Last month, David Cameron accepted an amendment to the immigration bill, stipulating that the UK will accept a quota of the many thousands of unaccompanied refugee children stranded on the continent. The author and engine of this amendment was Alf Dubs, the Labour peer known as a tireless and vocal presence in the Lords. A former child refugee himself, Lord Dubs was spirited out of Nazi-occupied Prague in 1939, at the age of six, on a Kindertransport organised by the British humanitarian Nicholas Winton. During his illustrious subsequent career he has been the Labour MP for Battersea, served under Mo Mowlam in Northern Ireland during devolution and continually campaigned for the rights and welfare of refugees.
1 | Walking
The Lake District is wonderful. We have a house there; if only we could get up there more often. What I say is: “1,000ft up and the problems of the world seem small, at 2,000ft they’re tiny, and at 3,000ft, what problems?” Get your boots on, get yourself up a hill and with a bit of effort you lose all your pressures and tensions. A couple of weeks ago I was up on something called the Lord’s Seat, on my own, when all the cyclists had gone. I could see as far as the Solway Firth and Dumfries and Galloway, and there wasn’t a soul. I’m not antisocial, but to be there totally on one’s own, and have this fantastic panorama of lakes and fells, is just wonderful. I shall get poetic if I’m not careful.
2 | Nonfiction
This book is all about British policy in Ireland from the late 1800s to the early 1900s, and I thought it was absolutely gripping. It’s fascinating to learn the mess British policy made in Ireland. Gladstone was the only one who had any sense; after that, successive British governments made a hash of it, all to keep the majority in Westminster, rather than worrying about the position of the people in Ireland. We sent incompetent people to take charge; after 1916 they started shooting people; it was divide and rule. We actually made things immeasurably worse. I was a Lord’s minister in Northern Ireland at the time of the Good Friday agreement, and a lot of our problems lay in the period covered by this book.
3 | Fiction
I should have read it long, long ago but I didn’t. It’s one of those books one can never admit to not having read. I felt ashamed and embarrassed, and I thought: “Well I can’t go on getting older and not reading Middlemarch.” So last year I made myself read it, largely on the tube going to work. But even though my motives may have been worthy, once I got into it, it was just captivating. It’s a lovely, lovely book: beautifully set, perfect characterisation, and even though it’s set in an England of a bygone age, the tensions, conflicts and ambitions of people are all there. If a novel is good enough, you can completely absorb yourself in it, even on a crowded tube.
4 | Film
I miss most of the films I want to see, but I thought Brooklyn was lovely. It’s about a young Irish woman from somewhere in the sticks, who decides to go to the States, and it deals with all the difficulties of being a young woman in the hurly-burly of New York: the pressures of where to live and how to live, and then the tensions between the chap she wants to marry there and the boyfriend back in her home village. It’s got all the drama of a young person emigrating from a very poor situation in her home country, trying to find a better life, and still hankering for the country she left behind. A beautiful film.
5 | Restaurant
WP Fish X Chips, Ravenscourt Park
This is a new fish and chip shop that’s opened in Hammersmith, west London; the fish is sizzling and the chips are freshly done, not sitting around in a greasy pan waiting for you. I’m getting into my anecdotage – the House of Lords is full of people in their anecdotage – but the first time we went there, I noticed they had Turkish coffee on the menu. I like Turkish coffee, so I asked: “How come you have Turkish coffee in a fish and chip shop?” It turned out they were all Kurds, and they were tickled because I’d been monitoring the first elections in Turkey last year, and I’d been in the Kurdish part. When I said I’d been to Diyarbakir they were astonished: that’s where they came from.
6 | Music
Vltava, from Bedřich Smetana’s Má Vlast
I’m not very musical, but this is my bit of sentiment. It’s called Vltava, which is the Czech name for the river Moldau that flows through Prague. You can hear the stream tinkling in the mountains, and then it becomes a big river as it sweeps down to the sea. It’s significant for me, because during the war I went to a school in Breconshire for Czech refugees, and they often played that song. These were people in exile, far away from their home country where the Nazis were in occupation, and so during the normal course of school events they did little patriotic things. I know it’s sentimental, but if you ran a school for exiles – there were several hundred of us – I think you would do that too.
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