Anti-Semitism

Lord Boswell of Aynho Excerpts

Wednesday 8th June 2011 Grand Committee

Asked By

[Lord Boswell of Aynho]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what steps they will take to tackle anti-Semitism and what assessment they have made of the success of the cross-government working group on anti-Semitism.

[Lord Boswell of Aynho]

My Lords, some noble Lords may be aware that in another place I participated in the all-party inquiry on anti-Semitism which sat in 2005 and reported in 2006. I should make it clear that I did so neither as a member of the Jewish faith nor as a Member of Parliament who had then taken much interest in, or at least shown overt commitment to, the political affairs of the Middle East. It would be fair to say that that degree of detachment was not confined to me; among the 14 members of the committee there was that general pattern. It informed the nature—I hope dispassionate nature—of the conclusions of our work.

I should begin with a confession to the Committee. After waiting six months for this debate, I booked the date when offered it without realising that it fell on the Jewish festival of Shavuot, which has precluded a number of noble Lords who are religiously observant, including the noble Lord, Lord Sacks, from participation. All I can say in mitigation is that I still felt that it was right in the circumstances to proceed because these issues needed airing. I also realised that if I could be so careless in my respect for others when I trusted my motivation was impeccable, how easy it is for us to neglect cross-cultural issues and the sensitivities that there are; and how easy also it is, for example, for a university academic, who might be less benignly disposed, to overlook the legitimate claims of Jewish or other students in the setting of exam dates and somehow finding that they coincided with a religious festival and created difficulties for the students. We all need to sharpen our act, and I shall be one of those. My overwhelming message to the Committee is that we need to be alert in these issues.

Beyond the strict remit of my Question, I do not feel that any views that Members may have on the Middle East situation or on the position of the Israeli Government—and I do have some of my own—should in any sense condone issues around anti-Semitism, although they are often used as a proxy.

Our concern here should primarily be with our domestic situation within the United Kingdom. This is rightly the concern of Members across the House. It is also important, and perhaps a useful piece of symbolism, that I speak as a Christian. My noble friend the Minister happens to be a Muslim and there will be others who participate who may have no act of faith at the moment. And so it should be. We should all engage on issues of intolerance involving our Jewish population because such acts and attitudes tarnish and diminish our society as a whole—and, of course, they are easily transferrable, in one nexus of intolerance, from one community to another, and that is intolerable too.

I am a member of the British delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. I should early on in the debate draw the Committee’s attention to a worrying upward trend in anti-Semitism internationally. As with our own British situation, this may from time to time burst out overtly into the public gaze. I remember going past synagogues in Vienna and seeing the police guard and so on and finding it depressing.

I am concerned equally by the Holocaust deniers, who tend to be rather noisy, and by what I might call the anti-Semitism deniers, who tend to be less open about it. We in Britain, at least in our Committee’s work, were honest enough to confess to our problems, but I become concerned when I hear other countries deny that contemporary problems exist or perhaps define them as merely extensive with those who happen to hold views that are critical of the Israeli political system or policies. With perhaps the exception of Germany because of its own ghastly history, accepted by nearly all those in responsible positions in Germany, too many other European countries turned a blind eye to pressure on their resident Jewish populations. This is perhaps partly because those populations—sadly, but it needs saying—have been reduced by the Holocaust, and they are now often by no means the largest faith minority. Nor in many cases do they have direct political clout.

I turn now to the specific issues raised in our 2006 inquiry and the government response. I have to say that there is much to celebrate and commend here. Under both the previous Government and the current coalition Government there has been a determined and positive response at both ministerial and official level. This has spanned a wide range of government departments, through the cross-government working group, and has drawn in partners from the agencies of the Jewish community. This dialogue has already led to three successive government responses, reporting to parliamentarians of all kinds in the light of that inquiry. One benefit of the occasion is to be seen when you revisit the latest White Paper that came out last December; for a government document it is, dare I say, quite a meaty response, with a lot of facts in it as to what has been achieved and what still needs to be achieved. Parliamentarians across the House and in the other place have maintained focus on that area and, in certain cases—and I include myself in relation to Holland—have taken the example of our work to a number of other Parliaments. This culminated in the first international conference on the subject in London, in February 2009.

I shall now comment briefly on a number of outstanding issues. First, hate crime itself—and these are crimes, whether they are attacks on individuals, buildings or cemeteries—continues in Britain at historically high levels. However, there is now better public articulation of the policing and other issues around them, and there is valuable co-operation with the community support trusts. Having as part of our inquiry visited a Jewish school in a Paris suburb which had been burnt out before we were there—and which, I found to my distress, was burnt out again after we visited—I welcome the money that the present Government have been able to find for school security. I hope that that will continue. It is appropriate at this point to mention, in difficult times, the money that the Government have recently made available to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Foundation—a good international lead.

Secondly, we know that there is an outstanding issue in higher education. I am sure that others will want to comment on this. As a former Minister in that field myself, I cannot remain silent. Universities are one of our glories, and they flourish through the pursuit of light and liberty. We can never be content for them to act as agents for academic boycotts or the denial of free speech on any reasonable or sensible arrangements, let alone the fostering or condoning of violent attacks. Of course, I know that most academics would take exactly the same view as I do. Very valuable work is being actioned through the Equality Challenge Unit and the vice-chancellors themselves, but there are still cases where individual Jewish academics are targeted, and Jewish students may feel chilled or deterred from attending particular institutions. Universities have a public sector equality duty, and they should follow it.

At a more demotic level, I welcome the work of community leaders such as Gary Lineker and what is being done in sport. There is identification of some clubs with the Jewish population, not just in Britain, and we need role models. Political parties also have a job to discharge at election time, and to criticise those who do not.

To summarise, I hope that, as a result of our work, parliamentarians and the Government are now engaged in an integrated approach to pushing intolerance in this country to the margins where it deserves to be. There cannot be any complacency or let-up in the process of reviewing this and there is no amnesia for the lessons of the Holocaust. Old hatreds may be buried but they have not gone forever. Our task is to create opportunities to tackle specific abuses while setting a moral tone which is wholly intolerant to extremism. We need to express respect for individuals and to meet their problems but, above all, we need to be ready at any time to take a stand on this.