Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Lord Biggar Excerpts

Thursday 1st May 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Biggar (Con) (Maiden Speech)]

My Lords, I begin with the customary round of thanks, which I give with my whole heart. Black Rod, the doorkeepers and all the administrative and service staff I have encountered in this House have been extraordinarily helpful and patient. Mr Thomas there just brought me a glass of water without me asking for it, and I thank him very much. I thank my noble friend Lord Griffiths of Fforestfach and the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries of Pentregarth, who are long-term mentors of mine, who introduced me to this House at the end of January. I hope that, in due course, the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, will forgive me for having chosen to sit on the Conservative Benches.

When I tell the House that I am a retired professor of Christian ethics, I imagine some of your Lordships may mutter to yourselves, “That’s nice, but what’s he doing here?” If so, I would sympathise since I think that intellectuals, especially from the arts and humanities, are best kept well clear of politics, since we tend to suffer grievously from the virus of wishful thinking. Being conservative, however, I have long sought to educate my moral ideals with reality.

In 1998, the year of the Belfast or Good Friday agreement, I ran a conference in Oxford under the title, “Burying the Past After Civil Conflict”. At the beginning of the conference, I started to talk without embarrassment about healing and reconciliation until up stood Ulrike Poppe, twice imprisoned by the communist authorities of East Germany because of her political dissidence, who said, “I now live on the same street as the man who informed on me. I didn’t know him then and I certainly don’t want to know him now. So, what exactly do you mean by healing and reconciliation?” I look forward to being further educated by the vast array of practical experience that this House, being unelected, contains.

In recent years, I have been preoccupied with colonial history for political reasons. As an Anglo-Scot, I had a dog in the fight that was the 2014 referendum on Scottish independence and, although an instinctive opponent, I felt morally obliged to consider nationalist arguments. One argument I came across was this: Britain equals Empire equals evil; therefore, the Scots should decolonise, disintegrate the UK, and sail off into a bright, new, shiny, sin-free future. But having read British imperial history for nigh on 20 years, I knew that the equation “Empire equals evil” is not historically or morally tenable. I call in aid two facts. First, the British Empire spent the second half of its life suppressing slavery from Brazil to New Zealand. Secondly, from May 1940 for 12 months, the Empire offered the genocidally racist Nazi regime in Berlin the only military opposition, with the sole exception of Greece. Empire cannot be identified with evil.

None the less, 45% of Scots voted to disintegrate the UK in 2014, which, according to our representative at the UN, would have delighted the Kremlin and damaged the international standing of this country much more than Brexit ever could. And the 45% voted in spite of being told by the London Treasury that they would each be £500 the poorer for it. If Lord Stupid were a Member of this House—which of course he is not—I would say to him, “No, my noble Lord, Lord Stupid, it’s not just the economy; it’s also the story”. The national story is politically potent, and a false story is politically destructive.

That brings me, very briefly, to Clause 47 of the Bill we are considering. Teachers’ unions are clamouring for decolonisation to be embedded in the curriculum, and decolonisation involves the story that 400 years of Britain’s global imperial engagement was nothing but a litany of racism and slavery. If the curriculum were to be decolonised and if the state were to impose that curriculum on academies, academies could no longer serve as centres of intellectual diversity and dissidence. The national story matters politically and having liberal schools that are free to challenge dominant ideologies and to tell the whole story—not just the lamentable failures and wrongs but also the heroic achievements of our country—is important too, and I hope the Government will agree.