Officially reopening the Parliament last Tuesday, the Queen outlined the government's priorities for the year ahead. In a ten-minute speech in the House of Lords, she highlighted 30 laws that ministers intend to pass in the coming year. While the Queen's Speech was critiqued for not addressing how best to protect people from conversion therapy, it also missed out on specifics of helping care homes and the homeless, despite mentioning that measures will be taken to reform the operation of the social care system in England. Opening the debate in the House of Lords, Lord Bhikhu Parekh addressed ethnic disparities, and that the first 10 NHS doctors to die belonged to the ethnic minorities along with more concrete data.
“I could go on producing statistics, but they are too well known to be rehearsed. Why is this so? The reasons, again, are fairly straight- forward and have been commented on. They include the fact that many from within the ethnic minorities are front-line workers; they work in high-risk places; they had no or inadequate PPE; they live in cramped houses; and they do not enjoy positions of power and influence, so their complaints go unheard or are unattended to. These are many of the factors which have led to the kind of disparity that I talked about. The Government took some time to recognise their importance, but when they did, they did not do enough, and the ethnic minorities continue to pay a disproportionately heavy price for the disaster that struck us,” he said.
He affirmed that the UK needs to “create a society in which there is a sense of solidarity and common belonging”. “It is important that the ethnic minorities should not feel that they are under the sufferance of the wider population, or that their problems are only their own and nobody is going to help them,” Lord Parekh added.
Lord Parekh also emphasised that taxes will have to rise. He said, “The rich will have to pay far more than they have done so far.” He also expressed his amazement on the fact that Britain has “not developed a culture of philanthropy”.
“Why do we not leave much money to hospitals? Why do we not even think it proper to express our gratitude in these and other ways? I am not saying that the NHS should start charging people,” he explained.
In a remarkable and much needed move, Lord Parekh brought up the adult dependent relative visa rule, which states that doctors and others in this country are not allowed to bring their parents from overseas unless they meet certain very strict conditions.
“I therefore suggest that we take a second look at the proposals from BAPIO, especially the ones that Professor Keshav Singhal and Dr Ramesh Mehta have made, not accepting them in their current form, but with some modifications,” he said.
