Laureation address: Lord Dubs BSc

Honorary Degree of Doctor of Laws
Laureation by Dr Natasha Saunders, School of International Relations

Tuesday 29 November 2022

Vice-Chancellor, it is my privilege to present for the degree of Doctor of Laws, honoris causa, Lord Dubs

If you will permit just a second to quote perhaps the greatest US President – Dr Josiah Bartlet -, as played by Martin Sheen in The West Wing:

'If fidelity to freedom and democracy is the code of our civic religion, then surely the code of our humanity is faithful service to that unwritten commandment that says we shall give our children better than we ourselves received.'

In an age in which public faith in politics and politicians continues to fail, Lord Dubs stands out as one of the few whose entire life has indeed been lived in service to this unwritten commandment. But it might not have been this way.

While now a Labour Peer in the House of Lords, Alfred Dubs was not born in the UK. That we can count him as an indispensable feature of our public life at all is thanks to Nicholas Winton’s ‘Kindertransport’ – an effort to rescue hundreds of Jewish children from Czechoslovakia and the grip of the Nazis. But unlike the fate that awaits so many children today forced to flee conflict and persecution, six-year-old Alfred was lucky to be greeted in London by his father and be reunited with his mother shortly thereafter. In pursuing his new life in the UK, Alfred Dubs could have sought a path of personal enrichment, but chose a life of public service instead.

After graduating from the London School of Economics in 1970 he entered politics and has served in a wide variety of positions, including as Minister for Northern Ireland during the conclusion of the Good Friday Agreement. He has worked tirelessly in government on rights for forced migrants and their families as Labour MP for Battersea from 1979 to 1987, and in the House of Lords since 1994. In addition to his various Ministerial portfolios, Lord Dubs has also served as a Trustee of the Open University, of Action Aid, and of the Immigration Advisory Service, as well as Chair of Liberty and of the Refugee Council. If one commitment can be said to run through Lord Dubs’ public work it is recognition of a fundamental duty to those less privileged than himself.

We have become, perhaps, so used to seeing those in positions of power and privilege pulling up the ladder behind them as they climb that the example of Lord Dubs cannot fail to register with our graduates today.

As he stated in a Guardian interview in 2016: 'I shall go on playing my part, to lessen inequality, to work for equality, to oppose discrimination of any sort...'

True to his word, and no doubt inspired by his own childhood journey through strange lands in search of safety and a life of dignity, Lord Dubs proposed what became known as The Dubs Amendment to the 2016 Immigration Act, to ensure that unaccompanied children fleeing conflict could continue to come to the UK.

While perhaps his most famous achievement in public life, The Dubs Amendment is simply the latest episode in a lifetime spent in service of the disadvantaged, the oppressed, and the marginalised.

Vice-Chancellor, in recognition of his major contribution to the cause of human rights, I invite you to confer the degree of Doctor of Laws, honoris causa, on Alfred Dubs.