Global Migration and Mobility (EUC Report)

Lord Judd Excerpts

Thursday 6th June 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Judd]

My Lords, first, I want to say—and I know I speak for others on the committee—that once again it has been a real privilege to work on this report under the leadership and chairmanship of the noble Lord, Lord Hannay. It really has been a good experience to be there with him on that committee. The second thing I want to say is that I passionately believe that we in this House, whenever we discuss the issues of immigration, should never miss an opportunity to say thank you to all those immigrants who have made such a fine, positive and desperately important contribution to our life in Britain and to the life we take for granted. It is true that all of us, every day, experience it in our families and with our friends when using the health service and it is true every day when we take our trains up and down the country. We know that we have received tremendous benefits in this country from immigration. That is why so many of us are ashamed of the myopic, cheap opportunism—that comes from educated people who should know better—of trying to seize negative emotion and work up passions, where we should be emphasising the importance of reason and analysis.

I found the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts, very powerful, very analytical and very challenging. When he was speaking, I could not help reflecting on paragraph 13 of our report, in which we state:

“There are approximately 214 million international migrants worldwide”.

So we are faced not only with the pressures within our own society but with the pressures of migration for the global community as a whole. That is why it is crucial for those of us in this House, who have the space in this House to look at things in perspective, always to emphasise that, if ever there was an issue that requires international collaboration and international policies to deal with the huge issues that arise from it, it is the issue of migration. We simply cannot solve the issues of migration as a nation on our own. European co-operation is vital. The noble Lord was right to say that we should never consider these matters in our own country without looking at the experiences of others in Europe. But, of course, it is in the management of the issue that co-operation is so important.

That is why the European debate going on in Britain at the moment is very significant. To me, it flies in the face of reason to envisage in any way a future in which somehow we will do better on these issues if we operate as an island on our own, offshore from the mainland of Europe. We need to work with those in Europe if we are to be effective in handling the situation. Of course, it is important not just in Europe but worldwide as well.

That brings me to the issue of higher education, which has been fully debated today. As we debated it, I could not help feeling that if the sub-committee was looking for allies in the House, it could not have had a better ally than the noble Lord, Lord MacGregor of Pulham Market. That was an amazingly penetrating analysis and speech, and I just hope that his noble friends on the Front Bench have listened to every word of it and will recognise its significance.

There is one other point that I want to make, and I declare an interest because I am involved on a voluntary basis in three universities in this country—the London School of Economics, Lancaster and Newcastle. We talk about the economic consequences of policy towards overseas students, for the universities themselves immediately and the long-term consequences for the country as a whole. These are very central issues for our debate. There is one other point that needs to be emphasised. The first reality of existence for all of us on planet earth is that we are totally interdependent, and how history—if history is there to judge us—will judge political leaders of the time in which we live is on the success or failure that we make of handling that reality of international interdependence. I simply do not understand how you can approach education, let alone higher education, without that international reality being central to the deliberation in virtually every discipline being studied.

It is absolutely crucial that in our fine universities—we have some very fine universities in this country—there is a real, living community of scholars, not just from these islands but from the world as a whole. It is going to be the interplay of cultural experience and of different perspectives that will help students to become educated, as distinct from trained, and to understand the nature of the world in which they live and the scale of the issues that confront them. I know that when I was an undergraduate I was learning all the time from people who came from very different backgrounds from my own. I greatly appreciated that. It is true of Britain, but it is much truer of the world as a whole. What we do not emphasise enough in our considerations about higher education is that the quality of our universities is related to the presence of an international community central to their activities. Whenever that is diminished, the quality of education itself is being diminished. It is disturbing that current policies are leading to a decline in the number of students wanting to come to study here, because it is perceived that it is not a welcoming place and it is not a good place to spend a lot of time trying to get to when you can get elsewhere. That point has to be taken very seriously.

There are a couple of other points in the report on which I want to dwell for a moment. They have been referred to in the debate. One is the issue of integration. I was very impressed by what the right reverend Prelate said about his work and experiences in Derby. It is clear that civil society is crucial to making a success of integration, but not just civil society in terms of the NGOs, although they are very important, but even in the more established parts of civil society, if that is not a contradiction in terms. The chambers of commerce have a very important part to play and trade unions have an absolutely crucial part to play in the issue of integration. But then the NGOs themselves are vital. As someone who has spent a great deal of my life in NGOs, I worry that we are slipping into an era in which they are seen as an extension of public administration to deliver policy. I want good quality public service and I am sure, therefore, that NGOs will have an important contribution to make, but that is to miss the point. In a vibrant society, NGOs are there to contribute to the debate. They are there to learn from their engagement and experience and to bring to the quality of the public debate the depth of their experience and what they are discovering every day, on the front line, with real people. I do not get the feeling, under any Government in recent times, that the views, attitudes and experience of the NGOs have been central to the development of policy on integration in immigration matters. There is a lot of work to be done on that.

It is also important to realise that, if we are talking about successful integration, we must face up to the pressures on many of our relatively deprived communities which find themselves grappling with the largest elements of immigration and the movement of people. This is why we must make sure that, in areas where immigration is more concentrated than others, the schooling, hospitals, public services, housing and employment are given real priority. It is in these areas that the frustrations build up and the idiots who demean the whole quality of public debate start deploying their opportunism.

On the opportunism, I say to all our political leaders, please realise that you are never going to buy off that kind of opportunism. It has to be challenged and confronted. One has to talk about the values which are central to our society and in which we believe, and about why, with rational analysis, we must make a success of this interdependence about which I am talking and the inevitable movement of people. How can you talk about free and open markets if there is not to be the movement of people? It is a fundamental contradiction if you say you have a free and open market but people cannot move about to follow the investment. However, we know that it is not currently possible for that to happen, so we have issues. Theoretical and ideological solutions like open and free markets will not provide a total answer. We must have pragmatism at work, based upon real experience, real issues and how we handle them.

I have been heartened by the seriousness of this debate today. Again, I offer warmest thanks to our chair for having led us in preparing the report. I hope that we may have many opportunities to go on discussing this issue, but not just as a sort of Greek chorus wringing our hands about it but as part of a process that is making sure that we are doing the things that are necessary to meet the challenges.