Standards in Public Life

Lord Parekh Excerpts

Thursday 9th September 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Parekh (Lab)]

My Lords, I begin by congratulating my noble and good friend Lord Blunkett on securing this debate and introducing it with great understanding and wisdom. Standards in public life has become a common subject of anxiety for many of us who care for this country. I want to make four or five points of a systematic kind.

The first thing to bear in mind on standards in public life is that there is a danger of being rather nostalgic about them and imagining an age when things were fine. That is not so. Look at 18th-century Britain and the scandals that took place then, or at 19th-century Britain, when things were horrendous. That is not to underestimate what is happening today but simply to put it in a historical perspective. Standards in any given age always seem to fall.

The other important thing is what kinds of standards we are talking about. If you asked a medieval monk—or my good and noble friend Lord Griffiths, who gave us a Methodist sermon—they might talk about religious standards. Later on, people might have talked about moral standards of people falling. What standards are we talking about—financial standards, those involving the treatment of women, or what? The first and most important thing to bear in mind is that when we talk about standards, we should not be too nostalgic about the past and should be precise about what standards we are talking about. The Nolan principles are very relevant but, at the same time, they are also limited. They never talk about sexual harassment or the treatment of women, which has become a subject of great importance. Therefore, the first point I want to make is, as I say, on specifying the kind of standards that we have in mind.

The second important point is that when standards fall, corruption sets in, and corruption always starts at the top. The man at the bottom does not have the guts to violate standards, because he knows he will get caught. The man at the top starts the process, feeling confident that others will bail him out if he is caught. So corruption starts at the top, gradually spreads downwards and, if we are not careful or if the process is not arrested at some point, it permeates the entire society like a blanket and creates a situation where it simply cannot be dealt with. Who do you appeal to against corruption when the entire society is complicit in it?

Another important point is that corruption in any society is often sustained because people are generally too tolerant. It is a difficult point to make but, in our own country, people often talk about the Prime Minister. I do not wish to get into this, but the point is that, whatever he has done, people seems to have lapped it up. People seem to be with him. How do you accept a situation where standards are violated—I could mention half a dozen systematic violations—and people laugh it off and allow him to get on with it? It never seems to be held against him.

To me, that is the danger: standards are ultimately sustained by what? What are the sanctions behind standards? The sanctions are individual conscience, although that may or may not work, and professional ethics. For example, as a doctor or professor, I cannot do certain things; however, again, that may or may not work. What else? There is public opinion. Public opinion is the guarantor, the custodian, of standards in public life. When the public opinion is no longer interested in or is indifferent to those standards—or, indeed, delights in the playful violation of those standards—who will guarantee that they will be kept and preserved?

That is the danger, and not only in this country. I am sorry to disagree with the earlier remark that we are better off than other countries. Sadly, we are not, partly because our standards are not as vigorous as those in some other countries and partly because we have not examined them as carefully. Our standards are no better and no worse than elsewhere; we are all the same human beings. The simple point is that the same failure of public opinion is evident in every country, including the one I come from—India—where standards have been systemically falling. The question is this: when public opinion fails to perform its role, where do you go? Whom do you appeal to?

The next question, therefore, is: how can public opinion be educated? However, that sounds very patronising, as though we are in the business of educating public opinion. How can the public themselves arrive at a more sensible view? There, you need freedom of information and all kinds of machinery by which the public can be kept informed.

Overseas Development Assistance

Lord Parekh Excerpts

Wednesday 14th July 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Agnew of Oulton (Con)]

I disagree with the noble Lord. The vessel to which he refers will be to promote Britain and trade and lead to wealth creation. The cost—some £200 million, I understand, has been mooted—should be amortised over the life of that vessel. The running costs will be covered by the companies using it. It will bring wealth to this country, and wealth creation is a high priority for us at the moment.

[Lord Parekh (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, 0.7% of gross national income is a moral obligation, it is an international institutional obligation because of our membership of the United Nations, and it is also a statutory obligation, so supersession of this obligation requires enormously compelling circumstances. I cannot see why it has to give way to others, especially when the amount involved is no more than £4 billion out of a total of more than £600 billion that we are going to have to raise. The Government say that this constraint in expedient and temporary. What measures are we taking to make sure that what is temporary does not become permanent? The Government say that they will return to 0.7% when the fiscal situation is established on a sustainable basis. That is a very vague term. How do we decide what is a sustainable basis? It takes a long time to work it out and, more importantly, it is a term which can be understood in several different ways. How can we be sure that the Government will return to 0.7% and what reassurance can be given to people who are deeply worried about the step that the Government are about to take?

[Lord Agnew of Oulton (Con)]

I disagree with the noble Lord that this is a small sum of money when it would be 1p on income tax and is something like four times the amount committed to hiring 50,000 more nurses and four times the amount committed to hiring 20,000 more police officers. We have set out, as agreed in the Commons yesterday, the criteria for re-establishing it and committed to re-establishing it when they are met.

Referendums

Lord Parekh Excerpts

Thursday 13th June 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Parekh (Lab)]

My Lords, we have had 13 referendums so far; three were national and 10 regional. This means that referendums have become an accepted practice and anyone who wants one from now on cannot be denied it on the grounds that it is inconsistent with parliamentary democracy. It is an established constitutional fact. In addition, there are several good reasons why a referendum has a place in a democracy. In a liberal democracy, the political class tends to be self-contained and it is quite important that people should be able to speak directly, unmediated by any institution. In that sense, a referendum serves as a safety valve in a liberal democracy. It also vitalises parliamentary democracy because from time to time, when the people speak and assert their sovereignty, parliamentary institutions are made accountable.

My good friend the noble Lord, Lord Norton, said that the difficulty with a referendum is who the people are accountable to. In a parliamentary democracy, parliamentarians are accountable to the people, but who are the people accountable to? Ultimately, there is an absolute premise for that authority. If I said that they were accountable to themselves, because they have to pay the price for the decisions they make, that answer should be sufficient. As Aristotle said, the wearer knows where the shoe pinches, so there is no responsibility beyond the people’s experience.

Given that, in short, a referendum is a part of our political life, the question is: what can we do to regulate it, so that we know when to implement it and on what issues, how great a majority should be required on that issue and what the preconditions are for a sensible referendum? All our referendums so far, bar one, have been noncontroversial. The EU referendum of 2016 became controversial, partly because its outcome is inconsistent with what the liberals and parliamentarians expected. That kind of clash between Parliament and the people had not happened on any of the earlier referendums.

Now that it has become controversial, it is very important that we should think in terms of a constitutional convention. That convention cannot be drafted by Parliament because it would be seen as a party—Parliament deciding its own future. The convention has to be done by Parliament in collaboration with the people. That is the kind of convention that the Scots had. Here, it is important to bear a simple point in mind. With a referendum, you create a kind of political system in which the country is ruled by Parliament in collaboration with the people. Just as we have the collaboration of Parliament and the sovereign, governing the country together, the situation would be that Parliament and the people govern the country. The people would express their views through a referendum, and Parliament through other ways. A referendum can therefore never be entirely advisory, nor can it be totally binding. There are ways in which its position can be defined, but I should have thought that one way in which we can look at the outcome of a referendum is where it is neither binding nor entirely advisory.

Conduct of Debate in Public Life

Lord Parekh Excerpts

Thursday 9th May 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Parekh (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Bottomley. It is also a great pleasure to take part in a debate initiated so ably by my noble friend Lord Harris of Haringey.

I think we all agree that there is a spirit of intolerance and aggression in our public life. Death threats have been made against public figures. Their property has been vandalised. Obnoxious language has been used to refer to what they are doing. Their past lives have been dug up and all sorts of silly things are talked about. They have been mocked, hounded and put in a situation where, inevitably, they make mistakes and once they do they become the subject of further acts of mocking. The result is a vicious cycle, which we have witnessed in the case of Brexit. Mistake after mistake has been made, not only by individuals, but by individuals in the context of the criticism and mocking that has gone on around them.

Why is this happening and what can we do about it? That is what this debate is about. I will concentrate on why, rather than what we can do about it. Obviously social media has played an important part but cannot by itself explain what has happened. Social media simply reflects a certain cultural consciousness, a certain way of thinking. It is the deeper way of thinking that we need to understand. This is what I want briefly to talk about: the way the deeper undercurrents of our public life are manifested on social media and, more importantly, through the offensive language in which our public discourse is conducted. We must remember that language is the cultural capital of a community. It is the repository of its ideas and aspirations. If that language gets corrupted, people’s thinking gets corrupted. It is very important to be a custodian and to recognise the integrity and importance of the language of public discourse.

Why has there been this decline and corruption of the language of public discourse? There are two kinds of politics at work here, which I will talk briefly about. One is the politics of identity and the other is the politics of marginality. I will start with the politics of identity. If somebody were to ask, “What is our biggest problem?” in the aftermath of the financial crisis, in any western society the response would immediately be inequality. A large number of people have found their income frozen and are unable to see any rise. People are suffering as a result of great inequality. These are the issues crying out for attention. Obviously, if you start raising those issues you upset vested interests who would rather not have attention concentrated on them. The result therefore is to bring up a substitute issue and to concentrate attention on that, which is the issue of identity.

National identity or nationalism is the battleground, the site on which our differences are played out. National identity is ultimately about who we are, where we belong and what our place in this world is. Ultimately, with those questions Europe becomes extremely important—the Europe that we joined reluctantly and that we have been a part of all these years, yet from which we want to withdraw. People have a strong feeling that the very soul and identity of their country, of who they are, is at stake.

It is in that context that the debate taking place in our country has to be seen. On the one hand, there are people who are the custodians of the national soul, the national identity, and on the other there are those who disagree. They are dismissed as traitors or as people who do not care for the well-being of the country. In other words, it is a process of demonisation. The other is always a demon: “I am right. I bring light, the other person brings darkness. I bring life, he brings death”. I think my noble friend Lord Harris called this kind of demonisation “polarisation”. I would go even further, because it is not just a polar opposite; it is the demonisation of the other. Once you demonise the other, the only way you can live with him is to eliminate him. It is either you or him. You cannot both inhabit a common earth. This is the politics of identity.

The other important issue I want to talk about is the politics of marginality. Our public life is dominated, so the analysis goes, by a metropolitan elite, which is basically liberal, cosmopolitan, has no national sentiments of any kind and is elitist and technocratic. This elite has been governing our country for the past 50-odd years and has got us into this mess. Therefore, this elite has to be fought by the “real people”.

The “real people” is quite an important expression. They are the people whose voice cannot be represented by the elite. They are the people who speak in their own language and whose aspirations are not articulated by the elite. Therefore, a kind of war is postulated at the very heart of our society between the “People” and the “Elite”. The war between the elite and the people can be fought at many different levels in different countries in different ways, but in western democracies it is fought in one way: this war obviously has to be fought to the end, but we, the people, as a majority, should rule in a democracy, and the elite should have no commanding say at all. The argument is that in this war between the people and the elite, the people are the legitimate winners because they are the supreme majority in a democracy. Therefore, once you begin to speak in the name of the people, you say that the people feel alienated and unrepresented and hence that the whole representative framework which brings the elite to power should be dismantled.

Therefore, I suggest that these two kinds of politics—the politics of identity, which brings self-righteousness, and the politics of marginality, which brings anger and passion—are at work in contemporary British culture. Unless we identify how they manifest themselves and learn to cope with them or get rid of them, we will continue to have this problem, again and again.

Referendums: Parliamentary Democracy

Lord Parekh Excerpts

Thursday 19th July 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Parekh (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Higgins, for securing this debate. We have had three national referendums so far and quite a few regional ones, but none of them has led to the kind of controversy that has arisen from the last referendum. There are two factors to that: first, it dealt with one of the most important events in our history, which is unscrambling the arrangements that we have had in place for the last 42 years; and, secondly, the result was totally unexpected—at least, unexpected by those who called it. Therefore, there is a danger that our debate on the place of referendums in a democracy could be clouded by our views on that referendum. In order to avoid that, I want to decontextualise the debate and talk almost entirely about the place of referendums in a democracy, irrespective of what happened with the referendum on the EU.

Our political system is parliamentary democracy, not parliamentary sovereignty, but I think that the two are often confused. First, it is a parliamentary democracy in the sense that the power lies with the people, and it is articulated not directly by the people but through the representative institution—namely, Parliament. Therefore, it is a democracy first and it is parliamentary second. It is a parliamentary democracy because it is democracy as articulated through the instrumentality of Parliament. Therefore, as a parliamentary democracy, people remain sovereign. Popular sovereignty, as in any independent state, is a basic principle of a political system, and that is true of our system as well.

Secondly, to talk of parliamentary sovereignty implies that the monarch has no role, but you cannot call a Parliament unless the monarch calls it, and the monarch is not a part of Parliament.

Thirdly, Parliament is subject to certain conventions and procedures. Unless those procedures are met, it is not properly constituted and its deliberations and decisions do not count as laws. Therefore, Parliament is not sovereign, and it is misleading to say that it is. Given that we have a representative democracy, the question is: what is the role of a referendum?

Here, I take a slightly different view from that of the noble Lord, Lord Higgins, because I am a keen supporter of referendums, provided that they meet certain conditions and are conducted in a certain way. Nearly 95% of parliamentary or representative democracies in the world practise referendums, and the fact that Hitler used them does not necessarily make them a weapon of dictatorship. For example, in a parliamentary democracy people might feel that Parliament does not represent them or that the political class, made up of different political parties, is already thinking in a certain way and acting on assumptions that people do not share, as I think happened in this case. What do people do in that situation? How do we elicit their views?

In that context, I think that people have a right to speak if they feel that the Parliament does not fully represent them. If they have a right to protest or demonstrate, they also have a right to express their views, and the only way they can do so is through a referendum. If people feel that they want to disown the political class, or if, on an issue of fundamental national importance, they feel that Parliament does not represent their views, how do people speak? They speak through protests and so on, or else through referendums. A referendum, with all its limitations, is a valuable constitutional device. It gives voice to people’s feelings and gives them a chance to express their views. It forces them to think, because a clear-cut issue is presented to them. It centres on a specific issue and is not won or lost by which political party is in power, as general elections are. More importantly, everyone feels engaged by it, and people feel committed to the decision that is taken because they have all thought about it individually and participated in it.

That referendums have a place in a parliamentary democracy is beyond doubt—as I said, we have already had three referendums so far. The important thing is to be clear about what the place of a referendum is: to constitutionalise it. It cannot just be an ad hoc convention by which a referendum takes place. It must be regularised and constitutionalised to give it a definite place in our constitutional system. This would mean laying down the conditions under which a referendum can be held and the manner in which it should be conducted so that information is provided to the people. It would indicate where a referendum is politically binding and where it is not, and where it should have a threshold or a supermajority provision. Once referendums are constitutionalised in this way, they would become an important part of our constitutional system and could be easily reconciled with any kind of parliamentary democracy that we happen to have.

Chilcot Inquiry

Lord Parekh Excerpts

Thursday 22nd October 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Parekh (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the noble and learned Lord, Lord Morris of Aberavon, for securing this debate. As he rightly pointed out, no other inquiry in our public life has taken so long. It was announced in June 2009 and it is now 2015. I have two questions to ask. What explains the delay? Was that delay justified?

It seems to me that five factors are responsible for the delay in submitting the report. The first is that it was not set up under the Inquiries Act 2005, and therefore the committee had to make up its own rules as it went along—for example, the rules governing the publication of documents within less than 30 years.

The second difficulty was that, as the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, pointed out, its remit was extremely wide—not just the lead-up to the war in Iraq but what happened afterwards and what we should have done.

The third factor that explains the delay was the dispute over access to various documents. For example, it took nearly a year to obtain the Blair-Bush correspondence and the notes Mr Blair is supposed to have left with Mr Bush, to read them and to decide whether to include them in the report.

The fourth factor is Maxwellisation, and the fifth, which I shall concentrate on, is the chairman’s determined attempt to be absolutely fair and to produce as accurate an account of events as possible. As the noble Lord, Lord Finkelstein, said, every relevant fact had to be gathered, every “i” dotted and every “t” crossed. That is where my difficulty begins. I want to ask whether these five reasons for delay were all equally justified. It is obviously true that no inquiry can be exhaustive. If I were to write the history of the House of Lords, or of Parliament, it would not be definitive, for obvious reasons. Different facts and angles emerge, and you can look at the whole thing in many different ways.

In the case of this inquiry, we have already been told by Sir John Chilcot that transcripts of discussions and dialogues with foreign government officials were not properly written down or will not be circulated, so even this report will not be entirely accurate or comprehensive. Simply no report can be, because new facts constantly keep emerging. If you aim to write a definitive and comprehensive account on an event as momentous as this, you will have to wait until the end of eternity. The chairman was wrong to aim to produce that kind of report.

Maxwellisation is another factor. I am not entirely sure that we should have gone along that road. Maxwellisation emerged in a certain context and it was justified, but should it be applied to every situation? It may lead to counter-Maxwellisation: someone might stand up and say, “Look, he is involved in a public inquiry; he should be able to defend himself against every criticism”. The public inquiry body would then say, “Look, we want to be able to answer your criticism”, and there is no end to the process.

Also, a report such as this, which tries to cover every aspect, ends up saying that someone is responsible for this and someone else for that, and there is no focus of responsibility—no single agent is responsible for the war in Iraq. My feeling is that the inquiry needed to be limited in its remit from the beginning, but that is neither here nor there.

If one looks at what is happening now, there are two things to bear in mind. First, an inquiry of this kind is supposed to attain certain objectives, such as closure for the families and the country; to get at the truth of the matter; to suggest ways to restore trust in politics; and, as the terms of reference set out—in a rather strange form of English—to,

“strengthen the health of our democracy … and our military”.

If these are the objectives, the question is: how will they be realised? The longer the delay in the report’s publication, the greater the chance that public trust in our system will be weakened, or that closure for the war, the families and the country will not be obtained.

In my view, these objectives require that the report should have been published much earlier, or at least that it now needs to be published as soon as possible. Having said that, I want to make it absolutely clear that this does not imply that there is any reason at this stage for discharging the chairman or the members of the committee. They have done a most honourable job. As I pointed out, where they have faltered, they have done so with good intentions and a sense of honour. We need to learn lessons from the inquiry itself and ensure that it is allowed to publish its report as early as we would like it to be.

Soft Power and Conflict Prevention

Lord Parekh Excerpts

Friday 5th December 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Parekh (Lab)]

My Lords, I begin by thanking and congratulating the most reverend Primate on securing this debate and introducing it with very considerable eloquence and wisdom. Today’s debate could not have been more timely and morally more engaging. Over the past few years we have become so used to violence that we resort to force every time we want something. This is true of private individuals and groups and, sadly, it is also true of nation states and Governments. When nation states and Governments intervene violently in the name of “humanitarian intervention”—paradoxically so called—sometimes they end up causing more direct and collateral damage than the harm they are seeking to prevent. We need, therefore, to explore non-military alternatives to the use of violence, which is precisely the theme of our debate today.

Before doing that, I want to question—or if not question then certainly interrogate—the concept of soft power. I have said on several occasions in your Lordships’ House that I feel slightly uneasy about the notion of soft power for two simple reasons. The first is that it traps us in the logic of power. We seem to think that soft power can or should achieve more or less the same things as hard power except that it does so by different means. In other words, soft power refers to a different modality, but it does not question the logic of power itself. The second difficulty is that I am not entirely sure what it includes. We talk about persuasion and getting people to think in a certain way, but what about, for example, economic sanctions? Do they constitute the exercise of soft power? What about threats of a non-military kind that one nation might make to another? The arm-twisting that goes on—does that constitute soft power? We need to be careful to ensure that soft power is not understood simply as a negative category—anything that is not hard power—but that it is understood as a positive concept capable of being defined on its own terms.

Once that is done, some difficulties arise. If we engage in certain charitable and philanthropic activities such as supporting NGOs, educational programmes in schools and so on, we somehow begin to think that we have acquired the right to exercise soft power. If the countries in which we invest in these ways do not oblige, we feel cheated. We then ask ourselves what it is that we have been doing, and why. The example of Nelson Mandela was cited a little earlier. Here was a man of whom I would hesitate to say that he was exercising, consciously or unconsciously, soft power. Why does he matter to us? Why does he have such influence? It is because he exemplified a certain way of life and certain ideals, and those ideals speak for themselves.

From a religious perspective—I am not a religious person but inevitably this debate has a religious character—ideals can speak in a quiet way often without being articulated and without being turned into instruments of power. We in Britain do have considerable influence—I will not use the term “soft power”—because we exercise a certain moral authority. However, the notion of moral authority is in danger of being subsumed into and misunderstood as soft power. Beyond the soft power which comes through the kinds of things we have been talking about, there is a certain kind of influence and authority that both individuals and nations can exercise. In our case, we have exercised and continue to exercise a certain kind of moral authority. When we speak, people listen. They may not necessarily agree with us, but they will listen because they know that it is a voice of maturity born out of great historical experience and a talented people who are given to critical debate and therefore to arriving at their views through critical reflection. Ultimately, it is what we stand for which matters, and thus it is how we organise our political life and culture that will give us our moral authority.

The danger, which I began to perceive while listening to the speeches of quite a few noble Lords, lies in the debate about how to connect soft power with the prevention of conflict. The debate is increasingly concentrated on how to accumulate and use soft power, while the prevention of conflict is quietly falling from view. If we are not careful, the language of soft power can be very seductive. It is also worth bearing in mind that soft power can so easily be lost. Britain stood for something very important and exemplified some great ideals. We made a disastrous mistake in the case of Iraq, with the result that lots of people all around the world began to ask what has happened to this great country. It is capable of great wisdom and maturity, so why did it have to follow the American lead? Everyone—Nelson Mandela, the Holy Father in Rome and many others—all said loud and clear that that was not the way to go. That voice included the Jewish community, as the Chief Rabbi said that it was not the way to go, and yet we went. The damage that did to us was great. It wiped out all the years spent building up our moral authority, or what some might like to call soft power.

The first thing to bear in mind when we talk about soft power is that it is, first, a slightly nebulous concept and, secondly, it can easily be undermined by the misuse of hard power. Ultimately, moral authority is achieved because people trust us. They must trust our intentions, that we mean well, and they must trust our judgment, our capacity to arrive at the right kind of view. Trust in our intentions and trust in our judgment take years to acquire, and once they have been acquired, we must ensure that we do not follow a foreign policy or act in a manner which is so partial that it wipes out whatever moral authority we happen to have.

I turn now to a question that has not been touched on, which is the question not just of preventing conflict but of moderating conflict. Human beings being what they are, tainted by original sin, will continue to fight, so what we can hope for is not the creation of a world free of conflict, but one in which they can be managed, moderated and, it is hoped, minimised. Religion has played a very important part in conflict—some data that I looked at recently suggested that, of the about 78 conflicts that obtain in the world today, around 50 or more can be traced to religion in one form or another. Religion either creates conflict or accentuates it, and precisely because it is the source of the problem, it has to be the source of the answer. Most of these conflicts occur in transitional societies in which people who are used to a particular way of life are embracing modernity and all the tensions that that can create. They hold on to their religious institutions, practices and values in order to give them an anchor and a sense of identity. Religion plays a particularly important role in transitional societies.

As I say, religion can become a source of conflict, but it can also be the source of resolving it. I want to explore two or three ideas of how we could lead a movement in that direction under the leadership of the most reverend Primate, who has a great deal to say on these matters and who brings with him his great historical experience. I think that we could take the lead in this direction, but how could that be done? Let us look at how religion has played a part in, for example, suicide bombings in the Middle East. Muslims have debated for years whether that is a right thing for a Muslim to do: is it permitted by the Koran? It was only after three or four years of serious jurisprudential debate that imams in Beirut and Cairo said, “Yes, it is consistent with Islam”, and people engaged with it. You could see how much even suicide bombing depended on religion to give it legitimacy.

Therefore, in order to ensure that religion plays a creative role, I want to suggest that we might do three or four things. First, religion should be encouraged to build bridges between and within communities. That is extremely important. It should also learn to challenge dubious interpretations of religion, as in the case of IS. It is very striking that in the case of IS some Muslim leaders in the Middle East have taken the lead, challenging those who try to hijack religion.

I am also persuaded by a slightly different argument that people have made. In the case of Nigeria and one or two other places—for example, Buddhist monks in Cambodia supporting Pol Pot’s regime, or Serbian churches blessing Serbian nationalists who then went about killing Muslims—religious leaders could have said, “Those who engage in certain kinds of activities will be excommunicated”, or, “They will not be entitled to funeral rites in the same way that suicides and convicted murderers are not”. Religious communities have powerful sanctions and people who have worked with terrorists report them saying, “If we had been told or if we had ever had any doubt that this activity would deny us a place in heaven or that it was against our religion, we would not have engaged in it”. They were looking for some heavenly place and the heavenly place would be denied to them. If church leaders were absolutely clear and said, “Those who engage in it will not be given a decent Christian”—or Muslim or Hindu or Buddhist—“burial or cremation”, I think it would have a profound effect and I am surprised that many churches and religious institutions have not taken a lead in this.

Finally, because religious leaders generally tend to be trusted and are seen as people of good will, well meaning, with good judgment, they should play a creative role in bringing various groups together, making their concerns mutually intelligible and ensuring that people are able to talk to each other in a common language. Here we have a wonderful example: South Africa would not have been—pre or post-apartheid—what it is without the role played by Bishop Tutu and many religious people. There is also the role played by the then Archbishop Monsengwo in Congo, by the Sant’Egidio community in Mozambique and Burundi and by Bishop Belo in East Timor. These are some examples of where religious leaders, guided by religion but politically savvy and politically sophisticated, have been able to bring various groups together.

I feel slightly uneasy advocating some of those things because there is a question about whether the close relationship between the state and religion in this way might not create conflicts for secularism, but I think that can be tackled at a different level in a different way. The time has come for us to recognise that religious institutions play a significant role in creating conflict and that they can, therefore, be persuaded to play equally significant roles in dissolving conflict. Therefore, rather than avoid them, states and Governments need to collaborate with them.

Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Lord Parekh Excerpts

Thursday 24th July 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Parekh (Lab)]

My Lords, I begin by thanking the noble Lord, Lord Alton of Liverpool, for securing this debate and introducing it so well. The freedom to profess and practise religion is obviously a fundamental human right, so I will not spend any time emphasising its importance. The noble Lord, Lord Alton, gave us a catalogue of all the various countries where this right has been systematically violated, and we have seen horrendous cases of religious hatred, bigotry and violence. I want to shift the focus slightly. Although we have been looking at the rest of the world, it might not be entirely amiss to look at ourselves from time to time.

Let us consider, for example, the controversy in France about wearing the hijab; Muslim girls are not allowed to wear it. There is the referendum in Switzerland which has declared that minarets on mosques should not exceed a certain height. This is not only a matter for day-to-day politics. It has been embodied into the Swiss constitution so it cannot be changed without an enormous amount of effort. Let us consider the trouble that Sikhs encountered here in our own country in trying to wear their turbans when working on building sites and so on. I want to suggest that, while it is absolutely vital that we should fight all forms of religious bigotry where it exists, it might be useful to look at the kind of difficulties that countries which are otherwise well-meaning face in implementing religious freedom. Extremes are easy to spot and to deal with, but what is not so easy is dealing with the practices of countries like our own, or India or most others, that mean well but get into certain difficulties and face dilemmas. I thought I would alert noble Lords to around half a dozen of the difficulties which different countries have faced from time to time.

The right to profess religion includes the right to propagate it, although it is striking to note that Article 18 makes no reference to the right to do so. However, we all recognise that religious freedom must include the right to propagate it. How far does propagating one’s religion go? Does it include proselytising? If it does, how far can proselytising go? Can you use financial inducements in the way so many American evangelicals have done in India? Can you use social or moral tricks such as saying, “If you do not convert to Christianity or Islam, your soul will be condemned to damnation”? When these things happen in certain countries, naturally people get a little worried and begin to ask themselves what legitimate limits might be placed on religious freedom. That is one area of controversy.

Another area is this. Religious freedom is fine, but religion includes all manner of beliefs. What sorts of belief might we tolerate and what might we not? For example, Catholics have taught over the years that Jews killed their Lord and are guilty of deicide. Is that the kind of belief that should be freely allowed? Should Muslims be freely allowed to tell their children that all idolaters—unfortunately, I, as a Hindu, would be an idolater—are condemned to go to hell and should be summarily dispensed with?

Thirdly, there are religious practices: church bells, for example, or muezzins calling people to prayer, or wearing a hijab, which is the kind of problem the French faced. Should all religious practices be allowed? Going a step further, there are religiously based social practices. For example, if my religion says polygamy is permitted, should it be allowed? If my religion says untouchability is sanctioned, should it be allowed?

Fourthly, there is the scope of religious freedom. This is the problem they faced in Switzerland. Minarets became a problem not in themselves, but because it was felt that minarets of a certain height changed the landscape and the identity of the country or of the area in which they were located. That is something that worried them. It was not a question of human rights because the question cannot be articulated in the language of human rights. No one’s human rights were violated. It can be articulated only in the language of collective identity. Does a nation or culture have a right to a certain kind of environment and landscape in which it can recognise itself?

My suggestion is simply that, while we ought to concentrate on these enormous acts of religious violence and hatred and deal with them as effectively as we can, there are two important issues to remember. First, problems to do with religious freedom arise in all societies—civilised and so-called not so civilised. Secondly, religions over the centuries have lived in peace in one form or another. We need to ask ourselves what has happened in modernity and what new forces it has generated, so that we can understand why people who once knew how to live together—had developed traditions, good sense and practices of living together—suddenly are at each other’s throat.

Extension of Franchise (House of Lords) Bill [HL]

Lord Parekh Excerpts

Friday 5th July 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Parekh]

My Lords, I support the Bill introduced by my noble friend Lord Dubs. Ever since I became a Member of your Lordships’ House, I have asked myself why we are not allowed to vote in parliamentary elections. In fact, the first Question that I asked, on 17 January 2001, was precisely this: that on the grounds of human rights and equality of treatment, we ought to be able to vote. The debate that took place following that Question makes interesting reading, because many of the points being made today seem to rehearse some of those made at that time.

Generally, there seem to be two arguments as to why we cannot vote. One is that it is an established practice, reference being made to immemorial law and common-law practice. The other has to do with the fact that we are already here, present and in person, and therefore do not need to be represented. I find both arguments somewhat flimsy. Let me take them one by one.

On the first argument, how did this become an established practice? It is not a law or something to which the House of Lords ever consented. It was a House of Commons resolution passed in 1699. If one looks at the debate surrounding the passage of that resolution, it is clear that in those days of rotten boroughs the Commons were very concerned that the Lords should not be able to influence local elections. It was designed to stop us interfering in the election. The Lords never agreed, were never consulted and were never involved. That resolution is not sacrosanct because it has been amended, first in the Peerage Act 1963 and then in the House of Lords Act 1999. Under the resolution of 1699, no Peer could vote. That was changed in 1963 so that Peers could vote, provided that they were not Members of the House of Lords—and for years, hereditary Peers have been able to vote without any kind of objection, legal or otherwise, so that practice is not sacrosanct. It has been changed and if it could be changed once, it could be changed again provided we are convinced that there is a reason to do so.

I want to argue that there is a reason to do so. That leads me to the second defence of this practice, which is that we are here in person. When I asked that question on 17 January 2001, I was told by my noble friend Lord Bassam that, since we are already here in person and are entitled to voice our feelings and express our views, to allow us to vote in the election would be to give us a unique privilege which is not given to others. I found that argument unpersuasive but during Question Time we are not at liberty to pursue the debate any further. I want to do that now.

[Lord McFall of Alcluith]

My Lords—

[Lord Parekh]

I am sorry. May I just finish this argument? When we are told that we are here in person and therefore need not be represented by the parliamentary election, we are making an important assumption: that the two Houses have equal powers. If they do not have equal powers, that argument collapses. If the Commons could do certain things that this House cannot do, then the fact that we are here in person does not give me a unique privilege if I should be entitled to vote for the other place. For example, the Commons can make and unmake Governments. It has the power to impose taxes and deal with money Bills, which we do not have. Equally importantly, under the Salisbury convention, if a particular measure of a Government or political party has been approved by the majority, the party concerned has a right to enact it—irrespective of what we think.

I am suggesting that the Commons has far greater power, and rightly so as it is the pre-eminent body. If it is the pre-eminent body then our simply being here in person but unable to vote deprives us of the opportunity to do many of the things that the Commons does and which we cannot. I therefore suggest that not being allowed to vote deprives us of the equality of treatment to which all citizens are entitled. I will give way. I just wanted to make sure that I made that point straight.

[Lord McFall of Alcluith]

As a Member of the other place for 23 years, I was both here in person and proud to vote for myself in every general election. Is it not the case that House of Lords Members are disadvantaged, and would be allowed to vote in future for someone other than themselves?

[Lord Parekh]

If we were allowed to stand, we could certainly vote for ourselves too. Logically, the argument that we are here in person and therefore should not be allowed to vote because we do not need to be represented is a flawed one. Once you undermine that argument, there seems to be no logical basis for us not being allowed to vote.

There are of course other arguments: that one should not make a piecemeal change, as it should be part of a larger change. Well, larger changes are made up of small changes and unless you start by taking the first step somewhere, you would not be able to cover the journey. We are also being told that this is not the time. When is the right time? Who decides that and by what criteria? If, for the past 250 years, we have been saying “Let’s change this”, given that I asked that Question in 2001 and my noble friend Lord Dubs has introduced this Bill, there is already a feeling of momentum—a groundswell of opinion—that if citizenship consists in being able to have a say in shaping the Government of the country, we are not citizens if we do not have that say. Symbolic as it is, that simple point is of great significance and I strongly urge the House, as and when the time comes, to vote for the Bill.

[Baroness Seccombe]

My Lords, does the noble Lord not accept that Parliament consists of two Houses: a House of Lords where Peers are appointed for life and a House of Commons where Members are elected until the next election, which is up to five years ahead? Does he not accept that we are already Members of Parliament? That is the difference between us and Members of the House of Commons.

[Lord Parekh]

The noble Baroness makes a fascinating point but there are two simple answers. She says that we are already Members of Parliament. Technically, I am but I cannot say that I am an MP. “Parliament” is used in two senses, one in the narrow sense of the House of Commons and one in the wider sense of both Houses. More importantly, if we say that we are Members of Parliament the point I would make is that membership seems to be a matter of degree. To be a Member of the House of Commons means that one can do lots of things, whereas a Member of the House of Lords cannot do certain things, such as censuring or removing the Government, or dealing with matters of taxation and so on. Therefore this abstract equality that is being emphasised—that we are all Members of Parliament alike—conceals a fallacy.

Crime: Sexual Violence

Lord Parekh Excerpts

Wednesday 6th March 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Parekh]

My Lords, I thank the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Wakefield for securing and introducing the debate.

Sexual violence tends to occur in conflict situations far more than in others. That is so for three reasons. First, the perpetrators of sexual violence think that they have a right to the bodies of their victims, either because they have subdued them in war or because they have spared their lives. Secondly, there is a culture of immunity. They believe that they will be able to get away with this. Thirdly, there is a collective ethos that supports and encourages such behaviour, because of either a breakdown in law and order or a climate of hatred.

If these three are the conditions that facilitate sexual violence, the answer has to lie in addressing them. In the one and a half minutes left to me, I suggest that there are half a dozen things that we might think about, and I am simply going to list them.

First, it is very important that we must change the intellectual climate of the armed forces. They should not think that subduing somebody gives you a right to that person’s body.

Secondly, there should be successful prosecution. In order for that to happen, there must be a team of experts who will gather evidence and make sure that the prosecution succeeds.

Thirdly, as a result of conflict there are peace agreements in which perpetrators of this sort of violence are generally exempted from punishment or given amnesty. That should not happen.

Fourthly, the West must set an example. In all the cases we have talked about it is always the other part of the world that engages in sexual violence. We forget the fact that the American forces in Iraq behaved no better and that, sadly, some of our own have not proved exactly worthy of the highest standards that this country sets them. It is important that the West should set a good example.

Fifthly, the churches should play a very important role. It is not entirely a matter for the state. The churches have either been silent, as in Rwanda, or partisan.

Finally, there must be a way of introducing some kind of early-warning system. Sexual violence does not break through the surface just like that; there is a build-up to it, and if it can be caught early enough it can be stopped.