Education (Values of British Citizenship) Bill [HL]

Lord Jackson of Peterborough Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 18th October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

My Lords, I welcome this Bill and the change in the language. The Bill rightly calls these principles “values of British citizenship”. They are civic values. Far from being a recent invention or a fiction, as some have suggested, civic Britishness is a very real concept which is now more important than ever before.

Diversity can be a very good thing but, where there are large and disparate ethnic communities in a country, as there are now in the UK, the possibility of conflict and distrust arises. To be able to resolve any tensions which come with that demographic change, the crucial precondition is that every citizen of this country is able to participate as a citizen in the processes and institutions through which we can make decisions about social harmony, the common good and our rules of engagement. If not, we risk in academic terms losing our pluralist society and becoming plural. Instead of having a unity within which we understand our differences, we will be truly and deeply divided.

However, there is good news, as was mentioned earlier. New immigrants to the UK are proud of this country’s history and traditions. As a recent Policy Exchange research document told us this week, the majority of British people of Caribbean, Chinese, Indian, Bangladeshi and Pakistani heritage believe Britain to have been a force for good in the world.

We are shockingly unvigilant about defending our enduring values in this country. Other European nations, such as France, are dramatically more insistent on inculcating those civic values. Yet in our country, there are actors who continue to claim that the British values strategy and the intelligence and research on which it is based are frivolous and therefore racist. Frankly, it is not so. The evidence says otherwise: that we have a clear and identifiable problem of a small proportion of people who reject our national values, where that problem is ideological—the product of competing value systems. We need a national education strategy to combat that. We are duty bound, for the good of everyone in this country, of all backgrounds, to refuse to allow people to be isolated, ghettoised and disfranchised by the holding of some of these attitudes. We must positively enfranchise these communities. Education is a natural first point of action.

Through such a strategy, we must stress that citizenship is no small thing but rather a calling to live up to. It is certainly not a purely self-serving right. It comes with a duty to participate in national life according to our common standards and customs. That is not degrading to those isolated communities. It is dignifying. The degrading thing would be to allow ghettoisation and a parallel world to continue unchecked. I commend this strategy and the continuing emphasis on our civic values, so well reflected in this Bill.