Islamophobia
Lord Parekh Excerpts(5 years, 11 months ago)
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Lord Parekh (Lab)
My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Sheikh, on securing this debate. It is to be expected that more than half of the speakers are from the ethnic minorities, and this is one of the very few debates where this has been the case.
It is a real pleasure to follow the very eloquent and passionately argued presentation from the noble Baroness, Lady Warsi. If I disagree with her from time to time, it is not out of disrespect but simply to explicate further what she has been saying.
The word Islamophobia comes to us from the Runnymede Trust report of 1997, with which I was associated. The report began to make it clear that the word Islamophobia is useful but also risky. It is useful for all kinds of reasons, which the noble Baroness, Lady Warsi, mentioned, but it is risky for two reasons. First, it confuses Islam with Muslims. To talk about “Islamophobia” simply means that I resent Islam while taking a different attitude towards Muslims. Secondly and more importantly, “phobia” absolves the agent of responsibility—for example, one might say, “I suffer from agoraphobia”, or say that they have a fear of heights or of speaking in public. If someone says, “I have this phobia; there is nothing I can do about it; it is an irrational, deeply ingrained fear”, it gives them a get-out. As the report argues, one therefore needs to think of an alternative explanation that captures the idea of Islamophobia while not remaining restricted to it.
The expression it used was “anti-Muslim racism”. That also does not quite work, because I do not know what “racism” is doing there. It looks like verbal obesity, using an extra word when “anti-Muslim” would convey what you wish to convey. It also fails to capture the specificity of Islamophobia. I therefore suggest that, rather than talk about “anti-Muslim racism”, one simply says that something has to be done about anti-Muslim hostility and discrimination in all areas of life.
This discrimination also occurs towards other minorities, but in addition Muslims have been subjected to something unique—a kind of irrational, instinctive fear. Whenever somebody talks about Muslims in a university or elsewhere, the feeling is: “Oh my God; keep it out”. Where does this irrational antipathy, this refusal to talk about it and closure of the mind, come from? This is peculiar to Muslims; it does not extend to black people or others. In that sense, I want to retain the word Islamophobia while recognising that it does not capture the full range of anti-Muslim discrimination.
If you recognise that there are two realities—anti-Muslim discrimination and Islamophobia, as I have just defined it—you require a dual strategy. One strategy should counter anti-Muslim discrimination, hence the useful repertoire of anti-discriminatory mechanisms we have developed. A very different strategy is required for Islamophobia, and I will spend most of my time talking about that, because I think it is very subtle, very deceptive and, if we are not careful, extremely dangerous.
When did Islamophobia in that sense arise in our society? I trace its origins to the Iranian revolution. When the ayatollah appears on the scene, Muslims in Iran and elsewhere acquire a tremendous sense of power and the feeling that what was done in Iran could also be done elsewhere. There is therefore an enormous growth in self-confidence, a desire not to be taken for granted or marginalised and to stand up for their rights. It is in this context that Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses appears, followed by an approach to the ayatollah and resulting in the fatwa. That is the seed, the origin of Islamophobia—the combination of the Iranian revolution, the ayatollah’s fatwa and Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. If you look at these, four things come together.
First is extraterritorial loyalty, the feeling that Muslims are somehow more loyal to the ayatollah than to their own sovereign—reminding them of the Pope asking the British people to revolt against Elizabeth I. Secondly, the argument arises that Muslims are somehow against liberal values, freedom of speech or gender equality. Thirdly, and increasingly importantly in recent years, is the idea that somehow minority identities—in this case, Muslim identity—are valued more and that the identity of the majority community in society as a whole is being systematically undermined. Finally, there is the argument that Muslims are keen to introduce religion into public life and question the secular settlement.
This combination of four different ideas generates a kind of instinctive, morbid and irrational fear of Muslims. How do we get rid of this? How do we counter this deep-seated, irrational fear? When you have a phobia of this kind, when one simply refuses to counter or even face something, it is a case for a kind of political psychoanalysis. One needs to refute it step by step. We must show that this is wrong, as I have done in my writings, and as others, such as my friends Tariq Modood and Varun Uberoi, have done. There is quite a lot of literature showing this. The noble Baroness, Lady Afshar, has talked about it as well. We need to show that the four different values and combinations are wrong. For example, on extraterritorial loyalty, it is argued that there is no sense in it as 95% of Muslims say that they are absolutely loyal to this country. They are not questioning secularism but simply want to redefine it to make it more hospitable to religion, but not to religionise public life. They are not hostile to liberal values. In short, one has systematically to unpack and attack this knot of values that is held against Muslims.
The other thing that is very important is for Muslims to be in positions of power where they are seen as responsible members, standing up for society as a whole. That, happily, has been happening. I cannot remember a situation before now when a Muslim has been talked about as a possible Prime Minister of this country. That is a great achievement, and if we look at many walks of life, a Muslim presence is seen, which is being recognised.
Then there is the question of creating a situation in which Muslims in their day-to-day context are accepted as a part of life. Sometimes I fear the Muslim rhetoric—the rhetoric of young Muslims who are angry needs to be toned down so that there is a better space for communication between them and the rest of society.
Anti-Semitism
Lord Parekh Excerpts(6 years, 2 months ago)
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Lord Parekh (Lab)
My Lords, during the past few weeks members of the Jewish community, including MPs and Peers, have been subjected on social media to the most abhorrent and abominable abuse. I condemn this abuse and express my sympathy for the Jewish community. That community’s contribution to all areas of British life has been greater than that of any other and its members have been at the forefront of the struggle against racism. I cannot think of any piece of race legislation passed during the past 40 years that has not been the creation of a member of the Jewish community. Like the noble Baroness who spoke a little earlier, I find it very puzzling that the Holocaust should have happened at all, in Europe, in a country which was highly civilised, only 80 years ago. As somebody who grew up in India, I find it very bewildering and puzzling, but there it is.
I would like to provide some balance, given that the Labour Party Benches are a little under-populated—partly as if there is a sense of guilt. But there is none and I suggest that the Labour leadership’s handling of the whole controversy could have been much more expeditious, much more public and much fairer. There is no reason why the leader could not have written an article or given a major speech, in which he could have explained why he found the definition unacceptable. What prevented him from saying that? In the absence of that, there were a few remarks here and there, and then a complete vacuum. I wish, therefore, that Labour had been more active, not just in making soundbites but in explaining more fully what the definition would not allow him to say. Nobody is going to say that that definition, or any definition, is perfect—no definition is. In this particular case, in fact, the Home Affairs Committee report on anti-Semitism says that the definition needs to be changed and has made two amendments to it. The Labour leader was right to suggest that the definition should be changed, although not necessarily the amendment that he was proposing. However, not to have explained why was certainly unacceptable.
What worries me most, as a Labour Party supporter, is simply this: in the course of this controversy there has been an unfortunate polarisation between the Jewish community on the one hand and the Labour Party, or the left, on the other. That is most unfortunate. It is unfortunate, first, for the Jewish community, because one day Labour will come to power, as I am sure it will; and, secondly, for those in the Labour Party who have close friends in the Jewish community and would not dream of anything happening to that community. I therefore suggest that the time has come for both sides to stop polarising the issue and to develop friendship and trust in a spirit of mutual understanding and forgiveness. In the heat of the moment, both sides may have said things that they regret, and therefore the time has come for reconciliation.
Inequalities
Lord Parekh Excerpts(6 years, 11 months ago)
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Lord Hunt of Chesterton (Lab)
My Lords, I welcome this debate and strongly support the analysis of the UK by my noble friend Lord Liddle. As he emphasised, we have to consider issues within regions as well as between them and some of the UK’s big cities—that is critical. We must also think about different types of inequality that correlate with each other: health and mortality, the environment, economics, transport, education, tourism and culture. So I was a bit disappointed when the Library produced a document for this debate that was exclusively on economics. All those aspects are critical. We should also note the maritime aspects of the UK along our coasts.
I declare my interests as a president of ACOPS, an NGO; as having set up an SME; and as a former city councillor. The issue of mathematics has also been raised: I have been president of the Institute of Mathematics.
National and local government leaders, public bodies and the private sector play an extremely important role in trying to deal with these issues of inequality. I went to China a couple of years ago and saw how difficult it is being a mayor or local government person in that country. Ningbo is now famous in the UK for Nottingham University having a branch there. The mayor of Ningbo gets up in the morning, draws his curtains and wonders if he can see the ground, 15 storeys below, because of the pollution. He then looks to see whether he can drive because of the incredible traffic jams. He goes into his room and turns on the tap to see whether the water is brown or white. So there are big challenges in huge cities all around the world. As we deal with our own inequalities, we interact with other countries.
It is particularly important to have continuing good relations between the regions of the UK and across Europe. It is essential that these links continue. I look forward to hearing from the Minister on whether this will be a new role for the FCO or some expansion of the role of the Department for Communities and Local Government. I should like him, or one of his colleagues, to look on the DCLG website. On 29 November it recommended that local government should apply for European structural and investment funds—so I suppose that we are still being encouraged to go there. Perhaps the Minister might explain, because it sounds as if boroughs should work very fast if they are going to get in there before the witching date.
In a recent speech to the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee, the noble Lord, Lord Heseltine—who I am pleased to see in his place—emphasised the role of local initiatives, exemplified by his work in Liverpool, Docklands and elsewhere. He thought that these initiatives could be improved by reinstating the local audit commission. I was astonished to hear him say that because, when I was in local government, the commission was extremely important. It enabled local government to explore more difficult and controversial areas with a body of great experience and authority. There were many occasions when the policies and advice of the local audit commission were considered.
For example, the advice was particularly important in a controversial initiative of the early 1970s when it had to deal with the financial implications of setting up a tourist office and facility. At the time, most cities in the country did not have that controversial facility, but it was finally accepted in Cambridge. I am afraid that even the noble Baroness, Lady Trumpington, a doughty lady, opposed the radical suggestion. There is no doubt now that many new kinds of tourism initiatives and investment are now being considered, and are a most important area of development. As my noble friend Lord Prescott reminded us, you need to have planning.
Hull is an example of a city that has benefited greatly from a cultural aspect to its economic development. There has been great development in artistic tourism and the arts, all supported by local communities and councils: great sculptures and culture parks now bring many visitors to centres. I was recently in Ilfracombe and saw the large statue that Damien Hirst has loaned to Ilfracombe for 20 or 30 years, and the website for Antony Gormley’s great sculpture, the Angel of the North, states proudly that it is in conjunction with Gateshead council.
Interestingly, some centres, such as Bath, are now so popular that it is really important that the Government, through their agencies, should promote other centres of tourism and the arts, because overcrowding needs to be dealt with. So what will the Government do to support these initiatives now that we have heard the sad news that the city of culture programme, which is funded through Brussels, will be closed down? Will the Government fund our own UK cities of culture to work with our European colleagues? This is a tremendous blow to the cities and an egregious loss of regional development.
Another approach to develop less developed regions is to establish and grow science and technology centres and museums. Many of these are already very successful tourist and educational attractions, drawing in thousands of tourists, such as the Eden Project in Cornwall, Jodrell Bank, Dundee City of Design, which connects to the V&A here in London, and the National Space Centre at Leicester. We do not yet have an international mathematics museum. They have one in Toulouse, which is combined with a museum for garlic. The French have this idea that we should have centres that combine two quite different areas of intellectual or economic activity.
It is also important that some areas of the UK have particular natural scientific qualities that greatly interest schools and other educational establishments, such as the Darwin Centre in Pembrokeshire, which involves science and theatrical events. An extraordinary new example is in Lyme Bay, where economic developments, working with the local marine protected areas, have produced all sorts of activities involving geology, history and the fishing industry. Such developments are complementary to having greater industrial strength in the different regions.
Another feature I wanted to mention, which may not have been mentioned so far, or only in passing, is that we have great inequalities in health and morbidity in different towns and areas of the UK. A study by Marmot and Stafford at UCL showed differences in life expectancy, about which we have already heard, between western and eastern London boroughs and in mortality between males and females. There are comparable differences between the regions. It is a welcome fact that all socio-economic groups are living longer—but the inequality between regions and sub-regions continues. Localised air pollution is a very important cause of local mortality. These inequalities will decrease only by the application of a broad range of policies and local initiatives, such as those presented in this debate. I look forward to the Minister’s reply.
Noble Lords
Lord Parekh
My Lords, I offer my sincerest apologies to the noble Lord, Lord Scriven, for attempting to jump the sequence of speakers. The idea was not to usurp his place; I was simply impatient to get what I wanted to say out of the way.
I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, on securing the debate and introducing it so well. I express my great delight and pleasure at the presence of the noble Lord, Lord Heseltine, who has given far more thought to this subject than many other Members of this House. I am pleased that he should be here, exerting a quiet influence on the speakers. One can exercise power without being in power. One can be influential from outside the political arena.
I want to address this subject from a slightly different angle. We have been talking about regional and national inequalities. When I raised this subject with a friend of mine, his question was very obvious. He said, “Regional inequality is simply a stalking horse for the old socialist idea of equality. After all, what are regions? What are nations? They are made of individuals. When we talk about regional equality, we are talking about equality between individuals—and if we are going to talk about equality between individuals, we are establishing some kind of equality between all British citizens throughout the country, which is nothing else but the old socialist idea of promoting equality by different means”.
I want to talk not about regional inequalities, which have already been demonstrated and established by many of your Lordships, but about equality in general. Why is equality a good thing? Why is it desirable? People say, for example, that as long as nobody is starving, everybody’s self-respect is maintained and everybody’s worth is respected, it does not matter who is equal to whom. In this case, when we are constantly comparing ourselves to London, the argument is that we all want to be like Londoners. If London has 60% more income than the national average, and better facilities, then why can we not have the same? A Londoner could turn to you and say, “This is all politics of envy”—as they always said about the preachers of equality. Are we simply talking about politics of envy? Do we all want to be Londoners, without living in London and suffering its hardships? At the end of the day, what are we asking for? Assuming that the question is about politics of envy, I want to address the question at that level.
Why is equality important? I think that equality is important for four reasons, at least. First, any kind of inequality, especially the kind that operates in our society, is unjust. If someone is born in a rich family, they inherit a network of contacts, which are never deserved but simply acquired by virtue of who they are. Inequality in our society is unjust because it makes people bearers of undesired, undeserved and unwanted privileges.
The other thing is that inequality is never alone. Different kinds of inequalities are always interlocked: inequality of powers, political inequality, inequality of income and inequality of respectability. They all come together and collectively create a system from which those at the bottom are unable to escape.
Inequality also skews a society’s system of values. After the financial crisis, banks were helped out pretty quickly, but millions were condemned to suffer from austerity. The question is: why? Why did even the most sensible people not think it proper to look after the victims in the aftermath of the crisis, rather than the bankers, who could simply laugh at us and move on to equally nasty things? This is what inequality does: it skews our system of values so that certain things appear obvious to us when they should not.
Finally, and importantly, inequality between regions and individuals creates unequal experiences. The rich live in gated communities, but we condemn the rest to travel by public transport or live in public residences. The result is that there is nothing in common between these people. If they have nothing in common, how can we sustain a sense of community? How can we sustain a democratic form of government, which depends on a shared sense of community?
Therefore, for all these reasons, regional inequality and other kinds of inequality are unacceptable and we are absolutely right to fight them—not out of politics of envy, but out of politics of common good. Common good and justice require that these inequalities should be countered and that something should be done to create a genuine sense of community in the country. The regional inequalities detract from that sense of community and therefore reduce the spirit of democracy that obtains in the country. At the same time, while I recognise that inequalities create these ugly consequences, I accept the fact that inequalities are bound to exist because of differences in talents and circumstances where one is born. This is where the state’s role comes in—to make sure that these inevitable inequalities that issue out of differences in circumstances do not get intergenerationally consolidated, do not get interlocked, and do not skew our values. This is where some kind of sensible policy from the state has a great role to play.
We are talking about a comprehensive agenda for equality. Obviously, a comprehensive agenda includes not simply economic equality but social inequality: of race, that the Muslims suffer, and that other communities suffer. However, given the shortage of time I will not talk about it. I will just talk about economic inequality and how it impacts on people’s lives. People in different parts of the country, from different walks of life, suffer from certain consequences because of the circumstances in which they are condemned to live. People in the poorest areas, for example, die on average seven years earlier, according to the British Lung Foundation. They are cognitively less developed, suffer from poor health, and there is weak motivation among those in deprived areas, and more smoking and more alcohol.
With all these things, too many people are left behind. The advantages of globalisation go only to the few and the rest express themselves through Brexit and other kinds of pedlars of strange, fanciful, seductive and unrealistic utopias. This is where the problem arises, that people who are unable to benefit from globalisation feel left out, full of resentment and anger, and the only way they think they can counter those who seem to be benefiting is by acting in ways which appear strange to some of us but perfectly natural to those who have grown up with them. In this context I am pleased that the Labour Party, certainly for the last few years, has taken up this idea of equality. Not only Jeremy Corbyn but Tom Watson, who happens to have been a student of mine once upon a time, have been strongly arguing for equality.
My last point is that I talked about community; without it there is no democracy or sense of sharing, and our destinies are interlocked. This is something that liberals do not often realise when they talk about choices. In a racially mixed school, if white parents withdraw their children, the blacks are condemned to study in all-black schools. This was not their choice—they did not want their children to go to all-black schools. They are condemned to send their children there because the whites have decided to withdraw. In other words, one man’s choice is another man’s coercion. When you choose, you choose not only for yourself but for others. Therefore, when you choose, you must choose with a sense of responsibility, with some concern for others. That implies a sense of community, which we have all been talking about.