Multiculturalism: Interfaith Dialogue

Lord Young of Graffham Excerpts

Thursday 8th September 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Young of Graffham]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Mitchell, for bringing forward this debate today and I declare an interest as a trustee of Coexistence Trust. I pay tribute to the work and the way in which he has transformed the trust over the past few years.

There are three monotheistic faiths. All have the Bible in common, all believe in the same creator, yet so many have suffered down the centuries through ignorance of each other. I am first generation. My father was an immigrant. He came here in 1905 aged five. His elder sister, who was three years older, came with him and kept a diary. She recounted how at night they crept out from the village where they lived, how they were smuggled across the border and how, after a difficult journey, they arrived here and found to their amazement that they could speak the language—they arrived in the Pool of London, the East End was next door, and the language was Yiddish. She quickly learnt that there were other languages. By the early 1920s, my father was playing club cricket and keeping wicket. Never did they wish to give up on their religion, but they were proud to be English. They regarded themselves as English Jews and never forgot their debt of gratitude to this country that gave them shelter and relief from persecution and pogrom.

My noble friend Lord Tebbit has a very succinct way of expressing ideas. His idea of the cricket test—that when you come somewhere, you should follow its side—is one that my father passed with flying colours, but I must confess that I have not yet heard of Lithuania playing test cricket. When they arrived, they expected to conform. They expected to rely on themselves or their coreligionists, for this was decades before Beveridge. However, many decades have passed, and after a period of what appeared unrestrained immigration we are where we are with some parts of our country appearing like another country and another culture, and that is not something that we can just accept.

To declare an interest, I am chair of the Jewish Museum in London, and I commend it to your Lordships' House. Please pay it a visit because it is a museum that shows the experience of an immigrant population that came here and subsumed itself in the life of the nation. Indeed, when our patron, His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales, came to visit us last November, he was met at the door by a group of 30 schoolchildren under 10 singing Hebrew songs, and they were, without exception, Christian and Muslim. I see the museum as a powerful force in order to spread knowledge of each other’s faiths. Every quarter, 100 Met officers who deal with immigrant communities come through. We have visits from many Muslim schools to better understand our faith. As soon as they see what our religion is about, they realise the similarities with their own religion and how similar the concepts are.

The only antidote to prejudice is knowledge and familiarity. I believe that there is an obligation not so much on the Government, although the Government have their role to play, but on each and every one of us as citizens of this country to reach out where we can to immigrants who arrived after us to show the way and to show how to play a part in the full life of this nation. We intend to widen our board to bring in others of different faiths, and although I may have referred mainly to the Muslim community in what I have said today, because that has been the greatest point of tension, I welcome very much those from the Hindu and Sikh communities.