Lord Sutherland of Houndwood
Main Page: Lord Sutherland of Houndwood (Crossbench - Life peer)
Lord Sutherland of Houndwood (CB)
My Lords, I congratulate and thank my noble and right reverend friend Lord Harries. This is a well-chosen topic; it is timely and another of the many nails he drives into the coffin of extremism.
The function of the state is one of the critical questions underlying this. What is the role of the state? I like to plumb the depths of British philosophy and history in trying to answer such questions, so I shall turn to John Locke and A Letter Concerning Toleration —he wrote three but I shall deal just with the first. It was written from a context that, if we think about it, is not unfamiliar now. He was an exile in Holland and all around him were the terrible deprivations of the Huguenots, driven out of France by Louis XIV, who had revoked the edict of Nantes. Locke saw persecution going on. He was an exile from religious persecution in Britain in 1685.
He raised the question of what the function of the state is, because he saw that as the starting point. The function of the state is to deal with matters temporal: life, liberty, health and property. The function of the state is not to take a view on what religion is appropriate or inappropriate. However, Locke moved on from that and asked: what kind of limits do you set to the function and the powers of the state? The limits had to do with his general philosophy—with what empirically can be shown to be true, and pragmatically what can be achieved. For example, today a separate question has to be answered pragmatically about the use of electronic surveillance, which we will come to in this House in due course. That was not a question for Locke, but it is for us. Let us deal with it in a way that looks for evidence rather than putting words in the sky.
My point is that right now in our schools and colleges, to our shock and amazement, young people from very sensible and pleasant homes who have been brought up to think of themselves as British are moving out and going—perhaps driven by ideals or perhaps by other things—to parts of the world where ideology reigns, not criticism or pragmatism. Locke’s point is: as part of how we carry on our practice of public values and education in public values we have to draw this very clear line and say, “Matters temporal have to be settled empirically and pragmatically”. You cannot settle matters political in the way that, for example, people will find they are settled as they move to certain parts of the world. There is a huge distinction here which I hope underlies how we begin to teach social values in our state.