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The man sitting next to the civil servant, one of the most powerful television executives in the country, said he believed global welfare was paramount and that therefore he had a greater obligation to someone in Burundi than to someone in Birmingham.
I hope I am not alone in finding these sentiments deeply shocking and in expressing the hope that the senior civil servant is no longer in post. This is not because I don’t believe that we owe some obligation to those who share our planet with us. It was partly out of a sense of that obligation that, when I was its leader, I committed the Conservative party to meeting the United Nations target of devoting 0.7 per cent of our national income to international aid. But another, at least equally important, strand in my thinking was that it is in our own national interest to promote the alleviation of poverty and disease in other parts of the world, not least because if we succeeded in doing so it might go some way towards easing the pressures which impel people from those countries to seek to emigrate.
There can surely be no doubt that the primary duty of those in positions of authority is to our own national interest. That, of course, means governing in the interest of all our citizens and one of the most interesting aspects of Goodhart’s book lies in his examination of how the increased diversity of our population makes this task even more difficult than it would otherwise be. In particular his dissection of that much overused and misunderstood term ‘multiculturalism’ is the best I have read.
Goodhart prescribes a number of steps, including a reduction in immigration, which should be taken to increase the integration of the new immigrant communities. Not everyone will agree with all of them. But he is surely right in emphasising the importance of a sense of national identity and pride, which all of us can and should share, as a key element in achieving this objective.He also recognises the significance of ordinary day-to-day contact across racial and communal divides in helping to weaken the feeling of ‘otherness’ which constitutes one of the biggest obstacles in the way.
Here is a small personal example: the East London mosque does not escape criticism in Goodhart’s book, largely on the grounds of its alleged links with the Jamaat e Islami movement which supports an Islamic republic in Bangladesh. But I have visited the mosque on a number of occasions, as chairman of Help the Hospices, to encourage local Muslims who worship there to use the excellent hospice facilities which are available in the neighbourhood. This initiative has the full support of the Imam and other leading members of the community. If it succeeds and, as we hope, can be replicated in other parts of the country, the coming together of our citizens from different backgrounds at the end of their lives could have implications far beyond the inevitably small number of people directly concerned.
Above all, Goodhart is right in asserting that shared pride in our country is the key. My father emigrated to Britain as a young man in the years immediately before the second world war. He lived to see me graduate from Cambridge and fight my first parliamentary election but died before I was elected. The one thing he taught me from a very early age was that Britain is the best country in the world.
In a more relativist age the certainty of that belief may not be as widespread as once it was, but the revival of a strong sense of national identity is a legitimate objective of government. If achieved it could make all our other challenges just a little less daunting.
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