Lord Kakkar
Main Page: Lord Kakkar (Crossbench - Life peer)
Lord Kakkar (CB)
My Lords, I join in congratulating and thanking the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, for having secured this important debate at such an important time. When I gave my maiden speech to your Lordships some five years ago, I was able to reflect on the journey of my own parents who came to the United Kingdom in 1961 to continue their medical training as part of a substantial wave of immigration from India at that time, which resulted from a broad consensus, recognising that immigration was a good thing but also that those newly arrived communities needed to integrate and make their full contribution to British society.
Some nations attempt to deal with the question of values by way of their written constitutions. That includes France, for instance, and the United States. We know about “Liberté, égalité, fraternité”, which is written in tablets of stone in the French constitution—a top-down approach to the definition of and imposition of national values. Regrettably, experience in France has shown that that does not necessarily achieve the greatest integration and cohesion in society. Our own approach without a codified written constitution has been to focus much more on institutions playing a vitally important role, both in establishing and helping us to understand over centuries what our values are and then ensuring that those values are broadly consolidated. Such great institutions as our constitutional monarchy, this great Parliament, a free press and an independent judiciary have all played a vitally important role in securing an understanding and a basis of our national values. But then smaller institutions throughout the land, which compose civil society, have provided the opportunity for a variety of disparate communities to be able to engage with those values, to understand them and start to live them. It is therefore vitally important that we reflect on the role of institutions in securing the values that we hold so dearly in our country and the opportunities that they have to ensure that all communities can understand those values and participate in living them.
Bearing in mind the dependence that we have on institutions, what role do Her Majesty’s Government take towards protecting and promoting them and ensuring that they can play their vitally important role in securing the values that underpin our country? If those institutions, both large and small, were to fail, there would be a very great risk to our nation, broadly, and to the security and functioning of communities, both established and newly arrived in our nation.