KISHWER FALKNER
Baroness Falkner of Margravine
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Baroness Falkner of Margravine
University of Northampton, 10 February 2008
It is an honour and privilege to be associated with the University of Northampton. While we in the House of Lords debate the public issues of the day, it is here, in the fields of health, education and social science, that public policy solutions are found. So I hope, over the next few years, to look carefully at your work and take lessons back to the House of Lords.
The Lords is a funny place, as I suspect the world of University Chancellors is too. There are many parallels: you don’t apply for the position – instead, you get appointed to it. You hold a grand title - but have no real power. Indeed, the House of Lords feels at times like a university – we have many professors among us, from whom we hear great thoughts. For this speech, I have drawn inspiration from one of those academics - from the man who sits on the benches opposite, Dr Rowan Williams. Now, before you start pelting me with eggs, let me reassure you that I only pick up his theme, not his obscurity.
So, I want to talk about multiculturalism, and the new challenges of diversity.
Globalisation is not a new phenomenon, but what has changed in living memory is that the state plays a more important role as the guarantor of the common good. In Britain, the common good rests on the base of what might be called a ‘social compact’. There are two elements to this: welfare and social values.
Firstly, the compact decrees that there is a base element of social provision for all. For relatively modest sums of our money, the state can meet our needs in areas such as health, housing, education and even pensions.
Secondly, we all agree to preserve values and institutions which work for everyone. Despite our discontent with politicians, city bankers or even the EU, we sort of muddle along in an imperfect democracy, never agreeing to how we might change the things we do not like.
The compacts rest on a form of unity within diversity: an acceptance that we will not assert our own preferences too strongly, as long as others do not assert theirs, in kind. There is a delicate balance between the unifying components of society, and the fragmentation which characterises ‘pick and choose’ individualism.
Against this backdrop of seeming stability we have seen a significant rise in diversity in Britain. It has changed all the key dimensions of identity: religious, racial, ethnic and demographic. So migrant workers, new arrivals who join families and foreign entrepreneurs are all coming in numbers. According to the Audit Commission, the increase in Britain’s population will from now on be from new arrivals rather than indigenously derived. A recent report showed that the number of children born of a foreign born parent had grown to 1 in 4. Other figures estimate a further rise of 8 million to Britain’s population over the next 25 years.
What are the impacts on this influx of people from elsewhere on the social compact? I would attempt to put these into two groupings: those which have an impact on goods and services; and those that impact on culture and cohesion.
The impacts are increasingly felt in both urban and rural settings. A shortage of housing has winners and losers. While landlords might do well, highly mobile short-stay tenants can change the character of neighbourhoods. Schools have new languages to cope with, so the challenge is for teachers to work on basic comprehension, never mind delivering the dreaded curriculum. The health service, now so reliant on foreign workers, increasingly needs to care for those very workers and their relatives, as they in turn need treatment.
And then we have pensions and welfare costs. In a system of growing liabilities, will the influx of new workers end up supporting previous ones, or will they dramatically increase the number of claimants? The answer will depend on the economic skills and saving patterns of the new arrivals, themselves. In some groups of earlier migrants, there has been few trends of socio-economic success. If one looks at Bangladeshis, Pakistani’s or Somalis, upward mobility has been extremely limited, but this is not to say that Eastern Europeans and other immigrants will follow the same trajectory.
The second aspect of increasing diversity is on culture and cohesion. This is naturally more complex and difficult to evaluate. What is nevertheless clear is that those groups which are hardest to integrate are from both different racial and religious backgrounds.
So someone from the old Commonwealth – say Australia, will have less trouble integrating than someone from Pakistan or Bangladesh. A white South African will get a different reception to a black Somali. And a black South African, used to a racially mixed society, may well integrate better than a person from Kaduna, the Muslim province of Nigeria.
All may encounter challenges in integrating but the challenge is ours, too, as we need to rethink and renew our values and norms in response to theirs. But, while we have to change too, this is not a case of meeting in the middle, it is not a symmetrical equation. The social compact, based as it is on consensus, must naturally mirror the majority, more than it can reflect the minority.
So far, the compact has held up well – it has held through greater EU integration, and through a near civil war in Northern Ireland. Only recently it has held through constitutional changes such as devolution in Britain. It has been tested and held through the ethics of an unpopular and dubiously legal war in Iraq.
This compact has held up because there has been a consensus on values. And when I refer to values, I do not mean simply those which are common to all democratic systems – although these are vital for that consensus. I also mean secularism which is embodied in our attempt to keep religious belief in the private sphere; free speech even when this shows complete irreverence towards authority; and, in recent times, a deep-rooted respect for equality. Inour culture, there is a tradition of recognising each individual’s worth and their rights, even if this is not enshrined in a written document called a constitution or a bill of rights.
So what are the new and different values which are testing our social compact? I will restrict myself to those communities I know best, and speak here about the challenges to do with Islam and its practice in modern Britain. Now, there has been criticism about Dr Williams’ desire to accommodate Islamic religious practice. This has mainly centred on our basic belief of equality under the law. But his speech also implied that our value system was in some way inadequate – which it may be, but it’s the product of a long period of discourse and dissent, and despite its seeming resilience, seems to be perpetually under strain in the eyes of successive generations, as we know too readily when we speak to our elders.
It is tempting to consider alternative legal jurisdictions, but the costs of this are too high. Sharia will, however voluntary, only pressure women to line up at the back of the equality queue again, not just in divorce and custody but also in the critical area of inheritance, all of which favour males. Voluntary norms can easily seem coercive, as concepts of familial honour, and clan solidarity, are keenly felt. So any attempt to accommodate different cultural and religious practices, as part of legal dispensation, is moral relativism at its most confused.
But let me come to the issue of demands for the recognition of ‘identity’. This too is socially corrosive in some of the forms it can take: The wearing a of a full-face covering – the niqab – is a deliberate attempt to detach oneself from relationships with strangers based on mutual trust – a trust which holds that we can look at each others’ faces without fear.
Or the assertion of contested notions of morality which are cloaked in dubious interpretations of religious adherence - take the destruction of legal billboards in Muslim neighbourhoods because scantily dressed women offend conceptions of virtue. Or the supermarket which has to go to court because its employee complains of discrimination, as the shelves he has to stack might contain pork products. There is a feeling of unreality in some of these stories. Most people feel that this has moved beyond a pragmatic view of live and let live, to something which we feel uncomfortable about, overall.
In democracies there are safeguards for minorities – hence the myriad human rights protections – which are rightly used by Muslims to secure their rights and demands. But laws and policies are not legitimate unless they have been adopted though the democratic process – and the democratic process is ultimately founded on the majority’s norms and values, from which it derives its legitimacy. When it becomes difficult to agree values, then the rest of the deal comes under renewed pressure. Issues about economic gains and losses, who should be cared for, educated, housed and clothed in old age become all the more divisive.
So while I have painted a gloomy picture of contemporary Britain, let me conclude by emphasising that the social glue still holds, despite assertions to the contrary. Given the pace of change, there is nevertheless resilience and continuity in our own culture, which enables us to recognise that we value our social compact, with all its imperfections. But to retain and renew it, we need to engage more clearly in a conversation about how we can update some aspects while preserving its essence. This is the challenge for Universities as much as Legislatures. I am privileged to have a toe-hold in both.
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