Civil Society

Baroness Neuberger Excerpts

Thursday 11th June 2015 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Neuberger (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the right reverend Prelate for bringing us this debate. I do not believe that the matters raised in the letter should be restricted to the people and parishes of the Church of England, so I speak as a rabbi serving a large congregation in central London. Our theology may be rather different from that of the Church of England, although our relationships are very close.

I particularly commend what was said in the letter about power, identity and minorities, for we read:

“The politics of migration has, too often, been framed in crude terms of ‘us’ and ‘them’ with scant regard for the Christian traditions of neighbourliness and hospitality”.

These traditions are by no means only Christian—biblical texts from the Old Testament about loving your neighbour and welcoming the stranger because you were strangers in the land of Egypt apply to Jews, Christians, Muslims and plenty of others. The phrase:

“You shall love your neighbour as yourself”,

comes from Leviticus. We had it first.

The letter goes on to say:

“The way we talk about migration, with ethnically identifiable communities being treated as ‘the problem’ has, deliberately or inadvertently, created an ugly undercurrent of racism in every debate about immigration”.

I cannot say often enough how true that is. However, all this goes beyond the concerns just for the Church of England. Shortly before the election, the Bishop of Manchester wrote a piece in the Guardian just as we were beginning to see the waves of desperate migrants drowning as a result of leaky boats, immoral people traffickers and a forlorn hope for a better life. As he put it,

“migration got a face, a human face. It’s not usually handled like that across much of the UK media, but the tragic plight of desperate families drowning in the attempt to cross the Mediterranean into Europe forced us out of our comfortable discourse about an amorphous ‘them’”.

We all saw those pictures then; it was only seven weeks ago. The truth is that we are already tired of seeing those pictures—they no longer make the front pages. Our politicians of all parties talk too much of traffickers and too little of the people who are desperate for a better life, fleeing war-torn regions, sometimes as the result of the UK’s intervention, as in Libya, or those genuinely fleeing in fear of their lives as ISIS threatens to behead Christians, or does so, with YouTube evidence there for all to see. For those few days, in late April and early May, migrants looked to us like real human beings, not the “cockroaches” that one particular columnist had described them as a few days earlier. We could see their desperation and the horrors they were fleeing.

Seventy-seven or so years ago, many members of my family were also desperate, fleeing the Nazi regime in Germany. Many failed to get out but some, with the greatest of good fortune, were able to come to this country because of a group of brave and far-sighted British diplomats—Robert Smallbones, Arthur Dowden and Frank Foley come to mind. They were all good Christians who helped terrified and desperate people—mostly Jews, but not all—escape the horrors. Because of the hospitality of many people in civil society—Christians, Jews, non-believers, ordinary working British people, and the voluntary and civil society groups working together—some 70,000 people or more were saved and welcomed. That was, I believe, a good thing. I certainly would not be here today if that had not been the case.

I do not believe that, in the end, we will be able to refuse to take any of these thousands of desperate people making the journey from Africa in dangerous and terrible circumstances, despite government rhetoric. Indeed, I shall be ashamed of my country if we do not take any. I do not believe that the British people are always so unwelcoming. We run a drop-in centre for asylum seekers at my synagogue, which is hugely popular with volunteers in civil society—Jews, Christians and Muslims alike. They want to make the case that we should be offering a welcome and hospitality to desperate people. They recognise their neighbours.

The Bishop of Manchester rightly said that the,

“political rhetoric that characterises them as wilful criminals … is as unworthy as it is untrue”.

The House of Bishops letter to the people and parishes of the Church of England rightly took the politicians to task for giving in to the hostility to migrants shown by some sections of society and set our nation a challenge. As the Minister responds to this debate, I hope he will comment on what the Government, newly elected, will do to make new migrants welcome and to tackle the vile language that defines immigrants as a problem and allows “asylum seeker” to be a term of abuse in the playgrounds of Britain. I hope that he will also refer to what can be done to make those who come able to find friends and occupation instead of hostility and abuse.

However, it is not only about government, as the letter rightly says, although government is there to set a lead. It is also about ordinary people. I have seen people from mosques, gurdwaras, temples, churches and synagogues coming together to help desperate asylum seekers. I have seen them helping with food banks, establishing cafes for the hungry and establishing winter night shelters for the homeless. Interestingly, there is no shortage of volunteers for these programmes—in fact we have to turn them away. People are only too keen to help.

This may be the big society about which we have heard so much. But it is the big society envisaged by people motivated by their faith or their moral concerns, not as prescribed by government. We need to rethink the big society. It is, as the right reverend Prelate put it, a good thing as a concept but it needs to be reimagined. These people who help and who volunteer do not like the language they hear about immigrants or the fact that people are homeless and freezing in our wealthy democracy. As the bishops wrote to the churches, I believe we need a new vision of the kind of society we want to live in, and that government and voluntary sector leaders need to talk to the nation together. The language of hate should be termed unacceptable. This is not about a Christian message alone; it is about a human one. I very much hope that the Government might heed some of the messages in the letter, so that we might hear a different and more human voice from government and the voluntary sector together about immigrants and asylum seekers in the wake of this debate.