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In this wide-ranging speech to the Black Majority Churches, William Hague spoke of the need to foster faith-based education and welfare, as well as his support for international debt relief and his opposition to discrimination.
Addressing the Black Majority Churches Joint Millennium celebration in Brighton, the Rt Hon William Hague MP, July 2000, then Leader of the Conservative Party, said:
"Thank you for inviting me to be with you at this celebration of the vitality of your 3,000 churches. The fact that on Sundays half of all churchgoers in London now attend black majority churches testifies to the huge significance of your contribution to the life of this country.
Your churches stand as shining lights of hope in communities which feel disadvantaged and discriminated against. It is you who provide a focus for community life, you who bring a moral voice and Christian teaching to our areas of our cities, you who provide after school classes that keep children out of trouble, you who offer support and comfort to the elderly and vulnerable.
'Listening to Britain's Churches'
I applaud your work. And I want to learn from it. That is why eighteen months ago, I launched a great listening campaign called Listening to Britain's Churches. Since then, my Party has listened to over 250 churches and Christian leaders and charities. I am delighted that black church leaders such as Joel Edwards, James Nelson, Angela Sarkis, Mannie Stewart and Mark Sturge have already taken part. Each week we visit and stay in touch with churches and faith groups and church leaders all over the country. And here at this Conference, we are doing more listening. We have a Conservative Christian Fellowship stand here, and I would urge you, if you have time, to pay us a visit.
When I was preparing this talk, I thought of William Wilberforce. Like me, Wilberforce was a Conservative MP and a proud Yorkshireman. He devoted much of his political life to his successful campaign to abolish Britain's unspeakably evil slave trade.
If Wilberforce were alive today, I wonder what cause he would devote himself to? The crippling debt burden on some of the world's poorest countries? The children within these shores who are addicted to drugs? The tragedy of family breakdown? The pensioners who are too fearful to leave their homes after dark? The films, videos and internet sites that bring violence and pornography into every home?
The greatest danger for our society is that we begin to believe that these challenges are indeed greater than our ability to defeat them.
They are not. We must put our faith in the values of the many millions of British people who still aspire to marriage, who still revere honesty, faithfulness and charity. People know that drugs are wrong, that crime must not pay, that the older generations should be respected. These values are Christian values. They are shared by other religions too.
What message are we giving to our young people?
But like many of you, I worry about the messages that we as a society are sending out to young people.
For example, what message are we sending to young people when so many things in our society, such as taxes and welfare benefits, seem to be stacked against marriage? I believe we should support families with an explicit recognition of the value of marriage in the tax and benefit system.
What message are we sending to young people when so many children today grow up outside of a framework of love and security, and support? I believe society should actively support organisations like your churches and charities that provide these children with help and encouragement.
What message are we sending to our schoolchildren when we remove the barriers that stop the active promotion of homosexuality in the classroom? I believe parents want to be confident that their children are being properly taught in school.
What message are we sending about standards on television, when we allow the law to discriminate against Christian TV and radio stations. I believe we should treat these Christian broadcasters in the same way we treat other broadcasters.
The state should be supporting the Judaeo-Christian values of our society, not undermining them. The fact is that our country will only succeed when our common values are acknowledged and fostered; when families are stronger; when neighbours look out for each other; and when the rich breadth of institutions that lie between the individual and the state grow tall once more.
The limits of politics
I do not have all the answers. Politicians do not have all the answers. But I know from visiting deprived areas in some of our inner cities that we all need to find more answers. For there are too many children growing up with no self-esteem, no aspirations, no positive male role models, no moral framework to guide them and no one to encourage them.
Government cannot wave the magic wand and solve these deep-seated problems - but together we must do better; we must cut through the cycle of deprivation. For it is no good people like me simply talking about spreading opportunity and choice. The people I am talking about did not have the same life choices and life chances that many of us had.
Together, we need to help these people. Your churches have a pivotal role to play. For there is plenty of evidence both here and from America that inner city children who are involved with their local have a much greater chance of escaping poverty and crime and drug addiction. The work that your churches have been doing on strengthening families, teaching parenting skills, micro-employment projects give us a clear idea of the way we should go.
Let me share some thoughts with you about the kind of things we should do.
Future policy
First, we should let your churches and faith-based organisations set up new schools. I thought the African and Caribbean Alliance's recent Making the Grade conference on the schooling of black children brought home some very important points. You pointed to the disproportionate rates of exclusion of black children from school. You also stressed that a culture of low expectations contributes to the sense of alienation that many black teenagers feel. New church schools, close to their communities, offering role models that pupils can identify with, would be one way to raise that culture of expectations and make black children feel fully involved.
Theresa May, our Shadow Secretary of State for Education, will be inviting the authors of the report on Making the Grade to meet her as soon as the results are available. I hope that this meeting will give black majority churches and communities an opportunity to explore the potential of establishing their own schools, so that we can give many black children the first class, values-based education they deserve.
Faith-based welfare
The second thing we should do is to give society's full support to faith-based welfare programmes. The Welfare State provides people with financial support but not moral support. Big state bureaucracies are no good at getting alongside and befriending people who may have a complex history of problems and disadvantage to overcome. That is where your churches and other religious communities come in. Let me give you two examples that Listening to Britain's Churches programme has brought to my attention.
The Kidz Klub initiative in inner-city Liverpool provides a personal visit to 350 children in a disadvantaged part of that city at least once every week. Every week 350 boys and girls know that whatever problems they may be facing at home, at school or on the streets, there will be a visit from a genuine friend who is concerned for them and their well-being. The visit takes place whatever the weather and despite some opposition from a few troublemakers. It is a Christian scheme which is being adopted elsewhere.
Then there is Yeldall Manor; a Christian-run rehabilitation centre for young men caught in the terrible spiral of drug addiction. Last December I visited Yeldall and met its leaders and the young men on its 'care and change programme'. Many of the people working at Yeldall had overcome drug problems themselves, and had discovered a fresh start through Christian belief. Of course, Yeldall would not suit everyone, and certainly no one should ever be compelled to participate in a faith-based programme; but its high success stands in stark contrast to the many much less successful government schemes. Kidz Klub and Yeldall Manor are just examples of many hundreds of projects like them run by Christians, other faith communities, and by people of no religious faith who have a heart for their neighbours.
I will be asking Conservative MPs and candidates to help me go out into our communities and look at what charity and faith based organisations are up to. Later this year I will present the results of what we find in a Report on Compassionate Britain. I hope that majority black churches will feel able play a full part in the Compassionate Britain project, and I will be writing to ACEA's leadership next week to discuss how we might learn from your work with the elderly, the homeless, with schoolchildren and on the provision of credit to low income groups.
Supporting faith-based welfare and setting up new church schools are two things we as a society should be doing. The third thing we should do is to wage an unrelenting war on racial and religious discrimination.
Fighting discrimination
When William Wilberforce fought against slavery, he faced hostility, apathy and contempt; but he never wavered in his belief that all men and women are made in the image of God. In our fight against the scourge of racism today we face hostility and apathy, but we must never waver in our belief that the battle can be won.
One important way in which we can break down barriers is by getting more people from ethnic minorities into Parliament and public life. At the last election, it saddens me to say that none of our candidates from ethnic minority communities were elected. There again, not many of our candidates were elected full stop.
Since becoming the Leader of my Party, I have tried to encourage people from ethnic minorities to stand as Conservatives. We have had some success. Last year the first ever Asian candidates were elected to the European Parliament - they were both British and they were both Conservatives.
I fervently hope that we can now encourage more black people, of whichever political party they support, to become MPs, and I would be very interested to hear from you about how that might be done. For I entirely support what Tony Blair said yesterday: I too look to the day when Britain has a black Prime Minister.
It is not only racial discrimination that we have to fight. There is religious discrimination too. The difference is that the religious discrimination often comes from the state itself.
For example, community projects are sometimes forced to tone down or even abandon their religious ethos to make them eligible for state funding. This is wrong. Faith-based groups must be free to operate in ways that are consistent with their beliefs and not be excluded from receiving a share of the public funds that their members are taxed to provide. We should end the discrimination against faith-based groups.
And all of us should be concerned by the new proposed European law that will stop Christian organisations only employing Christians, or for that matter, Moslem organisations only employing Moslems. I believe forcing Christian, Jewish and other religious organisations to employ people of different values would unacceptably compromise the spiritual character of these organisations. I applaud the efforts of the Evangelical Alliance to prevent this directive becoming law.
I believe it is also time we ended the unacceptable restrictions on Christian broadcasting and the attempts to disqualify Christian, or other religious groups, from apply for future national licences. The law should be changed to end this discrimination. Christian broadcasters like United Christian Broadcasters and Premier radio should be given fair and equal access to national permits.
Debt Relief
As Christians, our neighbours do not just live in the next door flat - they live on the other side of the world. All of us on this planet are each other's neighbours. Over the past two years we have witnessed a remarkable campaign - led by the churches - to champion the cause of debt relief. I know that many of you have personally been involved in that campaign. I pay tribute to the outstanding work of Jubilee 2000, a campaign that has succeeded in harnessing public support and changing the minds of politicians both here in Britain and around the world.
I hope that this year, the year 2000, we will see many of the world's poorest countries qualifying for much needed debt relief so that money can be pumped into desperately needed education and healthcare in these nations - and not into paying off interest on debts they could never afford. I support the Jubilee 2000 campaign. For it is part of my personal philosophy that we, as a relatively rich nation, should always do our part in seeking to alleviate the crippling poverty suffered by so many people in Africa and Asia and elsewhere in the world. Tackling debt relief, creating new church schools, allow faith-based welfare programmes to flourish, winning the war against racial and religious discrimination. These are some of the challenges our society faces.
For despite the tens of billions of pounds the state spends on addressing the problems in our society, we all know of very deep weaknesses in our country. Imagine if our country could combine the technology and wealth of today with the strong family and community life of yesterday. The doom-mongers will say that it cannot be done. I say that it must be done.
At the end of this great celebration in Brighton, you are making pledges about the future. As you commit yourself to racial tolerance, marriage and family life, religious liberty, economic opportunity and public responsibility you will be committing yourself to faith in the future. I join you in that commitment.
Related links
William Hague addresses Spring Harvest
William Hague launches Listening to Britain's Churches
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