Lee Rowley
Main Page: Lee Rowley (Conservative - North East Derbyshire)
Lee Rowley (North East Derbyshire) (Con)
Today, I want to return to the incredibly important conversation started in this country after the outrageous killing of George Floyd in May. In my view, that conversation is only partially complete: vital questions regarding our intentions and objectives hang in the air, alongside solutions asserted from some quarters which, at least to me, remain untested and are at times jarring to the good nature and general tolerance of the Britain I know and love—questions such as how we, rightly, consign all forms of discrimination in our society to history, how we interact with our complicated past, and, fundamentally, how we raise up our fellow man and woman to fulfil their ambitions, focusing on where they are going rather than where they have come from.
That this debate even began is something I welcome. When these questions arose two months ago, I looked forward to a robust, potentially uncomfortable debate, acknowledging the past and recognising the progress made, but accepting there would always be more to do. Yet what came next was neither what I expected, nor sometimes did it, in my view, do justice to the questions that were raised. On issues as deeply sensitive as this, we all have a responsibility to debate as broadly as possible, with a willingness to both listen and recognise that no single one of us and no single group has the answer to every question, but too often we have seen attempts to impose a single worldview on the contours of this important debate: a new framework about discrimination, saying that it is somehow intrinsic and unavoidable; about individual autonomy, saying that we are reduced to the indelible product of our physical and mental characteristics, rather than being more than the sum of our parts; about our societal ambition, saying that meritocracy may no longer be our shared objective; and about our compassion, saying that somehow we are institutionally unable to show it.
While I personally have much to learn and many more conversations to have, two months later I simply do not recognise this portrait of our country: systemic discrimination, inherited privilege, the implication that ends justify means, the assumption that only one ideology, anti-capitalism—or, more accurately, Marxism—can resolve some of the challenging issues in front of us, and the focus on inanimate objects rather than on minds and intents and souls.
Do we really want to centre debate on the vexed issue of statues, for example? How can the toppling of a statute ever be helpful in demonstrating our respect for the rule of law and due process, and, fundamentally, how does a focus on pulling down and graffitiing statutes help one poor child in North East Derbyshire or Newham or Norfolk?
Every day when I come to this place I am surrounded by reminders of the past. Many of those reminders are historical figures who at best ignored and at worst oppressed my family, my class and those who came before me who wanted to live their lives with the freedoms that I have today. They sent my forefathers down the mines to die early. They treated my rights and freedoms as their own personal playthings. They put people like me to death over hundreds of years. And yet the answer for me cannot be to focus on stone images or inherited sin; those statues are the reminder of an imperfect past, but also of how we built a better society based on the toils of individuals who can do both good and bad at the same time.
Our island has a story; it is gory, bloody, bloodthirsty and unacceptable at times by modern standards, but at the same time it is a unique story of progress and resolution. It is the shared endeavour of all of our history that now allows us the freedom to look at what might be, rather than to focus on what was.
And to do that, we simply must talk. I have heard too much in recent months about exhaustion and fatigue, and that some of us are no longer going to talk about issues of profound importance. Yet no one can be exhausted. Join the battle, be critical, stop cancelling your opponent; live that Voltairean notion that, other than those who advocate violence, we respect the right of anybody to say whatever they want, even if we disagree with it. One may erase men’s voices, status or words temporarily, but is it not better to seek their souls than their silence?
So, as we end this parliamentary Session with profound questions hanging in the air, I hope we will return to these issues again in the autumn. These issues of profound importance need to be constantly in our thoughts, but, equally, constantly debated, rather than reduced to predetermined ossification.