Democracy also gives minorities some political power and the opportunity to criticise the goings-on within the Government and various political parties. In other words, democracy is its own corrective. As long as it is conducted in a reasonably peaceful and non-threatening manner, it has a way of getting rid of its own toxicity. This is how Hindu fundamentalism was ultimately defeated in India. For several years, we thought that the BJP, the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Hindu fundamentalists, when they came to power, would refashion the country. Today, nobody is interested. How did this happen? In a country where 84 per cent of the people are Hindus and mostly illiterate, Hindu fundamentalism was defeated by the weapon of democracy. We need to bear in mind also that, in a democracy, people do not vote along religious lines nor should we expect them to; in fact, we should encourage them not to. The result is that class and other factors begin to play a part.

I say in support of what the most reverend Primate said that the struggle has to be conducted within the Middle Eastern countries themselves, and it has to be an intellectual struggle with two basic goals. The first is to get people to recognise that a society cannot be held together on ethno-nationalist lines—it must be multicultural and its identity must be defined in generous terms. Secondly and more importantly, people must read their own history sensibly. As the most reverend Primate said, Christians have played a fundamental role in the greatness of Arab civilisation. They plugged it into the Hellenic legacy; they were the custodians of the Arab heritage; and they played an important part in the Arab Awakening, not to mention the enormous role that they played when they chafed against the Byzantine yoke and even helped Saladin’s recapture of Jerusalem in 1187.

Reading history in this light helps Muslims to understand that Christians have been an integral part of their world for 2,000 years, that they continue to play an important role and that they are valued members of their community. When that happens, there is mutual respect, mutual appreciation, and the kind of violence that we saw becomes difficult to contemplate.

Libya

Lord Parekh Excerpts

Friday 1st April 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Parekh]

My Lords, I must confess to a certain degree of unease about our Libyan operation. The Minister’s statement has gone some way towards attenuating that, but he has not assuaged my anxiety altogether. China, India, Russia, Brazil, Turkey and Germany were unsympathetic to the UN resolution and have remained highly critical of the way in which we have interpreted the resolution and are conducting the operation. I am also struck by the fact that the United States is discreetly distancing itself from how the operation is going. It is increasingly being seen in the world at large as an Anglo-French operation, an operation by two middle-ranking former imperial powers living out an imperial fantasy and struggling to find a role for themselves. I do not say that they are right; rather, I am simply alerting the House to voices outside our Chamber.

The story began in Benghazi. When the rebellion took place, Colonel Gaddafi said that he was going to hunt down the rebels from house to house and would show no mercy. There was no certainty at the time that he would have acted on those words, but nevertheless we could not take the risk, so we went to the United Nations and obtained Resolutions 1970 and 1973. With the memory of Srebrenica and Rwanda, we were absolutely right to do so.

Resolution 1973, in order to be effective and for our operation to enjoy global legitimacy, had to be minimal, and I think we are in danger of forgetting what it has committed us to. First, it allows us to protect civilians under threat. There must be a direct or indirect threat. Simply an assumption that Colonel Gaddafi has arms stored away somewhere does not entitle us to act on it. Secondly, Resolution 1973 commits us to respecting the,

“sovereignty, independence, territorial integrity and national unity”,

of Libya. Thirdly, the resolution excludes,

“a foreign occupation force of any form on any part of Libyan territory”.

Fourthly and finally, Resolution 1973 stresses the need to facilitate dialogue with a view to securing,

“the political reforms necessary to find a peaceful and sustainable solution”.

Instead, we have been busy interpreting the resolution in an extremely wide and extensive manner. The United Kingdom alone has conducted 160 aerial missions, has used missiles and has tried to destroy military facilities and ammunition stores. Personally, I do not see any basis for this because there is no guarantee that these were being used or planned to be used against civilians. There is nothing other than the potential capacity for them to be so used, which could be said about almost anything.

We have also gone a little further and talked rather loosely—although the Government have not—of regime change. Resolution 1973 makes it very clear, as does public international law, that this is not something within our authority. We have been talking about arming rebels, and I am told that CIA teams are already on the ground busy doing the job. I must confess that when I read and then supported Resolution 1973, I had no idea that this kind of interpretation could conceivably be put upon it.

What is more, what we have been doing is to throw almost all our weight behind one party in a civil war situation. The rebels make noises about committing themselves to secular democracy, which is music to our ears. We are supporting them but without asking, as the noble Lord, Lord West of Spithead, pointed out, who they are. I do not know much about them, but I do know one thing: Libya has sent a large number of people to fight with al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, and 80 to 85 per cent have come from the Benghazi area. The rebels have also been talking about administering justice to the “enemies of the revolution”, and handing out instant justice to black African soldiers. The Interim Transitional National Council through which they operate does not seem to have a clear policy. Let us also remember that when people come to power having been backed by foreign powers, they lack legitimacy. Put simply, they are so fatally compromised that one could not possibly expect them to deliver on their promises to create a secular democracy.

Let us consider the long-term damage of what we are doing. The United Nations is in danger of being discredited because it is being seen as supporting a particular group of powers rather than representing global opinion. The whole idea of humanitarian intervention runs the risk of being discredited. We are in danger of losing our credibility because we are giving the impression that we said one thing when Resolution 1973 was mooted and then went on to interpret it in the way we liked. It is also deflecting our attention from larger questions in Egypt, Tunisia and Yemen. I am also a little disturbed that, when the rebels engaged in violence, we could easily have said to them, “Resort to peaceful protest as the people of Tunisia and Egypt have done”. Instead we accepted violence as a fait accompli, a fact of life, and went on to support it; we have even talked about arming it. Where does that lead us?

I hope that I have said enough to indicate why I feel deeply disturbed. On the question of what we can do now, I want to end by suggesting at least three things. First, we should ask Colonel Gaddafi to pull back his troops from Ajdabiya, Misrata and Zawiya and restore the flow of water, gas and electricity to those areas. Once he has done that, our intervention should stop. We have done enough to create the conditions in which some kind of political dialogue and settlement can take place, and we should leave the Libyans to do this.

Secondly, as Resolution 1973 makes clear, the Secretary-General of the United Nations and the ad hoc high-level committee of the Peace and Security Council of the African Union are supposed to negotiate a settlement. Rather than trying to take over these affairs, we should expect these two bodies, regionally concentrated, to deal with the matter, and perhaps ask Egypt and Turkey to play an important role.

Thirdly and finally, since all this is being legitimised in the name of Resolution 1973, a question arises: who is going to interpret the resolution? Whose authority is to be accepted? We, who are a party to it? As I said at the time of the Iraq war, I would have thought that in situations like this when the interpretation of UN resolutions is in dispute, it should be possible for us or the United Nations to refer the matter to the International Court of Justice for an advisory opinion. If that proves to be difficult, it should be possible for the United Nations to set up a body of expert jurists on the matter and their interpretation of the resolution should be binding, not the kind of interpretation that a particular interested party might choose to put upon it.

Iran

Lord Parekh Excerpts

Tuesday 30th November 2010 Grand Committee

[Lord Parekh]

My Lords, I, too, begin by thanking my noble friend Lord Corbett of Castle Vale for securing and introducing this debate. I am sure he will forgive me if I disagree with many of the things that he said. The Iranian regime has been guilty of violating human rights but it is not the only one in the neighbourhood or in the world. It has been guilty of ignoring basic democratic norms but, again, it is not the only one in the area or in the world. It has been interfering in the affairs of other countries; well, we have a long record of doing that for the past 70 years, so we are in no position to point the finger at the Iranians. We obviously have a duty to criticise and bring pressure to bear on Iran, but we should not engage in any kind of precipitate action that aborts its natural evolution into a secular, democratic society in the years to come.

Nuclear weapons are certainly a serious matter, but I am not sure how serious Iran’s interest is in developing those weapons. It could be a game of bluff or a negotiating counter, but let us assume that it is serious and embarks upon the programme of developing nuclear weapons. Why would it want to do that and what would it do with those nuclear weapons? It would annihilate Israel. It knows that is suicide because Israel has developed perhaps 200 nuclear warheads. It also knows that Israel would be supported by the United States. Is it a fear of its neighbours? It knows that if it were to embark upon nuclear weapons, Saudi Arabia would do the same thing, followed in due course by Egypt and eventually by Turkey. By turning to nuclear weapons for its own national security, it would be defeated by its own actions.

There are two basic concerns with Iran wanting to develop nuclear weapons. There is a sense of national pride. For all kinds of reasons, having nuclear weapons has become a badge of having arrived on the international scene and being taken seriously. In part, there is also the fear that the United States will interfere, as it has during the past 50-odd years, in the internal affairs of Iran. Therefore, we need to ask ourselves how we can normalise relations with Iran and allow its own internal dynamics to develop in a healthy direction when any kind of external pressure or interference will simply abort the process and create more problems for us.

We ought to reassure the Iranians that no one is going to interfere in their internal affairs, apply diplomatic pressure, and provide a carrot in the form of giving it a greater regional and global role and drawing it into global deliberations on a new kind of world order. More importantly, we ought to put pressure on its neighbours because we have been concentrating too much on Iran. We ought to make it clear to them that they ought to engage in establishing cordial relations with Iran, rather than turning to Uncle Sam every time there is trouble—in the hope that Uncle Sam will come down heavily on the Iranians—when no good relations are going to be created that way.

My final point is that Iran is going through a deep internal crisis: economic, political and cultural. If we allow that process to be uninterrupted by external pressure or internal panic, we might be able to create a more sensible order than we ended up creating in Iraq.

Diplomacy

Lord Parekh Excerpts

Thursday 11th November 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Parekh]

My Lords, I, too, thank the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, for securing and introducing this debate. As he rightly said, we are a middle-ranking power with limited resources but, thanks to our history, we have a global presence and a good reputation. Although our uncritical support for the US-led invasion of Iraq did us great damage, we are widely respected for our commitment to certain values and our ability to blend political realism with moral idealism.

Being a middle-ranking power, our hard power is limited. So far as what is called “soft power” is concerned, I am not sure that the term really makes much sense. It is a metaphor based on “hard power” and, like all metaphors, it is indeterminate and ambiguous. I have debated this with the father of the phrase, Professor Joseph Nye, and he takes it to mean “the ability to get others to think the way that we do”. I am not sure why we would want to do that; it has an element of intellectual seduction and manipulation, and I should have thought that diversity of view had much to be said for it. I would rather think that our concern should be to ensure that others think well of us, take care of our interests, are concerned about us and wish to be close to us. In other words, rather than talk about power, soft or otherwise, we should be thinking of building bonds of interest and affection with other countries.

If that is the goal, and it ought to be, there are three or four things that we should be aiming at. First, as a country, given our history and geography, we stand for certain values like human rights and mutual respect between nations. We ought to be able to display those values in our foreign policy. We should also encourage them in other countries, but never in a hectoring or arrogant spirit. The banal dichotomy of either intervention or indifference is not an option. I would like to think that the Prime Minister has shown how this can be done in his recent talk to students in China, talking about human rights, not as if it were a western export but rather something that China itself should want in order to create a stable and vibrant society.

Secondly, we live in a world of free and proud nations with different cultural traditions. It is extremely important that we should conduct our relations with them in a manner that does not offend or alienate them. There have been hilarious examples in recent years of how we can easily end up offending them. I was told—I hope this is not true—that one of our Foreign Secretaries, on a visit to India, addressed the Indian Prime Minister by his first name. You do not do that kind of thing. I was also told that the first Indian Prime Minister, Pandit Nehru, once complained to Sir Isaiah Berlin that, although he found American diplomats brash and full of themselves, he could handle them, while he had some difficulty with the British, whom he thought were rather patronising with an effortless air of superiority. He said, “I can’t handle that, having suffered it when I was a student at Cambridge”.

Having talked to Indian diplomats in recent years, I am told that things have changed considerably but, nevertheless, there are occasional glimpses of that effortless superiority. We ought to be careful about that. In other words, I am suggesting that we make sure that our diplomats are multiculturally literate and able to talk to people in other countries in the terms of the language and traditions that they share.

My third point has to do with the fact that the Foreign and Commonwealth Office should be open to new ideas and long-term perspectives. I am thinking not simply about tactical responses to this or that crisis, but rather about the deeper factors that influence a situation so that our response to a crisis is grounded in a long-term analysis. That will require that more of our academics and journalists are involved in the formulation of FCO thinking. In that context I ask the Minister: how many of the senior personnel in the FCO and in our diplomatic missions come from the ethnic minorities? My feeling is that, despite being a multiethnic society, we tend to present a rather monocultural, mono-ethnic profile to the world outside.

My fourth point has to do with our educational institutions, which play a crucial role. Overseas students are attracted to our great universities, and they are tomorrow’s leaders in government, business and the arts. It is very important that we should attract them, fund them and invest in them. The Chevening scholarships should therefore not be reduced. They are one way in which we invest in our own future.

In that context, we must also take a second look at the BBC World Service. It is widely respected as a source of unbiased information. As the noble Baroness, Lady Afshar, pointed out, the BBC’s Persian service, for example, is widely respected. It is striking that President Obama chose to give an interview to the BBC’s Persian service to reach out to the people of Iran and to refute President Ahmadinejad’s comments before the United Nations General Assembly in September. It would be a great mistake to deprive the BBC of this capacity to reach out to many people.

Finally, I greatly welcome the fact that the Prime Minister has set his heart on having special relations with India. The two countries have had close ties over the centuries, not just because of the imperial connection but going back further. This does not mean that Britain should be silent in those areas where India is wrong—for example, over Kashmir. I have protested strongly over the years that India’s policy in Kashmir is to be deeply faulted. At the same time, this can be done in different ways. Given the presence of the Indian diaspora, it is important that its people should be involved in formulating Britain’s policy and liaising with India.