Social Cohesion and Community during Periods of Change

Lord Willetts Excerpts

Friday 6th December 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Willetts (Con)]

My Lords, I congratulate the most reverend Primate on calling this debate on a very important issue: how, in a diverse and increasingly divergent society, we hold our country together. He is absolutely right to focus on that challenge. It has also been a very special debate because of the maiden speech from my noble friend Lord Sharma, and he is welcome to this House. He may think, in this his first debate, that he has strayed into a multiple edition of “Thought for the Day”: he has had about a fortnight’s broadcasts during this debate. Debates in this House take many characteristics; this is a distinctive debate and we have many others in many different styles.

I particularly appreciated a point which the most reverend Primate made, which I would like to develop, when he referred to institutions and their importance. If I may say so, sometimes we have talked about social cohesion as if it is feeling good about each other, a kind of social glue that we pour over our society and somehow hold ourselves together better as a result. Those instincts are admirable, but if I may say so, I found the intervention from the Cross Benches of the noble Lord, Lord Bird, particularly refreshing because he explicitly said that he was not going to appeal to those instincts. The real challenge of holding a society together is doing so without requiring admirable and highly motivated behaviour, however desirable that might be. Holding a society together, we should think much more of like drystone walling than somehow pouring glue over it. One of the insights, particularly in the Conservative tradition, is that institutions really matter if you are trying to hold a place together, because institutions are places where individuals interact more than once. The more that people find themselves interacting over time, the more co-operation develops because of mutual exchange and mutual benefit, without requiring high levels of saintliness or holiness.

That faith in institutions to which the most reverend Primate referred is, I have to say, one of the strengths of the Conservative tradition and also one of the things that holds us together as a nation state. It is not blood-and soil-nationalism; it is belief in a set of institutions which are of benefit to all of us, whatever our moral beliefs, our social, cultural or religious background. That is a very important strand to hold on to as we think about what holds us together.

I will make one other brief point. We have not really focused on what I think is the social contract of greatest significance in holding us together as a society, and that is the social contract between the generations. Over our lifetimes, we take out when we are dependent children and perhaps when we are elderly, and we may well at other times of our lives pay in or contribute. Those exchanges between the generations—some needing help, some offering help—are, I think, the most important single feature of the social contract. If we came into this world already independent, not requiring support and sustaining, I am not sure that society would exist in anything like the form that it does. This reciprocity and exchange between generations happens within the family and within society and is of mutual benefit.

I will now stray into extremely dangerous territory by, in the presence of the Bench of Bishops, making an observation about the 10 commandments, most of which are—I can see my noble friend Lord Brady turning towards me, looking shocked; I am going to stick with it. Most of the commandments are absolute. There is one commandment, which is often formulated in a much more contingent, almost contractual form, and that is the commandment about relations between the generations:

“Honour thy father and thy mother, that thy days may be long upon the earth”.


It is very interesting that this commandment suggests some mutual benefit. It is interesting to speculate—I am sure lots of learned theologians have done precisely that—why you might think that honouring your father and mother made your life longer on earth, and why this itself should become a moral principle. Is it that if you show that you are honouring your father and mother, your children are more likely to honour you? Is it that this of itself is a worthwhile activity? But there is a hint, if I may say so, even if we go back to the biblical text, of some understanding of reciprocity and mutual benefit in the exchanges between the generations.

I notoriously argue that it so happens that one generation—the baby-boomer generation—has done particularly well out of this generational contract. Sometimes I am accused of being a generational warrior, promoting conflict between the generations. But actually, I am trying to appeal to what I think is one of the most widespread instincts that holds people together from a very wide range of social and cultural traditions: namely, the desire that our children should have a better life than we have. My view is that an appeal to our shared obligation to the younger generation is one of the most powerful, mutual and widely spread beliefs that would unite people, regardless of their prior religious or cultural commitments. I see it as a cause that would unite us.

There are many ways in which we can do more for the younger generation, from the practicalities of day-to-day economic policy, helping them get a foot on the housing ladder, to helping them build up the kind of assets that are a great advantage as one goes through life. However, we also heard in that excellent maiden speech from my noble friend Lord Sharma another obligation we have to the younger generations: we have produced far more carbon dioxide during our lives than we can possibly expect them to produce, and we need absolutely to rise to the challenge he set in his excellent maiden speech as one of the most important single ways in which we can discharge our obligation to future generations.