Young People — House of Lords, 2018-12-13
Topic: Mixed Topics
Leslie John Griffiths (Labour, Centre-left): It is so marvellous to see the Government Front Bench giving me a hearty "hear, hear" on that—I mention it so that it will go into Hansard. How wonderful, too, to speak in a debate initiated by my noble friend—she was a noble friend before she was ennobled and became a Member of this House—who has not only led and shaped policy that was humane and reached parts that are not normally reached from government levels, but has also done it on the streets and in the communities, which gave authority to what she said I have made a patchwork of notes of the speeches that have been made. It would be invidious to mention people by name but it is worth me trying to describe the pattern. The subjects fixed on by various Members were duplicated by others. More than one person spoke on each of these subjects and they all reflect the list in the very helpful Library briefing: mental health, loneliness and identity, employment, citizenship, obesity and mental health, care and gambling—which got a special mention. Members have felt it important to emphasise each other’s points, as we reach out to give an adequate response to the challenge implicit in the debate. I am happy about that I have been thinking more generically. I am the president of the Boys’ Brigade and that gives me access to lots of young people across the countries of the United Kingdom. I spent quite a lot of the summer on leadership training courses in Belfast and Edinburgh, and at the Boys’ Brigade headquarters here in England. My work in schools and communities has gone on and on, particularly through my church work, and if there is a voice that I want to presume to have heard, it is that of the young black boys and girls with whom I have had extraordinary opportunities for conversation and development. I will come back to that in a moment Thinking back over the past 18 months or so and the debates in which I have taken part, I note that those debates were about obesity, mental health, children’s use of the internet and safeguarding them from its worst aspects, gambling and children, and bullying, knife crime and the criminal justice system. I think of those five subjects and wonder why we cannot see that, instead of separate debates that compartmentalise them, a gravitas and critical mass is beginning to be built up that might lead us—as in the 1980s with the Children Act 1989—to look at the place of children generically, from all angles, to see whether we should not find a more creative way forward. I think too of the headline topics in the briefing from the Library: unemployment, poverty, homelessness, crime and prison, and suicide and mental health. Again, we have five different tags I am interested in the number of subjects being five. At the moment, I am doing a bit of work on the Beveridge report. When it went through this very Parliament there was a Division in that war-time debate—a time when nobody wanted to divide the House. It was initiated from this side of the House by my own hero, Jim Griffiths, the Member of Parliament for Llanelli. In the end, it led to a commitment on the part of the Labour Party to implement the Beveridge report instantly as soon as it got into office. I believe that that was a major factor in the election victory of July 1945. Beveridge identified five evils: squalor, illness, ignorance, disease and want. Instead of looking at those in a compartmentalised way, through his report he looked at creating a welfare state that would stretch into areas of need in a more generic way I spoke to an 18 year-old black man whose mother was worried that, with his splendid A-levels, he did not want to go to university. I sat him down and asked him to tell me why. He said, "I know you’re going to tell me that I could be the Prime Minister, a journalist, a barrister, a teacher or a social worker. But on the street, we all know that those things take too long and we have too many obstacles as black people to get into the professions where we might scintillate and develop a career". I said, "Well, if you are not going to go into those, what are you going to go into?" "Five things", he said—there you are, five again. He said, "Quick money is to be made in one of these: crime, drugs, fame, music and football". Each one of them, of course, is a lottery, with about the same chances as you have in the National Lottery to make it and the kind of money that they fantasise about. At the same time, it made me aware of what extra obstacles young black people are faced by in a world that is inimical to them I have two or three minutes left. The following is for illustrative purposes, and my experiences are necessarily anecdotal. I do not have a command of statistics and I am not a professor of sociology, but I have worked with kids A 16 year-old Muslim boy was expelled from school for carrying a knife. His parents were worried. I found a room for him to sit his GCSEs and he did rather well. However, he went on carrying a knife and selling drugs and was imprisoned. We had a great fear that he might be radicalised while in prison In a girls’ school for which I have responsibility in east London—it is just half a mile from another girls’ school from which three girls went off to Syria—we worry about how to implement a Prevent programme that balances compassion, care and vigilance without it being a police-state type of authoritarian programme Louis, a young man they tried to kill on the streets not far from where I was living, is now rehabilitating young black offenders himself in an institution to do that. He is a wonderful young man who has learned from experience and wants to do better for his contemporaries and younger people Another young man had an opportunity to go to Oxford. Boy oh boy, getting black people into Oxford and Cambridge is still the worst thing in the world. However, when he became the first black president of the junior common room and got his splendid degree in PPE, he went on to serve in public life. The noble Lord, Lord Adonis, and I have taken an interest in this young man and we believe that he could become Prime Minister—and why not? I was arguing with the vice-chancellor of Cambridge University and asking why a young black woman could not get into Cambridge even though she had all the necessary qualifications. There were admissions tutors in colleges who swore that they were egalitarian but whose entry procedures seemed to prohibit a fair way of looking at people like her. She was not admitted but she achieved a first-class honours degree. We got her into a commercial law firm and the next barrier will be whether she can become a partner when the time is right. Getting women partners is one thing; black women partners is another. Young black people have problems beyond other people’s problems. However, I must not dilate The note I have made from what I have heard today is that listening to young people is a primordial responsibility which lies upon us all—not in a patronising or paternalistic way, but from wanting to hear the wisdom they have, the ordinary things that would make them happier than they are, and to see and welcome the great things that some of them are doing despite all the obstacles. I am pleased to have taken part in this debate and, once more, I thank noble Lords for making it possible.