26 Jan 07

The Right Honourable Jack Straw MP, Leader of the House of Commons, gave a lecture on 'Democracy and identity: building a global union' at the Examination Schools on January 25. He started by describing Cyril Foster as an 'engaging character'. Mr Foster, a retired sweetshop owner, lived and died in a caravan and left the residue of his estate to Oxford University. He requested that his money be used to promote peace with an annual lecture to deal with 'the elimination of war and better understanding of the nations of the world'.

Mr Straw said the theme of his lecture would go to the heart of these matters: that identity and democracy were the two issues driving modern day politics and the question was how they could be reconciled.

The end of the Cold War had eroded traditional political identities, he said, and encouraged people to retreat back to identities defined in terms of cultural, ethnic, national, gender or religious affiliations, with implications for civic political culture. Mr Straw said: 'The challenge is to recapture that civic political culture, by finding ways of allowing space for these affiliations but within a framework of common values.

'An important part of the answer, I believe, is to be clear and explicit about what it is to be a British citizen, and the bargain that each of us must make with each other to be that citizen.'

Mr Straw set out the common values that he felt defined this sense of 'Britishness', and explored how such common values could be harnessed to address some of the challenges facing the world in the 21st century.