Jo Cox Civility Commission

Lord Bates Excerpts

Thursday 18th June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bates (Con)]

My Lords, it is an honour to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Royall, and her introduction to this important and timely debate. I agree with everything she said, and I congratulate her on her work as chair of the Jo Cox Foundation and on this report, which I wholeheartedly support.

Jo’s core belief, as we have been told, is that we have more in common than that which divides us. This is an important challenge, because often we emphasise our different identities and forget to celebrate what we have in common: our British identity. We obsess about the relatively small number of things that go wrong and forget to celebrate the millions of things that go right across our country every day. It is like players and fans leaving the England game in Dallas last night and demanding an independent inquiry into who was to blame for Croatia’s two goals and forgetting to mention that we scored four and won the game comfortably. Jo’s sister, Kim Leadbeater MP, said yesterday:

“We’ve got to make sure the voices of positivity and perseverance and resilience are the ones that are amplified”.


I agree.

We call ourselves the United Kingdom, but united is not only an adjective, it is a verb. I will use my time to remind us of the amazing things this country, which we are privileged to call home, has done and is doing. We have given the world its most widely spoken language, with 2.3 billion speakers. It is the language of the internet, international trade and navigation. William Shakespeare perfected the language in the greatest literary works of all time. We are in the mother of parliaments. We are surrounded by statues of those who witnessed the signing of Magna Carta, which established basic human rights and set limits on government. English contract law is the basis of international trade—even time is measured from the Greenwich Meridian, which established longitude and opened up the oceans for navigation. We were home to the first industrial revolution and are the birthplace of the railways. We are a G7 nation and a permanent member of the UN Security Council. We play a leading role in the Commonwealth; we are a nuclear power; we are a cornerstone of the NATO alliance. The first meetings of the United Nations General Assembly and the UN Security Council took place just a few hundred yards from here, 80 years ago this year. We have stood alone against tyranny, stood up for freedom, stood by our allies, led the abolition of slavery and offered sanctuary for those being persecuted.

This year, the UK overtook India to become the fifth-largest economy in the world. London is consistently ranked alongside New York as the world’s leading financial centre. The UK is recognised as being a world leader in fintech, medical research and AI—the industries not of the past but of the future.

The world wide web was invented by a Brit, Tim Berners-Lee; Alan Turing was the father of AI; Geoffrey Hinton was the father of machine learning; and Demis Hassabis is the brain behind Google DeepMind. We have more unicorn businesses—billion-dollar tech companies—in this country than Germany and France combined.

On the day on which we welcome into your Lordships’ House another great Olympian—the noble Baroness, Lady Grainger—we should remind ourselves that we gave the world so many of its great sports: football, cricket, tennis, rugby and, of course, the Paralympics, all invented here. The Premier League is the most watched sports league in the world, broadcast to more than 200 countries. Formula 1 is the most technical of all sports, and seven out of the 10 teams are based here. When Lewis Hamilton won in Barcelona on Sunday, he stood on an all-British podium as our national anthem played.

This is the land of the Enlightenment: Hume, Smith and Locke. Newton’s laws of motion and Darwin’s theory of evolution continue to shape our understanding of the world. It is home to the National Health Service, the envy of the world. We are home to some of the greatest medical innovations: Fleming’s penicillin, IVF, CT and MRI scans, and Crick, Watson and Franklin’s discovery of the structure of DNA, the building block of life itself. We are now at the forefront of vaccine development around the world. We are home to four of the top 10 universities in the world. We have won 148 Nobel prizes, second only to the United States. Cambridge University alone has been awarded more Nobel prizes than Germany.

It is time for us to celebrate who we are and what we have in common, and to drown out the voices of pessimism and division, which have had their day. It is a privilege to live in this country, but that privilege comes with duties and the responsibility to contribute to it and to make it even better. That will require us to come together, to be united not just in name but in nature and purpose. That is what Jo Cox stood for, and that is what we must now work for.