Sir Edward Heath: Operation Conifer

Lord Parekh Excerpts

Wednesday 17th January 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Parekh (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Lexden, for securing this debate and for introducing it with such eloquence and erudition. Operation Conifer was an investigation by Wiltshire Police into the charges of sexual abuse made against Edward Heath. The Wiltshire Police investigation covered 14 police forces and it produced its report in October 2017, after years of investigation. The report’s conclusion was that, if Sir Edward had been alive, he would have been interviewed under caution regarding seven out of 40 cases. The report did not think much of the other cases and even those seven were distilled, for a variety of reasons, from an inquiry into various examples that those 40 cases showed. This does not mean that in those seven cases, he was guilty; it simply means that those seven cases are those where he had a case to answer.

There has been a demand, ever since the report was submitted in 2017, that because the report lives and Sir Edward’s reputation is under a cloud—it does not fully exonerate him—there should be a proper, independent judge-led investigation into this. All kinds of criticisms, some very strong, have been made of the report and I want to mention five or six of them, so as to indicate the gravity of the charges made against Sir Edward. They include: the lack of corroborative evidence; the way that the investigation was launched and publicised; the fact that Heath was dead and could not refute the allegations made against him. There was also the question of the way in which the investigation was carried out and concern about some of the individuals involved in it. All these things have been raised against the report, and therefore the demand is that we should have another independent judge-led inquiry.

I have been thinking about this a great deal. I read the report three or four times, with great care, plus the literature that has grown out of it. I have asked myself: what should be my response? My honest response is simply to look first at the reasons why such an inquiry is needed and then the reasons why it would be unwise. I will leave it to your Lordships to decide what should be the overall balance of evidence.

First, should there be an independent judge-led inquiry? The answer is yes. Why? The reputation of a Prime Minister is concerned. Public confidence in our system on child abuse has to be maintained. It is also important that justice should be lent to the individual, and that truth should surround that. Innuendos and silly gossip should not be carrying on. It is also quite important that shady characters in our society, as in every other, should not be allowed to blackmail or dishonour decent men after they are dead. There are cases in the report where shady individuals said all kind of things. with no kind of responsibility at all. These are the reasons why the report is unacceptable and another independent report is due.

However, there are also reasons why an independent report should not be produced. First, the Conifer investigation, with all its limitations, is reasonable and objective. That has been said by quite a lot of people, including those who were critical early on. They felt that the evidence was collected and examined very carefully, and therefore there is no reason to believe that the report needs to be superseded.

Secondly, to investigate this would take another year or two and our public life would once again be haunted by this issue. We have only just come out of the investigations into Sir Leon Brittan and Lord Bramall and others. Let this not drag on for another long period and give a silly impression about this society. There is also the question of public reaction. When you demand this kind of inquiry, it inevitably becomes the subject of public debate on the importance of the nature of politicians in our society. The whole climate of suspicion of politicians will go on. There is also the feeling that no report will silence the critics and detractors of honourable people. Therefore, there is simply no point in producing this independent report in the hope that it will silence the critics; it will not.

What do we do? One answer is given by the report: a narrowly focused statutory inquiry. That is one answer, but what does “narrowly focused” mean? Does it mean choosing a few cases out of those seven where Sir Edward would have been interviewed under caution? What do we want to do with those cases? Will only those cases be carefully examined, and others will not? If we stop there, we will be subject to the criticism that we selected only those cases where the outcome was what we were expecting. Therefore, we will be open to the same charge that we have been open to so far.

I am a little concerned about this. All I can say is that there are arguments on both sides but on balance I am convinced that an independent judge-led inquiry is not appropriate at this stage.

Rwanda: Memorandum of Understanding

Lord Parekh Excerpts

Monday 6th February 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Parekh (Lab)]

My Lords, I support my noble friend Lady Hayter of Kentish Town for several reasons, of which three are particularly important. I hope the Minister will offer a satisfactory response to them.

First, MoUs are not legally binding documents; they involve no legal obligations on either side and they are not subject to parliamentary scrutiny. Therefore, to replace them is to emasculate our democracy. There are already threats to democratic practices in our country, and I do not think we need to add to them.

Secondly, given not just this Government’s record on migration but that of the previous one, there is always reason to worry about what they might do with the licence given to them to replace legal documents with memoranda of understanding. The important thing is that memoranda of understanding can easily become a kind of camouflage or cover-up under which you can write almost anything that you want.

Finally, asylum seekers will have no understanding of the prevailing conditions in Rwanda and therefore cannot know what effective representation they should make—hence there is always a danger that the MoU will badly damage their basic rights.

In the light of all this, it is not at all surprising that the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees has said that this proposal is incompatible with the 1951 refugee convention. It is not just him; a lot of other people have also reached that conclusion. I therefore fully support my noble friend Lady Hayter and hope that the Minister can reassure us that this will not become common practice.

Queen’s Speech

Lord Parekh Excerpts

Thursday 12th May 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Parekh (Lab)]

Lady Fox? No? My Lords, I am sorry—there seems to have been some confusion, because there is a speaker before me in the list, but I had not realised that she was not going to turn up.

Anyone who cares about Britain is bound to be disturbed by the current state of inequality and injustice in our country. Inequality between individuals is too obvious to need spelling out—for example, the vast inequality of incomes between some who earn millions and some who starve—and the figures are too well known for me to retell. The recent case of a woman who travelled by bus all day to avoid having to spend money on heat is too well known and is emblematic of what actually goes on.

We have inequality not just of individuals but also of regions. As a recent survey by the Institute for Fiscal Studies pointed out, Britain comes out as the worst of 27 nations that it studied. Even the Prime Minister said that Britain is

“one of the most imbalanced societies and lop-sided economies”,

and, as he said, even well-designed policies will take decades to produce results. We have not even started with any of the policies which will help us to resolve these inequalities.

The cost of living is rising, and inflation is higher than ever before—it is certainly higher than in the 1960s. This inequality, as it continues to grow, becomes a source of a lot of unease in society. Society then breaks up into different communities, each going its own way. There is arrogance at one end of the social spectrum and anger at the other, and there is instability and a great degree of smouldering unease.

If these inequalities are going to be tackled, we require systematic, equal opportunities. We have to start in early childhood—which one sees very little mention of in the Queen’s Speech. Inherited disadvantages are perpetuated over generations and congeal into even stronger and deeper disadvantages. The class of birth is also the class of death; as many surveys have shown, social mobility in England has been rather low. When people protest against this growing inequality and the suffering it causes, the Government seek restrictions on what protest is allowed. These restrictions —far more than ever before, in fact—mean that a lot of people get arrested and that our prisons are fuller than ever before, becoming a training ground for future prisoners with more serious crimes.

As a result of that sort of situation, the legitimacy of our laws and political system is questioned. When that is questioned, there is a culture of cynicism. Our laws and political system are seen as instruments of oppression and repression, not of emancipation or law and order. No politician is trusted. They are exposed for breaking rules that they want ordinary citizens to follow. Public discourse becomes rather coarse and crude as a result. I find it impossible to believe that, when the Prime Minister gets up every morning, the references to him that one would find rather obnoxious—“He’s a liar”, “He’s this”, “He’s that”—do not destroy his confidence. Hardly any Ministers are referred to in a manner that one would regard as acceptable. I am not interested in what is true and what is not true; I am interested in how an individual is constantly referred to and how they might feel about it.

The result of all that, where every Minister is denigrated and treated as a cheat, is that the press becomes partisan. This was wonderfully discussed by Professor Brooks in his recent book, The Trust Factor. He points out that trust is the lifeblood of democracy. He says:

“We know no system is perfect”.


We know that no problem has only one answer—we all recognise that—but, as Professor Brooks says,

“we expect our leaders to be honest”

and dependable. However, when that does not happen and leaders are not honest, straightforward or transparent in their answers, we tend to become nihilistic and suspicious and fall for any story that is going round about any politician. Abusing and dehumanising opponents through simplistic stereotypes and clichés becomes a common way of referring to them.

This kind of situation, where you justify and suppress inequalities so that you can not only tolerate them but aggravate them, restricts liberty and, through that, results in the destruction of the very political system in which we take pride. This simply cannot go on. The problems of the legitimacy of our system and the inequality within it are urgent. Therefore, the remedy must also be urgent. We do not seem to realise even remotely what is happening to us.

Ukraine: Refugees

Lord Parekh Excerpts

Wednesday 6th April 2022 Grand Committee

[Lord Parekh (Lab)]

My Lords, I begin by thanking the noble Baroness, Lady Helic, for securing this extremely important debate. I want to do something slightly different from the direction she gave us and ask a simple question. We know we have had Ukrainian refugees and that they have been victims of harassment and persecution. What else do we need to know and why? In other words, we have had many refugees throughout our history—Ugandans, Afghans and others—and if you add them up you build up quite a total. Ukrainian refugees will, in due course, become an undistinguishable part of that. Is that what we want? I suggest that we want to identify Ukrainian refugees as a distinct historical group with distinct historical experiences, which need to be remembered and will always be remembered, thanks to the efforts of people like us and others. Their identity should not be lost.

My first point is that, wherever there is a war or a crisis, there are refugees. This one is no exception. The question to ask is: what kind of refugees are they? What do they bring with them? What have they suffered for which they have paid this price? Why have they evoked this degree of mindless hatred? How can we stretch out a supporting arm?

I want to do two things very quickly. The first may sound rather philosophical, but that is what I am. It is to identify the constitutive characteristics of the Ukrainian refugees. What makes them distinctive from that of other refugees? Secondly, what has been the point of the British Government’s response to this crisis and how satisfactory has it been?

It is striking that this is the largest refugee crisis since the Second World War. The population of Ukraine is 44 million. Some 4 million have left and 6.5 million are displaced within Ukraine, so 10.5 million people out of 44 million—a quarter of the population—have been turned into refugees. No wonder it has been called a level 3 emergency. That is the first thing to bear in mind: the number of refugees represents an incredibly large percentage of the population from which they emanate.

Secondly—this might sound trivial, but it is the basis of something more important—almost all of them are white and Christian. That should not mean anything at this stage in our history, but it is meaningful because it shapes their understanding of who they are. We seem to forget that what is happening in Ukraine is an explosion of an identity crisis. A group of people are saying, “Look, we are western; we have strong sympathies with the West and that is where we belong”, while another powerful group says, “No, you don’t know what you are. You are one of us; you are Russian”. They say, “Yes, we are Russian—we do not deny that. But that is not our whole identity. Our identity is mixed, in so far as we are Russian and western. Our overtures to NATO have grown partly out of our fear that our western identity will not be appreciated”. At a fundamental level, this is a quarrel arising from a collective identity crisis. I suspect that, if we are not careful, similar crises with similar origins will continue to appear in that part of the world, where there are long, deep-rooted, ambiguously connected sources of identity.

The third, rather interesting feature of the Ukrainian refugees is that there is an enormous sensitivity to animals which I have not seen in any past group of refugees. The Economist points out rather nicely that those carrying enough of a burden decided physically to carry their animals, and even those who had to leave them behind grieved for hours at the very thought of having to leave them to the mercy of mindless Russians. In fact, the pet travel specialist PBS Pet Travel says that 1.2 million pets have crossed the border along with human beings. I did not see this during the Ugandan or any other refugee crisis; if somebody did, I would like to be corrected. Even the British Government, in spite of being hard-hearted, had to make some provision for these animals. They have provided emergency licences for the pets and committed to cover their vaccination costs.

The fourth feature is the acute disparity we have noticed between the response of the British Government and that of the British people. For reasons that are very difficult to understand, some deep springs within British consciousness—which, despite being an historian, I have not been able to fathom—have been tapped, such that the overflow of sympathy, kindness and generosity has been unprecedented. The point is simply that the British people have responded with enormous enthusiasm and generosity. The Government responded— not on their own but only because the British people took the initiative—with the sponsorship scheme. However, having created it, they seem to have made a mess of it. Connecting with the sponsors and matching them with Ukrainians has not been easy at all, with the result that a large number of sponsoring hosts have felt deeply frustrated that their efforts, constantly knocking on the door of the Home Office to find out when their protégés were arriving, have not been listened to.

One simple fact will tell the story. As of 31 March, 65,000 visa applications were made. From that, 29,200 visas were actually issued. But if you look at the family sponsorship visas, you can see that 28,300 applications were made, while the number of visas actually given was 2,700. In other words, the system has been extremely bureaucratic and cumbersome. We need to introduce a much simpler and faster emergency visa system. We could lift normal visa conditions other than the biometrics and security checks, which could be done en route. Matching people to refugees could also be done quickly and refugees would not have to advertise on social media that they are available.

The simple story is that in desperate times you have desperate demands and desperate demands require desperate responses—and desperate responses may require visa requirements to be radically reconsidered, for the time being at least, so that more people can be brought in. It is also about trusting people when they say that they have visas or they do not have visas. Our climate of not trusting people has gone so far that when a man says, “My visa or my document is coming”, or, “My wife is coming in a few days’ time and she’ll bring it”, we believe that he is a liar and not to be trusted.

My last point is about a different category of people: third-country nationals in Ukraine who have been deported, harassed, persecuted and treated discriminatorily. It is important that they should be treated in exactly the same way as others, as long as they have gone through the same level of suffering.

Islam: Tenets

Lord Parekh Excerpts

Thursday 7th December 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Parekh (Lab)]

My Lords, I begin by complimenting the noble Lord, Lord Pearson of Rannoch, on securing this debate. His introduction was quite interesting, although I was a little disappointed that what began as a calm disquisition on Islam turned, as it moved on, into a kind of diatribe. That is an inevitable danger. If one talks about Islam as a whole, rather than concentrating on a particular aspect of it, there is a danger of spreading oneself too thinly and covering a lot of ground. Therefore, as, I hope, a good academic, I want to concentrate on the Question itself.

The Question that the noble Lord has asked—every word is carefully chosen, although occasionally mischievous, and certainly interesting—is whether the Government will encourage Muslim leaders to re-examine the three Muslim tenets of abrogation, Taqiyya and Al Hijra, and to publish their findings. I want to look at those three concepts. What are the Islamic tenets on these three concepts? Do they need to be revised or re-examined and, if so, along what lines?

The first is “abrogation”. I am sorry that the noble Lord used Arabic for the other two tenets, whereas he left this one as “abrogation”; in Arabic the word is “Naskh”. Naskh is simply a theoretical tool to interpret the Koran. Where the different verses of the Koran—or the verses of the Koran and the Hadith—do not match, you need a rule for interpretation. The rule generally is that the later Koranic verses supersede the earlier ones, as they do in the Hadith. That is what abrogation means.

Taqiyya is a much trickier concept. It largely means “covering up” or “dissimulation”. It means that when a Muslim is in a crisis situation or likely to face intense persecution, he is allowed to lie about his faith. He can say, “Look, I’m not a Muslim”, if Muslims are going to be attacked. At one level, he would seem to be disloyal to Allah to whom he has agreed to submit, but on another level he is excused because his life is in danger. As the Oxford dictionary puts it, it is really a precautionary dissimulation of religious belief. But again, it has been reinterpreted, as all these tenets have been. It was reinterpreted after 9/11 to mean that a Muslim has a religious obligation, not just a religious permission, to lie and to lie not only to survive but to proselytise his own religion.

The third idea is the idea of Al Hijra, which refers to Muhammad and his companions migrating from Mecca to Medina in 622 CE to set up the first Islamic state. The Muslim calendar counts dates from the Hijra, and Muslim dates have the suffix AH, which means “After Hijra”. In recent times, the concept of Al Hijra or Muhammad’s move from Mecca to Medina is taken to mean that Muslims have an obligation to move from a secular society to one that allows you to practise religion or be suffused with the religious spirit—or to oppose colonial rule. That is what happened, as the noble Lord, Lord Desai, suggested, in India during the time of British rule, when several Muslims on religious grounds said that they would rather move to Afghanistan from India rather than stay on because they suspected that colonial rule was not going to give them freedom.

My point in all this is simply to say, first, that the re-examination of these concepts is going on and that no encouragement is required because circumstances compel Muslim leaders to reinterpret those concepts, just as Hindus and Christians have been compelled. Secondly, government intervention in these matters is always ill-advised because it politicises scholarship. Scholarship loses its sense of detachment and integrity. More importantly, the Government have no competence in the matter. If someone interprets Al Hijra in one way and the noble Lord, Lord Desai, interprets it in another and the noble Lord, Lord Ahmed, in another, how will the Prime Minister decide which one to encourage and which to discourage? It is not the Government’s business. To give the Government religious authority is the worst thing that any liberal, or even non-liberal, society can aim to do.

The third difficulty is why only these three tenets? These three are not really crucial. I can think of half a dozen others, so why just these three? And more importantly, why only Islam? What about Hinduism? The noble Lord, Lord Desai, wrote a book about the Bhagavad Gita—a secular reading of a religious text. Lots of Hindus whom I know are deeply uneasy about it because they would like it to be seen differently. The question is why concentrate only on Islam. Even verses in the Old Testament breed the spirit of violence and hatred. The New Testament is just as bad in some cases—apart from the “Sermon on the Mount”, it contains other passages that can be just as obnoxious. So why concentrate on only one religion?

The next question that worries me is: will it assist the cause of anti-terrorism? It will not. Terrorists are not just guided because of these three tenets. They are guided by other considerations, such as being unhappy with our foreign policy or a sense of alienation growing up in our society. There are all kinds of reasons, and religion is simply being used as the language of expression, not as the source from which the inspiration is derived. When religion is simply being used as the language of expression, the causes lie elsewhere. If we are looking for a reinterpretation of the tenets in the hope that that would stop terrorism, there is no such possibility of that happening.

The last point that I want to make is that Islam, like any other religion, has both violent and non-violent traits. That is just as true of Christianity. How could the religion of simple peasants lead to the largest empire, of many different kinds, in human history—the British colonial, the French and all that? How could it justify slavery? If we think of Christianity, the enormous amount of good as well as harm that it has done simply cannot be explained away. Every religion has the potential for both. Which potential is being actualised depends on the circumstances. Muslim countries—it is not Islam as such but Muslim countries—are passing through a phase of identity crisis, deep alienation and anger against the West for its foreign policy or for its support of native tin-pot rulers, so obviously they are going to take the form of aggression.

The simple point I want to make is that, if we want to have this sort of discussion as part of an anti-terrorist strategy, the Government’s strategy—which I would have loved to discuss—leaves a lot to be desired. The Prevent strategy is not the answer, and to fit anything into that mould is not the way to proceed.

[Baroness Stedman-Scott (Con)]

My Lords, perhaps I may say respectfully that we have limited time in this debate. All noble Lords have prepared for it incredibly well and have great points to make, but we need to allow time for the Minister to reply to them. I would ask noble Lords to honour the time allowed for speaking.

Immigration Rules: Impact on Families

Lord Parekh Excerpts

Thursday 4th July 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Parekh]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, for introducing this debate on changes to the immigration rules. I will concentrate on three areas that worry me greatly.

The first has to do with the way in which one is not allowed to bring one’s parents and grandparents from the country of one’s origin. The new immigration rules require that if your parents or grandparents are over the age of 65, ill, disabled or otherwise unable to function, you may not bring them so long as you have a sibling in the country of origin who can look after them, or can hire a nurse who can look after them. I find this simply extraordinary for half a dozen important reasons.

First, looking after one’s parents or grandparents is a privilege to be enjoyed and an obligation to be discharged. It is not something that you outsource to your siblings or a nurse. Secondly, it is not just a question of physical care, which a sibling or nurse can provide; it is about emotional reassurance and support during the last days of one’s parents or grandparents, which only you can provide. Thirdly, people would leave the country if confronted with the choice of either going to their countries of origin to look after their parents or staying here. In fact, we had a moving submission from the British Medical Association written by Stephanie Creighton on behalf of a large number of doctors and consultants, many of them saying that they would leave the country. In fact, a couple of them have left already, simply because they could not bring their parents to live with them here.

Fourthly, I find the whole thing quite pointless. If our concern is to ensure that no demands are made on public funds, that is already taken care of. If people here who bring parents or grandparents are prepared to look after them—they used to be able to do so—those parents or grandparents will not be dependent on public funds: in which case, what is the point of this rule?

If this were the only alternative for controlling immigration, I would at least concede the point of it. Canada does not follow this policy. It has a super visa under which parents and grandparents can be brought in for two years until such time as their right to permanent settlement is decided. In the United States there is no problem. In fact, a few years ago, when I tried to bring my parents here—they were in their 80s—my brother, who is settled in the United States, found it much easier for them to spend their last few years with him.

More importantly, if our concern is to create a culture in which the aged are respected, I should have thought that letting people bring in their parents and grandparents would be ideal. It sets an example to their children and to wider society and helps to shift the culture in which the old are seen as a liability or a burden. So far, I have accepted the terminology of the rules, which talk about parents and grandparents. There is a complete embargo on uncles and aunts. I come from a civilisation where very often uncles perform more or less the same role as parents, as they did in my case.

If your parents are dead or disabled, you might feel that you have incurred the same moral obligation and emotional commitment to your uncle as you have to your parents. There is no reason why one should impose a complete embargo. Immigration officers should be required to look at the nature of the relationship. If the relationship with an uncle or aunt is of a kind that one would recognise as filial, they should qualify.

My first concern is therefore simply this, and I really want to emphasise it: not allowing one to bring in parents and grandparents as long as there is someone else to look after them is simply morally unacceptable. It is also unworthy of a civilised society. We are asking people to outsource their obligations to somebody else and saying, “Do not worry, pass it on to somebody”. That is a culture that we should not aim to encourage.

My second difficulty with the immigration rules involves family visitor appeals. These are being disallowed and people whose applications have failed are being told that they can apply again. Family visitor appeals make up about one-third of all immigration appeals and a large number of them succeed. The Government say that they succeed because very often new information is provided at the appeal stage, but as I look at some of the applications I do not find that. In fact, what is called new information is often the exposure of implicit bias, important facts that were mentioned but neglected, or bureaucratic irregularity that is pointed out.

It is certainly true, as the Government have said, that in some cases new information was provided, but the House should bear in mind that this is not the only factor. Other factors that appear at the appeal stage include the way in which certain biases appear. It is therefore important that we should allow family visitor appeals.

My third concern is one which the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, rightly pointed out: the way in which one is allowed to bring in spouses. This is a long story and many of us have spent at least 30 or 35 years fighting for the right to bring spouses. The Government require an income of at least £18,600. If a child is involved, it is £22,400. On current estimates, just under 50% of people simply would not qualify, because they do not earn that kind of money. For some of us in this House, like me, a university professor, £18,000 is not even a quarter of what one earns, but that is not what schoolteachers, nurses, UK Border Agency officers or even some sections of retired people earn. If we insist on this sum we will disqualify half the ethnic minority population, as well as many others.

Equally importantly, income fluctuates. In a volatile economy, jobs come and go. I might have a job paying £18,600 today, but tomorrow it might be much less. Nor do the regulations take into account the likely income of the spouse, or the way in which, among ethnic minorities and elsewhere, families generally chip in with their savings. I very much hope that the Government will reconsider this figure.