Education (Values of British Citizenship) Bill [HL]

Lord Blunkett Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 18th October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Blunkett (Lab)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble and right reverend Lord on bringing forward this Bill and on his contribution to the Select Committee he mentioned. I was proud to serve with him on it, under the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson.

There is a lot to be said in three minutes, but this is a timely moment—timely because there is a curriculum review now initiated under the chairmanship of Becky Francis; because, sadly, we saw over the summer the riots taking place across our country; and because, of course, we see the most enormous threats both from distortion on social media and from the re-emergence of the far right across the world. This is the moment to reinforce the importance of those values that hold us together—the ties that bind.

British values are not exclusive to Britain, but they are about our country. We debated this at great length in the committee and came to the conclusion that of course other people will share those values in their own context, but to reinforce them is really important, as former Prime Minister Gordon Brown endeavoured to do in the debate he initiated just under 20 years ago.

I was proud to introduce the idea of citizenship and democracy teaching in the curriculum over 20 years ago. Sadly, many of those who have the power to ensure that it works never had citizenship and democracy taught to them when they were at school, so they do not really get the message. That applies right across the most powerful elements within our education system. So if we are to make this work—and to detach it from the Prevent strategy, mentioned by the noble and right reverend Lord in terms of what happened in 2011, which I think is the right thing to do—we need to move quickly.

I could go on and on, but I do not have the time this morning, about how my old tutor, Professor Bernard Crick, who chaired the working group that led to the curriculum on citizenship and democracy, used to ask, “How can you tolerate the intolerant?”. Tolerance is a very odd phrase, because if you have to tolerate something, your dislike of it is such that you do not accept that you can respect and hold it on common terms.

If we are to make this work—there have been a number of iterations, and my noble friend Lord Knight has brought forward ideas about the environment—we must train teachers, we must give bursaries, which we are not doing, to enable that to take place, and we must get rid of the Catch-22, which is that if you do not teach children, they will not go forward through the GCSE. If they do not do that, the department rules out providing the support to train more teachers —and round we go. Let us take this Bill and use it as a mechanism to go forward, genuinely believing that, if we do not teach this now, we will regret it later.