FCO hosts Eid reception
13 Oct 2009
David Miliband, Alan Johnson and John Denham were joined by members of the Muslim community for an Eid reception at the FCO on Monday 12 October.| Speaker: | Foreign Secretary, David Miliband |
| Event: | Eid reception |
| Location: | Foreign and Commonwealth Office |
David Miliband, together with Alan Johnson, the Home Secretary, and John Denham, the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, were joined by members of the Muslim community for an Eid reception at the FCO on Monday 12 October.
Read the Speech
Good evening ladies and gentlemen. As-Salamu Alaikum and of course Eid Mubarak as well. Belated Eid Mubarak, at least belated Eid Mubarak for Eid ul-Fitr but Mokbul has assured me that we are early for the Eid al-Adha, so maybe the timing is perfect.
I want to welcome you very warmly to the Foreign Office. Whether you’ve come from the far North or the far West or the far East or even the far South of the UK you’re extremely welcome here, and whether you’ve come from the charitable sector, from the diplomatic community, from the business community or whether you’ve just come from the community of citizens you’re very welcome here.
And you’re welcome here for a simple reason, that this Foreign Office is the Foreign Office for every British citizen, whether you pray in a mosque or in a synagogue or in a church or even if you don’t pray at all. So you’re all very, very welcome here tonight.
I have one piece of news which you might think is good or you might think is bad, but knowing them I assure you it’s good. I am only the first of three Cabinet Ministers addressing you tonight. I’m merely the hors d’oeuvre for Alan Johnson, the Home Secretary; and merely the appetiser for John Denham, the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government.
And I hope it’s a mark of the importance of what is now an annual event that they are here as well alongside Sadiq Khan who of course has already made history by becoming the first Muslim Cabinet Minister in Britain and Sadiq, it’s brilliant that you’re here tonight.
But tonight is about three things for me which I think will run through the remarks of myself, of Alan Johnson and of John Denham. Tonight is about who we are as a country, a country that is a mirror to the world in many ways, a country of many Muslim communities as well as many faith communities of all kinds and stripes.
And I want to say to you that it is an enormous advantage as well as privilege to be the Foreign Secretary of a country, knowing that wherever I go there is a community in Britain from that country, a diaspora community, concerned, engaged, passionately supportive of British engagement with that country.
So tonight is about who we are. It’s also about our values. If I understand rightly the values of Ramadan, the values that we celebrate tonight are the values of responsibility, the values of social justice, the values of compassion and values that say there is something more important than ourselves, and those are important values that we should celebrate as a country, not just as a community here tonight.
But the third thing that we are marking tonight and which I just want to reflect on very briefly, is that for those of you who are British citizens, each and every one of you is an ambassador for the best of what Britain can be. And I’ve spoken to people tonight who’ve been on Foreign Office missions to Bangladesh, people who are passionately engaged on issues of Darfur, people who care deeply about the plight of the Palestinians, people who are concerned about human rights in Sri Lanka.
All of you are ambassadors for the sort of world we want to see, not just the sort of Britain we want to see. And I think it’s important to say very clearly and very loudly that the sort of engagement we are beginning to develop from Britain’s Muslim communities to Muslim communities around the world, talking about the sort of Britain we want to see as well as the sort of world that we want to see, that is a huge new dimension to our diplomacy and one that I think gives us the potential to be an even stronger diplomatic power in the years ahead.
So tonight is a chance to say thank you to those of you who’ve engaged in our work but also to encourage more of you to be part of the honest, critical, outward looking dialogue that I think is the heart of modern foreign policy.
And I know from talking and speaking at the Bradford mosques, which was an enormous privilege for me, from the meetings I’ve had, not just in England but also in Scotland and in Wales, I haven’t made it to Northern Ireland yet in this job, that we have communities, Muslim communities, who are immensely proud of their faith but are also immensely proud of being British, and that is I think an important point of unity tonight.
Maybe I feel it especially because I am the first generation in my family to have been born in Britain, but I know that this is a country that welcomes people, that brings the best out of people and that brings people together.
And if tonight can be part of that process of bringing people together, of sharing what we have in common and debating where we have differences, and of committing together to be an outward looking force for our country, then we will not just be celebrating marking an important part of the holy calendar, we will also be contributing to the strength of this country.
