National Life: Shared Values and Public Policy Priorities

Baroness Sherlock Excerpts

Friday 2nd December 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

My Lords, we owe a considerable debt to the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury for this debate. He introduced it so well that I have almost forgiven the noble Lord, Lord Luce, for taking him away from Durham and transporting him back down to London. I am not quite there yet, but—I declare an interest as a Christian—I am still working on it. Some things take time.

This has been a wonderful debate. We have had two very engaging maiden speeches. I look forward very much to hearing more from the noble Baroness, Lady Bertin, and the noble Lord, Lord McInnes. I will be able to engage with only a fraction of what has been said, but I will try to do so. The question of who we are or who we want to be tends to surface at the times when there is either no obvious answer or we have lost confidence in the answer of yesteryear. The timing for this is very good.

So what are our shared values? The list I have gathered today includes: democracy, freedom, tolerance, fairness, hospitality, creativity, entrepreneurialism, courage, sustainability, internationalism, social justice and more. I actually love all those. I would want to add to any discussion of values something that reflects our more communitarian instincts, something that recognises that we are not just a nation of individuals, but a community of communities, and acknowledges—in fact celebrates—our interdependence in some way. I also greatly like the idea, touched on by my noble friends Lord Glasman and Lord Stone, of virtue and understanding what we do as well as what we think about who we are.

Some interesting questions were raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Warsi, and others. Can we invent such a view or does it have to evolve? The noble Baroness said that each generation invents these values again. I think the most reverend Primate was wise on that: perhaps what they do is reinterpret and add to these values; perhaps these change, generation by generation. Can these values be aspirational, as mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, yet still resonate and feel real to a majority of people to whom they need to apply? Who will develop these values? It will need to be a shared experience—government cannot just invent identity; it has to be a collective enterprise.

If we want to be aspirational, we first need to have a shared view of what good looks like. The most reverend Primate referred to the kind of deep values which are way above my pay grade, so I will plough the shallows in which I am rather more comfortable. I think we all agree that a good country is one which enables its citizens to flourish. I go a step further and say that a good society is one which recognises that the flourishing of each depends upon the flourishing of all, and that a society structured to enable some to flourish at the expense of others is ultimately bad for everybody.

Professor Michael Sandel, in his now famous 2009 Reith lectures, talked very thoughtfully about the purpose of democracy. Markets are there to “organise productive activity”, but democratic governance is about much more:

“It’s also about seeking distributive justice; promoting the health of democratic institutions; and cultivating the solidarity, and sense of community, that democracy requires”.

Sandel goes on to make a really strong case that we cannot do that without thinking hard about inequality within nation states. Anyone who has read The Spirit Level will know that there is a lot of evidence, and it is incredibly interesting, that some of the main factors affecting the strength of societies, do not relate to the average income but correlate much more to differences within society. It is not surprising that the poor do better in more equal societies; what is really interesting is that the rich do too, as does society as a whole.

Sandel goes even further. He says:

“The real problem with inequality lies in the damage it does to the civic project, to the common good.”

This is, in part, because as inequality deepens, rich and poor live separate lives. The rich use private, not state schools, and private healthcare, not the NHS. They take out private insurance rather than rely on the welfare state; they use private gyms, not council swimming pools, and have second cars rather than use buses or trains. Towns and cities become segregated by wealth. Public services deteriorate as those who do not use them become less willing to pay for them. People literally do not mix. In Sandel’s words:

“The hollowing out of the public realm makes it difficult to cultivate the sense of community that democratic citizenship requires”.

Any politics of the common good demands that we address inequality and invest in the infrastructure of civic life; in transport, health service, libraries, and leisure; but also, I suggest, in a revitalised contributory welfare state—a term coined, of course, by Archbishop William Temple—which is not only a safety net but can fulfil its original ambition to be a companion service to the NHS, one which pools risk across the population and across lifetimes, so we pay in, work and contribute when we can and we take out when we cannot, or when our needs are greater. That would go a long way towards helping us be a single society again.

I agree very much with the stress on intermediate institutions given by the most reverend Primate and a number of other noble Lords. I am particularly interested in the role of charities, mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Addington, and faith groups, as the noble Lord, Lord Singh, and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Gloucester described so powerfully.

How does this sense of interdependence and its outworking in public policy relate to the idea of listing values? I wonder whether we can talk not just about lists but about the stories we tell about ourselves. I think that these tell us much more about where we came from, how we understand our history, how we see ourselves and how the rest of the world sees us. It is also the songs we sing, the sports we play, the books we read, the art that we make and consume. It is about our democracy, our public institutions and our creativity. Of course, the story evolves, as the noble Baroness, Lady Berridge, said, as each new generation comes along and joins in. It becomes a different story in future.

A good example is the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics. That told us a story about who we are. It talked about Glastonbury Tor and the Industrial Revolution but also “Windrush”, the shipping forecast and “EastEnders”; it had The Wind in the Willows and Lord Voldemort, Elgar and the Sex Pistols, James Bond and Mr Bean; it had the dead of two world wars and 7/7; it had Tim Berners-Lee and the internet; and it had the NHS, our most valued shared public institution, as the noble Lord, Lord Crisp, pointed out. One bemused American watching it tweeted: “Imagine loving your health service so much, you do a happy dance about it on television”. But actually it was because it embodied something about who we are as a people rather than being about just a public service. That is not definitive but it tells us something very important.

I will respond to some of the points that have been made. Immigration has been raised by a couple of noble Lords and I think we need to talk about this in the wake of Brexit and some of the discussion. Like the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, I have come across young people who are concerned about what has happened to their future. I have also talked to people in the north-east who are very concerned about migration. They do not live in areas where there has been very high migration and they are worried about the impact on public services, which needs addressing. They often live in areas where there has been no migration at all—no one moves there because there are no jobs—and yet they feel very strongly about what is happening. Often what they are really saying is that they feel they have not been heard, a point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Bottomley. They have been marginalised. The Government or global capitalism have passed them by. Somehow they are not being listened to. Their living standards have suffered, a point made very well by the noble Lord, Lord Newby. They feel they have not been listened to, a point made by the noble Lord, Lord Paddick. That tells us something we need to think very hard about.

Is integration the answer? The noble Lord, Lord Popat, raised this. During my time at the Refugee Council, we ran some very effective integration work, supported by the Home Office. I want to lay down a couple of markers. First, integration, like friendship, has to be a two-way process. It begins with being welcomed. Secondly, like the noble Lord, Lord Bilimoria, I believe that integration is not assimilation. I do not want us to end up as a nation of identikit, roast beef-eating, bowler-hatted Stepford citizens. I also do not want us to end up like France, where you cannot wear a yarmulke or hijab in school and women are fined for wearing the wrong clothes in the street or on the beach, or when you get to the point where Marine Le Pen says that schools should not be offering non-pork alternatives. Do we end up like Belgium, which passed a law in 2011 banning face veils? Three years later Gavan Titley wrote in the Guardian about an incident in which members of a right-wing Flemish nationalist group stormed a food festival at a school and reportedly forced pork sausages into the mouths of children. We need to think very carefully about where this goes.

We must challenge the demonisation of any minority group the minute it appears. The 1930s are not that long ago and they saw the rise of fascism on our very own streets. Now, as the noble Baroness, Lady Warsi, said, we have lost a colleague—my honourable friend Jo Cox, killed by a neo-Nazi. We have seen the alt-right doing fascist salutes to welcome Trump. Our citizens who are members of minority ethnic and religious communities are frightened. They have every right to believe that we will stand up and defend them from the very beginning.

I will make two more brief points. The education and post-truth question was raised by a number of noble Lords. This is incredibly important and something we need to come back to. There is a real role for schools here in helping young people understand how to evaluate the sources of information that are being brought to them. The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Ely made a really important point about the role of schools in helping young people to work out how to disagree well. Let us not kid ourselves: the values we have sometimes clash and if they are going to clash, we need to understand how to engage properly with the other and how to model that to young people and to each other.

My final point concerns Britain in the world. There is no time to go into our whole future post-Brexit but surely the biggest challenge is for us to maintain our ability to be an outward-looking country, where we forge relationships with others on the basis of our values, as Angela Merkel put it. I agree very much with my noble friend Lord Collins about the importance of challenging homophobia at home and abroad and using the resources we have in government and faith groups to do so effectively. But some of our proudest moments as Britons have been when we have reached out and shown who we are. In the terrible times of the Second World War, we welcomed the Kindertransport. In the 1970s, when we were struggling, we welcomed Ugandan Asian and Vietnamese refugees. People brought them into their homes and their communities were better for it.

What is going to happen next? I hope that this is only the first step in a national debate. I hope that the most reverend Primate has not been put off and is willing to carry on what he has started. Perhaps he would like to think about doing some work to identify a shared ethical sense that could underpin our common life and institutions. To do that, we would need to engage with the communities across our country, not just government but local faith groups, trade unions, community groups—all the different components that make up our national life. It is an ambitious task but the prize is potentially huge: a pathway to once again being a truly United Kingdom, a country genuinely at ease with itself and its place in the world, caring for all its citizens and secure enough to be outward-looking, facing the future with hope.