Bevan Foundation annual lecture 

Thank you.

It is a pleasure to be here this evening. It’s a great honour to be asked to deliver this lecture, given that, in spite of my impeccably Welsh names, I am from another country.  But it is of course impossibly daunting.

Aneurin Bevan was a man brimming with talents - an intellectual, a skilled administrator and probably the most brilliant public speaker of his time. And they say he could sing. So let me start by surrendering - I can't get close on any of these counts. But perhaps fate, and Parliament have given me the chance to walk a few miles in Nye Bevan's shadow, by creating the Equality and Human Rights Commission, and allowing me to be part of its inception.

Bevan's great creation the National Health Service was, and remains the most essential expression of this country's commitment to equality. The NHS was the vanguard of the post-war Labour government's attack on Beveridge’s five great giants: illness, ignorance, disease, squalor and want.

Perhaps if we set our sights high enough, the new Commission will one day become an institution remembered as the spearhead of this generation's assault on some of our contemporary giants : inequality, discrimination, disadvantage and social division. We have a great role model for our ambition.

Our underlying political motivations of course don’t have to be the same to support these aims. Bevan himself was an unashamed class warrior, and so were those around him.

I've been called many things, but I don't suppose that anyone would seriously put the words Trevor Phillips and class warrior in the same sentence. Maybe I could just about aspire to the term equality warrior.

But we make no bones about it. Bevan's broad aim was the same as the that of the new Equality and Human Rights Commission: to challenge the iron law that had ruled his generation and many before it - that an infant's start in life would be conditioned by what his or her parents were; that children’s achievements and talents should be constrained by the circumstances of the households in which they grew up; and that young men and women should have no larger ambition or opportunity than that afforded to their parents.

In short our new Commission shares Aneurin Bevan's most profound ambition: that no accident of birth should determine the destiny of any human being.

This basic principle has always stood above and beyond everyday politics. And that is why its expressions, amongst them the NHS, have always survived the most extreme partisanship. Tonight I want make the case that in our modern, diverse society, the institutions of our society dedicated to equality should similarly transcend party division.  

The new Commission opened for business 23 days ago to address that basic principle. The Equality and Human Rights Commission can already claim unique status.

We are Great Britain’s first national body tasked with promoting the values of the Human Rights Act.

And we are the first full spectrum equalities and human rights organisation of our kind and size in the world.

For the first time, not only disability, gender and race, but also age, faith and sexual orientation have in us a statutory home in Britain.

This last point - the range of our concerns - is perhaps the thing that marks us out from any similar body that might have been imagined sixty years ago. Just as then the world that we enter is a world of flux. Bevan faced momentous changes - reconstruction after the War; the start of the cold war; the challenge of re-building a nation that freed the world of fascism but was left on its knees.

But this evening I want to argue that we face a new set of equally momentous changes. And top amongst them is the challenge of delivering equality and fairness for all across a series of dimensions, some of which we didn’t even have names for sixty years ago.

Back in post-war Britain, the workforce comprised largely men in manufacturing or primary industries. Today we are heading for a majority female workforce dominated by the service sector.

In 1947, the principal foreign policy issues were largely about the decline of empire; today we face fundamental changes in economic life which we summarise in the word globalisation.

And back then even progressives, if they thought of racial discrimination at all, regarded it as something that happened in the colonies. Popular feminism was decades away. Disabled people were to be, at best, patronised and pitied.

Today there are more recognised drivers of inequality, and more complex relations between the dimensions of inequality, than were confronted in Bevan's day. We live in an era of unparalleled social and cultural diversity. This is truly an age of difference. There is a bewildering array of emerging issues all of which challenge our historically limited idea of what affects our life-chances relative to those of others.

Even a cursory look at the events of the past couple of weeks illustrates this.

At the start of last week, the mother of a teenager with cerebral palsy went to the Court of Appeal to request that her daughter be given a hysterectomy to avoid the trauma of womanhood; in the middle of the week, the newspapers were full of a highbrow literary spat over one author's attitudes to race and to Muslims; at the end of it a world-famous scientist appeared to claim that black people are intellectually inferior.

This weekend the outgoing leader of the National Black Police Association was criticised after he called for the police to stop and search more young black people to tackle rising gun crime; yesterday we learned that Scotland plans to axe prescription charges while patients in England have to pay for vital medication. And to top it all, JK Rowling revealed that Dumbledore is gay.

These stories, disparate as they are, have one crucial factor in common: they raise hard questions about the balance between equality and equal treatment on the one hand; and the recognition of human difference on the other. In a world where more of us meet more people who are very different to ourselves, issues like these test the boundaries of our commitment to equality and human rights for people who do not share our gender, race, sexual orientation or physical attributes.

What is new perhaps is that none of the protagonists in these disputes will hide away and accept that the price of being different is invisibility and impotence. Everyone wants to have their special kind of humanity acknowledged, and to have their difference respected. Just as Nye Bevan insisted that his class should not make him the inferior of people who had enjoyed a more fortunate start in life, we live in an age in which difference   cannot be an explanation for inequality.

That, in a way, is the first part of our new Commission’s job. Just as the early trade unions saw it as their business to celebrate the dignity of labour, and to highlight the exploitation of the working classes, it is our function to highlight the enormous energy we gain from our diversity - and to eliminate the practices which make it a disadvantage to be different.

On day 23, it’s just too early for me to say what we think about each of the cases I've just mentioned but I can promise that we will take a deeper look than merely respond to the headlines; and I can guarantee that in each case what will guide us is that fundamental commitment to preventing people being trapped by others' prejudices

For example, we know that the police’s use of stop and search powers is an issue, but I must confess that I greet proposals for an increase in their use with some scepticism, even if this is a genuinely popular demand. Since black men are six times more likely to be stopped anyway, how much more attention can we possibly give them? Isn’t it possible that what people really want is just more and better policing in poor areas?

And behind the public anguish about Alison Thorpe’s desire to seek a surgical procedure to prevent her daughter, Katie’s maturation, to what extent is Katie's human right to privacy being respected; and how can Katie’s own wishes be understood and respected?

These stories show that the territory we work in today is more complex than faced by previous generations. But let me acknowledge straight away that however significant the disadvantages associated with race, disability, even age, there is still a great elephant trampling over the garden of equality, and that is the same beast that Nye Bevan addressed all those decades ago. Today we give it new names - but it's still class, whatever we call it.

When the Equality Act set out the Commission's mandate in 2006, it did not explicitly make class a part of our business. Yet the gaps in life prospects that come as a result of the basic economics which divide the rich from the poor are responsible for widespread distress, disappointment and social division. What is more, as we showed in the Equalities Review published earlier this year, they cost our society billions.

Yet, a generation ago, people talked optimistically about the slow erosion of the class system. It is probably true that my generation enjoys more economic and social freedom than our parents; it is certainly true that there is less deference, and it is evident, if I think of my own profession, that, listening to Huw Edwards or John Humphrys, for example, you no longer need to speak like the Queen to read the BBC News.

But every piece of sociological evidence says that we remain a society addicted, to paraphrase Freud, to the narcissism of small differences. We are still what people used to call a class-ridden society.

But we don’t have to have utopia tomorrow. What we do want to ensure is that our parents’ pasts should not determine our futures. In short, we want a society that may not be classless, but could be class free.

So how do we get from here to there?

Tonight I want to propose three steps:

• First, that we need to develop a new, richer modern account of the causes of inequality – a new map of the equality battleground.
• Second, that we need to focus on new policy, practice and legislation that will transform the life chances of those who face the greatest inequalities.
• And third, that we need build irreversible momentum towards greater equality into our society’s institutional framework, to ensure that the future generations’ legacy is a society which the curse of inequality withers, and opportunity flourishes.

This is a tall order in today’s world.

Global changes of a scale and spread not seen before in human history are transforming our nation and others in the developed world.

The accent and complexion of our economy is being transformed before our eyes. The Leitch report published last December showed that the service sector now makes up 75% of the UK economy. No longer does Bevan's quote hold true that we could "manage to survive without money changers and stockbrokers, but that we should find it harder to do without miners, steel workers and those who cultivate the land".

New patterns of inequality, exclusion and segregation reflect a society struggling to come to terms with change. Our greatest resource is our people. But not everyone is sharing in the benefits of change – some people are being left behind. For some people material inequality, as well as other inequalities in health and education, are becoming entrenched. And the groups who most face disadvantage now are going to become more numerous.

We are facing a population with greater number of older people than ever before. There are 9.4m people over the age of 65 now – there will be 12.4m by 2021. By 2050 the number of people aged 80+ will double. Wales has a higher share of older people than the rest of the United Kingdom, most of whom are concentrated in the rural areas of the country.

Families overall are changing. There are more lone parents; 8% of households were headed by a lone parent in 1972. In 2005 the figure had risen to 24%. Most of those households are headed by women.

A large number of lone parent families are families with a disabled child. There are currently 700,000 disabled children in the UK. By 2029 the numbers could rise to 1.25 million. This is partly due to better diagnosis of the conditions, as well as a breaking down of taboos surrounding mental illness. But in addition, there is a well-documented pattern of ill-health in areas where heavy industries used to thrive, such as the North of England and in the Valleys here in Wales.

Ethnic minorities are expected to grow as a proportion of the British population from 9% now to 11% by the end of the next decade. But that growth will be different to that of past decades. We will have more different kinds of people – in 1991 nine census categories seemed excessive to some; now even the 17 categories used in 2001 look pretty crude when you think that a single category covers the Cardiff born sons of Somali herdsmen and Ghanaian barristers, another Polish electricians and Greek waiters.

At the end of last year foreign-born workers made up 12% of the labour force, up from 7% in 1997. Today, one in four babies born in Britain has a foreign parent. And new migrants aren’t only settling in the big cities anymore; mid-size towns are by turns bemused and bewildered by the appearance of thousands of foreigners.

To speak in this very building is to take part in Cardiff and Wales’ history of diversity - this church exists because of South Wales’ role as the starting point for the global trade in coal, a precursor to oil as a global commodity. And that trade brought a range of newcomers to these shores.

Wales has been in the forefront of managing those changes for the best part of a century, especially in its cultural life. This summer I attended the international Eisteddfod in North Wales, as a Day President, where performers were welcomed from all over the world.

Just a few days ago I met the son of the great singer, actor and political activist Paul Robeson, who regarded Wales as a second home. He told me, by the way that his father and Nye Bevan shared a remarkable distinction, Fifty years ago, at the first Eisteddfodd to be held in Ebbw Vale [in Welsh; Glynebwy] Bevan and Robeson became the first two people to be allowed to address the festival in English – surely a recognition of Wales’ historic openness, and a rebuke to those who see Welsh identity as a narrow, inward looking reaction to globalisation.

'Welshness' itself provides an excellent model for successful integration. Ethnic minority people are for example far more likely to describe themselves as Welsh than ethnic minority people in England. And linguistically and culturally, Wales has managed to include two core strands of its national identity with fairness, courtesy and consideration.

We all need to learn from Wales’ example. Increasingly we risk fraught relations across the lines of human difference - gender, race, faith, sexual orientation, age, disability - and class. The two are related: we will never be a society confident with our own diversity as long as some are disproportionately disadvantaged. Diversity coupled with unity enriches our society; but difference allowed to fuel inequality is capable of destroying it. And our growing diversity creates more opportunities for division and fragmentation.

We live in a time when rightly the claims of both individual and group identities are more and more pronounced. People want to be themselves in public and in private.

Women no longer want to have to behave like men in order to be recognised for the contribution they can make to society; Muslims don't want to have to sink beers in the local pub in order to be counted as 'integrated'; disabled people want to be able to live independent lives rather than suffer the daily indignity of being carried up stairs and refused taxi rides because they considered by others to be 'difficult'.

Class inequality still remains a provocative and divisive force in our society. And it still plays too large a part in determining who and what we each become. The Guardian and ICM poll last weekend showed the 89% of people in Britain think that we are still judged by our class.

And as the demands of our skills economy become ever more sophisticated, class inequalities are operating in new and pernicious ways. Certain attributes take on a new importance: the subtle, soft skills that come with confidence and aspiration.

A recent IPPR report on childhood cites two longitudinal surveys that followed young people born in 1958 and 1970. In just over a decade, personal and social skills, such as communication and self-esteem became 33 times more important in determining relative life chances.

At the same time, young people from less affluent backgrounds became significantly less likely than their more fortunate peers to develop these skills. Social immobility – the passing on of disadvantage through families – has increased not decreased over the past 30 years.

The Commission's mandate clearly sets out the need to address inequality on the six dimensions of age, disability, gender (including transgender identity), race, religion or belief and sexual orientation. Class ranks as a significant factor across all of these categories. And this is true, not just across a lifetime, but across the lifetime of future generations.

Let me give you some examples:

When I chaired the Equalities Review we looked at the educational performance of children. Children were tested at 22 months old and 72 months old. What researchers found was that initially low-achieving children from more advantaged homes, will tend to out-perform initially high-achieving children from less advantaged home at 7months. In a nutshell, bright poor children will fall behind dim well-off children by the age of six. That is neither fair nor right.

The government's chief inspector of schools, Christine Gilbert, in last week’s annual report on the state of the country's education system, has found that pupils from low-income backgrounds are half as likely as their better-off classmates to get good GCESs. The most vulnerable group, children in care, are only a fifth as likely to leave school with good qualifications as others in their peer group.

Public policy scholar Alison Wolf has argues that because previously restricted career opportunities have now been opened up to women, a female graduate today who remains childless can expect to rise as high and earn as much as a man with the same qualifications. But outside the educated elite, economic inequalities between men and women remain marked.

So class still matters. And we can do something about if we employ our whole society's efforts. As the country's guardian against injustice, the Equality and Human Rights Commission cannot ignore the significance of class.

So we are already clear that our description of the equality battleground will include socio-economic status. In our triennial State of the Nation report, for example we will map and analyse inequality in Britain in a way that is as meaningful and as inclusive of young non-disabled, white men in Sunderland or South Wales as it will be of older Bangladeshi women in east London.

But it won’t be enough just to be able to describe inequality. Our second step is to do something about it – to reduce the gaps in life chances particularly in the areas of work, education and access to public services, including by the way justice.

And here a still newly-autonomous Wales has a great deal to teach us already.

The level of attention that the Welsh Assembly and the Welsh Assembly government have paid to human rights is exemplary.

The absolute duty on public bodies, including the Welsh Assembly government to promote equality for all people was, I think, the most ambitious and forward-thinking obligation of its kind in any Government administration in Great Britain.

The Welsh equality duty pre-dated any of the specific public sector duties on race, disability and gender. It has resulted in many innovative practices such as successfully challenging poor practice in equal pay issues in the civil service; funding the very first Lesbian and Gay Forum in Wales; and establishing the Croeso project to promote good relations with a particular focus on influencing the school curriculum – a project which we intend by the way, to extend to England and Scotland.

I was also impressed in the last Welsh Assembly elections by the dedicated Equalities Day, in which all politicians made sure that their activities reflected their commitment to equality. Truly, Wales is ahead of Westminster in making equality central to governance.

We also welcome the Labour/Plaid Cymru governing coalition programme to place new duty on public bodies to reduce child poverty.

The Equality and Human Rights Commission of course has a history of its own to draw on when it comes to transforming life chances. We intend to build on the foundations laid by our predecessors, the Commission for Racial Equality, the Disability Rights Commission and the Equal Opportunities Commission;  and we are already drawing on the experience, expertise and the talents of staff that have come to us from the legacy Commissions.

So what will be different? What new value will this new body bring?

To start with we have a range of powers at our disposal to fight persistent inequality and disadvantage, some inherited, some new. Our Helpline is already advising hundreds of individuals on their rights and the law each week. We will also produce clear, simple guidance for public authorities and employers, work in partnership with other organisations and inspectorates, and use our campaigning skills, expertise in advocacy and fine arts of media persuasion to change the climate in which we operate.

But we want to go beyond the mere letter of current equality law. We want to touch that deeper level of inequality, of destiny frozen by circumstances, of the lack of aspiration and closed horizons that leaves many of our citizens certain that they will end their lives in more or less the same situation into which they were born.

So we will build on the shift which was already discernible in recent years to move the emphasis to stopping discrimination happening before it takes place. We want to create a climate of proactive prevention, rather than retroactive remedy.

In practice we think there are three key ways in which we can achieve this change; through vigorous use of the positive duties on public bodies; through positive action; and through procurement.

In many ways, this shift started with the introduction of the public equality duties. The public equality duties are, quite simply, the legal requirement upon public authorities actively to promote equality in all the functions and services. They are amongst the most progressive pieces of equality legislation in the world, shifting the onus from a negative one, a responsibility not to discriminate, to a positive one, a responsibility actively to deliver equality.

The first such duty, which was the race equality duty, came as a result of the landmark MacPherson Inquiry into the police’s handling of the murder of black teenager Stephen Lawrence. This was followed by the introduction of the disability equality duty last year, and the gender equality duty this Spring. 

But over the years we also learned a great deal about the equality duties. In practice, they have become more about process than about outcome. Essentially, at the moment the equality duties say to public bodies, "You must go through these steps" but they do not say what their results should be. And they can fulfil the public duties, if they are prepared to do all the bureaucracy, without changing their outcomes or indeed their practice one iota.

So, in the technical detail of our work on the public duties, the new Commission will place a greater emphasis on results.

Our second important tool is stronger and more effective positive action. This does not mean giving someone a leg-up in a competitive process solely on the basis of, say, their ethnicity, gender or disability, but it does mean targeting inequalities at a pace that reflects their gravity and depth.

Why positive action? Because though things are changing they are changing too slowly. Institutional inertia means that even with all the goodwill in the world, it is taking just too long to eliminate the practices that we all know hold back women, for example, or exclude older people.

By changing the framework in which decisions are made, positive action can help to accelerate the elimination of disadvantage at a structural level; for example, by examining how job entry systems affect different groups and taking steps to ensure that application and success rates are balanced.

Positive action is an under-used tool. And this is largely because the legal provisions that govern how it is used in this country are limited, inflexible and readily misunderstood. The new Commission wants more flexible, but also more ambitious positive action at the heart of a new equality duty.

Our third important weapon is public procurement. Publicly funded services are increasingly moving towards commissioning services through a range of public, private and not-for-profit organisations and contracting arrangements. The public sector spends over 100 billion pounds each year in this way.

At present there is no requirement to ensure that equality audits are built into commissioning frameworks, and central guidance often does not specify the need to address inequalities between different population groups. External providers also have a poor record of data collection on equalities issues. We propose that any new public duty place a specific requirement on public bodies to use procurement as a tool for achieving greater equality.

It is worth pointing out by the way, before anyone shouts “more bureaucracy on the horizon” that private sector firms are beginning to adopt these practices as a defence against the risk that they themselves get out of step with their customers because they have failed to recognise the changing times. That is why Barclays requires diversity information from many of its suppliers; and why Microsoft dropped one of its suppliers his year for its failure to measure up on diversity.

I want finally to turn to the third of the three steps I spoke about earlier in my remarks – to build an irreversible pressure towards greater equality into our society’s institutional framework, to ensure that the future generations’ legacy is a society in which the curse of inequality withers, and opportunity flourishes.

The best metaphor I can think of for this is typically British. Up until now most of our efforts to tackle discrimination and inequality have been narrowly focused, and individually oriented; we do little to change the overall environment. In short we have concentrated on creating more and more umbrellas against the showers of disadvantage. We now need to find some ways of changing the weather.

Though our Commission will be able to help many thousands of people to fight discrimination, and can cajole or compel hundreds of organisations to change their practices, we need to ensure that things change when we aren’t around. We, no matter how large and powerful we grow cannot change a culture by ourselves. That will take the work of many millions of people in many thousands of institutions over many years.

So in creating that irreversible pressure for culture change we will aim to do two things. One is to give more people power to change their own circumstances. The other is to constitutionalise equality so that people do the right thing even when we, the Commission, aren’t in the room.

 One way to give more people power is to allow them to act collectively. We know that many people face discrimination, but fail to act because they feel that the trouble involved for them as an individual far outweighs the potential gain. They nurse their hurt and sense of injustice, which is bad enough. But even more importantly, the offender gets away with it. That is why the National Employment Panel reported last week that 83% of employers for example now believe that they will never face any sanctions for discrimination.

Access to justice through the courts is a luxury good for many of those experiencing discrimination. Many cases are meritorious, many have had an experience which has been intolerable, and who should have their day in court – but there is just no way to fund them.

More importantly, going to a tribunal takes patience, resource and fortitude – and these qualities are demanded at the very moment when an individual has been made to feel small and impotent. In truth, taking action against discrimination today is the business of heroes. It should not be.

These are powerful reasons for shifting the burden away from individuals taking a case towards organisations such as the Equality and Human Rights Commission taking a case on behalf of a group of individuals.

We call this representative action. By using representative action the Commission could bring a claim on behalf of a number of identified individuals, and use the full weight of our force to fight their battle. In financial terms, this provides real access to justice. It also protects the individual from having to stand up and fight his or her own case, living in fear of victimisation for doing so.

One area where this could make a real, practical difference is in terms of equal pay. A couple of City sex discrimination claims taken by individual women, receiving a great deal of media attention and record compensation payouts, have overshadowed the fact that many victims of unequal pay are women working alongside other women doing the same kinds of work – school catering assistants; local government administrators – and it really doesn’t make sense to deal with this kind of situation as a series of disconnected individual claims. It disadvantages the citizen and clogs up the tribunals.  There are currently over 44,000 equal pay claims lodged with the employment tribunal, an increase of about 150% on last year – this is in no-one’s interest.

Taking an action on behalf of an entire group of such claimants, we – and bodies such as trade unions - will be able to tackle the discrimination inherent in pay systems, and help to reduce the burden of the employment tribunal. Representative actions would provide quicker and more effective access to justice.

But changing the weather ultimately is a much bigger task even than transforming what happens in our courtrooms. We need to ensure that equality becomes a fundamental principle of the way that we work in every area of our society.

In short we want equality to be part of the foundation of our country’s constitution. And if our Prime Minister is truly serious about the idea of a written constitution we know what one its first clauses needs to be , perhaps only preceded by the security of the realm - a 'constitutional promise' of equality to the British people. We need a fundamental commitment that guarantees all citizens of equality regardless of other factors, and provides an anchor to hold us firm in the storms created by social change.

At the moment, our legal commitment to equality is embedded only in the multiple anti-discrimination acts and regulations that make up the relevant legislation. We want equality to be elevated to the status of a constitutional principle, superior to all other pieces of legislation: a principle which is independent of the changing fortunes of politics, which conditions parliamentary sovereignty, and to which Parliament itself is subject.

In the current climate, with the government consulting on constitutional renewal and the possibility of a written Bill of Rights, the time is ripe to ensure that equality is established as a bedrock principle of our society. The government's recent Green Paper was a self-proclaimed ‘first step in a national conversation’ about ‘how to forge a new relationship between Government and citizen’. This new relationship needs to be built on a fundamental principle of equality.

Constitutions are more than a simple codification of what has gone before. They should embody the highest aspirations we can imagine. So this should be about the promise that government and Parliament makes to us. A constitutional promise of equality will in effect to set out in law a duty on lawmakers themselves to ensure that in future new statute should be drawn in a way that enriches equality of opportunity.

It is also about the promise we make to ourselves as a society. We can no longer in this changing world take our inheritance of Parliamentary democracy, the rule of law, freedom of expression and protection from tyranny for granted. We need to make explicit that our constitutional promise should set out fundamental principles about what kind of society we want and what standard of treatment we can expect from each other: not about arid abstractions, but real behaviour based on the basic truth that all men and women have equal worth.

A constitutional principle that is written in clear, inspirational terms must be intelligible to the general public and not just to lawyers. This will empower everyday men and women with a clear knowledge of their rights and equal place in society.

With a constitutional guarantee of equality, certain real life injustices would not have had to have gone to the European Court of Human Rights for legal redress.

Religious blasphemy laws could not be restricted to followers of the Church of England strain of Christianity – they would protect all faiths, or perhaps, better, none; partners of same sex couples could not have been denied the occupational benefits that heterosexual partners enjoyed; women from abroad settled in the UK would not face a refusal when they ask to be joined by their husbands, even though men from abroad could be joined by their wives without contest; tenancy succession rights could not be denied for surviving partners of same sex couples; and the UK would not have been able to deny a widower a payment that it makes to widows.

In practice the detail of the new Equality Bill that has been promised for next year should take a constitutional principle of equality as its philosophical basis. Changes to the complex web of anti-discrimination law in this country need to be more than merely the 'tidying up’ exercise so far proposed by the government in its recent Green Paper: they need to make a difference. To make a difference, we need a new vision.

Our new Commission came into being at this time for a reason deeper than mere administrative convenience. It marks a new stage in a struggle that is now centuries old – to free people from the shackles of inherited disadvantage and to drive prejudice from our treatment of others.

We are all of 23 days in and we’ve barely begun. But we have a great inheritance in which Aneurin Bevan is an iconic figure. We are determined to live up to his example.