National Life: Shared Values and Public Policy Priorities

Baroness Warsi Excerpts

Friday 2nd December 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Warsi (Con)]

My Lords, I join the most reverend Primate in welcoming my noble friends Lady Bertin and Lord McInnes of Kilwinning. I have had the pleasure of working with both of them over many years. I look forward to their maiden speeches.

Post-truth, along with Brexit, has been the big buzzword of 2016. The climate of political and media discourse in 2016, here and across the water both east and west, has left a lot to be desired. We have seen a Member of Parliament, Jo Cox, murdered on our streets by a man whose idea of being a patriot was based on beliefs rooted in neo-Nazi ideology and white-supremacist propaganda. He was no patriot, as the judge said on sentencing him. Jo was.

We have seen hate crime rise, with the NPCC reporting a surge in England, Wales and Northern Ireland in the second half of July this year. We remain on severe alert in relation to terrorism, namely that a terrorist attack is highly likely. We see the steady march of the far right across Europe, with Austria, Hungary, Denmark, Germany, Greece, the Netherlands, Slovakia, Sweden and Poland now having such representation in Parliament. In the United States we see xenophobia rebranding itself as the alternative right.

This debate is timely and important. I am grateful to the most reverend Primate for offering your Lordships’ House the opportunity to debate what are our values and how committed we are to them when shaping public policy. British values, even in recent times, are not a new debate. Britishness, and a definition of what underpins it, is something that Labour, the coalition and Conservative Governments have struggled with, but we seem to have now achieved a formal definition, which is this: our British values are democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty, and mutual respect and tolerance of those with different faiths and beliefs. It is what we teach our children in school and what Ofsted measures our schools against.

However, the debate has caused much debate. Politicians have claimed that these values are British, but are they uniquely so? David Cameron and other Prime Ministers have claimed these as Christian, but are they uniquely so? That is a conversation I have often had with the most reverend Primate. I would argue not. Sadly, the time limit we have been advised of does not allow me to argue each point in detail, but I simply say this. No one religion, race or nation has a monopoly over good, nor a responsibility for all that is bad.

My focus is therefore on the term “British values” as an effective term to do what it sets out to do: to create a shared sense of belonging around an agreed set of norms. The term suggests not only who we think we are now, but who we have always been. Yet, if we take each separate value, this statement is neither historically correct nor factually accurate. Each generation defines its own values, which are based on the norms of that particular time. Many in politics in the 1980s were adamant that heterosexual relations were the definition of family, according to our British values—not so today. Britain in the 1950s had a very different notion of equality relating to women. Tolerance during the heady days of overt racism in bygone decades was not necessarily an easily recognised feature of our public life—not an obvious British value.

The point I make is that we are not a reductive list; we are a complex set of aspirations which change and change often. So I suggest the term “British ideals”, a forward-looking, inclusively created hope of what we would like to be, is a much better way forward. It would be a raising of our eyes to the horizon even in dark times, to the place we want to get to; a pull factor that ensures that we carry on walking the path towards liberal values—a path, in light of the politics of the last 12 months, that can no longer be guaranteed to be a one-way street. That would ensure that we remain a nation of values and leave future generations a public discourse, a climate more open and welcoming than the one that some of us grew up in. A fantastic cross-party initiative launched in Parliament yesterday by Sir Eric Pickles has as its slogan, remembering those times, Britain is “BetterThanThat”.