Lord Ramsbotham
Main Page: Lord Ramsbotham (Crossbench - Life peer)
Lord Ramsbotham (CB)
My Lords, I, too, congratulate my noble and right reverend friend Lord Harries on obtaining this debate. As my noble friend Lord Sutherland was speaking, I was reflecting on the marvellous essay by Field Marshal Viscount Slim on the foundations of morale, which he wrote in 1943. One of the things he said is that a man must feel that he will get a fair deal from his commanders, and his living and working conditions must be made as good as they can be. I fear that one of the things about people leaving this country is that they do not feel that.
I declare an interest as having been a member of the Select Committee on Soft Power, which asked the Government exactly the same question at the end of its report. What were the British values which underpinned the so-called British way of life? We were influenced to a slight extent by Mr Hague’s statement that we must work,
“to persuade other nations to share our values and develop the willingness to act to defend and promote them”,
which requires,
“allowing our soft power—those rivers of ideas, diversity, ingenuity and knowledge—to flow freely”.
The most interesting evidence that we took during the whole period was from the High Commissioner for Mozambique who explained why it was that Mozambique had sought to join the Commonwealth. He underpinned the values which it felt that it would gain from doing so, which were exactly the ones quoted by the right reverend Prelate; namely, freedom, tolerance in others, accepting responsibility, absence of corruption and, above all, respecting and upholding the rule of law. Those are terribly important and we lose them at our peril. What worries me is that that may be fine when said by the Prime Minister but is the Minister certain that Ministers are practising, exercising and accepting responsibility, and upholding the rule of law?