Islam

Lord Triesman Excerpts

Tuesday 19th November 2013 Grand Committee

[Lord Triesman (Lab)]

My Lords, I start by doing something that I have not done often, which is simply to endorse the Prime Minister’s words. It is notable to me that no noble Lord today has started with the convention that we have of congratulating somebody on getting a debate on the Order Paper. That is probably because most of us, certainly me, have looked forward to this with some apprehension. I was apprehensive because I know from the time in November 2009 that the noble Lord, Lord Pearson, in running for the leadership of his party, UKIP, said that the political class was complacent about Islamism. He claimed that our people—again, I do not quite know who the “our” and “we” are—were strangers in our own land. He went on to commend the right-wing Dutch politician, Geert Wilders, and invited him to screen his controversial film about Islam here.

A number of speakers in this debate have treated it, understandably, as though it were a discussion of a religious or theological issue. I do not believe that it is—I think that it is straightforwardly political. It is about the potency that is sometimes achieved, at times of economic crisis, of characterising some people in ways that are dismissive of them and stereotypes them, speaking about them with a generality that cannot be justified. I shall have to go back through Hansard to make sure that I am quoting accurately, but in introducing this debate the noble Lord talked about the “dark side” and birth rates of people who are, obviously, not quite as good as us, people stirring up hate and “red hot” people striving against us, people who we will finally see looking down the barrel of a gun at us, the plight of Christians, and so on. These are all characterisations which, candidly, should have no place in the debates in this country and our Parliament.

[Noble Lords]

Hear, hear!

[Lord Triesman]

Sadly, and I want to say this as briefly as I can—and I make the point about it being political—this is not simply about the noble Lord, Lord Pearson. I have been going through quotations from a large number of other people from UKIP, and there is obviously an attempt to adopt positions on the extreme right in our country. Cavan Vines, the candidate in south Yorkshire, talked of people who hide behind women and kill our children. Chris Pain, the opposition leader in Lincolnshire, gave a foul-mouthed diatribe about Islam. Peter Entwistle, the deputy chair of Bury UKIP, speaking of President Obama said:

“If I ever see him on a Greyhound bus wearing a rucksack, I’m getting off!!”.

Misty Thackeray, the deputy chair of UKIP in Scotland, praised the right-wing Dutch politician, Geert Wilders as a self-confessed hater of Islam. I could go on. I have also noted that the support for those UKIP positions from the EDL has been as conspicuous as those quotations are. This is a sequence of attacks that have no place among us.

Whatever the justification that some people may feel for political objectives that they cannot achieve by normal, democratic means, those objectives never justify the use of violence to achieve them. That is true for any people in any community; it is never justified, and nobody in here would try to justify it. Nobody would say that the people of the United Kingdom can be bombed, shot at or violently compelled to make political changes that they do not wish to see. They never have been compelled that way and I do not believe that they ever will be compelled that way; this is a country that repudiates violence from any quarter and insists that those who conduct violence from any quarter are brought to justice. That is a straightforward convention among all of us, for reasons that are very profound.

It is not a matter, in my view, of whether people choose to live differently in their style or at a distance from others in their own communities. Personally, I have no taste for seeing communities constructed in that way—let me be quite clear about it. I prefer to live in an integrated society in which people share each other’s cultures and enjoy them. But it is also a truth that if people live that way within the law and including all laws that protect equal status of all citizens, there is no reason why those people should be subject to state intervention or trenchant language, as we have heard in the House this afternoon. People do have different lifestyles, and if they wish to live lawfully in their own communities we should at least have some modicum of respect for those facts.

I noted what the noble Lord, Lord Pearson, said about abrogation, with the later verses superseding the earlier ones, but I am not a sufficient student of that tradition to understand what is or is not within context. However, I am, in my modest way, a Talmudic scholar—at least, I have studied it to some extent—

[Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon (Con)]

Perhaps the noble Lord could conclude his remarks.

[Lord Triesman]

I am nearing my final words. I notice that one of the most prominent quotations often relied upon is about smiting one’s opponents hip and thigh. That appears in Judges, chapter 15, verse 8. I tell noble Lords that I have never set about doing that, I have never thought of doing it, and I have never thought that it was a compunction upon Jewish people or anybody else.