National Life: Shared Values and Public Policy Priorities

Viscount Eccles Excerpts

Friday 2nd December 2016 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Eccles (Con)]

My Lords, I am very pleased to follow the noble Baroness. When she talked about values, how right were the things she said to us. Values are to be found at individual, community and national levels, and in some sense universally. It seems to me that in this debate, so brilliantly introduced by the most reverend Primate, it is universal values we need to think about most carefully.

There are two things on the role of intermediates and institutions I want to bring out as a prelude. We would not be sitting here if it had not been for the role of intermediates and institutions. Westminster democracy arose at least strongly in part from the efforts of the Church as an intermediary and as an institution. As a final preliminary thought, I am informed by the phrase, “By their deeds ye shall know them”. Much of what we have heard has been about front-line action and deeds that have been taken and which are going on every day.

This Motion is very carefully and skilfully crafted. It represents a challenge when we come to the end of it. We first have to identify values. In my opinion that is not too difficult. We then have to consider which are shared, which is a more complex exercise. The shared values then have to have some role in underpinning our society—again, an additional complexity. Finally, the challenge is what the role of these shared and underpinning values is in settling our priorities in a liberal democracy. That is not so easy. I will try to concentrate on priorities.

At school, I had a history master who was a school chaplain and a canon of Winchester Cathedral. He had set pieces in his classes. One was about democratic expectations. He described the onward march of science, technology and knowledge in his life. He also taught us a lot about art and poetry. Walt Whitman was a great favourite of his. He worried because he said that the pace and quality of change was such that there must be some doubt that we would be able to cope with what was happening to us. He saw that as a threat to liberal democracy. He felt we would come to the day when we did not have the resources. We would know so much and have so much potential that we would fail to have the resources. He would have put people first and money second. If all this was to happen, there would be disappointment. There must be a question as to whether we could cope with that disappointment.

Briefly, a personal disappointment: I had always thought since the end of the Second World War and 1949 that our efforts to bring Europe together to avoid what had happened to us in the first half of the last century would never come to an end. How wrong I have been proved by the Brexit vote.

There are other things that draw one’s attention to the difficulty of establishing priorities: how are we coping with social media—that has also been mentioned —in our schools and more widely in our society? We have recently been debating, and will again, the integration of mental and physical health, which raises all sorts of priority problems and philosophical problems that we may not yet satisfactorily have solved. Then there is prison reform, which, along with many other features of our modern society, causes us difficulties when we come to decide which we should choose, and which we should choose first. We probably need to think very carefully, along the lines of the Motion, about priorities; probably much more carefully than we have been wont to do in the recent past. There is a text from Disraeli that runs:

“Without a knowledge of the spirit of the age life might prove a blunder … It did not follow that the spirit of the age should be adopted; it might be necessary to resist it; but it was essential to understand it”.

Good advice, I think. The challenge is to define our priorities and, I would add, to get much better at explaining why we choose the priorities that we do.