Baroness Verma (Con)

My Lords, I thank all noble Lords for their contributions today, particularly the two maiden speeches. They were incredibly informative but humorous as well. At a time when there is so much misery around, a bit of humour goes a long way. I am pretty certain that we will hear much more from the noble Lords in future debates. Each contribution today has brought a different lens. I feel it demonstrates that we can have an intelligent debate where we can raise the issues without raising the temperature. The difficulty we have is that we raise the temperature so that the mouth and brain do not always work together. If we were to just stop and think that all our words have outcomes and actions, we might speak more wisely. We should all collectively call it out when we see something that is not right and is causing problems. We should collectively say that this is unacceptable in our country. Whatever faith you come from, if your faith is doing something wrong, we should collectively come out and call it out. That is the strength of a good, strong democracy. If we undermine it, the vacuums are then filled by people who generate hate. I hope that we can continue working and learning from today’s debate. I hope the other House takes note of it and introduces the policies that we in this House all want to see, but there are many more discussions to be had on this. Unfortunately, we have often allowed ourselves to sleepwalk into crisis. We do that because we do not want to be called out as being politically incorrect. It is time we started to realise that, for the value of others, we have to speak out. I say to my friend, the noble Lord, Lord Griffiths, that it is a great joy to be at a university which is so multicultural and actually shares all the values of this country.