Queen’s Speech

My Lords, I struggled with the problem of whether my speech would fit into this evening’s debate, as it could well have come under the area of education. However, I am really pleased that I am speaking this evening because the subject of my speech is equality, and it dovetails with the very fine speech which the noble Baroness, Lady Young, has just given. I would like to speak about a project that I have been involved with on improving relations between Muslims and Jews. To give a bit of background, I became a trustee of an organisation called the Coexistence Trust about three years ago; it had been set up jointly by my noble friend Lord Janner and His Royal Highness Prince Hassan of Jordan. I was a trustee who attended the odd meeting and did not do very much. Last May my noble friend Lord Janner buttonholed me and asked if I would like to become chairman. In a weak moment I said yes which I regretted for a week but then I thought, ““You have got the job now; you had better make a good job of it””. I am doing my best and actually enjoying it very much. The Coexistence Trust set out to go around the world getting Jewish or Muslim parliamentarians in various parliaments to deal with the issues of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. My noble friend Lord Janner, in particular, was very successful in getting lots of people to sign up to this. When I took over as chairman I wanted to change the emphasis and to concentrate on the UK. It may come as a surprise to noble Lords to find out that on our campuses there are tensions between Jewish and Muslim students, and I felt we should address this issue. A meeting was held and I got into conversation with the noble Baroness, Lady Warsi. There seemed to be a great meeting of minds between us. We talked about how we could address this issue and the concept of a road show came into being, where we would go round various universities as parliamentarians. In any conversation between Jews and Muslims, of course, the Middle East is the elephant in the room but we wanted to keep it out because if it stayed, it was going to kill all debate about other subjects that we felt were really important. By and large, we were successful in doing this although we had a few tense moments. The essence of the road show and the debates was to start off with parliamentarians talking about their journey, in particular the journey of Jewish immigrants who came to this country 100 years ago and that of Muslim immigrants who came here 30 or 40 years ago. There were similarities in that the new immigrants did not speak the language, they moved to the same area as other immigrants and their food and culture were different from those of British society in general. There were also similarities in how they managed to address the new country they were living in. We got together a group of parliamentarians, mainly from your Lordships’ House, but there were a couple of Members of Parliament as well. It was a cross-party group with Liberal Democrats, Conservatives, Cross-Benchers and Labour Party Members. As well as the noble Baroness, Lady Warsi, the group included the noble Baroness, Lady Falkner, from the Liberal Democrats, the noble Lord, Lord Hameed—a Cross-Bencher—the noble Baronesses, Lady Afshar and Lady Deech, and my noble friend Lord Janner. From the other place we had the right honourable Michael Howard, who attended one of our road shows, and the Labour Member of Parliament Khalid Mahmood. I would like to thank all of them because they gave up a lot of time travelling around the country. It is not easy to give up time but they did it very well. The format was quite interesting. We went to five universities—Oxford, Cambridge, London School of Economics, Birmingham and Leeds. At each debate we had four panellists—two Muslims, two Jewish, all parliamentarians. The first debate was at the London School of Economics. I have to confess that I was petrified. I was convinced there was going to be trouble in the audience and that nobody would turn up, but it was packed and it was a very exciting evening. We all started by talking about our family background—where we had come from, where our grandparents had come from, what their experiences had been in this country and the prejudice and hostility they had suffered in their lifetime. Not surprisingly there was a tremendous commonality. The issues that came up were interesting. We talked about being British Muslim and being British Jewish. We talked about integration. As a Jew I talked a lot about assimilation and the fact that the Jewish population in this country is declining rapidly because of intermarriage. To a lot of people that is a threat to the Jewish community. We talked about Sharia law. We talked about the way universities deal with examinations being held on religious holidays and the issue of food that is common to both religions. We both have some rather arcane and difficult dietary requirements that are difficult for other people to understand. Nevertheless, for observant Jews and Muslims, these are very important. Most of all, we talked about the real common threat to both communities of the resurgence of the BNP and everything that it is doing. Whether it is attacking Muslims today or Jews yesterday, it is the same people attacking all of us in the same way. What was most exciting was that after the debate we generally had a dinner with members of the Jewish Society, the Islamic Society, the panellists and some of the university administrators. This gave people an opportunity to become much more involved and to talk about their fears and concerns. It was an overwhelming success. Members of the Jewish and Islamic societies who had never spoken to each other were exchanging mobile phone numbers and saying that they needed to get to know each other and understand each other’s religion better. That was very rewarding. Nobody in the room disagreed; nobody said that it was a complete waste of time, and that was tremendous. We have posted a video of this road show on the website that has been set up. We are encouraging students to get on blogging sites because that is the way they communicate. Anyone who wants to can reference the website at www.coexistencetrust.org.uk. I want to conclude by talking about a particular danger that we saw. At one ancient university a student said that she had been having a meeting with a member of the faculty about taking a day off for a religious event and the member of the faculty had said, ““If I do it for you, I am going to have to do it for pygmies and mountain people””. That provoked stories of numbers of instances where members of the faculty had been less than helpful to Jewish students and, I would guess, to Islamic students, to women, and to people from all sorts of minorities. Members of faculties in our universities are able to say and do things that would not be permissible in the workplace or in schools. We need to address this issue to make universities a much better place for students to be in.