House of Commons
(9 years, 11 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
Prayers
(9 years, 11 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
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Mark Hunter (Cheadle) (LD)
I beg to move, That the House sit in private.
Question put and negatived.
International Development (Official Development Assistance Target) Bill
(9 years, 11 months ago)
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12:00 - The House having divided: - Ayes: 146 / Noes: 6 - Question accordingly agreed to.
12:15 - The House divided: - Ayes: 6 / Noes: 148 - Question accordingly negatived.
12:25 - The House divided: - Ayes: 4 / Noes: 147 - Question accordingly negatived.
12:36 - The House divided: - Ayes: 4 / Noes: 149 - Question accordingly negatived.
13:53 - The House divided: - Ayes: 145 / Noes: 5 - Question accordingly agreed to.
14:03 - The House divided: - Ayes: 146 / Noes: 5 - Question accordingly agreed to.
Mr Christopher Chope (Christchurch) (Con)
On a point of order, Mr Speaker. Is it possible to move that the Bill be referred back to Committee?
Mr Speaker
The hon. Gentleman is seeking to move to recommit the Bill. Under Standing Order No. 32 I have the power to select or not select such a motion. In the circumstances, I decline to select the motion.
New Clause 1
The Independent Commission for Aid Impact
“(1) The Independent Commission for Aid Impact (ICAI) shall have responsibility to carry out independent evaluation of the relevance, impact, value-for-money, efficiency and effectiveness of the ODA in accordance with the provisions of this Act.
(2) The Schedule [The Independent Commission for Aid Impact] makes further provisions about the ICAI.”—(Mr Nuttall.)
Brought up, and read the First time.
Mr David Nuttall (Bury North) (Con)
I beg to move, That the clause be read a Second time.
Mr Speaker
With this it will be convenient to discuss the following:
New clause 2—Reduction of Cabinet members’ salaries if 0.7% target not met—
“If an annual report laid before Parliament in 2016 or any subsequent calendar year shows that the 0.7% target has not been met in the report year, salaries provided for under Section 1 and Part 1 of Schedule 1 to the Ministerial and Other Salaries Act 1975 shall each be reduced by £1000 in the following financial year.”
New clause 3—Annual reporting: relevant period—
“(1) The International Development (Reporting and Transparency) Act 2006 shall be amended by leaving out section 1(2) and inserting—
“(2) In this Act, “relevant period” means a period of 12 months ending with 31 March in the case of information which is normally produced by reference to financial years.”’
New clause 4—Independent International Development Office—
“(1) There shall be established an independent body known as the Independent International Development Office (referred to in this Act as “the IIDO”).
(2) The Schedule [The Independent International Development Office] makes provision about the IIDO.”
New clause 5—Calculation of ODA for the purposes of section 1—
“An amount equivalent to the following annual payments, or estimates thereof, shall be included in the calculation of annual UK ODA for the purposes of section 1—
(a) the amount payable by the United Kingdom to the European Union.
(b) Welfare benefits paid to foreign nationals.
(c) Welfare benefits paid to UK nationals living abroad.
(d) The administrative costs of the Department for International Development and its agencies and associated public bodies.”
New clause 6—Calculation of Gross National Income for the purposes of section 1—
“Adjustments to the figure provided to Parliament as the UK’s gross national income as at the end of the financial year shall not change or invalidate the UK’s performance against the target under section 1.”
New clause 7—Applicability and expiry of the provisions of this Act—
“(1) This Act shall come into force on such a day appointed by the Secretary of State by an order contained in a statutory instrument.
(2) An order under subsection (1) shall not be made unless a referendum has taken place in the United Kingdom and more than 50% of those casting a vote do so in favour of meeting the target.
(3) This Act shall only have effect in those years where the United Kingdom records a budget surplus.
(4) The Secretary of State may vary the target mentioned in section 1 by an order contained in a statutory instrument in response to the UK leaving or joining a multilateral organisation which itself disburses ODA.
(5) This Act shall expire on the anniversary of its coming into force in the fifth year of its being so in force.”
Amendment 16, in clause 1, page 1, line 4, leave out “gross national income” and insert
“final gross national income of the preceding year.”
Amendment 20, page 1, line , leave out “met” and insert “progressed toward”.
Amendment 18, page 1, line 5, leave out “calendar” and insert “financial”.
Amendment 5, page 1, line 5, at end insert
“when the central government net cash requirement is in surplus.”
Amendment 21, page 1, line 6, leave out “the 0.7% and insert “a 0.35%”.
Amendment 6, page 1, line 7, leave out from “by” to end of line 9 and insert
“the Office for Budget Responsibility.”
Amendment 19, page 1, line 13, at end insert
““financial year”, for the purposes of this Act, includes a period which begins with the day on which this Act comes into force and ends on the following 31 March.”
Amendment 22, in clause 2, page 1, line 16, leave out “the 0.7% and insert “a 0.35%”.
Amendment 7, page 1, line 17, leave out
“as soon as reasonably practicable”
and insert
“, no more than 10 days during which both Houses of Parliament are sitting,”.
Amendment 8, page 1, line 18, leave out from “statement” to end of line 19.
Amendment 23, page 2, line 2, leave out “the 0.7% and insert “a 0.35%”.
Amendment 24, page 2, line 5, leave out “the 0.7% and insert “a 0.35%”.
Amendment 9, page 2, line 7, leave out from “State,” to end of line 8 and insert
“need take no action on the basis of such a revision.”
Amendment 10, page 2, line 8, leave out from “statement” to end of line 9.
Amendment 11, page 2, line 10, leave out subsections (3) and (4).
Amendment 25, page 2, line 10, leave out “the 0.7% and insert “a 0.35%”.
Amendment 26, page 2, line 19, leave out “the 0.7% and insert “a 0.35%”.
Amendment 1, page 2, line 25, leave out clause 3.
Amendment 15, page 2, line 36, leave out clause 5.
Amendment 2, in clause 5, page 2, line 39, at end insert
“and is relevant, sustainable and capable of having a measurable impact.”
Amendment 37, in clause 6, page 3, line 4, leave out subsection (2).
Amendment 3, page 3, line 4, leave out “1 June 2015” and insert “1 January 2016”
New schedule 1—The Independent Commission For Aid Impact—
“Accountability and Reporting
1 (1) It will be the responsibility of the Secretary of State for International Developent to lay responses to reports of the ICAI before Parliament.
(2) The ICAI shall carry out all other duties as established.
Finance
2 (1) The budget of the ICAI for the purpose of section ( ) will be agreed by the Secretary of State for International Development.
(2) The Department for International Development may make to the ICAI such payments out of money provided by Parliament as the Department for International Development considers appropriate for the purposes of enabling the ICAI to meet its expenses arising under this Act.
(3) Payment are to be made at such times, and subject to any such conditions, as the Department for International Development considers appropriate.”
New schedule 2—The independent International Development Office—
“Membership—
1 The IIDO is to consist of a member to chair it and six other members, appointed by the Secretary of State for International Development following apre-appointment hearing by, and with the consent of, the International Development Committee of the House of Commons.
Employees
2 (1) The IIDO may employ staff.
(2) Staff are to be employed on such terms as to remuneration and other matters as the IIDO may, with the approval of the Minister for the Civil Service, determine.
(3) Service as a member of staff of the IIDO is employment in the civil service of the State.
(4) The IIDO must pay to the Minister for the Civil Service, at such times as the Minister may direct, such sums as the Minister may determine in respect of the increase in the sums payable out of money provided by Parliament that is attributable to the provision of pensions, allowances or gratuities under section 1 of the Superannuation Act 1972 payable to or in respect of persons who are or have been members of staff of the IIDO.
Duties
3 (1) The IIDO will have the responsibility to carry out independent evaluation of the relevance, impact, value-for-money and sustainability of ODA.
(2) The IIDO will develop systems to verify the extent to which ODA is spent efficiently and effectively.
Annual report
4 (1) The IIDO must prepare a report of the performance of its functions in each financial year.
(2) The report relating to a financial year must be prepared as soon as possible after the end of the financial year.
(3) The report must be sent to the Department for International Development.
(4) The Department for International Development must lay the report before Parliament.
(5) “Financial year” means—
(a) the period which begins with the day on which this Schedule comes into force and ends with the following 31 March;
(b) each successive period of 12 months.
Accountability and Reporting
5 (1) It will be the responsibility of the Secretary of State for International Development to lay responses to reports of the IIDO before Parliament.
(2) The International Development Committee of the House of Commons may provide parliamentary oversight of the work of the IIDO and report annually on its current and future work programme.
Finance
6 (1) The budget of the IIDO will be agreed by the Secretary of State for International Development.
(2) The Department for International Development may make to the IIDO such payments out of money provided by Parliament as the Department for International Development considers appropriate for the purpose of enabling the IIDO to meet its expenses.
(3) Payments are to be made at such times, and subject to any such conditions, as the Department for International Development considers appropriate.
Accounts and audit
7 (1) The IIDO must—
(a) keep proper accounts and proper records in relation to its accounts, and
(b) pre pare in respect of each financial year a statement of accounts.
(2) Each statement of accounts must comply with any directions given by the International Development Committee as to—
(a) the information to be contained in it and the manner in which it is to be presented,
(b) t he methods and principles according to which the statement is to be prepared, and
(c) the additional information (if any) which is to be provided to Parliament.
(3) The IIDO must send a copy of each statement of accounts to—
(a) the Secretary of State for International Development, and
(b) the Comptroller and Auditor General, before the end of the month of June next following the financial year to which the statement relates.
(4) The Comptroller and Auditor General must—
(a) examine, certify and report on each statement of accounts, and
(b) send a copy of each report and certified statement to the Secretary of State for International Development.
(5) The Secretary of State for International Development must lay before Parliament a copy of each such report and certified statement.
(6) “Financial year” has the same meaning as in paragraph 4(5).
(7) The IIDO must keep under review whether its internal financial controls secure the proper conduct of its financial affairs.
References to International Development Committee
8 (1) Any reference in this Schedule to the International Development Committee of the House of Commons—
(a) (a) if the name of that Committee is changed, is to be treated as a reference to that Committee by its new name, and
(b) if the functions of that Committee (or substantially corresponding functions) become functions of a different Committee of the House of Commons, is to be treated as a reference to the Committee by which those functions are exercisable.
(2) Any question arising under sub-paragraph (1) is to be determined by the Speaker of the House of Commons.”
Amendment (a), to new schedule 2, line 3, leave out “six” and insert “four”.
Amendment (b), line 4, leave out “for International Development”.
Amendment (c), line 5, leave out from “of,” to end of line 6 and insert
“a committee in the House of Commons and an equivalent committee in the House of Lords”.
Amendment (d), line 6 after “Commons” insert
“and equivalent committee in the House of Lords”.
Amendment (e), line 12 leave out sub-paragraph (3).
Amendment (f), line 19 at end insert—
“2A All costs associated with the IIDO shall count towards the target set out in section 1 of this Act.”
Amendment (g), line 38 leave out “for International Development”.
Amendment (h), line 72 leave out “for International Development”.
Amendment (i), line 78 leave out paragraph 8.
Mr Nuttall
As the House will have seen on the amendment paper this morning, there are seven new clauses, two new schedules and several amendments. I propose to divide the amendments into several sub-groups, although others may choose to deal with them in a different way. For the sake of clarity, it might be helpful if I draw together a number of different threads. I will start with new clause 1 and new schedule 1.
Sir Peter Bottomley (Worthing West) (Con)
For context, and for those who read our debates, perhaps we should remind ourselves that we are talking about whether, from every £100 of our wealth, we should give 70p each year to those who will use it well. It is important for people to know that some Conservatives—probably most—want the Bill to go through and some oppose it, and some of these discussions help to delay the passage of the Bill.
Mr Nuttall
I do not want to be drawn immediately off target. We are considering some rather detailed provisions this morning. I accept that there are different views. There are many on the Government Benches who think it would be a good thing to use some of our public money—moneys that we have taken from the taxpayer—to pay for international aid. To a large extent, I go along with that, but what the Bill does is entirely different. It tries to enshrine in statute one particular area of Government spending, which no other areas of Government spending enjoy. It could be argued that it is better for a Government to spend whatever they want, be it 0.7% or 0.8%, of their own free will, rather than being obliged by statute to do so. There is another point. There may be those who, once they see that the 0.7% target has been enshrined in statute, think the job is done.
The people of this country have a long and proud history of giving generously to charity, and long may that continue, but is not there a danger that some—although not all—might think that, because 0.7% is enshrined in statute, the Government are doing that job for them? I for one do not wish to go down that road. I would like people to feel that it is also their responsibility, as an act of charity, to contribute to international aid.
Mr Chope
Is not the problem with the Bill highlighted by the autumn statement? GDP is forecast to increase by more than 3%, which means more than £400 million extra will have to be spent on overseas aid next year in order to meet the target. At the same time, the Chancellor is saying that we are still in the age of austerity.
Mr Nuttall
My hon. Friend makes a good point. Several newspapers have today reported that that would indeed be the effect of an after-the-event revision in gross national income. Some of the amendments that we will consider today attempt to deal with that problem.
Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)
Is it not worse than that, though? Given what the Chancellor said in the autumn statement, and given the OBR’s projections, Government spending as a proportion of GDP will have to come down. As the OBR has highlighted, even health spending will have to come down as a proportion of GDP. If the Bill goes through unamended, the percentage of Government spending that goes on overseas aid would have to keep rising, rather than remaining constant. Our amendments are designed to deal with that anomaly.
Mr Nuttall
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. That is one of the reasons why we are attempting to change the definitions in the Bill.
As I mentioned, there are several new clauses, two new schedules and 22 amendments. I propose to speak first to new clause 1 and new schedule 1 and then to contrast them with new clause 4 and new schedule 2, together with several amendments thereto that have been tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset (Jacob Rees-Mogg). I will then deal with the proposed changes to the definitions in the Bill and one or two stand-alone amendments that do not fit into the other categories. I will deal with the accounting period at the same time. I will then speak to a series of amendments that would reduce the figure from 0.7% to 0.35% and explain how that proposal arose.
Philip Davies
My hon. Friend mentioned our hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset (Jacob Rees-Mogg). Perhaps I should point out that he has been detained as one of his children is performing in a Christmas event at school, but he will be dashing here as soon as he can to speak to his amendments. I thought that I ought to put that on the record.
Mr Nuttall
I am extremely grateful for that intervention, because I was looking towards where our hon. Friend normally sits in the Chamber and was somewhat concerned by his lack of presence. I am relieved that he will be able to deal with amendments 8, 9, 10, 11 and 37, which stand in his name. I will touch on those briefly at the end of my remarks. Before that, I will deal with the definitions of the accounting period, the 0.35% proposal, the issue of enforcement, which is dealt with in new clause 2, and amendments 1, 2 and 3, tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch (Mr Chope).
Concerns were raised on Second Reading about the original Bill’s provision for a new body that was to be known as the independent international development office. That had been provided for in clause 5. Although the clause was relatively short, the related detail in the schedule to the Bill was extensive. Subsection (1) simply stated that there should be established an independent body, known as the independent international development office—I shall refer to it from now on as the IIDO—and subsection (2) provided that the schedule should make provision for it. The schedule provided a lot of details about the membership of the IIDO, including who its employees were going to be, its duties, its annual report, its accountability and reporting requirements, its financial arrangements, and its internal financial accounting and audit requirements. It was a comprehensive statement of what was to be required of the new body.
Philip Davies
My hon. Friend is making a powerful case for new clause 1. Given that the proponents of the Bill say that the proposals in new clause 4 received overwhelming support when they formed part of the Bill on Second Reading, does he not think that those people should have the opportunity to vote for the Bill that they voted for on Second Reading rather than for a Bill that a few individuals decided to change in Committee? Is new clause 4 not, therefore, helpful because it would allow people to vote for the Bill that they thought they were voting for the first time around?
Mr Nuttall
I certainly hope that the House will have the opportunity to choose between the options that are available. The will of the House may well be for a new body to be established, but I have concerns about that. A new quango will need staffing; it will need to find new premises, probably at great expense—perhaps in London, or perhaps in another part of the country; it will need to set up a new website; and it will need to set up its own accounting functions. It will need to start from scratch, whereas the ICAI is already up and running. In Committee, my right hon. Friend the Member for Eddisbury (Mr O’Brien) said of the ICAI that
“we have been extremely pleased with the members who have served on it under an expert chairmanship.”
Of course, my right hon. Friend was a DFID Minister back in 2010 when this body was being established. He went on to say:
“They were able to make their own selection of the projects they wanted to examine, after looking at a menu of options. None of that was steered by or in any way discussed with Ministers or the Department. It was entirely an opportunity for ICAI to make its own judgment; indeed, that is precisely what it has done over the years. I think everyone would agree that that has had a good and beneficial effect, in terms of scrutiny and ensuring real accountability for the massive aspirations that are tied to this public money reaching the intended destinations and public goods. ICAI now has a track record.”––[Official Report, International Development (Official Development Assistance Target) Public Bill Committee, 11 November 2014; c. 36.]
My right hon. Friend clearly thinks that there may be a role for the ICAI and I hope it will find favour with the House.
Philip Davies
Clause 5 states:
“The Secretary of State must make arrangements for the independent evaluation of the extent to which”
the aid
“provided by the United Kingdom represent value for money”.
The Bill does not say how that will be achieved, so without either new clause 4 or new clause 1 Members will potentially be voting for a pig in a poke.
Mr Nuttall
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. I hope that when the Minister addresses this sub-group of amendments he will explain exactly how the provision in the version of clause 5 that was inserted in Committee—it is not the same version that the House agreed on Second Reading—will be achieved in practice. It is all very well to say that the Secretary of State
“must make arrangements for the independent evaluation of the extent to which ODA”
represents value for money, but it would be helpful to know exactly how that particular provision will be delivered.
Philip Davies
Is not the danger with the Bill as crafted that, in effect, the Government will be responsible for deciding what constitutes an independent evaluation and for marking their own homework? Surely it is the duty of this House to set up the basis on which we think the Government should be scrutinised, rather than leave it to them to decide for themselves what constitutes independent evaluation.
Mr Nuttall
My hon. Friend is right. Indeed, more suspicious minds than mine may wonder why the Government are reluctant to include a provision to enable either the ICAI or my hon. Friend’s proposed body to carry out independent evaluation and oversee the Department’s work. There may be a good answer to that and I look forward to hearing the Minister’s explanation.
Mr Nuttall
Yes; I am pleased to see that my hon. Friend has arrived in the Chamber.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
It is always one of life’s great pleasures to be in the Chamber, and it is always a sadness to be away from it.
My hon. Friend is making an interesting point, and I wonder whether it brings us to the underlying tokenism of the Bill: without any proper mechanism for checking whether the money is well spent, it is merely a grandiloquent expression of intent, rather than proper legislation.
Mr Nuttall
That is the core problem, which some of us have pointed out since the Bill’s inception: it is a Bill without teeth. One of the new clauses tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Shipley shows how the Bill might be given more teeth, or enforcement powers.
The ICAI would be the perfect body to carry out the role of scrutiny and evaluation because it operates on the basis of the following core values. It is independent: it undertakes its work without fear or favour, and reports the facts as it finds them. It has professional rigour and uses the highest professional standards to gather and evaluate evidence. It is transparent in that it places on its website all its reports and, crucially, the supporting analysis, as well as its records of costs and activities. It is responsive in that it takes into account public and parliamentary opinion in selecting its work programme and undertaking its work. It is innovative in that it makes the most of its new status to experiment with new ways of working, reporting and interacting with its stakeholders. Its last core value is to operate with the greatest integrity by ensuring that its operations are characterised by value for money, high ethical standards, transparency, and accountability to Parliament and the public.
The ICAI is a fairly small body. It consists of just four commissioners, who are led by the chief commissioner and supported by a small secretariat. We are not talking about some large, burgeoning bureaucracy. I accept that it has not been going for many years, but it has been around for most of this Parliament. As I said, it has been well received. Its work has been praised by former Ministers of the Department and the International Development Committee.
The ICAI is the ideal body to take on this role. It will have to be undertaken by somebody, because clause 5 states that the Secretary of State “must”—it does not say “may”—
“make arrangements for the independent evaluation of the extent to which ODA provided by the United Kingdom represents value for money”.
If the ICAI is not going to carry out that work, who is? It is vital work on behalf of this House and, indeed, the country.
I will go through the other proposals in passing. New clause 5, tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Shipley, gives us a flavour of what I have loosely termed the definition amendments. It sets out that
“An amount equivalent to the following annual payments, or estimates thereof, shall be included in the calculation of annual UK ODA for the purposes of section 1—
(a) the amount payable by the United Kingdom to the European Union
(b) Welfare benefits paid to foreign nationals
(c) Welfare benefits paid to UK nationals living abroad
(d) The administrative costs of the Department for International Development and its agencies and associated public bodies.”
There was some discussion on the last point in Committee on whether the cost of running the Department should be included in, or excluded from, the target. It seems entirely sensible to include the cost in the target for the simple reason that it gives those involved in the work of international development programmes the desire to help themselves. The more they cut down on administration, the more they can put towards the cost of helping the people around the world we all want to see helped. I am sure my hon. Friend will have more to say about the quite astonishing figures relating to the amount of welfare benefits that go around the world. Without new clause 5, they will not be included in the definition of what constitutes overseas development assistance.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
Before my hon. Friend moves on, he mentioned payments to the European Union being included. As most of those payments go to poorer countries in the EU, is it not perverse that they do not count as overseas aid?
Mr Nuttall
My hon. Friend, as ever, is absolutely right. That is one reason why new clause 5 should be included in the Bill. As we all know, a substantial part, if not the largest part, of EU funds are disbursed in regional grants to the poorer parts of the EU.
Philip Davies
Just to give an illustration, the overseas aid Department gives aid to Moldova, which is the poorest country in Europe. If Moldova were to become a member of the EU, we would be expected to make higher contributions to the EU to pay for all the work that would need to be done to bring Moldova up to scratch. The money we currently give to Moldova in overseas aid would then have to go somewhere else. In effect, the money would be spent twice.
Mr Nuttall
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that example, which is a perfect reason why it would make sense to accept new clause 5.
New clause 6, also tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Shipley, concerns the calculation of gross national income for the purposes of section 1. As has already been touched on briefly in an intervention by my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch, some difficulty has arisen this week concerning national statistics. As often happens, to be fair, they are subject to revision as more information comes in and more firms send their statistics to the Office for National Statistics.
New clause 6 therefore proposes:
“Adjustments to the figure provided to Parliament as the UK’s gross national income as at the end of the financial year shall not change or invalidate the UK’s performance against the target under section 1.”
Together with the other amendments that are being proposed, that would go some way towards dealing with the problem we have seen this week.
Amendment 16 proposes:
“Clause 1, page 1, line 4, leave out ‘gross national income’ and insert ‘final gross national income of the preceding year.’”
It would also deal with the problem of changes being made to the gross national income after the figures had been reported.
Amendment 5 is slightly different. It was tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset, who has disappeared for the moment. It proposes:
“Clause 1, Page 1, line 5, at end insert “when the central government net cash requirement is in surplus.””
That is an important change, given the overall position of our nation’s finances, and I am sure that my hon. Friend will have more to say about this and his other amendments before the House today.
Amendment 20 would
“leave out “met” and insert “progressed toward”.”
That would cut down on the number of times the Secretary of State has to account for not having met the target.
Amendment 6, which would amend clause 1, page 1, line 7, deals with the inclusion of a role for the Office for Budget Responsibility. This is perhaps one of the most important amendments being proposed this morning, because rather than leaving matters as are currently provided for in the Bill it would be much better if the responsibility for determining whether the target had been met was decided by the independent OBR.
The OBR has been much in the news this week, as it has given its report on the nation’s finances. Again, rather than having the current provision in the Bill, it would be much more sensible if this task was given to the independent OBR. It would not be much of a further imposition on its resources. It is the organisation that has these figures, and each week, each month and each year it has to report to this House. It will be the first organisation to know whether the figure—0.7% or any other figure that the House may decide upon—has been met.
New clause 7, also in this sub-group, was tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Shipley and is entitled, “Applicability and expiry of the provisions of this Act”. Subsection (1) reads:
“This Act shall come into force on such a day appointed by the Secretary of State by an order contained in a statutory instrument.”
Mr Chope
I have not signed new clause 7, but its heart seems to be that the Bill will have effect only in years when the UK records a budget surplus. Does my hon. Friend agree that without such a provision the Bill will require the Government to increase borrowing to fund overseas aid?
Mr Nuttall
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. While we are in deficit we are undoubtedly borrowing money to pay for the overseas aid budget. There is no getting away from that. It is a fact of economic life. Some might think it a good idea to borrow money with one hand and give it away with the other; others might not take that view. It would be an interesting referendum were one to be held on that question.
In one way or another, new clause 3 and amendments 18 and 19 deal with the accounting period in the Bill. I might have missed it—I am happy to stand corrected—but nowhere in our proceedings have I seen a convincing explanation of why the accounting period by which our success in meeting the target is to be assessed is a calendar year, rather than a financial year, which we all deal in. The new clause and amendments would change the relevant accounting period from a calendar year to a financial year, bringing to the Bill much greater clarity, openness and transparency, because all the Government’s accounts are done in financial years. I cannot see why this aspect of Government expenditure should be any different. I hope that those amendments find favour with the House.
Mr Nuttall
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. It makes sense for those who want to see the United Kingdom making the maximum impact with the money available for international aid, including some who have tabled amendments, to make the reporting requirements—everyone accepts we need some means of evaluation so there must be reporting requirements—as simple as possible. I cannot understand why we make them so complicated by putting them on a different basis from all the other Government accounts. It seems to me logical and common sense to assess the accounting period on the same basis as for all other annual accounts.
Amendments 21 to 26 would reduce the figure of 0.7% to 0.35%. Before anyone jumps up to say that this will mean cutting our aid in half, let me say that that is not necessarily so. This issue reveals the problem with the Bill. At the end of the day, the Government could continue to spend more than 0.35% on international aid; they could continue to spend 0.7% or even 0.8% on it if they were so minded. It is worth while considering why this figure of 0.7% has achieved almost mythical proportions.
Philip Davies
Does my hon. Friend agree that we need some flexibility around what is affordable for the country? Simply having a very high target every year, irrespective of the country’s financial circumstances, is ludicrous. These amendments would thus allow some flexibility to take much more account of the nation’s finances.
Mr Nuttall
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. I will not go into all the detail, but other countries have realised this point. If the suggestion of 0.35% were adopted and the Government decided on it—I do not think for one second that they will—it would put us in the pack rather than being second in the list, as we are at the moment. We would not be behind the rest of the world. It is worth looking at the detail of the figures. Anyone who does so will see that, rather bizarrely, for most of the last two or three decades we have spent around 0.35% and that it is only in the past three or four or probably five or six years—and incredibly since the financial crash—that there has been a huge increase at a time when the country can arguably least afford it.
I am conscious of the fact that there are many amendments, so I shall move on quickly to deal with the final two groups. My hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch has tabled three amendments, one of which is amendment 2. It sets out one of the criteria for evaluation of the policy and provides that it should be
“relevant, sustainable and capable of having a measurable impact.”
I look forward to hearing my hon. Friend’s explanation of the definition of “sustainable”. Perhaps he will convince me that that can be easily assessed. Amendments 8, 9, 10, 11 and 37 were tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset. I should mention in passing that any Member who looked at the Notices of Amendments in the Table Office yesterday should bear it in mind that at that stage amendment 37 appeared as amendment 10. The second “amendment 10” should have been “amendment 37”. I am sure that my hon. Friend will set out in convincing detail his reasons for believing that the amendments should be accepted.
It is right and proper for the Bill to be scrutinised this morning. Millions of people outside the House support this country’s aim and ambition to do all that it can to help those around the world who are starving and need help—no one denies that—but I do not think that giving special status to our aid programme has universal support in this country, and I think it important in a democracy for all sides of the argument to be put.
As I have attempted to say during the last few minutes, the amendments would not wreck the Bill. In fact, they would make it more understandable. If they were implemented, more rather than less money would be available for international development. They would make the Bill more straightforward and transparent, and would increase the funding available for international aid.
Gavin Shuker (Luton South) (Lab/Co-op)
I hope that we shall make good progress today, and respond to the concerns of those who have tabled amendments, new clauses and new schedules. Given the number that have been tabled, I shall not speak to each one; instead, I shall address the broad themes into which they can intuitively be grouped.
The first of the themes that I can discern is independent evaluation—the independent oversight of the duties for which the Bill provides. This group includes proposals for the evaluation to be overseen by, variously, the Independent Commission for Aid Impact, the Office for Budget Responsibility, and a newly created independent international development office—as well as, confusingly, a proposal that there should be no independent evaluation at all.
The hon. Member for North East Somerset (Jacob Rees-Mogg) has called for the creation of an independent international development office. The hon. Gentleman’s late conversion to the quangocracy is a surprising development, which is somewhat at odds with his own preference for
“Parliament regulating things rather than handing them out to random bodies.”—[Official Report, 12 July 2013; Vol. 566, c. 720.]
I look forward to hearing his views.
I can reassure Members that
“the independent evaluation of the extent to which ODA provided by the United Kingdom represents value for money”
was debated extensively in Committee—
Gavin Shuker
Just one second.
It was agreed, on a cross-party basis, to amend the Bill to provide for an independent evaluation while giving the Secretary of State flexibility in respect of the precise organisation that would be responsible for overseeing that scrutiny.
As for the 0.7%, several creative alternatives—
Jacob Rees-Mogg
On a point of order, Mr Speaker. The hon. Gentleman has misspoken in attributing an amendment to me. It is not my amendment, but that of my hon. Friend the Member for Shipley (Philip Davies). I am sure that the hon. Gentleman would like an opportunity to correct the record.
Mr Speaker
The hon. Member for Luton South (Gavin Shuker) has heard the point of order, to which he may wish to respond.
Gavin Shuker
I am delighted to correct the record, Mr Speaker. It is absolutely true that the hon. Member for North East Somerset attached his name to the amendment rather than moving it himself.
Several creative alternatives to the 0.7% figure were advanced in the 54 or so amendments tabled, including 0.35%—try as I might, I simply could not establish the correlation of this to 0.7%—and 0.67%. It is a bold move to try to renegotiate the terms of a 40-year international agreement to which we are signatories, which states that all developed countries should devote 0.7% of GNI to meet official development assistance commitments. Perhaps most entertainingly given the hon. Members’ apparent hostility towards the 0.7% figure, they advocate that all Ministers should be liable to a £1,000 drop in salary if it is not met, which presumably has made the Minister rather grumpy, as well as putting in place a rather perverse incentive indeed.
Philip Davies
The hon. Gentleman is rattling through these amendments at a rate of knots, and we can barely keep up with his arguments. He glossed over the subject of the international development body to scrutinise this. He voted for that on Second Reading, and he voted for a money resolution to put that into being, so could he give us some detail as to why he seems now not to support something that he voted for previously?
Gavin Shuker
Forgive me for teaching the hon. Member how this place works, but we vote for the principle of the Bill on Second Reading and then we go into Committee and vote for amendments that allow for the Bill to enact that principle. We viewed, on a cross-party basis, that this was the best way to go forward, and so I will move on.
On the calculation of ODA and GNI, the amendments deal with the time frame of calculation, opportunities to synchronise aid reporting with financial accounting, and the detail of which payments should be included within the calculation of ODA. Given hon. Members’ widely acknowledged preference for turning back the clock, I suppose we should not be surprised by the amendment changing the calculation for ODA to be based on the UK’s GNI from 1975—when, I am assured, a packet of Spangles cost just 2p. I was more perplexed by the move from the internationally accepted calendar year as the calculating period to the financial year of April to March, and of course in their amendment 19, their redefinition of “financial year” to a period of little over 100 days. I am sure the House will be relieved to hear that, again, the terms of this calculation form part of the same internationally agreed covenant.
That concern led to arguments on which payments should be included in the calculation of ODA, and specifically hon. Members’ contention that this 0.7% figure should include payments to the EU, welfare benefits paid to foreign nationals and welfare benefits to UK nationals living abroad, among others. I am afraid ODA is officially defined and therefore this amendment would clearly frustrate the will of the Bill and the principle moved on Second Reading.
Finally, I come to the applicability and expiry of the Act and other technicalities, and the amendments concerning a public referendum, implementation once we have achieved budget surplus, and a sunset clause that limits this Bill to a period of just five years. I do not know whether hon. Members are experiencing a personal crisis of confidence in their own representative capabilities, but they might be interested to know that 29.5 million of the British public give charitably each month, and that on average the British public believe we should give not 0.7%, but around 1.5% of our nation’s wealth to help development. I hope that will reassure the hon. Member for Shipley (Philip Davies) in particular, who worries this Bill enjoys the support of only
“a few middle-class, Guardian-reading, sandal-wearing, lentil-eating do-gooders with a misguided guilt complex”
and helps them to
“feel better about themselves”.—[Official Report, 12 September 2014; Vol. 585, c. 1232.]
I can also reassure him I have never voluntarily eaten a lentil.
Moving to the five-year time limit, the hon. Gentleman may be surprised to learn that I, too, want to reach a time where we are able to repeal this Act, not because I aspire to living in a UK that is less generous, but because I aspire to living in a world which is more equal, and where each country has the resources, institutions and industry that it needs to be independent of foreign aid. With the greatest respect, when this moment arrives it will be dictated by the humanitarian need that remains, not the diktat of a few Members of Parliament determined to frustrate the passage of this Bill.
We reject these amendments. It is time to pass this Bill.
The Minister of State, Department for International Development (Mr Desmond Swayne)
The Bill places a simple duty on a Minister to report to this House. The amendments fall into four categories. The first is those that seek to negate or reduce that reporting duty, or indeed place the burden of that reporting duty on somebody else—a new body or the OBR, or, indeed, make it subject to judicial review. I, however, prefer the simplicity and the authority of reporting to this House.
The amendments in the second category seek to change the means of calculation on which the report is based, either by changing from a calendar year to a financial year, by adopting a figure of 0.35%, by using the preceding year’s gross national income or by including other payments, such as those made to the EU. I, as a Minister, would find a couple of those amendments quite convenient, but I do not believe that it is the purpose of this House to make Ministers’ lives more convenient. As the hon. Member for Luton South (Gavin Shuker) has said, these matters are defined internationally. The purpose of the Bill is to meet an international commitment, and to mess about with the calculation would be to undermine the fundamental purpose of the Bill.
The amendments in the third category are those that are mischievous—namely, those that would seek to reduce the salaries of Ministers if we were to fail to meet the commitment. We know, however, that those who have tabled those amendments would be glad that Ministers had not met the commitment—indeed, they would probably wish to pay them more for not having met it. The amendments in this category also seek to provide for a referendum, a sunset clause or some other such impediment to implementing the Bill.
The amendments in the fourth category are those that are, frankly, trivial. Those who have tabled them would have us argue today about the meaning of commonly understood terms such as “value for money” and “reasonably practical”. It is my estimate that none of the new clauses or amendments would improve the Bill. Indeed, they all seek to undermine it. I call on those hon. Members to withdraw them and, if they do not do so, I call on the House to reject them.
Philip Davies
I want to begin by saying how regrettable it is that the Minister and the shadow Minister have treated the House with such contempt this morning by making no attempt at all to engage with the debate. Basically, they think they have a right to just come along, stand up and sit down without offering any explanation of the Government’s position or that of the official Opposition, in an attempt to railroad through the House a Bill that has very little public support. They really should be ashamed of themselves for treating the House with such contempt today. We are no wiser about the position of the Government or the Opposition on the amendments, or about their arguments for or against them, even though they supported some of them on Second Reading and supported the money resolution passed in the House. It is unfortunate that the Minister and shadow Minister have chosen to adopt this tactic today; it does neither of them any credit. I will attempt to fill in some of the gaps that they have left unfilled today.
If you will allow me, Mr Speaker, I will go through the new clauses and amendments tabled in my name first. Then I will comment briefly on those tabled by my hon. Friends. New clause 3 deals with the relevant period for annual reporting. The international agreement, which we keep being told makes the Bill so essential, actually dates back to the mid-1970s, yet all of a sudden it has become a matter of urgency that, in 2014, we should implement something that was agreed back then. That agreement included provisions for reporting on a calendar basis, and the Bill proposes that the target should be reported and calculated on that basis. However, we do not work on that basis in this House. We have a financial year. We could end up with some unintended consequences with this legislation, whereby it tries to put into a calendar year what this House does in a financial year. The Office for Budget Responsibility, the Treasury and all Departments calculate things on a financial year basis—all departmental budgets operate on that basis. So it is just not practical to decide that one Department should be able to opt out of that framework and have its budgets determined on a calendar basis, unlike every other Department.
Philip Davies
My hon. Friend is right about that. I know that what he says reflects a proposal that he has put forward, with which I have much sympathy. I will discuss it a little later, if he will allow me.
What is in the Bill will mean that in a financial year in this House the Government may not be spending 0.7% of their budget on overseas aid—they may be spending more or they could be spending less. Whatever this House decides, it must treat the Department for International Development in the same way as every other Department, and a financial year should be the basis for that. I hope that the Government will reflect on this matter, because I do not know how this arrangement will work otherwise. I have no idea how they propose it will work either. It would have been helpful if the Minister had set out how it would work from a Treasury, OBR and general reporting perspective and what implications there may be. As he failed to take the opportunity to do so, we are none the wiser.
New clause 4 would set the Bill back up as it was on Second Reading, by putting in place the independent international development office. That was deemed necessary by the Bill’s proponents on Second Reading, but now, all of a sudden, it has become completely unnecessary. We have been given no explanation from anybody today as to why a few members of the Committee decided to strike it out. No doubt the shadow Minister, the Minister and the promoter of the Bill all connived to take it out, yet no explanation has been given this morning as to why they choose to do so. That is why I say that they have treated the House with contempt. We have been given no explanation of why the Committee chose to act in the way it did. My new clause has provided the opportunity for the House to revisit this matter. If it thought this body was important on Second Reading, I want to know why it is no longer important.
I worry about this situation very much. I am not one for having bureaucratic bodies set up willy-nilly, with limitless budgets, in order to empire-build for no particular purpose, but when the right hon. Member for Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk (Michael Moore) proposed the Bill he thought that this independent international development office would have a serious purpose. That purpose was to evaluate
“the relevance, impact, value-for-money and sustainability of ODA.”
It was also to
“develop systems to verify the extent to which ODA is spent efficiently and effectively.”
We have to worry about why the Government and the official Opposition are so keen that that is no longer the case. Does that mean they do not want any body being given a remit to evaluate the relevance, impact, value for money and sustainability of overseas aid? Might it be embarrassing for the Government and for the official Opposition—if they one day hope to be in government? Their actions will not now be independently monitored by a body that commands any great confidence—that seems to be the implication of the Government and the Opposition taking this bit of the Bill out. It means that they do not want to be scrutinised on how well this money is spent—and no wonder. We have seen time and again—I gave some examples on Second Reading, which I will not rehearse again today—that money has been spent on the most ridiculous things in the name of overseas aid. These things would not command any support among the British public, but they come under the overseas aid budget. Of course what is happening here is that Ministers do not want that level of scrutiny.
My hon. Friend the Member for Bury North (Mr Nuttall) has proposed an alternative, and it may well be that it makes more sense than mine.
I am not precious about whose new clause is accepted, which body we have or whether an existing body could do the job properly. That is of no concern to me. My concern is that there is some independent evaluation and scrutiny of how the money is spent. Many people around the country feel that overseas aid is about taking money from poor people in rich countries and giving it to rich people in poor countries. They see millions of pounds siphoned off by dictators around the world for a new fleet of Mercedes, or whatever it may be. Dictators of some countries probably think that the Government should include a Mercedes catalogue with the aid that they are giving. Those are the legitimate concerns of many of my constituents and many people around the country. Those concerns will only be enhanced when they realise that the two main parties and the promoter of the Bill have removed from the Bill any attempt to ensure that the money is spent effectively, wisely, and for the good of the people it is supposed to help. We have not had any explanation as to why they have made that decision today.
Philip Davies
The hon. Gentleman says “absolute rubbish” from a sedentary position, but there is lots of evidence that that does happen. In fact, he makes my case for me. If he thinks it is rubbish, then let us set up a body to prove that it is a load of rubbish. What his party and the Government fear is a body that points out that these things are happening, and so they have done away with it, because it may be embarrassing for all these things to be out in the open. We should have a body, which this House voted for on Second Reading, to scrutinise objectively what the Government are doing to ensure that the money is being spent wisely. How on earth can anyone disagree with that? What is there to disagree with about ensuring that the money is spent wisely and for the purposes for which it was intended? Why does no one have the nerve to stand up and disagree with it? They would rather slouch in their seats and try to railroad this Bill through Parliament.
My hon. Friend the Member for Bury North mentioned the Independent Commission for Aid Impact. Chief Commissioner Graham Ward said:
“We saw very little evidence that the work DFID is doing to combat corruption is successfully addressing the impact of corruption as experienced by the poor.”
When the hon. Member for Cardiff South and Penarth (Stephen Doughty) says “rubbish”, he is at odds with what the ICAI chief commissioner said about corruption. Indeed, the chief commissioner went on to say:
“Indeed, there is little indication that DFID has sought to address the forms of corruption that most directly affect the poor: so called ‘petty’ corruption. This is a gap in DFID’s programming that needs to be filled.”
When we have the ICAI making that point for us, it is perfectly obvious that signing up to a blank cheque of overseas spending needs to be properly monitored. The ICAI has made it clear that the Government are not doing that effectively at the moment. Now it seems that the Government do not want anybody to judge how well they are spending the money. It is completely unacceptable to taxpayers to expect them to hand over money without any proper scrutiny.
New clause 5 requires a calculation of overseas aid spending for the purposes of clause 1 and asks that the calculation of ODA includes the amount paid by the UK to the EU, welfare benefits paid to foreign nationals and welfare benefits paid to UK nationals living abroad. All those things should be included in the 0.7% target, as I do not see how they could not be described in one way or another as overseas aid.
Let me give an example to illustrate. We as a country hand over to the EU just short of £20 billion every year and I think that we receive back about £8 billion a year, although my hon. Friend the Member for Bury North is the expert in these matters. One purpose of the money that comes back to the UK is for it to be spent in the areas of greatest deprivation in the UK. That is what the European Union does and, fortunately I guess, the UK clearly does not have that many areas of mass deprivation in an EU context, which is why we get so little back compared with what we put in. The extra money that we have put in is then diverted around the rest of the EU, in effect to prop up the poorest countries and to try to bring their economies up to a level similar to that of the rest of the EU. That is the purpose of how the EU is funded: it is about taking money from the richest countries and handing it over to the poorest. If that does not constitute overseas aid, I do not know what does.
If the Minister had had the courtesy to speak for more than five seconds flat, we might have known his opinion on this, but I thought that the purpose of overseas aid was to take money from the richest countries in the world and transfer it to the poorest. That is exactly what our funding to the EU does on a European basis. That seems to me to be overseas aid, without any controversy. It therefore seems quite extraordinary that everybody now argues that that is not overseas aid, that it should not be counted as such and that it should be paid on top of it. That means that our overseas aid spending will be not 0.7% but considerably higher— probably 2% of GDP by the time we add in all these other factors.
There is a clear case that our money to the EU should be classed as overseas aid and therefore form part of this target. Then, of course, we have welfare payments paid to foreign nationals. In recent years, far too many people from other countries have come to this country and, to be honest, migration is at levels that we cannot cope with. We are regularly told by people who are in favour of all this immigration that all these people will not stay here but will go back so we should not worry about it at all. I do not believe that, but I am humouring those people. That is their argument, but if that is the case it is perfectly clear that people are coming over here to get some of our British money, as we might want to describe it, to take back to their much poorer country. That seems to me to qualify as overseas aid by anybody’s standards, because in some cases the money is passed back to the country of origin while the person is in the UK. We are basically handing our money out to benefit the economies of those much poorer countries and we give a considerable amount in that way.
The third part of the new clause involves welfare benefits paid to UK nationals living abroad. Again, this is a considerable amount. I cannot find the figures offhand, but from recollection I would say that in the region of £3.8 billion a year is given by the Department for Work and Pensions to UK nationals living in countries around the world. That money does not benefit the UK economy in any shape or form. It benefits the economy of the country where those people reside, so that is clearly UK taxpayers’ money going out to benefit the economy of the other countries around the world. It seems to me that that is also overseas aid according to anybody’s reasonable definition.
Mr Nuttall
Does my hon. Friend find it astonishing that jobseeker’s allowance is included in those benefits? It is difficult to understand why the country is paying people jobseeker’s allowance when they are not even in the country.
Philip Davies
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. You would not let me get sidetracked into discussing the definitions of benefits and how they should be paid, Mr Speaker, and I do not want to do so either, but it is worth mentioning in passing that £1 million a year of jobseeker’s allowance goes to people who live abroad. Like my hon. Friend, I am not entirely sure how they can qualify as a jobseeker, but that is a slightly incidental point.
I have the figures now for your benefit, Mr Speaker. In 2013-14, £3.6 billion of DWP money was given to people living abroad. That is a considerable amount of taxpayers’ money that benefits those countries and I do not really see why it should not count in the overseas aid budget. On all three counts, the Minister might want to explain why his Department does not think that that is the case, because he has given no indication of that at all.
New clause 5 also covers the administrative costs of the Department for International Development, its agencies and its associated public bodies. My hon. Friend the Member for Bury North touched on this and I am grateful to him for his support for my new clause in that regard. I am not entirely clear where the administrative costs for DFID and its agencies stand, and if people did not rattle through their speeches so fast, we might all actually learn something. Are administrative costs counted as overseas aid or do we say that overseas aid is paid over and above them? I am not entirely clear. I am clear, however, that they should be included in the overseas aid budget because, as my hon. Friend said, that gives the best possible guarantee that the Department will cut its cloth to ensure that as much money as possible is handed over to the people who need it most rather than being spent on self-serving bureaucracy. We are none the wiser today, but perhaps that might be clarified at some point in the future.
Mr Chope
My hon. Friend’s point about administrative costs is very important. Does he recall that when Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister, she vetoed having the Department responsible for overseas development based in what is now Richmond house in Whitehall? She thought that that would be an ostensible gross waste of money and that money being spent on overseas aid should go to the countries in need rather than being spent on administrative costs.
Philip Davies
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that intervention. As in virtually everything, Lady Thatcher was right about that. To be honest, it is a pity that her views do not carry more sway today because we would not find ourselves debating such a ridiculous and pointless Bill if she were still at the helm.
New clause 6 is about the calculation of gross national income, which, in many cases, is one of the most important parts of the Bill. We certainly should not gloss over this quickly because it involves the spending of a considerable amount of taxpayers’ money based on whatever happens to be the calculation at any one time.
This is very serious. The Minister is a good man normally—I have no idea what has come over him today. He should be ashamed of himself for not treating the matter with the seriousness that it deserves. He should explain the Government’s position.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
The situation is even worse than that. There will be pressure always to overspend above the target because in years when GDP turns out to be less good, there will be no means of clawing the money back, but where it has grown faster, there will be an expectation that more money will be paid or a statement laid. Therefore, there is a pressure in the Bill for there to be more than 0.7%.
Philip Davies
My hon. Friend is right. Nobody could deny that if the recalculation means that we have underspent, everyone will be clamouring for the extra money to be found for a non-existent project somewhere in the world just to satisfy themselves, but if the GDP figure is downgraded, there will not be many in the House calling for some of the money to be clawed back. The Bill, in effect, sets a minimum target for spending, not an amount. That is not what most people have in mind. The public will be confused about why they have to spend an extra £550 million—I have no idea where the money would come from—to meet this arbitrary target because it did not happen to match the projection that was made. That is ridiculous.
My new clause 6 means that none of those adjustments would be made. If the calculation was wrong but the money was spent in good faith on a good-faith calculation, that should be that. There should be no end-of-year recalculation of the budget based on an upgrade or a downgrade—it could work either way and I cannot predict which way it would go. It strikes me as ridiculous that the Treasury should have to dig out money from nowhere just to hit a particular target. That is why the new clause is so important.
The way in which GNI is calculated is changing: 0.7% of the old GNI is quite different from 0.7% of the new GNI. For no reason other than statisticians deciding to calculate things differently, the taxpayer will have to find hundreds of millions of pounds extra in order to hit the 0.7% target.
Mr Nuttall
Will my hon. Friend make it clear that the Office for National Statistics has had to change the way national income is measured because the ONS was required to bring it into line with the rest of the EU? It is because we are members of the EU that we have to do this.
Philip Davies
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that. I am sure everybody in the country will be pleased to know that the taxpayer has been stuffed because of the European Union—not for the first time and, no doubt, not for the last time.
The fact remains that we have a new calculation. This is not a pledge that was made in the 1970s or even when the proponents of the Bill first wanted to enshrine it in law. We are being asked to sign up to something entirely different from what we were originally told, and it will cost the British taxpayer more. If 0.7% of the old calculation was good enough, why can we not stick to that figure and that calculation? Why do we have to move to the new calculation? What evidence is there that that is necessary? What is the thinking behind it? We have had no explanation of that. Nobody has even touched on the issue. The taxpayer is expected to hand over a few extra hundreds of millions of pounds. Some in the House do not care that they are spending other people’s hard-earned money willy-nilly, but I care about people’s hard-earned money and the taxes that they pay, and I want to make sure that those are spent properly. It is just an accountancy figure to many Members, who do not care.
The GNI figure is essential. By passing the Bill unamended and without my new clause, we are at the whim of any future recalculation of GNI which requires the Government to hand over even more to hit the arbitrary 0.7% target. We should not allow that to happen. My new clause 6 would put in place safeguards for the taxpayer.
New clause 7 is also extremely important. It deals with one of the assertions from the Opposition. It provides that the Bill would take effect only after a referendum had taken place and had resulted in more than 50% of the people voting in favour of the target. I am constantly told that the target is extremely popular out in the country, that everybody wants to see it met, and that only a few reactionaries do not. I am prepared to take my case to the country and have it tested in a referendum. If more than 50% of people vote to spend all that money on overseas aid, I will be the first to accept that. I will try to make sure that the money is spent as well as possible, and I will accept the will of the people in a referendum.
Philip Davies
My hon. Friend makes the point particularly well. I am pretty confident that the majority of the public are on our side on this issue. It is important to note, in relation to new clause 6 and the percentage of GNI, that the OBR’s figures, published only this week, show that spending in every Government Department—that includes spending on health, defence, schools and education—will go down as a proportion of GDP over the next five years. I suspect that the majority of my constituents would want to protect the health budget, if anything, as a proportion of GDP.
Is not it extraordinary that we are effectively being asked to rubber-stamp a provision that will ensure that although spending in every other Government Department will go down as a proportion of GDP, spending on overseas aid will remain the same as a proportion of GDP? I cannot accept that that is the will of the British public. In fact, I am not entirely sure that we will see that it is the will of the House. I have proposed that 50% of the public should have to vote for it, but I suspect that we will not get anywhere near 50% of MPs voting for it today. Let us have some democratic legitimacy for the policy. Let us have it out in a referendum. Let the people decide what they want their taxes to be spent on.
I suspect that I will be proved right and that those arguing for the Bill will be proved wrong. Of course, if they are right, they have nothing to fear from a referendum. I want to know why they fear the public’s opinion so much—we did not hear it today because they were so determined to rattle through their speeches. I think that we should put this to the people in a referendum, given that we seem to be embarking on a new constitutional settlement. In our constitution we have never gone down this route of protecting spending for one Department as a proportion of GDP. Let us see whether the British public are in favour of that new constitutional arrangement. I fear that they are not.
Of course, if the Bill is not amended today, overseas aid will become a bigger and bigger proportion of Government spending every year, because spending by every other Department will go down as a proportion of GDP. Nobody has admitted it so far, but that, in effect, is what the Bill will sign us up to. Is that really what Members think the public want, when there is so much pressure on our public services, our military and our transport system? Do they really think that they want a higher and higher proportion of Government spending to go on overseas aid? I do not think they do. My hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch (Mr Chope) has given us the polling, which suggests that is not the case either. I would like other Members to trust the public with their own money.
Subsection (3) of new clause 7 states:
“This Act shall only have effect in those years where the United Kingdom records a budget surplus.”
We are borrowing more than we expected this year. The Chancellor gave us the figures this week. He has done an excellent job in getting the deficit down—I am the first to praise him for that—but it is still far too high. It is about £5 billion higher than he anticipated it would be at this stage. The hon. Member for Luton South (Gavin Shuker) talked about how much money the British public give to charity. We are very generous in this country when it comes to helping those less fortunate than us. That is a proud tradition that I suspect and hope will continue. I would much prefer individuals to decide which charities to give their own money to, rather than the Government deciding what they should and should not be supporting through their taxes. That is an essential principle of mine.
Philip Davies
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. I would be the first to say that when countries face some terrible humanitarian situation or natural disaster, the United Kingdom should always be at the forefront in helping them in their hour of need. However, if anybody thinks that our entire overseas aid budget goes on helping countries in their hour of need, they need to study much more closely what the budget is spent on.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
When other countries are in their greatest hour of need, it is often our armed forces who come to their rescue soonest. It would therefore be better to spend the money with them so that they can respond.
Philip Davies
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. I do not want to go down that cul de sac either, but it is worth noting in passing that we made a promise to spend 2% of GDP on defence, and that promise does not appear to have been legislated for anywhere. In fact, the OBR has calculated that, on current projections, it will actually drop to 1.5% by 2020. My hon. Friend makes a very good point on what is the most worthwhile thing to spend our money if we are to help other countries around the world.
Philip Davies
My hon. Friend makes his point well and I agree with it, but I will make no further comment, because we would be going off the rails if we started debating a different Bill.
Subsection (4) of new clause 7 would allow the Secretary of State to
“vary the target… by an order contained in a statutory instrument in response to the UK leaving or joining a multilateral organisation which itself disburses”
overseas aid. I think that we need more flexibility in the Bill. We might join an organisation that is giving aid to something we already give aid to, in which case it would be ridiculous to in effect doubt the money that is already being spent. We have no idea what our future international relationships will be and what these international organisations may or may not be doing. The Bill should therefore have some flexibility whereby if we join an organisation that is already doing what we are doing, we do not, in effect, end up doing it twice, and the Government can adjust the target to take account of that.
The final part of new clause 7 is a sunset clause whereby the Act would cease to exist in the fifth year of its being in force. I am a big fan of sunset clauses generally; they should be used more widely. Often when we pass legislation in this House, we guess or second-guess its implications, and then find that it has no end of unintended consequences, yet it stays there on the statute book causing problems because nobody can be bothered to get rid of it or find the parliamentary time to do so. It would be much more sensible if, as a matter of routine, we introduced sunset clauses so that we were forced as a House to assess how legislation was working and whether it needed to be tweaked. That would force people to come back either with the same proposal or a revised proposal taking into account what we had learned.
If overseas aid is doing what it should be doing, then it should not be there in perpetuity. This goes to the heart of why this Bill is completely ridiculous. We should be saying to countries around the world: “You’ve got some issues that you need help with. It’s your responsibility to sort out your own issues, but we’ll give you a helping hand. We expect you to sort out your own arrangements on the rule of law and governance and so on to enable inward investment to be encouraged. Once you’ve sorted yourself out with our helping hand, we can then walk away and leave you to stand on your own two feet.” Surely the purpose of overseas aid, if it has any purpose whatsoever, is to help countries to stand on their own two feet; it should not be there in perpetuity. Why, therefore, does this Bill enshrine this level of spending in perpetuity? Are we accepting that overseas aid does not make any difference to these countries—that they do not get any long-term benefit from it and it is just a short-term sticking plaster to make us feel better? If it is achieving anything on a longer-term basis, then surely we should not need to keep spending all this money but should instead be tapering it off.
A sunset clause is a sensible provision to allow us to assess five years hence what is an appropriate figure for us to spend in order to deal with the world as it then is. It is complete lunacy to say that we are going to spend 0.7% in future years when we have no idea of what the world’s circumstances will be—what countries will need help, and how much.
There is no doubt about why Labour Members agree to these things. They believe that people should be judged simply on how much money they spend on something—that it is all about input. That is what the Labour party is all about. I remember, years ago, asking the then Government why truancy had got worse under their stewardship. They told me that they had spent £1 billion on tackling truancy, as if that made it all right; they wanted to be judged simply on their input. I thought that the fact that they had spent £1 billion on something that had got worse was terrible, but that is because I am a Conservative. I do not doubt that Labour Members think they should be judged on how much they spend and that it is all about input. What astonishes me is that people who like to describe themselves as Conservatives think we should be judged only on how much we spend and on our input, and have no judgment made on our output whatsoever. A sunset clause would help by making us look at the output of what we had done and whether it was worth persevering with.
I have previously outlined the difficulty of basing how much money we spend on an ongoing calculation throughout a year. Under amendment 16 the 0.7% figure that we spent would be based on the final adjusted figure for gross national income in the preceding year. No guesswork would be involved—it would be the final adjusted figure that everybody accepted as such. The figure that would be spent the following year would be 0.7% of the previous year’s GNI.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
I accept the thrust of the amendment and what my hon. Friend is trying to achieve. However, the Office for National Statistics keeps on revising things over such an extended period that I would like to know when the final figure is deemed to be the final figure. He will be aware that the apparent double-dip recession that the socialists accused us of having turned out not to have existed once the figures were revised. This has become an increasing problem as the ONS has made more and more revisions to historical figures.
Philip Davies
My hon. Friend makes a good point. My amendment does not give any particular date for a final figure; it refers to just one. By definition, it would be the final, final figure, whenever that was reached. It may well be that as a consequence of my amendment we would be dealing with figures from two or three years previously; I am not entirely sure.
My amendment would mean that we were not guessing the figure, so the Department could work in a certain year knowing what its budget was going to be for that year and not having to guess what it might be. That has to be a much more sensible way of managing its budget than having to second-guess things. It would also avoid what might be described as local authority syndrome. Once local authorities get to the end of the year in March—in this case, it would be December because we have this ridiculous new regime for DFID—they use up the rest of their budget because they have more money than they had anticipated. Let us not have any illusions that that would not happen if we stuck to this Bill in its current form.
Amendment 16 would allow the Department to know with certainty how much money it had for the year so that it could make plans for its spending based on that certain figure. Wherever one stands on overseas aid, that has to be a much more sensible way of dealing with things. I am sure that the Minister would appreciate knowing with certainty what his budget was going to be for the year rather than having to second-guess it.
Amendment 20 would mean that we would not have to have achieved the target but only to have “progressed toward” it. That would give the Bill more flexibility so that we do not need to have huge spikes in spending to meet an arbitrary figure, but the progression would be in the same direction.
Amendment 18 refers to replacing the calendar year with the financial year. I have spoken before about why it is so important that we should do that. Nobody else reports on the basis of a calendar year. The OBR does not, and the GNI figures are not worked out on that basis. The Minister could have helped us with this. I have no idea of who is going to calculate the 0.7% figure for the calendar year. We rely on the OBR for these figures, but it does not calculate them in that way, so how will we know whether we have hit the 0.7% figure?
Jacob Rees-Mogg
Is it not obviously absurd to have one Government Department accounting on a different basis from all the other Government Departments? We cannot have one Department working to a calendar year when the whole Government budgetary process is based on a financial year. That is the fundamental flaw in the Bill.
Philip Davies
I have made that point, but I agree with my hon. Friend.
Who will calculate the calendar year figure? As far as I understand it, it will not even be domestically set, because the OBR works to a financial year and so it will not be doing it. I suspect that the decision on whether we have hit this figure will be determined solely by the international body that calculates these things on the basis of a calendar year. In effect, we are setting up Government spending without any of our own controls over it—not even with our independent body determining it for us, but rather with it being done by an international body in whose calculations and figures we may or may not have any confidence. Having our Government spending determined not by ourselves—not even in this country—but by an international body is a very dangerous precedent to set.
Amendments 21 to 26 are consequential amendments that flow from one another. They would remove several references to 0.7% and replace them with 0.35%. I believe that I may have been overly generous with the target of 0.35%, but I am a generous kind of chap. I set out earlier the fact that we give lots of overseas aid—whether to the European Union or in welfare payments—that is not covered by the Bill. When all those things were added on, even if we were to accept my amendments and make the target 0.35%, we would be spending way over 0.7%. My amendments are, therefore, rather modest.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Dawn Primarolo)
Mr Davies, that is very gracious of you. We both made our views clear last week, but today is another day. Of course I accept your apologies, because I know that you would not mean any discourtesy to the House or to whomever was in the Chair. Please continue with your speech in order.
Philip Davies
Thank you for graciousness in accepting my apology, Madam Deputy Speaker, which is, I might add, typical of you.
After that brief interlude, amendment 37 would remove clause 6(2), which states that the Act will come into effect in June 2015. My hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch has tabled a sensible amendment, and I cannot see why anybody should object to it, to the effect that the legislation should come into effect the following January. It is the will of those who promoted and sponsored the Bill, and of those on both Front Benches, that it should be a calendar year operation. I think I have made it clear that it should operate on a financial year basis. Given that they have proposed that the Bill should operate on a calendar year basis, it is quite extraordinary that they have included the provision that it should come into effect in June 2015.
How on earth do we square that circle? How on earth will we determine, at the end of 2015, whether the Government have hit their half-yearly target? If they have overspent in the first bit of 2015 but underspent in the second bit of 2015, will the evaluation state that they have missed their target, even if they have spent 0.7% over the whole year? I am happy to be corrected by anybody who claims to know any better, but it seems to me that if the Bill comes into effect in June 2015, the Government will be required to have spent 0.35% on overseas aid between June and the end of the year, otherwise they will have broken the rules. If the Government had spent, for argument’s sake, 0.4% between January and June, and at the end of the year the international body that is set up to scrutinise how much every country has spent says that we have spent 0.72%, are we going to chastise ourselves because in the second half of the year we did not meet the legal requirement? I genuinely do not understand that. Perhaps the Minister could explain what his obligations will be under the Bill as drafted.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
My hon. Friend raises a very serious and important point, because it is not the usual practice of this House to pass retrospective legislation. Indeed, as a constitutional principle it is very bad to pass retrospective legislation.
Philip Davies
I agree. I am not entirely sure how any money spent in the first half of 2015 will apply to the Bill. It is a shame that the Minister could not give any explanation as to why it should start in June. Perhaps the Bill’s promoter, the right hon. Member for Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk, can shed some light on the importance of June 2015. Surely it makes sense to begin at the start of a calendar year if the provision is to be judged on the basis of a calendar year.
My new schedule 2 is a consequence of new clause 4 and would bring the Bill back to how it was envisaged by its promoter when he moved its Second Reading. I am happy to leave it to him to explain why the IIDO is so important. He was the one who put it in the Bill in the first place and I presume he did so not because it was pointless, useless, unnecessary or ridiculous, but because it was very sensible. My new clause 4 and new schedule 2 give him the opportunity to explain why this particular international body is so important. Perhaps we could test the will of the House on whether it should be reinserted, given that the House as a whole voted for it only for a small Committee to take it out.
My hon. Friend the Member for Bury North made a very good case for new clause 1, which builds on the work of my right hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield and deals with the bodies that he brought into being. In effect, it would be a vote of confidence in them. Given the ICAI quote I gave earlier on the Government’s poor efforts in tackling corruption and how it affects the poorest people around the world, I think the ICAI rightly has a reputation for standing up to the Government and holding them to account. That is to the credit of my right hon. Friend and the ICAI. Given that it has shown its independence of mind and robustness, my hon. Friend the Member for Bury North made a very good case for giving it the independent oversight envisaged when the Bill came into being. There should be proper oversight of how the Government spend this money; they should not just be left to mark their own homework, as the Bill currently allows them to do.
New clause 2 was tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset (Jacob Rees-Mogg) and I have added my name to it. It would reduce the salaries of Cabinet Ministers by £1,000 a year if they did not meet the target they had imposed. Even though I have argued against the target and think it is a mistake, I do believe that Ministers should be held accountable for the legislation they pass. There is an important principle at stake. If the Government are going to pass such completely meaningless legislation, they should be held to account for it.
The Minister decried those of us who think that the salaries of Cabinet Ministers should be cut by £1,000 if they do not meet the target. He said that we were, in effect, arguing against ourselves, but the reality is quite the contrary—if the Government spend less than 0.7% and if Cabinet Ministers think it is so important, I would be very happy to see them topping it up with their own money. I do not think I am arguing against myself at all; all I am saying is that I would rather that those who argue in favour of spending all this money paid for it out of their own money rather than expect everyone else to cough up for their grandiose schemes.
Mr Nuttall
Is my hon. Friend aware that, in an August 2012 report specifically on the introduction of targets in legislation, the Institute for Government made it clear that having no teeth or penalties to back them up
“brings into question the point of putting a target into law in the first place”?
Philip Davies
I absolutely agree with that. Apparently this ridiculous Bill is very important, but there is no sanction if the Government do not deliver on it. Surely there must be some sanction available. If I understand the Bill correctly, the only sanction is that the Government would have to make a statement to the House—and that’s it! It does not even have to be an oral statement; it could be a written statement. What a complete joke! This is a piece of joke legislation and I am afraid that the Government are treating us with contempt by having no sanction in place if they do not deliver on it.
Philip Davies
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. This sort of thing brings this place into contempt with the public. We have to guard against that.
I agree wholeheartedly with amendments 5 and 6, which were tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset, who will be able to offer a much better explanation of their merits. He also tabled amendments 7 and 8. Amendment 7 is very good. At present, the only sanction is that the Government will have to make a statement on why they have not achieved their target
“as soon as reasonably practicable”.
When will that be? What does that mean? Will we have to wait for a report to come out a year hence? It is completely meaningless and I cannot believe that anyone has fallen for it. My hon. Friend’s amendment, which is very sensible indeed and should be welcomed by the whole House, says that the statement should be made after
“no more than 10 days during which both Houses of Parliament are sitting”.
That would genuinely hold the Government’s feet to the fire, but, of course, in their haste to get anything on the statute book, it appears that, as usually happens on a Friday, hon. Members on both sides of the House are happy to accept it, even though it is completely meaningless.
I have to say to my hon. Friend that I do not agree with amendment 8. He wants to leave out the subsections in clause 2 that give reasons for why the Government have not hit the target. I will conclude shortly, so I hope my hon. Friend will be able to offer an explanation. Perhaps I have read it wrongly, but it seems to me that there are some reasons in the Bill as drafted for why the Government may not have hit their target of 0.7%. I would like to see as many of those reasons as possible in the Bill, but my hon. Friend wants to take them out.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
I simply do not think it is right for a statement, which is a proceeding in Parliament, to be the subject of legislation. I think it is a direct interference in our proceedings through the legislative process.
Philip Davies
I take my hon. Friend’s point. He is usually right on most things, so I always err on the side of thinking that he is right. I am still not entirely persuaded; he may be able to have a better go in a bit. I am happy to see some reasons for why the Government may not have been able to hit their target, and I would like to see them expanded rather than taken away. My hon. Friend has some work to do to persuade me to accept amendment 8.
Amendment 9 is very good. It basically says that if the Government do not hit the target, no action needs to be taken, which seems sensible. Amendment 10 does the same thing. Amendment 11 is a hybrid amendment in some respects, because I agree with clause 2(3), but disagree with subsection (4). My hon. Friend wants to take out both subsections. As I made clear earlier, I think that subsection (3) is helpful, because it gives reasons for why the Government may not have hit their target. Subsection (4) is completely pointless, so I agree with removing it.
My hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch has tabled some amendments as well. Amendment 1, which would leave out clause 3, is very sensible. It relates to the point about accountability to Parliament. It is clear that it is a meaningless clause. There is no accountability whatever for the measures in the Bill. Rather than pretending that there is, we ought to put the Bill out of its misery, be honest that there is no accountability and leave it at that.
We have discussed amendment 3, which is about the Bill coming into force on 1 January 2016. I cannot see how anyone can disagree with that—it is just common sense.
Amendment 2 is also a very good amendment. My hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch has a track record of tabling telling and sensible amendments, and he has struck oil again. Clause 5 states:
“The Secretary of State must make arrangements for the independent evaluation”
to show that there has been
“value for money in relation to the purposes for which it is provided.”
He wants to add that the way in which the money has been spent is
“relevant, sustainable and capable of having a measurable impact.”
I agree absolutely. Does anyone here disagree that the money should be spent in a way that is relevant, sustainable and capable of having a measurable impact? If they vote down amendment 2, they will, in effect, be saying that they do not think that it should be spent in that way. Of course it should be spent in that way. It would be helpful if the proponents of the Bill accepted that amendment as an improvement to the Bill to ensure that the money is spent as properly as possible.
The only point on which I take issue with my hon. Friend is the use of the word “sustainable”. It is one of those words that everybody bandies around, but nobody really knows what it means.
Philip Davies
I applaud my hon. Friend for his ingenuity. Everybody is in favour of sustainability, but nobody knows what it means. It is a bit like social justice—everybody is in favour of it, but nobody really knows how to define it. Sustainability is definitely in that camp. I agree that it is hard to see how anybody can disagree with it, particularly the proponents of the Bill, as he says.
I have had a quick canter around an awful lot of amendments. I think that there are 30-odd amendments in the group. I apologise to the House for going through them so rapidly, but everybody wants to make progress. I look forward to hearing the proponents of the other amendments make a more cogent case than I have been able to make. As I made clear, I do not fully understand some of them. It is a great shame that the Minister and the shadow Minister have treated the House with such contempt and not even bothered to engage with the amendments that have been tabled or explain their position. One day, I hope that they will come to regret that. Some of my hon. Friends and I will keep arguing for common sense. I would love to hear why everyone in the House, other than a few of us, is against the Bill being put to a referendum.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
I have tabled a number of amendments to the Bill, which I will speak to before turning to some of the amendments that have been tabled by my hon. Friends. I have tabled amendments in a number of categories. Some are intended to make the Bill achieve what it is intended to achieve, and some are offered up in a less friendly spirit towards the Bill, of which I fundamentally disapprove.
I will start with the most important proposal—the one that is intended to make the Bill serious. It seems to me that a lot of fine words are being spoken in passing a Bill that can do nothing at all: it has no sanction, but is merely an intention, an expression of good will. That is not the sort of reason for which legislation is passed. It does not have that majesty and authority that the statute book ought to have; it is a wish, a hope, a desire, but it is not something of fundamental strength and importance. Hence my new clause 2.
We hear from all parts of the House lots of pious talk and fine words about how important it is that we spend this money, but when it is suggested that there should be some enforcement of how the money is spent—that there should be some penalty if it is not spent—we hear that it is not possible, it is too difficult, it is unfair on the Ministers concerned. Surely it is simply a matter of making our legislative desire effective. If Ministers and shadow Ministers do not support new clause 2, one has to think that the Bill is merely a matter of fine words and pieties, and not a serious legislative desire.
That is why I challenge Front Benchers on both sides to accept new clause 2. I challenge them to do so on a bipartisan basis, because it is deliberately phrased so that the penalty comes into effect in the following financial year, so that if there is a change of Government, it will affect the incoming Ministers. Why? Because they all buy into this proposal. They are all in favour of frittering away public money overseas—of spending 0.7% of our wealth there, even though the statistical evidence is not available until some time after the money is supposed to have been spent. There are in-year revisions that inevitably lead to money being spent without the proper rigour being applied. Let them show that they really mean it, that they really are in this together, and that they really do subscribe to the pieties that they propose—to the fine words and grandiloquent sentiments that they express up and down the country—by saying that if they do not achieve it, they will accept a fine of £1,000 on their Cabinet colleagues in the following year.
One thousand pounds is the amount that has traditionally been used in this House to indicate the disapproval of the performance of a particular Minister in his or her duties, and it makes for a sensible extension to the Bill. I do not believe that anyone who supports the Bill can oppose new clause 2, because if they oppose it, they do not really mean what they say. Without this new clause, there is no effective mechanism of enforcement.
My hon. Friend the Member for Bury North (Mr Nuttall) said that there would be no teeth to the Bill without the new clause. Without the new clause, there are not even dentures, there are not even gums, to gnaw away at the failures that there may be in implementing the details of the Bill. Let us put in some mild teeth—some teeth that will have a little bit of a bite, but not a huge one. One thousand pounds will not devastate the financial circumstances of a Cabinet Minister over the course of the ensuing year, but it will make them put their money where their mouth is.
That is important, because this House is very good at spending taxpayers’ money and very happy to send it around the world, but what happens if we say instead, “No, it won’t be taxpayers, but the Ministers themselves who find that their money is reduced if they don’t do what they say.”? They run away, they are scared, they are frit, they do not like it, but they are quite happy to spend taxpayers’ money all around the world on projects that may or may not succeed, with almost no accountability to this House or anywhere else.
I am surprised that the shadow Minister, who is a sensible and wise fellow, has not decided to take up my new clause and put it forward as an Opposition proposal. I thought that I could reasonably have expected the Opposition to add their names to it as an indication of their passion for overseas aid—not a passion that I share, but one that is honourable, as long as it is taken to its logical conclusion. Hence, new clause 2 tries to pave the way for people to support what they believe in and what they want to do, by ensuring that it has meaning and meat, rather than being a simple expression of will.
Why do I dislike mere expressions of will in legislation? I do not believe that mere expressions of will are what Acts of Parliament are for. Acts of Parliament are not there to say that we believe in motherhood and apple pie, even though I happen to approve of both. I think that motherhood is a wonderful thing and I like apple pie, particularly if the apples are from Somerset and cream and sugar are provided, but that is not a matter for legislation. To put wish lists into legislation is a poor way of legislating. All legislation needs to have a consequence if it is ignored. It must not be free of any form of consequence and, therefore, open to being ignored by any future Government.
The only penalty provided for in the Bill is that a statement must be laid before the House. Statements are laid before the House every day. If Members look at the back of today’s Hansard, they will find a very interesting statement by my hon. Friend the Minister for Culture and the Digital Economy on a meeting that took place in Brussels on 27 November 2014. It is an important statement and an important part of European scrutiny, but the Government are not going to stand or fall on a written statement. Whether he made it today, yesterday or in a week’s time is not fundamental to how this nation is governed, and so, as a sanction, it is entirely worthless. Not even an oral statement is required. One wonders why the promoter and sponsors of the Bill have not come up with a suitable sanction. They may have thought of one that was better than the one I could—
Mark Hunter
claimed to move the closure (Standing Order No. 36).
Question put forthwith, That the Question be now put.
The House proceeded to a Division.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Dawn Primarolo)
I ask the Serjeant at Arms to investigate the delay in the No Lobby.
Michael Moore (Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk)
I beg to move, That the Bill be now read the Third time.
Let me say—on behalf of most of us, perhaps—that I am delighted that we have reached Third Reading. The Bill seeks to commit us, as a country, to contributing 0.7% of our GNI to official development assistance each year. [Interruption.]
Madam Deputy Speaker (Mrs Eleanor Laing)
Order. Will Members who are leaving the Chamber please do so quickly and quietly? The right hon. Member for Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk (Michael Moore) has an important speech to make, and it ought to be heard.
Michael Moore
Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker.
The Bill matters because UK aid—from emergency relief and humanitarian assistance to capacity-building and economic development—saves lives and transforms lives. By enshrining this commitment in law, the parties represented in the Chamber honour the election commitments of 2010, and the coalition honours the coalition agreement; but what is perhaps more important is that we give predictability to our aid expenditure, critically for our partners and for the recipients of the assistance. We show leadership internationally, which can be used to press other rich countries to join us, the first G7 country to reach the United Nations target, and we move the debate forward to focus on how we allocate our official development assistance, not how much we spend on it. I recognise the need for the expenditure to be properly scrutinised, and the requirement for “independent evaluation” adds to the scrutiny that the House and its Committees provide.
I thank all the Bill’s supporters. There has been cross-party consensus on this issue since the publication of the first draft Bill back in 2010, and campaign groups and non-governmental organisations have given the Bill immense support. I am proud that, today, our country appears to be taking another important step, and doing everything that it should to help the poorest and most vulnerable in the world.
Mary Creagh (Wakefield) (Lab)
I pay tribute to the right hon. Member for Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk (Michael Moore). Without his efforts, we would not be here debating this important Bill. I also want to thank all Members who took the time to remain here today, and my hon. Friend the Member for Preston (Mark Hendrick), whose attempt to pass this Bill into law was blocked by some of the usual suspects the first time around. I thank, too, the campaign groups, NGOs, faith groups and charities, and people of good will across the United Kingdom who support this Bill. Few votes in this place can, with certainty, be said to save millions of lives; this one will.
British aid money built the sexual violence unit at Panzi hospital in Bukavu, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Our money supports the work of Dr Denis Mukwege in repairing the bodies and minds of women and girls who have suffered sexual violence and torture. When I visited in 2006, I heard how women were being kidnapped by militia groups and then gang-raped every night. The women and their babies will be rejected, or even killed, if they return to their villages. Dr Mukwege and his hospital give them a precious second chance at life.
British aid funds a Save the Children maternity hospital in Burundi that I visited in 2009, where one in five children dies before their fifth birthday. British aid invested £24 million helping Rwanda set up its own tax system after the genocide. That investment has been repaid in collected tax revenues many, many times over. Labour in government more than tripled the aid budget from £2.1 billion to £8.5 billion. We worked with other countries to cancel $200 billion of debt and to lift 3 million people out of poverty every year. We helped to establish the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.
As well as being morally right, Britain’s international development spending is in Britain’s national interest. We face huge challenges today. After a summer of conflict in Syria, Iraq, Gaza, the Central African Republic and South Sudan, we have the largest refugee crisis since world war two. There is also climate change and food insecurity, human trafficking and terrorism, and 1 million children die on their first and only day. There are also 168 million child labourers, and 17 million people living with HIV because of a lack of access to antiretroviral drugs to save their lives. These are huge challenges—global challenges—and it is in Britain’s interests to tackle them at the global level. By passing this Bill today, the UK will become the first country in the G8 to do so. While we have seen attempts by some Members to frustrate this Bill’s progress, we are many, they are few.
This Bill will ensure that aid becomes more effective, and provides long-term certainty for aid workers working in difficult, dangerous conditions. This Bill will be a catalyst to action by other countries, as next year the world agrees the sustainable development goals and how we can end global poverty over the next 15 years. Today we mark the first anniversary of Nelson Mandela’s death. Today we have an historic chance to honour his memory and to change this world for the better.
The promise to pass this legislation was in all three of our party manifestos. People complain that politicians make promises they do not keep. Today is our chance to keep our solemn promise to the poorest people in the world. Today, with this Bill, we stand with them in solidarity. The poorest people deserve more than charity. They deserve justice, so let us get on with it.
Mr Swayne
The Government support the Bill, and I believe that, in the face of an enormous humanitarian crisis across the world, it is a very timely Bill, and a Bill that meets our long-term commitments and the commitments we made at the last general election.
I want to pay tribute to my right hon. Friend the Member for Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk (Michael Moore) for his dedication and his co-operation in Committee, but I also want to pay tribute to my right hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr Mitchell), because I do not believe that I as a Minister in this Government would be at this Dispatch Box giving support to this Bill if it were not for the work he did, principally in opposition but then in the Government as Secretary of State. We owe him a tremendous debt of gratitude for the work he did.
My right hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield did something else as well. I believe we have improved this Bill since it came to us on Second Reading. In Committee we took out what was the old clause 5, and now the Bill requires the Secretary of State to report to this House. It underlines the primacy of this House. She is under a requirement to show how she has established that the calculation of whether we have reached the 0.7% commitment is independently verified. His singular contribution in creating the Independent Commission for Aid Impact put in place this independent mechanism that measures our aid, scrutinises it and ensures that it is of the highest standard. That will also be the body that will establish the independently verified figures, so I twice commend him on what he has done.
This is an excellent and timely Bill, and I hope it will be passed today.
Dr Eilidh Whiteford (Banff and Buchan) (SNP)
You will be pleased to learn, Madam Deputy Speaker, that I do not intend to detain the House for long, but I do want to put on record my wholehearted support for this Bill and the Scottish National party’s support for it. I also want to congratulate the right hon. Member for Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk (Michael Moore) on his perseverance and patience in bringing it forward.
Given that enshrining the 0.7% commitment was in the manifestos of parties across this House, it is perhaps disappointing that it has taken until now, and taken private Members’ business, to reach this point, but perhaps more disappointing is the fact that today’s debate has been dominated by such protracted discussion of trivial and spoiler amendments instead of the most important issues and the substance of the Bill.
Aid is not a trivial matter. Thousands of people in our constituencies understand that it saves and transforms lives, and they understand the value of the UK’s aid contribution. Many of our constituents give their own hard-earned money to organisations that are tackling the underlying causes of poverty, and they expect us to keep the promise that was made in 1970 to play our part as a responsible member of the international community. If we failed to pass this Bill, we would be letting them down, we would be letting down the millions of people who could benefit from our interventions, and we would be letting ourselves down by failing to live up to the expectations of those who have trusted us to do the right thing.
Mr Andrew Mitchell (Sutton Coldfield) (Con)
I will not detain the House for long, but I want to add my congratulations to my right hon. Friend the Member for Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk (Michael Moore) on piloting this Bill through the House so skilfully. I also want to say that it is a matter of huge pride to many of us in the House and to our constituents that this Bill will, we hope, reach the statute book before too long. It puts into operation a promise that all the three main parties in this House have made to the public. It is not only the right thing to do, but it is hugely in Britain’s national interests. It not only makes some of the poorest people in the world more secure, safer and less conflict-ridden; it also helps to make them more prosperous, and it does the same thing for Britain, too—it makes us safer and more prosperous in the long term. It is a huge investment in the future lives of our children and grandchildren.
The one point I want to emphasise is that passing a Bill like this in this House places a strong obligation on us to ensure that the taxpayer is getting value for money: that we are delivering these results on the ground; that when we take a pound of hard-earned taxpayer’s money, we really do deliver 100 pence of value.
I have some sympathy with the comments that some of my hon. Friends made about value for money and the importance of the Independent Commission for Aid Impact. As the Minister just said, the ICAI is the right body to tell the public—the taxpayer—whether the money is being well spent. We made a commitment in opposition to set up an independent commission, and we did so after the election when we were in government. Many voices from the civil service and the international development community urged us not to set it up, but we did so. As I know, it is an uncomfortable experience for Ministers to see its findings, but this was the right thing to do. In deciding to pass the Bill today, this House must acknowledge that the other side of the coin is to accept independent evaluation from a body reporting to Parliament, the legislature, not to Ministers in the Executive, to ensure that the money is being well spent.
Britain is a brilliant exponent of international development. We are very good at it, but when we get it wrong we must put our hands up, and we must have the self-confidence to accept the discipline of independent evaluation by the ICAI. The commission is very well run by Graham Ward and his fellow commissioners, John Githongo, Mark Foster and Diana Good. They have already done a great job, and we must have the confidence in ourselves in order to have the confidence in them to ensure that the ICAI is now a permanent part of the international development architecture.
Mark Reckless (Rochester and Strood) (UKIP)
It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr Mitchell). The whole House and many out there in the country will appreciate the integrity of his work and the commitment that he gave as Secretary of State for International Development. Although it was not a particularly high hurdle, the record and reputation of British aid—particularly that part of our spending that goes through the European Union—is now significantly higher, and his reputation reflects his work in that area.
I wish to oppose this Third Reading and the principle behind the Bill—[Hon. Members: “What a surprise!”] I listen to the heckling coming from all round the House as I say that—[Hon. Members: “Absolutely right!”] And it continues. Right hon. and hon. Members would do well to realise that the extent of the disconnect between what they want to do and what their constituents want is nowhere greater than in the area of overseas aid. The most recent poll I have seen was conducted by YouGov. On the question of whether we should increase or decrease our overseas aid, 66% said we should decrease it, and only 7% said we should increase it. In this House, however, the ratio of support seems to be even stronger in the other direction, with Members simply ignoring what their constituents want to see happening in this area.
There is a cosy cartel of establishment parties that ignore what their constituents want in this area, and instead choose—[Hon. Members: “Utter rubbish!”] Again we hear the heckling of Members who do not want to listen to the facts on how their constituents feel about what they purport to do in their name—[Interruption.]
Madam Deputy Speaker (Mrs Eleanor Laing)
Order. Before the hon. Gentleman takes an intervention, may I ask the House to give him the courtesy that has been given to other Members this morning? He might have something important to say.
Mark Reckless
I give way to the hon. Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn).
Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Lab)
I thank the hon. Gentleman for giving way. He is obviously not aware that very large numbers of people in this county feel passionately about inequality in the world, about the Ebola crisis and about many other crises, and that they believe that donating money, through the taxpayer and individually, to help to alleviate that terrible suffering involves a moral duty as well as a public good.
Mark Reckless
I am aware that there is a significant number of people in that category, and I pay tribute to what many of them do through their private charity in choosing to give their own money to charitable causes, whether here or overseas. But that is not what we are talking about here. We are talking about taking away money from our constituents under threat of law and forcibly transferring it overseas. I say again that reputable polling on what our constituents believe shows that two thirds of them want to reduce overseas aid and only 7% fall into the category that contains almost everyone in this Chamber, who want it to increase.
Mark Reckless
No, I want to finish my point.
I say again that that polling is simply ignored by a cosy cartel of establishment parties that put aside what their constituents want and displace it with what they want instead—
Stephen Pound
Thank you very much indeed. I am sure that the hon. Gentleman is aware that, every month, 30 million people support charities. May I remind him that this is not an either/or? Many of those people wish not only to give money personally but to see their country, their nation, supporting people who have nothing when we have so much. Will he at least accept the fact that there is a spirit of decency, generosity and giving abroad in the land, even if it has not quite become apparent to him yet?
Mark Reckless
I do accept that spirit, and I believe that people deserve great credit when they give voluntarily, out of their own resources. What I object to is Members of this House forcing people to give their money to overseas aid through the force of law, when only 7% of our electorate support that course of action.
Mr Swayne
The last opinion poll I saw showed that when people were asked what they thought we were giving in international aid, they said 15%. So perhaps there will be dancing in the streets of Rochester when the hon. Gentleman returns and tells his constituents that we have cut it to 0.7%.
Mark Reckless
I thank the Minister for his intervention. It reveals the extent of the weight he attaches to the views of our constituents. Members are voting in large numbers to increase and put into law the 0.7%, which represents a rising amount of output, as though they were doing something on behalf of their constituents, when they know that the vast majority of their constituents do not want them to do that.
Philip Davies
Does the hon. Gentleman agree that his constituents, like mine, would not support the premise of the Bill, which means that, as spending as a percentage of GDP goes down as the cost of government as a whole is reduced, the Government will be spending a higher and higher percentage of their income on overseas aid? My constituents certainly would not want that, and I am sure that his would not want it either.
Mark Reckless
The hon. Gentleman is quite correct. He is one of the very few Members who appear actually to vote as their constituents would wish them to.
We have heard today that the numbers are being revised upwards still further. We are now going to be spending £12.4 billion on overseas aid. My party wants to reduce that amount—[Interruption.] We do not want to eliminate it entirely, as the hon. Member for Shipley (Philip Davies) might wish, but we want to cut it by 85%. That would give us a saving of £10.5 billion to spend on the priorities of our constituents.
The other question that Members around the House simply seem to ignore is that of whether we as a country can afford this. If we want to give overseas aid on a sustainable basis, we have to sell overseas more than we buy from overseas, yet we now have a current account deficit coming close to 5% of GDP. That figure is usually the sign of a country in crisis and in an unsustainable position, yet we are going to enshrine in law an obligation to make an overseas transfer of 0.7% of our GDP indefinitely, through force of law.
We saw the autumn statement and the Office for Budget Responsibility and its three-men-and-a-dog approach to forecasting the current account deficit. This blithely assumed that the 5% gap would disappear and become less than 2% over the forecast horizon. For some reason, it was assumed that overseas transfers would trend lower, but there is no serious prospect of that happening while we are handing over 0.7% of our resources as overseas aid, never mind our contributions to the EU and the rising amount of remittances that we see transferred overseas as a result of the degree of immigration we have seen in this country.
Caroline Lucas (Brighton, Pavilion) (Green)
The hon. Gentleman clearly does not see the point of giving aid for humanitarian or compassionate reasons, but will he at least acknowledge the self-interest involved? Would he acknowledge that, if we want a safer, more secure world, with fewer people being forced to leave their countries—which his party certainly does not like—sharing our wealth more equally would be a very good way of achieving that?
Mark Reckless
No, I do not acknowledge that; the idea that by giving all this overseas aid we are reducing immigration to our country is complete baloney. Immigration tends to come much more from middle income people; the most strife-torn and poorest people do not have the money to pay people smugglers to come illegally to our country. I do not think the argument the hon. Lady makes is right, and the evidence does not support the idea that overseas aid reduces immigration or benefits us from a selfish perspective of leading to more trade. Indeed, we completely untied aid from trade. Other countries, most notably France, have traditionally tried to bring some benefit to constituents and companies by saying, “We will give you this aid but it should be spent in this way which will benefit not only your countries, but our constituents.” By untying aid in that way, we have made it even less popular than it previously was.
There is an idea that we can somehow sustain giving away 0.7% on overseas aid every year, even when we are borrowing 5% of our output every year and we have no plans to put that right. Even the OBR says that our exports are going to grow more slowly than our imports; it just has preposterous assumptions that suddenly we are going to get 2.5% of extra GDP from investment income and somehow transfers are going to decline—they are not. All this money we are giving in overseas aid we are borrowing—and doing so from overseas. We are purporting to be a rich country that is able to give this great handout of 0.7% of everything we produce every year, but we are not giving what we produce—we are giving money that we are borrowing from overseas. These are debts we are building up for our children and our grandchildren. We see the other forecast that debt as a proportion of household income in that sector is going to go up to 180% of GDP, and that is partly happening to pay the taxes this Government need in order to give away 0.7% of their output to overseas. People here should think about what our constituents want and about whether it is sustainable to give away this amount of money when we are actually having to borrow it all from overseas.
Stephen Doughty
The hon. Gentleman has tried to paint a picture of a cosy cartel and of us not listening to our constituents. Does he believe that, given that we have all listened to the voices of many churchgoers, mosque-goers and synagogue-goers in our constituencies, all of whom have written to us, and to the voices of people such as the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Catholic cardinals, the leaders of all the major faiths and many others, who have all urged us to be here today to vote for this Bill? Does he think we should not be listening to their voices? Does he think they are part of some sort of cosy cartel?
Mark Reckless
I think right hon. and hon. Members should listen to all our constituents. The problem is that we listen greatly to those who write to us and lobby us on these matters, but we ignore the fact that the vast majority of our constituents are opposed to what they want. That is why I refer to the radical tradition—the tradition of Gladstonian finance. It is now being represented not in the hon. Gentleman’s party but in mine, because the vast majority of working-class people in this country do not want to give vast amounts of their income to the Government, including for it to be given away in overseas aid.
Martin Horwood (Cheltenham) (LD)
The hon. Gentleman should know that Gladstone said the lives of the hill tribesmen in the wilds of Afghanistan were as “inviolable” in the “eyes of almighty God” as are our own. Gladstone was a champion of humanitarian intervention in other parts of the world and he would have been proud of our turning up to save lives today. The hon. Gentleman should not quote him in defence of his mean-minded approach.
Mark Reckless
I could not disagree more. The difference between the Liberal Democrat party today and the Liberal party of Gladstone could not be greater. What Gladstone would have welcomed—what he was extolling—was private charity. The last thing he would want is the Government to tax people—on the pain of fines unless they give their money, and of going to prison if they do not pay the fines—and for that money to be used as a political class at the top of that country might discern, giving away overseas 0.7% of everything we earn, when we are actually having to borrow 5% of our output, from overseas, in order to finance it. That is the complete antithesis of everything Gladstone stood for, as is what the hon. Gentleman’s party has become.
We may be able to find a degree of consensus on my final point. The only good principle of this Bill is that it sets a precedent for this House taking back control of Government spending, which we abandoned in the 1930s. During that period of national Government, with an overwhelming majority, right hon. and hon. Members of this House gave up scrutinising effectively the spending of government. We now have instead three estimates days a year, when we debate everything except the spending estimates, and then we have one or two votes a year that almost invariably go through nem con, and there is no real scrutiny of spending. So the principle of saying what public spending every Department or activity should have, and putting that into legislation or at least into a process where this House can effectively hold Ministers to account, is a good one. However, specifying a minimum without a maximum is not a sensible way to do it.
Mr Chope
It is a great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Rochester and Strood (Mark Reckless). I used to enjoy listening to him when he was a compassionate Conservative and now he is a compassionate “UKIPer”. He brings a lot of wisdom to this debate. It is important that we realise that what he has just articulated is the view of not just members of the United Kingdom Independence party, but of many members of the Conservative party, including a lot of my hon. Friends who have participated in these debates. Unfortunately, this is the first contribution I have been able to make to the debate on this Bill, because I was unable to speak on Second Reading, I did not serve on the Public Bill Committee and I was not able to speak to the amendments I had tabled on Report because the Bill’s promoter moved a closure motion, which was rather undemocratic.
Mark Reckless
Let me ask the hon. Gentleman a question about his statement that so many Conservative Members and supporters share his and my view on these issues. Why is that view so poorly represented within the Conservative parliamentary party, and why we have had only six or so people in the No Lobby today?
Mr Chope
I am not sure that it is represented only by a small number of Conservative Members. We saw during these proceedings that the preponderance of people supporting the Bill were on the Opposition Benches and I suspect that a lot of Conservative Members have grave concerns about the Bill—
Mr Chope
They are not here at the moment, but I cannot answer as to where they are. I do know that the Chair of the Treasury Committee, who was in the same Lobby as me in the first vote earlier today, and his Committee have produced some important work on this subject. That Committee has reached a consensus on a number of issues relating to ring-fencing overseas aid and the way a Bill such as this can distort the public expenditure decision making that should be being done by the Government.
Mike Thornton (Eastleigh) (LD)
When the hon. Gentleman has left this House after this debate, will he do me the great favour of reading Luke 10, chapters 25 to 37 and ask himself the question: who then is my neighbour? May I ask him to do that?
Mr Chope
The hon. Gentleman is entitled to his own views, but the misunderstanding at the heart of his intervention is that he probably thinks we should equate generosity in spending other people’s money with generosity in spending our own money. Those of us on my side of the argument are keen to encourage people to participate in giving aid for good causes, including causes overseas. We support, and have campaigned strongly for, encouraging tax relief for those sorts of donations. It is easy for people to say, “I want to be generous with somebody else’s money.” As the hon. Member for Rochester and Strood has just said, we are talking about being generous with money—taxpayers’ money—that we do not have but will have to borrow. We should be very careful before we put a burden on future generations.
Mark Reckless
As well as support for inoculations and clean water, the area of overseas aid that my party does support is emergency disaster relief, as there is a particular role for Governments and their mechanisms for working quickly. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that emergency relief is one area in which Governments can do useful work?
Mr Chope
Absolutely. That is one area in which the British people are traditionally incredibly generous. I am talking about humanitarian disasters such as Ebola and the ghastly happenings in Syria at the moment. The British people as individuals are prepared to put their hands in their pockets to get out their own money and to contribute to these causes. Taxpayer support is at its best when it is in the form of matched-funding, because then the taxpayers’ money follows what the people want. We get into problems when we have an administrative Department second-guessing what people think and then saying, “Let’s have a slab of money thrown here and another slab there.” That is when overseas aid falls into disrepute.
In an earlier intervention, I quoted from the 2012 British social attitudes survey. I think it is worth re-emphasising what I said. When asked what their highest priority would be for extra Government spending against a list of possible options, 41.9% of people said health, 30% said education and 0.5% said overseas aid. When asked for their next preference, 31.5% said education, 29.5% said health and 0.5% said overseas aid. The problem is that people do not want extra taxpayers’ money to be spent in this area at a time when the increases in public expenditure on health and education are not as great as those on overseas aid.
Philip Davies
Does my hon. Friend agree that it is important for the public to know the whole truth about this Bill? As all parties have agreed that spending cuts need to take place in the next Parliament, the truth is that the more that is spent on overseas aid, the more that will need to be cut from other Departments such as health and education.
Mr Chope
That must be correct. If we have a pot with a declining amount of money, we may be taking out more from that pot for one particular topic—overseas aid. We know now that, as a result of the change in the GDP, we will be spending an extra £400 million next year on overseas aid, raising the total amount to £12.4 billion.
Mr Angus Brendan MacNeil (Na h-Eileanan an Iar) (SNP)
If the hon. Gentleman has any concerns about spending money that the UK does not have—indeed the UK has been in deficit since 2001—nuclear weapons, and not overseas aid, should be the target. Do he and his colleagues oppose any renewal of Trident?
Madam Deputy Speaker (Mrs Eleanor Laing)
Order. The hon. Gentleman well knows that this Bill is a narrow one. I appreciate that he is answering the point made by the hon. Gentleman, and it is perfectly reasonable for him to do so, but I am sure that he will not stray into discussing any other Bills whether in his name or that of any other Members.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
This Bill sets such a bad precedent that we should not follow it in other areas, and we should look to repeal it rather than extending the precedent right, left and centre.
Mr Chope
As always, there is logic in what my hon. Friend says, but, as Madam Deputy Speaker has said, I will not go down the route of making comparisons between this Bill and any other Bill that may or may not be discussed in due course. Over the coming weeks, I shall try to work out a convincing response to my hon. Friend’s intervention.
Cross-party consensus often results in rather woolly legislation. My concern, like that of my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset (Jacob Rees-Mogg), is that this Bill is an exercise in tokenism; it is gesture politics. It is about raising expectations beyond what is actually going to be delivered by the Bill itself. Clause 1 sets down a statutory duty. Normally, a breach of statutory duty is something against which an individual or an organisation can litigate. They can sue in the courts against the Government for being in breach of a statutory duty. Clauses 2 and 3 negate that possibility. What they say is that notwithstanding the statutory duty set out in clause 1, there is no remedy in law; the only remedy is through a report to Parliament. There is not even a requirement for a debate. The promoters and supporters of the Bill see this as a fantastic breakthrough in law-making. They believe that they now have a new statutory duty to meet a target, but when one looks at the detail of it, one sees that it is a statutory duty without any right or ability to enforce it.
When I was a law student, I was told that there was no point in having a command in law without a sanction. It seems that this Bill fails to deliver an effective sanction against a failure to fulfil the duty set out in clause 1—whether or not one supports that duty. I fear that this Bill shows that we in this House are out of touch with the wishes of the British people, and it will, in the end, disappoint in practice.
As people realise the distorting effect that this measure will have on other spending plans, hostility towards it will increase. In its report on the autumn statement of 2013, the Treasury Committee said:
“Ring-fencing, by definition, requires that the balance of public expenditure restraint and cuts be borne in the rest of public expenditure. Each successive year of public expenditure restraint results in an increase in ring-fenced spending as a proportion of the total. The smaller non-ring-fenced areas in turn have to bear a higher proportion of any savings in subsequent years. The IFS has shown that non-ring-fenced expenditure may fall from 61.6% in 2010-11 to around 50% in 2018-19 of total Departmental Expenditure Limits.”
The Committee cites as a specific example the fact that overseas development expenditure as a percentage of departmental expenditure in 2010-11 was 2.2% but it is expected to have almost doubled to 4% by 2018-19, a far higher percentage increase than in any other area of public expenditure. I do not think that fits in with the priorities of the people and I do not think that has been spelt out clearly enough, if at all, by the promoters of the Bill or by my right hon. Friend the Minister in his all-too-brief remarks on Report.
There is another important point about ring-fencing. As the Treasury Committee has said, it reduces the discipline on spending in the areas subject to it. The rigour of negotiations between the Department and the Treasury on allocations will be weakened since it is known by both sides in advance that the spending is protected. When there is ring-fenced expenditure, a departmental Minister cannot go before a Cabinet Committee and say that they need more money to spend on a programme and, when the Chief Secretary to the Treasury asks where they are going to get the money from, point out where another Department is wasting a lot of money.
Mark Lazarowicz (Edinburgh North and Leith) (Lab/Co-op)
Leaving aside the general validity or otherwise of the hon. Gentleman’s argument, does he not accept that such Bills have a positive aspect as they can encourage other countries to follow suit and ensure that they have a level of spending that means that we can work together worldwide? Is that not a good thing about a Bill and is it not a good idea?
Mr Chope
That takes me back to the debate we had in this House on the climate change legislation, when my hon. Friend the Member for Shipley (Philip Davies) and I, along with three other Members, voted against Third Reading. One of the arguments in favour of the Bill was that it would set a global example and everybody would follow us. What has happened is quite the opposite. We have put on our hair shirts and increased the subsidies for electricity, thereby increasing the costs to consumers, whereas the rest of the world has carried on as though nothing much has happened. I do not see any evidence of other precedents that shows that the high-minded idea of setting an example means that everyone will follow us. We have already been spending roughly 0.7% of GDP on overseas aid, as has been said earlier, and very few big countries, if any, are following our example.
Philip Davies
Is it not the case that since we have been increasing the amount we have been spending as a proportion of our GDP, other countries have been reducing the proportion they spend? That completely blows a hole in that argument and it looks as though other countries are leaving it to us to spend the money rather than doing it themselves.
Mr Chope
My hon. Friend makes a good case. This is one reason we need proper evidence-based policy making in this place. The Minister asserted earlier that the Bill would encourage others to do exactly the same and increase the proportion of GDP spent on aid, but where is the evidence of that happening? I do not think there is any evidence, and the evidence that there is seems to point in the opposite direction. If there is evidence, it will be very useful when we come to discuss the issue of the proportion of GDP we spend on defence.
I have considerable concerns about the Bill and want to close by referring to the accountability to Parliament covered in clause 3. It does not seem to me that the clause delivers anything more than a bit of hot air. All that it requires is the laying of a statement before Parliament. It does not have to be a statement to the House, by which I mean one on which questions can be asked and answers given. It merely involves a document being put in the Library. It does not seem to me that that is the sort of accountability the people promoting the Bill are talking about when they engage with their constituents. They are hyping up the Bill as though it will deliver fantastic results when all it will actually do is put unnecessary constraints on the Government.
The Bill is proposed to come into force on 1 June 2015, and it will cover the whole of the calendar year for 2015. In that respect, it offends against the principles of retrospective legislation and I hope that when it goes to the other place, as it no doubt will in due course, it will be scrutinised in a lot more detail than that with which we have been able to scrutinise it because of the limited time available.
Those of us who think the Bill is misguided and a waste of time are not against giving help to those from other countries who are less well off than ourselves. Years ago, when Lord Patten of Barnes was in charge of overseas aid and did a job not as distinguished as that done by my right hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr Mitchell), somebody asked how we would stop migrants coming from north Africa. Lord Patten memorably said that we should start buying their tomatoes. Aid through trade is a lot more powerful. If the House spent more time discussing how we can improve aid through trade, the world would be a better place.
Mr Tom Clarke (Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill) (Lab)
I intend to be brief because the case for the Bill is overwhelming, as the votes this morning showed. I warmly congratulate the right hon. Member for Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk (Michael Moore) on his good judgment in introducing the Bill and on his tenacity in seeing it through. He has made this a very proud day for Parliament and for those who support decency, honesty and compassion in the way we deal with those less prosperous than ourselves.
As each Member, including me, has been speaking, every three seconds a child has died. The small minority who have been keeping the House back today as we aim towards the noble objectives of the Bill may feel able to look the parents, the families and the communities of those children in the eye and justify what they are doing. I could not.
Mr Clarke
No. The hon. Gentleman has had enough to say and I found him totally unconvincing.
What I do find convincing is a commitment to ensuring that as we have now reached 0.7% of GNI, it is perfectly reasonable that that should be written into legislation, and equally reasonable that the House should feel that there is accountability. Under the Bill there is a report to the House, whatever Government are in power, indicating how the figure was achieved, how the expenditure has been monitored, and how we honour the manifesto commitments of the major parties, which made the British people fully aware that such legislation would be put before the House.
Again, I congratulate the right hon. Member for Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk. The Bill is a major step forward. I will look my constituents in the eye, and I believe wholeheartedly that they believe that at a time of international pressure, such as we discussed this week, there is all the more reason why the poorest people in the poorest countries, who have given so much to this country over the years, should have their poverty respected, addressed and eradicated. That is what this excellent Bill seeks to do.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
I very much admire and respect the emotion that comes from those who support the Bill, though it is not an emotion that I would express in that way. The problem with the Bill is that it does not reflect that depth of emotion. I listened carefully to what the hon. Member for Wakefield (Mary Creagh) said. The stories that she tells are desperate and tragic and deserve to have help in solving them. All decent people would think that is right. But then it is a question of how that help is to be given, and by what means this country as a whole, both as a Government and as a people, decides to give it, and that is where I find the Bill so inadequate.
I disagree with the hon. Member for Wakefield when she says that the Bill delivers on the commitment given in the party manifestos. Although I happen to think that it was not a wise commitment to give, I think that the Bill singularly fails to do that, because it says it does something but provides no means of ensuring that it is done, and that is not a proper means of legislating. If we had wanted a real Bill, it should have been introduced on a resolution from a Minister, because it would tie down spending, and Back-Bench Members, under the relevant Standing Orders, cannot bring in such Bills. The Bill is therefore unable to make a commitment to spending in any real sense.
What could a Government Bill have done instead? It could have set out where the revenues would come from to fund the promise. It could have hypothecated some element of taxation. It could have set up an independent body to ensure that the revenue was dedicated to the causes that are, in and of themselves, enormously admirable. But the Government chose not to do that. Instead, they chose to support a Back-Bench measure that will have absolutely no effect beyond a declaratory one.
What is the benefit of a declaratory Bill? We heard an hon. Gentleman say that it might lead others in the same direction—a good example Bill—but I do not accept that or think that it is right. We do not change the laws of other countries by what we say we are going to do. We might do it by what we actually do, but a mere declaration of good intention does not, in fact, lead to the good intention being carried out. Indeed, were that the case, the Bill would never have been brought forward, because the original declaration—on the commitment to 0.7% of GDP—was made in 1975, and it was made by a large number of countries that all missed it for many years. The idea that fine-sounding declarations lead to behavioural change is, I think, demonstrably false.
We then come to the details of what the Bill actually says. It would reinforce the duty to reach the 0.7% target from 2015, but, as has been pointed out, it would not come into effect until half way through 2015 so there is an internal contradiction as to its efficacy. It merely makes a statement that that has to be done, and done under a certain framework.
Beyond the declaratory effect, I do not think that that is the right way to legislate. All Governments at all times have a duty to consider their budgetary expenses in the round. There may be occasions when the most pressing expenditure is for a budget different from overseas aid—perhaps the health service in a particularly difficult winter, or the defence budget if the tensions caused by Russia become more extreme. To declare that one area of spending will be protected when no others will is not a sensible way to proceed when constructing the public finances. That has become clear with the issue of hypothecation of tax revenues, which has almost invariably led to an excessive amount of revenue in one area when other areas are in need. The most obvious example is the old road fund licence, where we simply ended up with too much money for roads and the fund was raided.
That is always the case with hypothecation of taxation, and it is why the Treasury has always set its face against hypothecating taxes, but the same applies to the reverse principle—the hypothecation of expenditure. There may be years when that is not affordable. There may be years when we need to spend more, perhaps because there is an emergency. That is the type of aid I am most in favour of: the emergency aid that only Governments can deliver. I believe that other forms of aid are fundamentally a matter of private charity, which Governments support through gift aid, allowing charities to claim back the taxation, rather than being something where it is right for Governments to tax modestly well-off people in this country in order to be charitable.
I have a slight suspicion—this does not apply to current Ministers and certainly did not apply to my right hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr Mitchell), who was a most distinguished Secretary of State—that it is always possible for Governments to grandstand about their generosity overseas using other people’s money. Therefore, I would not follow the principle even if I thought the Bill was any good, but I do not think it is any good. Its sanctions are useless. It refers to laying a statement before Parliament. Statements are put before Parliament every day. Hansard is full of statements put before Parliament, which are hardly read. I read some of them. Some are very interesting and important, and they are always beautifully written, because Hansard’s command of the English language is so fine that they do not allow sloppy grammar to get through, even from Her Majesty’s Government. A statement from a Minister is not a particularly powerful form of being held to account.
The provisions laid down in the Bill for what the statement will need to say are otiose. No Bill, once it is an Act of Parliament, can be enforced against proceedings in this House. If a Minister entirely fails to take any notice of the requirements of clause 2(3) and puts down a statement saying, as a former Labour Minister memorably said, “There’s no money left”, or something pithy like that, the Bill has no form of recourse against what he has done.
Mark Reckless
Does the hon. Gentleman consider that the Bill will be susceptible to enforcement through judicial review? For instance, could a judge determine that a decision on spending for a certain year needed to be taken again because it was not compliant with the law?
Jacob Rees-Mogg
No, it would not be enforceable by judicial review because the sanction provided for is a proceeding in Parliament, and proceedings in Parliament are not judicially reviewable.
Mark Reckless
Is not that, of itself, a reason why a judge might determine that because the legislation specifies no remedy that a court can enforce, the general remedy of judicial review would be applicable?
Jacob Rees-Mogg
No. There is a remedy, but it is not enforceable in the courts. It is essentially at the discretion of Ministers because it is a proceeding in Parliament and therefore not challengeable outside.
Parliament is very unwise to bring its proceedings into legislation because it is of such constitutional importance that our proceedings are not judicially reviewable. If we legislate in such a way that we bring our proceedings into the orbit of the courts, we have to be careful about whether a judge may feel that Parliament’s intention was to allow the courts to interfere, overriding the Bill of Rights. I therefore take the greatest exception to clauses 2(3) and (4), which are erroneous in terms of what Parliament ought to be trying to do.
The Government really ought to be held to account for clause 5. They removed from the Bill a detailed, if perhaps rather expensive, way of holding the Government to account and put in something of the most utter wishy-washiness.
I return to the question of whether this Bill increases or decreases trust in politicians. When the House of Commons, and later the House of Lords, legislate to say merely that it is nice to do something, but with no means of enforcing it, and failing to use all the procedures that we have at our command to make sure that it happens, are we assuming that electors do not understand what we are doing and that we can pull the wool over their eyes? Will they not look at what we are doing? This is not a real keeping of the commitment that was made. It is a minimalistic, tokenistic approach to pretending that we have done what we said we would do, because when we looked at what we had proposed in our respective manifestos we realised that it was a silly thing to do because the hypothecation of expenditure is fundamentally unwise in any budgetary system. For that reason, I will oppose Third Reading.
Naomi Long (Belfast East) (Alliance)
I am pleased to be here to support the Bill on Third Reading. I pay tribute to the right hon. Member for Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk (Michael Moore) for bringing this important Bill to the House. It will have a huge impact in the developing world by saving lives, supporting families and encouraging increasing independence. By demonstrating that we are making a commitment on which we will follow through, we will provide certainty about development aid, which will allow those who are involved in the expenditure of that aid to make long-term and properly structured plans that will make a difference in the societies that need them. In such a way, we will take an important step away from providing aid only in disasters and emergency situations, and towards delivering aid in a more strategic way that can make a tangible difference to people’s lives.
The Bill will have an important impact on our influence internationally. It will allow us to tackle issues related to aid, including fairness in society, corruption, support for stability in developing nations and progress for extremely vulnerable people who are not only on the margins of society, but on the margins of marginalised society. The Bill gives us an important opportunity to reinforce our support for those people.
The Bill will have an influence internationally by encouraging others to move in the same direction as we in this country and this Parliament have done. Other hon. Members have pooh-poohed the idea that anyone looks to this Parliament for leadership internationally on such issues, but they are wrong to do so. There is considerable evidence that where the UK takes a stand and does something important and significant, other countries follow. As an example, when the water, sanitation and hygiene measures were discussed at high-level meetings, the UK Government’s decision to send ministerial representation completely changed other nations’ decisions about who they would send to those meetings. That resulted in the taking of proper decisions rather than simply more talk on that key issue.
Northern Ireland still has one of the highest levels of charitable giving of any part of the UK, and in my constituency there is considerable support for the measure. We have heard other Members’ views about the lack of public support for any increase in international aid, based on polling. However, many things based on polling are predicated on myths peddled by those who are in principle opposed to the matter in hand, whether that be immigration or, as in this case, international aid.
Mark Hunter
claimed to move the closure (Standing Order No. 36).
Question put forthwith, That the Question be now put.
Specialist Printing Equipment and Materials (Offences) Bill
(9 years, 11 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Mr David Amess (Southend West) (Con)
I beg to move, That the Bill be now read the Third time.
I say immediately what a pleasure it is to see my hon. Friend the Minister on the Front Bench. It seems just a short while ago that he and his now wife used to campaign for me, in those halcyon days in Basildon. It is very good that he is the Minister responding to the debate. I also want to praise our hon. Friend the Member for Dover (Charlie Elphicke), who piloted the Bill through the House last year but did not have my good fortune. I also thank all Members for giving up their valuable time and serving in the Committee.
I am sure the House will agree that the available figures for identity crime are worrying. Figures published by the National Fraud Authority revealed that almost one third of UK adults had been the victim of identity crime at some point. It is estimated that 4.3 million adults were victims in 2012 alone. Of those, 2.7 million lost money, with an average of £1,200 lost per person. To the most vulnerable members of our society, the damage caused goes much further than just this loss of money. Some victims spend a lot of time attempting to clear their names and are chased by debt collection companies unaware that the person has been the victim of identity crime.
Of course, criminals are not concerned about the damage they cause and will continually try to stay ahead of the game by obtaining the latest specialist printers to make a wide range of false documents. They rely on members of the specialist printing industry to supply the specialist printing equipment to them, either by tricking suppliers into thinking they will use it for legitimate purposes, or by colluding with unscrupulous specialist printing companies. By supplying this equipment to people who will use it to commit crime, they enable some of the most serious crimes affecting this country and compromise the safety of the public.
I recently met the Metropolitan police, and was concerned to hear that they have numerous recent examples of illegal document factories being uncovered and documents relating to thousands of identities being found. This includes passports, driving licences, birth certificates, immigration documents, EU identity cards, national insurance number cards—the list goes on. However, in none of these cases has the police been able to prosecute those who supplied the specialist equipment to the criminals, even when there was evidence that they knew what the equipment would be used for. That is why the Bill is needed.
Mr David Nuttall (Bury North) (Con)
I congratulate my hon. Friend on getting his Bill through to Third Reading. I was delighted to serve on the Bill Committee. Will he confirm for the benefit of the House that the Bill will place no costs on business—no extra regulation or bureaucracy—and that the only people who will suffer as a result of the Bill are the criminals, who deserve to suffer?
Mr Amess
My hon. Friend, whom I thank for serving on the Committee, makes an excellent point: there will be no cost to the public purse, other than the cost of the courts and prosecutions.
The Bill will support the police in targeting rogue suppliers who collude with criminals, and if there is evidence that an individual or business has knowingly supplied specialist printing equipment for criminal purposes, they could face imprisonment for up to 10 years and/or an unlimited fine. It covers the manufacture of documents that can be used for a range of identity purposes of the type I have outlined. These documents provide the holder with access to various services and benefits across both the public and private sectors.
In the wrong hands, false versions of these documents can cause untold damage, including enabling illegal immigrants to merge into our society and fraudulently access public services to which they are not entitled. Crime committed through the use of false documents can have a serious impact on businesses, particularly small businesses, and that can also have a serious impact on the economy. The Bill provides a simple and targeted measure to deal with this serious problem. We recognise that false document factories are a cross-border problem, so this Bill will apply to the supply of specialist printing equipment for criminal activity occurring in any jurisdiction. If a supplier in England and Wales sells equipment to an identity fraudster knowing that they will use it to manufacture false documents, they will themselves be prosecuted, whether the manufacture itself happens in England, Scotland, France or even Australia.
This Bill will empower the police to deal effectively with those who seek to profit from identity crime. It sends a clear message that if anyone knowingly supplies specialist printing equipment to criminals, they will face the consequences and be prosecuted.
Seema Malhotra (Feltham and Heston) (Lab/Co-op)
I congratulate the hon. Member for Southend West (Mr Amess) on getting the Bill to this stage and on garnering support from Members on both sides of the House. I welcome the draft Specialist Printing Equipment and Materials (Offences) Bill. It is indeed a step towards cutting off the supply of machinery and equipment to those who intend to commit serious crimes such as identity theft and document forgery, including of passports, driving licences and credit cards.
To stop those who knowingly supply specialist equipment to criminals who undertake this activity is also to send a strong message of deterrence before these crimes are committed. Identity fraud ruins lives and it can take victims months or even years to undo the damage that perpetrators cause. The damage—financial, professional and personal—can be enormous, and any steps we can take to prevent this will be welcome.
We know how false documents are used by criminals across a spectrum of offences. Giving the police powers to stop this activity can have a real impact on the wider fight against other crimes, too. We also know that the police have identified this gap in enforcement. The police find it difficult to prosecute those who knowingly supply this equipment to criminals because of the absence of a targeted offence. By creating a specific criminal offence of knowingly supplying specialist printing equipment to criminals, the Bill will help the police to end this practice. This Bill is to be welcomed and there is widespread support across the House for it. I wish the hon. Gentleman the best of luck with this Bill.
The Minister for Security and Immigration (James Brokenshire)
I add my thanks to my hon. Friend the Member for Southend West (Mr Amess) for taking the Bill through the House and for raising awareness of this serious issue, which affects a significant number of people throughout the country. I am certainly grateful for his kind words of introduction, and I am very pleased to be here to support him, as I have in so many different ways over the years, and to see this Bill progressing.
Stealing people’s identities, or creating false identities, is generally used as an enabler for a number of serious crimes such as fraud, terrorism, immigration offences or gaining access to children and vulnerable adults. I therefore agree with my hon. Friend that the Bill is a very important step in tackling a crime that has the potential to endanger the safety and security of our citizens. I welcome the support for the Bill across the House and endorse the comments of the hon. Member for Feltham and Heston (Seema Malhotra), who spoke for the Opposition. My hon. Friend, working in a cross-partisan way, has secured the support that the Bill requires, underlining the important issues, recognised on all sides of the House, that show why the Bill is needed.
It is important to tackle this issue at its source and prevent criminals from gaining access to the specialist printing equipment that is capable of making a range of identity documents, such as false passports, driving licences, travel documents and birth certificates. As the hon. Member for Lewisham West and Penge (Jim Dowd) rightly pointed out in Committee, it is possible to prosecute individuals or businesses for conspiracy to defraud under the Fraud Act 2006. However, this is not easy to prove and requires a lot of time and resources to take forward.
The Bill will strengthen the police’s powers in this area and send the message that this Government and this House take criminal behaviour very seriously: if you are colluding with criminals, you are a criminal. There is strong support for this Bill from both the police and the specialist printing industry. Some 81% of respondents to the Government’s public consultation supported this measure, with 93% agreeing that legislation would act as a deterrent to those who seek to sell this equipment to fraudsters. That is important, because if fraudsters cannot get hold of the specialist equipment that they need to manufacture false documents, they will not be able to manufacture them, and we shall be able to prevent a range of crimes that could otherwise have been committed through the use of those false documents.
The Bill is proportionate. It does not affect the law-abiding majority, but introduces sanctions to deal with those who knowingly collude with identity fraudsters. I hope that all Members will support this much-needed measure, which is an important step in the tackling of identity crime. I congratulate my hon. Friend again, and I commend the Bill to the House.
Question put and agreed to.
Bill accordingly read the Third time and passed.
Convicted Prisoners Voting Bill
(9 years, 11 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Mr Christopher Chope (Christchurch) (Con)
I beg to move, That the Bill be now read a Second time.
This is an unexpected surprise. I did not expect to be able to introduce the Bill today. Like the Bill that we have just discussed, it is supported by a great many members of the public, and also by a great many Members of Parliament.
During the current Parliament, we have debated the issue of whether or not convicted prisoners should be allowed to vote. A draft Bill has been produced and examined by a Joint Committee, and there has been much Back-Bench discussion of the matter. It seems to me that the time has come for us actually to make a decision, and I thought that it would be helpful if I presented, in the form of a Bill, the decision that I think we should make: the decision to ensure that convicted prisoners cannot participate in parliamentary and local elections.
The Bill is short. It is based on what was published in the Government’s draft Bill, and on what was said in the Joint Committee. This is unfinished business, and the Bill gives us an opportunity to finish it.
Mr Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)
I do not think that any of us quite expected to be debating the Bill, after the exciting afternoon that we have had so far.
Clause 1, which is the operative clause, states:
“A prisoner serving a custodial sentence is disqualified from voting at a parliamentary or local government election.”
I thought I had heard that before, so I looked at section 3 of the Representation of the People Act 1983, which states:
“A convicted person during the time that he is detained in a penal institution in pursuance of his sentence”—
or unlawfully at large when he would otherwise be so detained—
“is legally incapable of voting at any parliamentary or local government election.”
I have a great deal of respect for the hon. Member for Christchurch (Mr Chope), but for him to propose a Bill that appears to repeat the existing law strikes me as otiose, and, given his attitude to many of the Bills with which we deal at this time of the week, it also strikes me as somewhat perplexing.
Mr Slaughter
I suspect that we have hit the nail on the head, Madam Deputy Speaker. I suspect that the Bill has not much to do with prisoners voting, and rather more to do with the European convention on human rights, the European Court of Human Rights and, probably, the Council of Europe and the European Union. I am sure that the hon. Gentleman would like us to be well away from all those things, and, if he could tow us a bit more westward, would take us well away from Europe full stop. I can only say that I admire his fortitude in these matters. I am more at home with his right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Beaconsfield (Mr Grieve), who has said that sticking to international rules can be “irksome” at times, but that it has been the “settled view” of British Governments for centuries that such obligations should be met.
We do not need this Bill, I am afraid, although Opposition Front Benchers do not disagree with the sentiments that it expresses. I shall end my speech there, as I want to leave a little time for the Minister. I appreciate that it is only a little time.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (Mr Shailesh Vara)
I thank the hon. Member for Hammersmith (Mr Slaughter) for allowing me 30-odd seconds in which to speak.
I have heard my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch (Mr Chope) speak on many occasions, and I have to say that today’s was perhaps the shortest speech that he has ever delivered. This is an important issue. The Government recognise that, and it is good that there is an opportunity to debate it once more. Of course legislation barring prisoners from voting can be traced back to the Forfeiture Act 1870—
Business without Debate
(9 years, 11 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
Hon. Members
Object.
Debate to be resumed on Friday 23 January 2015.
Benefit Entitlement (Restriction) Bill
Motion made, That the Bill be now read a Second time.
Hon. Members
Object.
Bill to be read a Second time on Friday 9 January 2015.
Road Traffic Regulation (Temporary Closure for Filming) Bill
Resumption of adjourned debate on Question (7 November), That the Bill be now read a Second time.
Hon. Members
Object.
Debate to be resumed on Friday 9 January 2015.
Illegal Immigrants (Criminal Sanctions) Bill
Resumption of adjourned debate on Question (24 October), That the Bill be now read a Second time.
Hon. Members
Object.
Debate to be resumed on Friday 9 January 2015.
House of Lords (Maximum Membership) Bill
Queen’s consent signified.
Motion made, That the Bill be now read a Second time.
Hon. Members
Object.
Bill to be read a Second time on Friday 9 January 2015.
EU Membership (Audit of Costs and Benefits) Bill
Motion made, That the Bill be now read a Second time.
Hon. Members
Object.
Bill to be read a Second time on Friday 9 January 2015.
Wild Animals in Circuses Bill
Motion made, That the Bill be now read a Second time.
Economic Growth (London)
(9 years, 11 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
Ms Diane Abbott (Hackney North and Stoke Newington) (Lab)
It is a great pleasure to address this House on the question of London’s economic growth. I am a Londoner born and bred and the prospects for London is an issue very close to my heart. I have recently thrown my hat in the ring to be Labour’s candidate for Mayor, which gives a particular emphasis to my concern about these matters.
We are having this debate a few days after the Chancellor’s autumn statement, which I think Members on the Government Benches regarded as some kind of triumph. The reality of the Chancellor’s autumn statement is that the positive macro-economic numbers he was able to set out are based on a housing bubble, and we have seen a failure to garner the tax receipts that the Chancellor hoped for because his recovery is, if not a jobless recovery, a low-wage, zero-hours contract recovery, and nowhere feels the problems of that more than London.
London stands at a crossroads economically. The City of London, for so many years the powerhouse driving London’s global growth, is now reputationally tarnished by a series of scandals and is still getting to grips with the ramifications of the 2008 financial crisis. We hope that harsh lessons have been learned from the crisis. We as politicians are aware, now more than ever, that an over-reliance on a potentially volatile financial sector is unwise and counter-productive.
There have also been changes in circumstances outside this country’s borders over which we can exert little control. The Prime Minister has already warned of another potential global slowdown, and I must ask what the Government are doing to safeguard the growth of the UK in such an unpredictable financial climate. The eurozone crisis has rocked the European markets in recent years and had an impact on our largest export market, while the global growth of emerging international economic powerhouses such as India and China threatens our ability to compete globally. For how long can we attempt to compete on the basis of low wages and zero-hours contracts? To ensure that London and the UK are at the forefront of global markets, we must ensure that London’s economy is balanced, sustainable and fair.
Before I move on to the economic issues, I want to talk about the devolution of powers. Ever since the independence referendum, we have had a tremendous amount of debate in the House, in the media and among the public about the devolution of powers to Scotland. London has the population of Scotland and Wales combined, and it contributes twice the amount to our GDP that Scotland and Wales do combined. I therefore argue that it cannot be right for powers to be devolved to Scotland if similar powers are not devolved to the capital.
London is a powerhouse. It is a leading global city and a premier destination for business, education and cultural exploits. However, compared with its global competitors, it sorely lacks the freedom and empowerment that would derive from increased fiscal devolution. It is staggering that in comparison to New York and Tokyo, which receive respectively just 31% and 8% of their income from central Government, 66% of London’s income flows from Whitehall. England must be one of the most centralised countries in the entire western world, and London must be among the cities most constrained by the fact that it can raise so little of its own revenue. Does the Minister agree that London enjoys only a fraction of the financial freedom of its global competitors? For London’s continued and sustainable economic growth, it needs investment in its infrastructure. Above all, the Government need to give the city the freedom to control its own revenue streams to help to facilitate infrastructure investment.
Empowering London and England’s other great cities to raise and spend their own capital would bring decision making closer to the ground, increase the accountability of political leaders and facilitate more integrated investment decisions. With greater autonomy, the office of the Mayor and the Greater London assembly could operate as truly accountable bodies, enhancing the benefits that increased localism brings and moving away from centralisation to create a more democratic and efficient system that listens to the needs of people on the ground. London and other cities currently compete for many central Government grants—a system that is inefficient, wasteful and slow. Devolving power over tax revenues would ensure that London could contribute more and took less from the national pot.
A number of recent reports have spoken about the importance of London having more power over its tax revenues, especially in regard to property taxes. They were produced by, among others, the London Finance Commission and the Royal Society of Arts City Growth Commission. After consultation they recommended that, among other things, London should be given control over the following property taxes: stamp duty land tax, business rates, the annual tax on enveloped dwellings and capital gains property development tax. I would add one other tax that is yet to come into being: the mansion tax. Given that so much of the mansion tax would be raised in London and the south-east, and that those are the areas that have suffered from an inflated housing market, it is right that we should be allowed to keep, in common with other cities and municipalities, a fair share of the mansion tax. As the London Finance Commission report detailed, such an approach would increase City hall’s retention of the capital’s total tax base from only about 5% to 12%, but that small change in the national Government’s revenue would be a hugely important and empowering one for London.
We often hear an argument made against London’s growth that the city is becoming an almighty behemoth, siphoning off talent and capital from other parts of the country. However, as Michael Bloomberg, the successful mayor of New York—and no socialist—once noted:
“Empowering cities to invest in their own futures not only makes them stronger, it makes their nations stronger too.”
Such proposals would not only benefit London’s economy, but would enhance the Treasury and the entirety of the UK.
Greater financial autonomy for this country’s great cities is part of a growing consensus, and it is clear that such measures are vital in order that London may continue to innovate and grow, and to ensure that the UK remains a top international destination for business, entrepreneurship and education. So I ask the Minister: what work has been done on the devolution of powers to England’s great cities, particularly London? Can he offer me any assurances that devolution of property taxes to London is being considered?
A big issue in London is infrastructure, as there is a threat to the continued economic growth of London as a city. It is not just me saying that as a London politician; it is the considered view of London’s business and financial institutions. The capital’s population is expected to exceed 9 million by 2020 and roughly 10 million by 2030. Without urgent investment in housing, jobs, the transport network, schools and leisure, the continued growth of London will be unsustainable. After years of under-investment in skills and infrastructure, and a lack of innovation, serious structural weaknesses in London’s economy are emerging. I am sure that many in the Chamber today would be shocked to know that, according to the World Economic Forum, the UK’s infrastructure is ranked 28th in the world for quality. The Institute of Civil Engineers in its “State of the Nation” report in 2014 highlighted that London’s energy supply, water supply, transport network and flood prevention apparatus all require attention. Anyone in the House who boards a London tube train at peak times will know that we face an increasing issue with overcrowding on our transport infrastructure—it is beginning to creak. It is appropriate to point out that Boris Johnson’s reckless plans to close ticket offices and cut the number of jobs run the risk of a poorer service to the increasing number of customers using our underground service.
Just this September, the chief of Transport for London, Sir Peter Hendy, warned of the problems related to the increased overcrowding on London’s transport networks, saying that the city will face “overwhelming” overcrowding on transport by 2030 without urgent progress on new rail lines. We used to see photographs of the Tokyo underground in which Japanese people were literally being pushed on to the train to be able to squeeze in—the London underground is fast approaching that state. London’s lower-paid workers are now being forced to live on the outskirts of the city, rather than in inner-city neighbourhoods, as in the past, and it will be more difficult for them to access the jobs they require. If that is the case, the city cannot progress and its economic growth will stall. In addition, fares on London buses, the staple mode of transport for outer Londoners, have risen by more than 50% in six years—it is time to look at stabilising fares. It is critical that London raises the required investment in infrastructure and in its own world economic outlook. The International Monetary Fund suggests that borrowing for investment in infrastructure is likely to pay for itself.
The UK has the second worst infrastructure in the G7 leading high income countries, ahead only of Italy. Let me repeat that: the only country that has worse infrastructure is Italy. London’s infrastructure and how we pay for it must be an important issue.
Sadly, we are seeing the rise of a toxic anti-immigrant culture in the nation’s political discourse, with both major political parties trying to out-UKIP UKIP. We need to remember the important role that immigration has played in London’s economic output and growth. London was built by immigrants. Whether we are talking about the Irish labourers who came over in Victorian times to build our early transport infrastructure, the Jews from eastern Europe, West Indians, Africans, Kurds and now eastern Europeans, immigrants have, over the centuries and decades, been woven into the very fabric of the city and have played more than their part in the economic prosperity of the city today.
We hear about the ill effects of immigration, but east European migrants put more into the economy than they take out. We need to start seeing immigration in the light of its contribution to the economic growth, prosperity and the cultural diversity of the great city of London. It is immigration that makes London a great global city.
The economic detriment of the anti-immigrant discourse can be seen in the drop in the numbers of international students applying to study in UK universities. The introduction of more stringent visa regulations meant that 2013-14 was the first year in 29 years in which the numbers of international students coming to study in the UK fell. That cannot be right for London’s economic growth. London and London’s leaders should be the ground zero in the fight against the anti-immigrant politics engulfing Westminster. We should celebrate the strength in diversity that London has come to represent, and recognise the economic benefits that migrants can play in continued growth.
Although we are all aware that London is growing economically, the key question is whether that growth is healthy and sustainable. Alongside the growth, we are seeing an alarming rise in living costs and spiralling house prices. The result is an ever-increasing inequality gap between Londoners. That gap is not just between the very poorest and the super-wealthy. Those on middle incomes are suffering, too. Average wages in this country have fallen £50 a week in real terms since 2008. Accordingly, many middle-income Londoners are struggling to cope with spiralling housing costs, transport costs, job insecurity and falling standards of living. We see a chasm opening up between them and the international glitterati who flock here in such numbers. It is often not recognised by people who see only London’s bright lights and expensive restaurants that London is more unequal than any other part of the British Isles. The top 10% in London earn four and half times the bottom 10%, and child poverty is a third higher in London than in the rest of England as a whole, and that gulf is widening.
Inequality has so many ill-effects. It has been highlighted just this week that Londoners in their 30s are fleeing the capital because of the ever-increasing cost of living and rising house prices. Figures from the Office for National Statistics show that, in the year until June last year, 58,000 people aged between 30 and 39 left London—a 10% increase on 2010.
I point the Minister to a London Chamber of Commerce and Industry report published in May that highlighted the fact that more than 40% of London businesses said that their ability to recruit and retain skilled workers was negatively affected by housing costs. Does the Minister understand the seriousness of the implications of the link between inflated property prices in London and the difficulties of recruitment for London’s sustainable future?
I believe that if we are to see sustained and fair economic growth in London, we must first work to ensure further devolution of powers, particularly in relation to property taxes. We must take a stand against the pervasive anti-immigrant narrative occupying the column inches and we must take action to ensure that London’s economic growth does not continue to induce a growth of inequality across the city. The growing gulf between London’s super-wealthy elite and everybody else presents our capital with a mortal threat to its future economic development. Cities are living, breathing ecosystems and those that function best function as a whole.
We are a wealthy city and a city that has had enormous expansion and growth, but we must ensure that the smallest boats and the poorest move at the pace of the largest boats and the wealthiest. We need sustainable economic growth that is based not just on financial services and the housing bubble. We need investment in our infrastructure and, in this way, London will continue to be not just a great international city but a city whose sustainable growth helps to bring the entire UK forward.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government (Kris Hopkins)
I thank the hon. Member for Hackney North and Stoke Newington (Ms Abbott) for securing the debate. At the beginning of her campaign to become the Mayor of London, perhaps we need to develop a technique to grow a bigger crowd. It is quite lonely in here this afternoon.
The hon. Lady has picked up on several issues that I will try to answer, although I have limited time in which to do so. Local growth is an essential part of the Government’s long-term economic plan to secure Britain’s future. By trusting local people, backing businesses and investing in infrastructure, skills and housing we are creating thousands of new jobs. That means more economic security, peace of mind and a brighter future for hard-working people across the country. In London, it is the role of the Mayor, working closely with borough and the private sector, to develop sustainable growth. There is no doubt that London is an economic powerhouse and, as the Mayor rightly and repeatedly says, it is a global city that needs to ensure that its economy performs at an international level.
The Mayor has set out a clear vision for delivering growth in London by creating jobs, building new houses and providing the infrastructure that is needed. The opportunity areas, such as Battersea, the Royal Docks, Greenwich and Stratford, are seeing a renaissance, while new business areas, safe leafy neighbourhoods and vibrant town centres are rising from the ashes of former industrial areas.
Kris Hopkins
I thank the hon. Lady for her question, but as the Chancellor pointed out the other day, 85% of the 1.7 million jobs that have been created are full time. The issue of zero-hours contracts is important, but I suggest that the Labour party gets its own act sorted out first, as I understand from the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority that some 62 Labour MPs use zero-hours contracts.
Let me return to my speech. The Mayor has overseen a massive investment in London infrastructure to deliver growth from Crossrail, the biggest engineering project in Europe, to the London light railway, the Northern line extension, which has unlocked development in Battersea, or the rail extension in the Barking riverside area, which will allow some 11,000 homes to be built.
In the autumn statement, the Chancellor announced a further £141 million to support the Mayor’s project to create a new cultural and educational facility at the Queen Elizabeth Olympic park that will deliver economic and social benefits for the east of London as part of the Olympic legacy.
Kris Hopkins
I would like to answer the questions that the hon. Lady asked, but I am more than willing to give way.
Kris Hopkins
Much investment across the country was put at risk by the reckless handling of the economy that left us with a £162 billion deficit and compromised many projects across the country. It is this Government who took a failing economy that was on its knees, with mass unemployment and mass business failure, and in a few years secured growth in this country that is not bettered by any country in the G7. This Government continue to promote, in London in particular, a diverse economy and local growth, which is about not just large-scale regeneration projects, but rejuvenating town centres. There are some 600 high streets at the heart of local communities in London.
The Mayor’s regeneration fund and the outer London fund are helping to support diverse local economies by establishing local businesses districts and improving retail, leisure, culture and arts provision to bring vibrancy back into those communities, and providing more security for those who live and work locally. The London enterprise panel chaired by the Mayor has invested some £111 million as Growing Places funding to create jobs, drive growth and enhance transport links to unlock potential and support small and medium-sized enterprises around London.
Within the Hackney council boundary some 2,530 properties have benefited from the £1,000 business relief that the Government have put in place in 2014-15. That was extended in the recent autumn statement. Significant projects such as MedCity, a £1 million investment, was launched this year, and a £1.5 million project to support SMEs via the National Apprenticeship Service has encouraged take-up. In Hackney and Stoke Newington, some 2,500 young people have started apprenticeships in the past five years.
Time is limited, but the hon. Lady raised some specific questions, one of which related to devolution. We should recognise the enormous amount of devolution that this Government have already offered. The Localism Act 2011 has transferred powers and money to deliver housing and regeneration projects. The Local Government Finance Act 2012 enables councils in 33 boroughs across London to retain a significant amount of business rates. That will grow. Across the country, more money is retained by councils from business rates than is raised through council tax. Through the local growth deal that the Mayor secured, some £63 million will deliver more housing in London.
The hon. Lady raised some important issues which it is worth spending a minute or so discussing. I said earlier that some 1.7 million jobs had been created. That is important, considering where we were in 2010. The massive deficit of £162 billion has been reduced by a half. The hon. Lady spoke about immigration. I agree that London is an amazing multicultural and global city that attracts people. I reflect on my own city, Bradford, a great melting pot of ideas and cultures that offer great depth to the place where I live. I agree that immigration makes a positive contribution to the economy and will continue to do so. As the Mayor says, London is a global city that attracts great people, and it attracts significant investment as well.
Question put and agreed to.
Written Statements
(9 years, 11 months ago)
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Mandate to NHS England
(9 years, 11 months ago)
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The Secretary of State for Health (Mr Jeremy Hunt)
Today the Government have laid before Parliament the updated mandate to NHS England for 2014-15.
Our mandate reflects the Government’s focus on getting the best health outcomes for patients, by empowering clinical commissioning groups, health and wellbeing boards and local providers of services.
We are making a non-recurrent increase to the revenue budget for NHS England for 2014-15, and a slight reallocation of resource from capital to revenue. A revision to the current mandate has been laid before Parliament today reflecting these changes to the budget only.
This week’s autumn statement set out the Government’s plans to invest significant additional funding in the NHS. This funding recognises the rising pressures on the NHS and the investment required to support the plans set out in the “Five Year Forward View”.
The additional funding for NHS England for 2015-16 will be confirmed in the revised 2015-16 mandate to NHS England which will be published shortly.
The updated mandate for 2014-15 is attached. Copies are available to hon. Members from the Vote Office and to noble Lords from the Printed Paper Office.
Attachments:
1. The Mandate (The_Mandate.pdf)
Attachments can be viewed online at http://www.parliament. uk/business/publications/written-questions-answers-statements/written-statement/Commons/2014-12-05/HCWS65/ .
Dalton Review
(9 years, 11 months ago)
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The Secretary of State for Health (Mr Jeremy Hunt)
Today I am announcing the publication of Examining new options and opportunities for providers of NHS care —The Dalton Review. In February 2014, I commissioned Sir David Dalton, Chief Executive of Salford Royal Foundation Trust, to lead this independent review into how we enable the best leaders and organisations in the NHS to expand their reach and do more for patients.
Sir David, the expert panel and the review team sought evidence and engaged widely across the NHS, with patients and system leaders, international health systems and other sectors to inform the work of the Review. This open and consultative approach is reflected in the publication alongside the report of the evidence packs, case studies and engagement findings which informed the analysis and recommendations aimed at continuing to secure the clinical and financial sustainability of providers of NHS care through offering new options for organisational forms.
The Report notes that while the NHS has a number of world-leading providers and has achieved remarkable successes over the past 10 years, not all NHS providers have improved at the same rate, resulting in variation in quality of care across the country. This variation in standards of care across the country, alongside the wider challenges faced by all providers of NHS services, must be addressed.
Sir David’s Report examines a range of organisational forms that are relevant to all providers of NHS care, providing options for them to drive the spread of improvement methodologies, quality systems and operating models they have developed to other organisations. The Report also provides options for providers who may not currently be delivering services at the standards they and we all expect. The recently published NHS Five Year Forward View, accepted by all parties, provided new and innovative models of care to meet the demands and challenges of the future; the recommendations and organisational forms of the Dalton Review complement the NHS Five Year Forward View, providing a range of organisational forms to help deliver these new models of care.
Sir David has highlighted five key themes in his Report, which are that: one size does not fit all; quicker transformational and transactional change is required; ambitious organisations with a proven track record should be encouraged to expand their reach and have an impact across the sector; overall sustainability for the provider sector is a priority; and, change must happen through supported implementation. The Report suggests that addressing these five key themes will accelerate the transformational change that is required to help overcome the challenges facing the NHS. To do this, the Report makes recommendations to the national bodies and leaders across the NHS, the wider system and to the Government.
Sir David highlighted the importance of funding and support for implementation of new care models and organisational forms. That is why I am delighted that the Government have announced £200 million funding to support these new models and transform challenged health economies as part of the Governments two billion pounds additional investment in the NHS in 2015-16.
The Government welcomes the Review and its recommendations, encourages all those working in or with the NHS to consider the options and recommendations of the Review and will take a close interest in their adoption and implementation over the coming months.
I would like to thank Sir David Dalton, the expert panel members and the Dalton Review team for their hard work and commitment.
Examining new options and opportunities for providers of NHS care - The Dalton Review has been placed in the Library of the House. Copies are available to hon. Members from the Vote Office and to noble Lords from the Printed Paper Office.
Attachments:
1. The Dalton Review (Dalton-Review.pdf)
Attachments can be viewed online at http://www.parliament. uk/business/publications/written-questions-answers-statements/written-statement/Commons/2014-12-05/HCWS63/
Transforming Rehabilitation
(9 years, 11 months ago)
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The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice (Chris Grayling)
Following the announcement of preferred bidders on 29 October, the Ministry of Justice has taken another step towards completing the Government’s probation reforms.
Following further negotiations with preferred bidders, I have today announced that I am awarding contracts to the successful bidders for the 21 community rehabilitation companies (CRCs).
I have placed a copy of the list of successful bidders in the Library of the House and all bidders are receiving formal notification today.
After formal notification of bidders, we will enter the standstill period at the end of which we intend for contracts to be signed with new providers.
Attachments:
1. Transforming Rehabilitation - Successful Bidders (Table of Successful Bidders - FINAL.pdf)
Attachments can be viewed online at http://www.parliament. uk/business/publications/written-questions-answers-statements/written-statement/Commons/2014-12-05/HCWS64/
House of Lords
Soft Power and Conflict Prevention
(9 years, 11 months ago)
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The Archbishop of Canterbury
That this House takes note of the role of soft power and non-military options in conflict prevention.
The Archbishop of Canterbury
My Lords, I am most grateful for the opportunity to introduce this debate on a subject of great importance to the role of the United Kingdom in a world increasingly characterised by conflicting values which end in violence. I am particularly grateful for the interest shown by so many here today and to those noble Lords who have put their names down to speak. I look forward very much to hearing them. It is perhaps appropriate to remember that it is a year to the day since the death of Nelson Mandela. There you have an illustration of soft power executed through virtue—something to which I would not lay claim—which demonstrates the potential impact of great figures in changing history.
There have been two particularly significant aspects to my preparation for today. The first has been to read the report of the Select Committee on Soft Power and the UK’s Influence for Session 2013-14 entitled, Persuasion and Power in the Modern World, published at the end of March 2014. The second has been the experience since April 2013 of travelling, with my wife, to all 37 other provinces of the Anglican communion. One of the most difficult and dangerous visits was finished last week, when I was in Edinburgh. That will get me into trouble.
The Select Committee report was the result of significant evidence-taking and much reflection by a remarkably experienced and expert number of your Lordships’ House. Particular tribute should be paid to the noble Lord, Lord Howell of Guildford, who chaired the committee. I was especially struck by three aspects. First, the report makes it clear that there is no avoiding the need for the exercise of soft power, and in fact the exercise of hard power, from sanctions to the use of violence, is effective only as an addition to the impact of soft power. It is soft power in its many ramifications that makes it possible for this country to exert a benevolent and beneficial influence in the world around. I saw an example of that two or three weeks ago when, at the degree awards ceremony at Coventry University—one of the best of our modern universities—60% of the students were from overseas. They are a powerful source of earnings and will return home with a brilliant education and an exceptional experience of the UK. In most cases, they will be our friends for life.
Secondly, the report points especially to the rapid increase in complexity and what it calls hypersensitivity in the modern world. There has been an introduction of information technology, with more than 5 billion mobile telephones around the world. We have the growth of access to the world wide web, which means that you can sit in Kaduna and look at what is happening in London and you can look at the shops in New York. You have access to cultural influences of the most extraordinary kind. The possibilities of that both for Governments and for non-state actors are ever more powerful with the advent of the sophistication of modern computers.
Thirdly, the report highlighted that power is in three levels, three-dimensional chess it is called: at the top, force; in the middle, economic actors; at the third level, civil society with NGOs, principally of course—I will return to this, as noble Lords might expect—churches, the world’s greatest and most beneficial multinationals. I might declare an interest there.
Since the report was published, there has been added to the mix the recognition of international and often religion-linked terrorism and the growth of ISIS, Boko Haram, al-Shabaab and numerous others. There is a continuity between the Select Committee report and the needs of a world in which international terror and localised conflict seem ever more dangerous. The clear conclusion of the past few months of reflection on the advent of ICIS and of our renewed involvement in the use of armed force in Iraq has been that this is principally an ideological and even theological struggle that cannot be won by violence. It has to be won by the development of a fresh narrative which provides a peaceful, humane, viable, motivating and effective alternative to the terrible visions of ISIS and Boko Haram, to violence in India, Myanmar and many other areas of the world. Such a narrative will only be developed with soft power in collaboration with allies and partners around the world. It is the only way of avoiding the alternative: a long descent into the dark and fear filled ways of anarchic, networked conflicts—perhaps never critical but always a frightening and deeply draining demand.
The key institutions that are capable of exerting soft power for the common good of the countries with which we have contact, rather than merely to our own advantage, will be those that represent most adequately this generous hospitality that so characterises this country. In 1867, in an inscription on the door of the 16th century, temporary but still existing, Huguenot chapel in Canterbury Cathedral—it is still used every Sunday by the French Reformed Church—the author Samuel Smiles spoke of the history of the hospitality of church and nation to those in need. His words bear quoting. He said that,
“still that eloquent memorial of the religious history of the middle ages survives, bearing testimony alike to the rancour of the persecutions abroad … the large and liberal spirit of the English church, and the glorious asylum which England has in all times given to foreigners flying for refuge against oppression and tyranny”.
In our 21st century, such a sentiment must still apply. It is who we are.
Apart from the church, those generous and hospitable institutions are listed in the Select Committee report. They include the BBC, the Commonwealth, DfID, the brilliant and often profoundly courageous diplomats of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the armed services, the monarchy, the universities and so on. The common characteristic is clear British identity without being wrapped in the flag, a powerful ethos of service and a self-criticality. They are the institutions of the top level of power and of the bottom of the three-dimensional chessboard.
In the middle level, the economic, there is remarkable and frequently neglected potential of benefit both to us and to those with whom we deal. In the 37 Anglican communion provinces, we found that in those hit by war or suffering from fear or economic underdevelopment there is almost invariably a great desire for British presence in trade and investment as well as presence and engagement in other ways. We are much trusted, as the Select Committee report also shows, but little present and we seem in many places to have lost our nerve commercially and in engagement. Others come in with more self-interest and less ethics, and we seem far away, at a time when it is in our interest, in terms of manufacturing and employment, and in the interest of those overseas, to have ethical, committed and long-term economic partners. Especially for the grossly undersupported SME sector in this country, one that I grew to know well in Durham and in Liverpool, it comes down to simple measures recommended in the report such as one-stop shops for exports, good advice on agents and reliable export finance. Many others provide this; we seem to find it difficult. All this lies within the grip of Government, and has done so these past 20 years or more.
The institutions at all three levels that live out the narrative we need demonstrate how it is possible to operate internationally in a way that increases understanding, and hence reduces the likelihood of armed conflict, while maintaining a generosity of spirit that enables those with whom we co-operate to maintain their autonomy, their independence and their self-respect. We can do all that to mutual advantage. This benefit is especially evident at present through the commitment of the medical teams fighting Ebola, who come with support from DfID and have set an example of courage and sacrifice that is drawing attention across the whole of west Africa. We cannot be anything but overwhelmed by what they are doing.
Following the election next year, it seems likely that there will be a strategic defence and security review that should consider both soft and hard power—not merely hard power. I suggest that this is the moment for an exceptionally serious commitment to this review, not merely to use it as an adjunct as that of 2010 was, and that the seriousness should be especially in the interface between soft power and hard power. The review should set out clearly the ways in which foreign policy will support and develop the generous hospitality of soft power, in particular, first, to provide the convincing narrative of which I have spoken as an alternative to the malevolent and evil claims of violent religion, whether in the Middle East or elsewhere around the world, and, secondly, as a means of conflict mitigation and prevention. The new narrative must operate at all three levels of power. It requires the next strategic defence and security review to involve a national debate that draws in all three levels and enables us, as a country, to find afresh the vision of who we are. It cannot be simply an Armed Forces versus the Treasury rumble in the jungle of Whitehall, out of which emerges something unconnected to the vision of our role in the world.
An example of the nature of a good inclusive review brings in the questions of visas, the role of universities, the future of the BBC World Service and so forth. Visas were highlighted in the Select Committee report. I mention them simply because everywhere we go the first thing anyone says to me is “visas” and how difficult that system is. It was highlighted in the report that the apparently random and invariably extremely expensive way in which those coming here apply and are refused or accepted is deeply damaging to the exercise of soft power. You have only to look at the number of students coming from India, which has fallen precipitously. It appears that this policy is unconnected to our wider interests and, in my experience of more than 35 years of visiting Africa especially, has been so for much of that period.
At the third level there is, crucially, the use of intervention through reconciliation and mediation work, something that I have worked on for more than 10 years, including in its economic and investment aspects, as well as the use of stronger levels of force, at the early stages of development of conflict. It is both economically more effective than hard power by several orders of magnitude and, in humanitarian terms, transformative. This reality is acknowledged in the Government’s 2010 Building Stability Overseas strategy. Yet the application of this strategy in terms of developing the tools for intervention through reconciliation and mediation is still absent.
The exceptional skills and courage of the Diplomatic Service, which we have seen in our travels around the world, and the credibility of the BBC and the British Council, the Commonwealth and the extraordinary collaborative, autonomous but interdependent networks of the Anglican communion, provide unrivalled networks for conflict mitigation. Other countries look at them with envy and are unable to emulate them.
A clear policy for conflict mitigation is called for in any strategic defence and security review, and it will require investment. But when one considers the Institute for Economics and Peace research figure of violence containment costing up to $9.4 trillion a year, the contrast is a stark one. Conflict prevention seems quite a good investment. Coventry University is working with the Church of England on the faith-based conflict prevention scoping project, reflecting the reality that the church—the Anglican communion globally—is consistently at the forefront of conflict prevention, above all currently in the Great Lakes of Africa, South Sudan and the Central African Republic. Standing by a mass grave that I had just consecrated for the bodies of clergy and lay leaders of Bor Cathedral last January, and then hearing the Archbishop of Sudan, whose home town it was, call for reconciliation, and knowing that he is working with us on that now, was one of the most powerful moments of my life.
I might, if your Lordships will permit another slight dig, comment that the Anglican communion, as far as my research and reading found, was unmentioned in the otherwise excellent Select Committee report. I could not find “bishop”, “archbishop”, “church”, or indeed “Church of England”. As we are in 165 or more countries, far more than the Commonwealth, that seems, if I may put it at its most polite, a little surprising. The Anglican communion enables better communication of information than anything that can be arranged through government agencies but it does it with an end of blessing rather than advantage.
Soft power is far cheaper to exercise than hard power. One day of deploying a battalion will cost more than years of conflict prevention work by NGOs. In the other place today they are debating a Bill to enshrine in law the 0.7% of GDP target for overseas aid. This Government have, with strong cross-party support, superbly reached and maintained that target. It is not only right; it is also extremely cost-effective, in the best sense, for deploying our values and showing our generosity. DfID, incidentally, is one of the world’s best agencies in the field.
To conclude, I hope that in this debate we will see how the different strands of soft and hard power can be better combined, and there can be a clearer sense of the narrative which sustains this wonderful country which has in the past given so much to the world when at its best, and has the potential to give even more if the advantages of our history, the skills of our institutions and the courage of our people are combined with a clear aim in view.
Lord Howell of Guildford (Con)
My Lords, I am particularly pleased that the most reverend Primate should have brought this issue before your Lordships’ House today. I am honoured to be following his words and flattered that he has referred to the report, which we published in March this year, of the inquiry that I had the honour of chairing with my many distinguished colleagues.
We were not the first to come to this concept; it is one to which your Lordships have given considerable attention over the years. There have been excellent debates in 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013 and indeed this year. We are dealing with central issues in the completely changed international order in which we now have to operate and think our way.
It will be noticed that in the title of our report we avoided using the words “soft power”. We called it, as the most reverend Primate has already pointed out, Persuasion and Power in the Modern World. We did this because we believed that the term “soft power” was rather open to misunderstanding by certain commentators and was seen as a sort of easy, appeasing option to necessary harder and rougher methods, a way of trying to duck hard action in response to violence, cruelty and hideous persecution, especially the persecution of Christians in a uniquely violent and dangerous world today. I have in mind one particularly absurd and ill informed article about British foreign policy in the Daily Telegraph, which tried to depict soft power as some sort of weak alternative to the firm use of guns and killing power in the face of terror and the shadowy wars against brutal but elusive enemies. It seemed to be an argument for more of Iraq and Afghanistan, ignoring the lessons of those difficult campaigns.
Of course, soft power is no such thing. Hard and soft power, as the most reverend Primate has made crystal clear, are all parts of the same armoury—along the same spectrum of choices in our work to defeat violence and evil and protect the oppressed, promote tolerance and uphold both our values and interests and our nation’s position against brutal attack and terror. The big difference from the past is that we are now in a world not of armies and states at war with clearly established declarations of war, but of the mass involvement of peoples and networks in constant conflict. Thanks to the information revolution, we have almost total connectivity on the one hand combined with the terrifying absorption of civilian populations in violence and guerrilla wars to a greater degree than ever before. In these conditions, it is not the side with the biggest battalions, the most missiles and the most killing power that wins; it is the side with the best narrative and the best and cleverest communications techniques. We are in what the director of Chatham House, Robin Niblett, with great ability and clarity, has called a world of “hybrid wars”. This is a situation in which we require entirely new forms of diplomacy and a new power in conveying our message in order to ensure the results that we want, and that the direction in which we would like others to go is achieved in a way that old, pure hard power conflicts—more tanks, more rockets—clearly cannot achieve and no longer achieve.
That is the first point that I wanted to add to the most reverend Primate’s most excellent presentation of our report; indeed, I think that he did rather a better job than we did ourselves in putting forward its contents, and I thank him very much. My second point is that people say, “Well, it’s all very well talking about tolerance, values, the rule of law and good governance and so on, but you can’t eat those things; they don’t put food on the table”. That is what the sceptics say. They are wrong. In fact there is a kind of equation that exists in the modern world that I do not think has been fully understood by all Governments: values equal trust, trust equals confidence, confidence equals investment and investment equals prosperity, business, growth, jobs and food on the table. It is not necessarily the preaching but the conveyance of that message of values, and the urging of others to uphold them, that produces the prosperity and the development that everyone wants.
It is not just a matter for Governments. A committee of Parliament reports and its thoughts are directed at departments, Governments and so on. We have already had a useful reply from one department, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, to our report, but this is a world in which agencies and professions are as deeply involved as government. The most reverend Primate mentioned the British Council and the BBC World Service. They are more than ever the spearhead of promoting soft power stories and the case for our country and its place in the world. However, it goes far beyond on that. All the professions are now weaving together fantastic global networks. Business and markets are just as much our ambassadors as they are concerned with commerce. The media are central to the story. It goes far beyond that into journalism, electronics, engineering and the creative arts, which are central to the story of promoting our soft power. As we have seen in this morning’s newspapers, museums have a key role to play. While one expects a lead from the Government, this is an endeavour, a story, in which everyone is involved.
In our report, we came to the conclusion that a number of other countries were doing a great deal as well. In fact, many of them are spending far more resources on promoting the story of their country, their version of soft power, than we are doing in Britain. Nevertheless, that does not detract from the point that the soft power assets of this country are simply enormous. They cover the whole range, as the most reverend Primate mentioned, including respect for the monarchy, understanding our parliamentary system, our traditions, our experience, our legal system, and even our accounting system and our educational network, which includes huge global linkages between 530 universities through the Association of Commonwealth Universities, which is run from Tavistock Square and links the entire planet into the higher education system.
It will probably not surprise your Lordships that I mention the place of the Commonwealth in this story, and in the United Kingdom’s role and ability to prevent conflict and to carry forward the case for this country’s position in the new world in which we have to compete avidly and vigorously in entirely new markets and new conditions. Why do I bring the Commonwealth into it? Some people would say that it is not really the best example. We read in the media of endless quarrels between different Commonwealth countries and of doubts about whether all Commonwealth countries are keeping up to the standards they are signed up to and so on. We saw an example of that with the Heads of Government meeting in Colombo last year. That is just the visible tip of things that the media can see. The genius of the real Commonwealth network is that it is people-driven, civic society-driven, community-driven, common interest-driven, certainly education-driven and increasingly market and business-driven. Increasingly it weaves together non-governmental forces, including in the central role the message of the church, of course, in an age of weakened Governments and empowered groups, tribes, interests and, indeed, the street. That is why the age of hyperconnectivity has acted like a blood transfusion to a network covering almost a third of humankind, half of them under 25, half of them women struggling to have their full and rightful place, millions of them young entrepreneurs aspiring to break out of development dead ends, many of them from smaller states and small islands—there are 32 of them in the Commonwealth network, to which globalisation has given not much chance at all, and 16 of them are realms of the Queen’s subjects under Her Majesty the Queen.
I conclude by again congratulating the most reverend Primate on bringing forward this central theme. The reality is that the transformed international landscape is now filling up with a quilt of networks and new alliances, some involving the old West, where we belong, but some excluding it altogether. Not only economic power but political power has to a very large extent shifted eastwards. The Commonwealth is only one of these new or renewed systems, but it is a mighty one, and for a heavily interdependent Britain it is a huge potential asset in every respect, from both the trade and business point of view and the point of view of our contribution to peace, stability and development and to the effective containment, prevention and resolution of conflicts around the world. We on this island have an amazingly fortunate position. We have rather inherited the Commonwealth in ways that perhaps we do not always deserve. Over the past 40 years, it has not had the attention that it should have had, but the wheel has turned, and new growth, markets, savings and power now lie either in Commonwealth countries or in the countries to which they are a gateway, such as China and the great rising powers of Asia, which are also using soft power weaponry to full effect. We should grasp these opportunities brought to us by the new technology, the new age and the digital world and share them with our excellent European neighbours who are struggling at the moment. We have to work with them as well, as the good Lord has placed us in Europe and that is where we have to be, work, operate and co-operate. The two horses can be ridden, if I can put it that way, so long as we keep our balance and our confidence in what we can do and achieve. I repeat my gratitude to the most reverend Primate for enabling us to put forward these thoughts in this debate.
Lord Anderson of Swansea (Lab)
My Lords, I, too, warmly congratulate the most reverend Primate, and I adopt his challenge to future Governments in relation to adding a soft-power component to the coming SDSR. I note what he says about the role of the Anglican Church, and I only regret that in a spirit of ecumenicalism—I can say this as a Welsh Baptist—he did not also mention the role of the Roman Catholic Church, as I have had the remarkable experience of watching the work of Archbishop Hurley in South Africa and of being with the Catholic Church in Argentina, during the troubles in Central America and on refuse tips in the Philippines. Watching the reconciliation work of that church together with the Anglican Church, I think the churches have overall made a remarkable contribution.
The most reverend Primate is right to focus our attention on soft power and the possibility of non-military options. As he said, much of the same ground is covered in the Select Committee report that was published in March. The Select Committee, faithful to its remit, accepted Professor Joseph Nye’s definition:
“Soft power is the ability to affect others to obtain the outcomes one wants through attraction rather than coercion or payment”.
I understand that a debate on the report was scheduled for Monday week but then postponed—rather like the number 23 bus, they do not come and then they all come together. It was a most stimulating introduction, as was the report, and when we come to the debate on the report, I will say that I detect some of the fingerprints of the noble Lord, Lord Howell, notably—I speak as a former chairman of the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association—in perhaps overplaying the potential of the Commonwealth and underplaying the potential of the European Union.
By contrast, the most reverend Primate seeks to cover a wider area, including non-military options. For example, that phrase would extend to the current sanctions regime against Russia over its conduct in Ukraine. The West will not risk war but has imposed sanctions, and are not sanctions war by another means? Have they been effective? Coupled with the fall in oil prices, the sanctions have imposed major damage on the Russian economy, with the fall of the rouble, the decline in investment and Russia’s cancellation of the South Stream pipeline. There have been other examples of sanctions leading to a loss of confidence and trust—I refer, of course, to Iran and to the fall of apartheid in South Africa. There was of course an insurgency, but instruments such as the sports boycott and the decision of Chase Manhattan Bank in 1986 not to roll over its loans to South Africa had a major influence. As with Russia, as the most reverend Primate said, that shows the importance of having private sanctions alongside official ones.
We should also recognise that early military intervention can prevent a humanitarian catastrophe. After the Rwanda genocide in 1994, when, it is said, over 800,000 people were killed between March and June, the Carnegie Foundation commissioned a simulation exercise from West Point which concluded that, had a small number of troops intervened at the beginning, that might have prevented the looming catastrophe.
I offer a few reflections. First, soft power is a useful instrument for analysis, but there is no simple gradation towards sanctions and military intervention. In short, there is a power spectrum, and it is very difficult to ascertain the effectiveness of our major soft power tools. Obviously, those include DfID, the FCO, the British Council and the BBC World Service. So far as the British Council is concerned, I saw at first hand the quality of its work in intervening, particularly with the black population, during the apartheid years in South Africa. On the BBC World Service, I recall dining once with President Kaunda, who was far more up to date on UK internal affairs than I was, as I had been travelling and he listened to the BBC World Service. I was once in the middle of the Sahara when my host rushed out when his watch alarm went off. Why? “Because it is the one o’clock news on the BBC World Service”, he said, “and it’s the purest Arabic I’ve ever heard”.
To take a few simple examples, the 2012 Olympics told our British story to the world in the opening and closing ceremonies. How do we evaluate the effect of that? Manchester United claims to have 108 million followers in China—more than the membership of the Chinese Communist Party. So what? Will that lead to people buying British goods? Will it influence Chinese foreign policy? Finally, “Downton Abbey” has a worldwide audience. Will British values thus be carried abroad, or does the England of country houses rather than technological advances divert attention from our real interest—the real British story?
Thus, we should recognise that there is a spectrum—a public and a private contribution. Our development NGOs, often co-financed by government, reach parts of the world which government cannot—rather like Heineken. In the Middle East, the work of people such as my noble friend Lord Stone in building up networks between UK supermarkets and Palestinian exporters is an excellent contribution to the infrastructure of peace. Ultimately, however, if there is a settlement, military monitors will be needed. We have many strengths across the spectrum as regards our cultural and military weight. In that sense, we are rivalled only by France and China; the US has different strengths.
My second reflection is that some countries, such as Norway, Canada and Ireland, pride themselves on their expertise in soft power; our self-image is different. Perhaps I should leave the inventory of our assets to the debate on the Select Committee report, but I say in passing that I am puzzled by the omission from the report of the role that we play in the Council of Europe, which is the main forum for human rights in Europe and whose court—the European Court of Human Rights—has been heavily influenced by British lawyers. I shall not spell out the dangers of the Government separating us from the court and the effect on our influence in Europe and beyond. I can leave that to the former Attorney-General, Mr Dominic Grieve, and his withering criticism of government policy as regards the ECHR.
My third reflection is that it is right for churchmen to force us to ask us difficult questions—in effect, to be troublemakers, as Elijah was to Ahab. They should make us ask questions such as: is there a way other than war? Have we made the military option the last resort? I have seen the contributions of Christian men and women worldwide in combating poverty and the need to build a human infrastructure. However, perhaps the “professional deformation” of churchmen is to say to themselves that love conquers all and to ignore the necessity from time to time, ultimately, of the military option. Often, too, soft power works best when buttressed by hard power in the background. Obviously, the end of communism in Europe involved a subtle interplay of hard and soft power. Increasingly, development agencies are forced to recognise the linkage between development and security, as we have seen very much in Afghanistan. However, that is a debate for another day.
Fourthly, and finally, what are the implications for us? The starting point is perhaps the Delphic oracle’s “Know thyself”, or, as the most reverend Primate put it, “Who are we?”. At a time of austerity and military draw-down our power is no longer mainly exercised through military strength. We have, however, from history—from who we are—a unique range of assets to influence others. Perhaps the adjustment to a new role is more difficult for us, with the burden of a glorious past and the temptation to nostalgia. The new means of influence is surely through partnerships; unilateral action, such as over the Falklands, is no longer possible. We should avoid nationalist temptations —for example, the siren voices that influence the Government over the European Court of Human Rights. We should play to our strengths, which include the English language and the new diaspora in our midst. For example, have the Government seriously thought of encouraging people from the diaspora communities in our midst to go abroad to their countries of origin? For example, people from Turkish communities, who have learnt perfect English in our schools, could go for a year as assistants to Turkey; it would be good for them in improving their Turkish, and good for us in spreading the influence of our culture and values. The new diaspora in our midst is one of the many new assets we have.
We should seek creative ways of rebalancing soft, hard and smart power—using, as effectively as we can all our assets, mostly now in partnership with like-minded countries.
Baroness Williams of Crosby (LD)
My Lords, I add my thanks to the most reverend Primate for introducing this debate. Such a turnout on a Friday morning is so impressive that it reflects the great respect that this House has for him and the work that he and the Church of England have done. I hope he will take much strength from that observation.
I have been interested in the way that we have talked increasingly about soft power. I remember when the concept was introduced—originally, I think, by Professor Nye of Harvard. He talked about soft power in a very influential book which was published about 20 years ago, in a country that, for a very long time, did not perceive soft power as anything other than an escape from the hardest choices that have to be made. Among the things that I hope various Members of this House—perhaps not least the noble Lord, Admiral Lord West—will be able to talk to us about is what the relationship should be between the military and soft power, because it is crucial that they work together and are not in conflict with one another.
We have huge assets which a number of noble Lords—not least, of course, the noble Lords, Lord Howell and Lord Anderson—have mentioned. It is important to say that one of the things that we should make quite clear is that we have those remarkable assets which, frankly, we have consistently undervalued. The list is astonishing. Importantly, of course, it includes the BBC, as the noble Lord, Lord Anderson, said, and in particular the World Service, which is often the Cinderella of the whole BBC system. It should not be, because its influence and effect have been colossal—far beyond the expenditure on it. Secondly, we have the huge advantage of the English language, which we have been lucky enough to make our own but which is now the closest thing we have to an international language. It is of crucial importance.
Thirdly, and not least, as the most reverend Primate said, there is the astonishing and growing influence of British universities and British technical colleges up and down this country. I completely and totally endorse and strongly support the remarks that he made about visas. We are seeing a conflict between the attitudes of different government departments, which is doing none of us any good. I speak as someone who was an overseas student first at Columbia and later at Harvard. There is a lifelong effect from studying in another country and getting to know that other country—coming out with friends from that other country, as the most reverend Primate said. Incidentally, there is one point that should be made about that—and not only the point about visas, which I hope the Minister will convey with some extreme passion to the Home Office. We also, importantly, need to think carefully about the hospitality that universities organise for those students who know this country not at all and do not perhaps speak English very well but who need a certain amount of help and assistance in settling down in the new context of a university in another country. It can be crucially important that people establish friendships while at university. Very often, those friendships—if one wants to be very tough-minded indeed—lead to business deals, investment and relationships between businesses of a kind that is of economic value to this country, as well as of cultural and educational value. We consistently underestimate the extraordinary power of higher education in building bridges and links with other countries, not least within the Commonwealth.
That brings me on to the Commonwealth itself, as the noble Lord, Lord Howell, said. It is an astonishing asset. We have largely failed to realise its full potential, which is absolutely immense. It is one of very few organisations in the world which, apart from being international, is also intercultural, interracial, and inter-educational and, not least, brings together different religions, cultures and so forth. I think that we could make much more of it. In that context, we have failed to recognise the astonishing contribution made by the Prince of Wales, who has established within the Commonwealth astonishing ways in which to recruit young men and women into entrepreneurial futures and innovation in science, and into new jobs. He is sometimes regarded by the media in this country as something of an eccentric figure, but it is important that we recognise the great contribution that he has made, with thousands of young men and women finding opportunities for the future and being able to contribute to the Commonwealth. That is something that we need to look at very closely. I pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Howell of Guildford, because he has played a very large part in this. Although I myself am a strong European, I agree completely that there is no necessary conflict; in fact, on the contrary, the United Kingdom should be crucial in building bridges between this newly developing great society and the old world of Europe. It could be immensely good for Europe as well as for the Commonwealth itself.
I shall say a word about the third form of soft power, which is very important but quite controversial. I refer of course to economic soft power, which comes very close to being hard power. I know Russia quite well—I am going to go there next week—and I think that sometimes we fail to remember its history, which is that of a huge country that is constantly challenged by invasion and, in some cases, occupation and, in many cases, misunderstanding. One sees in many policies of the Russian Government at present what could be described as a somewhat paranoiac reaction to the sense of being constantly on the defensive. What I am trying to say is that I recognise that sanctions have been effective—but targeted sanctions are much more sensible than generalised sanctions, which tend to be carried out with the suffering of the general public. Having targeted sanctions of the kind that we have specifically imposed on senior leading people in Russia is a much more sensible and imaginative policy. I also strongly believe that, if you are going to occupy yourself with a policy of sanctions, it is absolutely crucial that there is side by side with it a policy of negotiation and reconciliation. We have not done that sufficiently with Russia. We are moving tragically towards some kind of rather foolish resumption of the Cold War. What we need to do above all is to relate Russia to the other forms of relationship—cultural, artistic and educational —that are open to us, to show that great country that it is not simply put in the doghouse, to be blamed and pushed out of the international community.
I do not say those things while failing to recognise the colossal challenge to the world of law that is represented, particularly, by the annexation of Crimea without any legal process having been gone through or without acknowledging the deep and difficult concerns of the Russian relationship with Ukraine, a country that I know well. But it is so easy for us in Britain to forget the desperate history of the relationship between Ukraine and Russia, going right back to the First World War and the Second World War. As a country that wishes both well, we have a considerable role to play in mediation and negotiation, and it is one that we should take up more ambitiously and with more conviction than we do at present.
I shall talk briefly about a couple of other things. I shall talk quite controversially for just a moment about the role of the City of London. It is a very powerful international organisation with links throughout the world. It has long been part of the things that people greatly respect about the United Kingdom, but it is currently putting itself into a very vulnerable position. I greatly appreciate the role that the most reverend Primate has taken in trying to suggest to the City that it needs to regain its moral compass. The last three rounds of scandal—the forex scandal, the LIBOR scandal and, earlier on, the banking crisis itself—suggest that the City needs to sit down and think very hard about what its relationships should be in a world of soft power. I shall give only one illustration but I could give many more. It is vital that the leading banks in the UK, which have long had great respect paid to them, often rightly, should look much more energetically than they currently do at the whole issue of money laundering and its relationship to drug money and the sale of arms. In Parliament, we deserve greater attention to be paid to these things by the City, and I hope very much that the Treasury Select Committee and others will start to take up these matters in a way that the most reverend Primate has taken them up, with great courage and almost in the legacy of Christ overturning the tables at the temple that were mastered by the money changers.
Finally—and I apologise to the House if I have talked for longer than I should—I shall say one other word about the issue of soft power, and the way in which we as a country have to get across two things to our citizens and ourselves. One is, essentially, that if we are going to be effective in soft power, we have to show a certain humility. You cannot impose the old attitudes of the past. That means that, essentially, what we have to do is to extend our own education and learn from other countries—not least in the Commonwealth. There are things that we can learn from others. That is very important for the attitude that we take towards the wider world.
I conclude by saying that I have always believed very deeply that one central theme of Christianity is the victory of the Cross over the massed armies of Rome. That is in a sense a victory of soft power over hard power, and we have perhaps no better example to bear in mind when we consider how we should proceed with the policies advocated by the most reverend Primate.
Lord Craig of Radley (CB)
My Lords, it is a privilege to follow the noble Baroness, whose knowledge of these issues is profound.
Given the stress in the debate’s title on non-military means of conflict prevention, I hope that the most reverend Primate, who opened it in a most interesting and thought-provoking way, will not take it amiss if one who has spent his whole professional life in the Armed Forces should presume to contribute. I fully share the vision that it is far better to deal with situations by non-military means and sensible applications of soft power, however defined. I shall allude to its application for deterrence or prevention of conflict rather than to Joseph Nye’s definition of an ability to attract and co-opt others.
When I was studying for my RAF promotion exams more than 60 years ago, I was taught to consider three aspects in dealing with potential adversaries. They were political, economic and military. Non-conflict concepts were alive all those years ago. Today they have been rebranded and brigaded in a contemporary media-savvy vision called soft power. I leave it to others to unwrap the conundrum that so many from overseas wish to live and stay in this country while many others are so militantly averse to all that we stand for and believe in.
I turn to my third heading and the point I wish to make. It may be summed up in that phrase first attributed to Theodore Roosevelt. He wrote in 1900 that you can go far if you:
“Speak softly and carry a big stick”.
Others have coined the phrase, “an iron fist in a velvet glove”. My concern about the values of non-coercive soft power and non-military intervention lies not in their intrinsic worth but in the context in which they are applied.
The debate focuses on conflict prevention, not just winning the hearts and minds of others, so the perceptions of the interlocutors in the exchanges are all-important. The view from their end of the telescope may well not match ours. They may need to be cajoled or won over with economic or political gestures—but will those suffice to ensure a satisfactory outcome? The other side will certainly be weighing up what more it might extract, or what pressures it might face.
I fear that in recent years—I know this from my own experience—we have had harsh lessons, paid for in blood and treasure, about an opposition’s presumptions about the temper of the iron in our national fist. For decades before 1982, we had expended much effort in political-diplomatic exchanges to dissuade the Argentinians over their claim to the Falkland Islands. During the mid-1970s, the Argentinians became more belligerent—so much so that a nuclear-powered submarine was dispatched at short notice to the southern Atlantic as a successful deterrent.
As a then Assistant Chief of Air Staff at the MoD, I looked at the possibility of flying ground reinforcement into the Falklands by Hercules. Regrettably, I had to advise that, while a Hercules transport aircraft could, indeed, just fly into Port Stanley’s short airstrip, insufficient fuel was stored there, let alone runway length, to recover even a single aircraft. The idea of building a new airfield of reasonable size to allow for rapid reinforcement and in-theatre operations was considered, following an in-depth report by Lord Shackleton. However, the cost was sizeable and no department felt that it could be afforded, so it was dismissed as unnecessary. Non-military negotiation should continue and would—it was presumed—prove as adequate as in the past.
In subsequent years, the Argentinians noted that our military commitment to the Falklands was further and further diminished, with the withdrawal of a guard ship and eventually HMS “Endeavour”. By the time the Argentinians invaded in 1982, there were just 40 marines in place and no prospect of rapid reinforcement by air. Only after recapture did we get round to building the airfield at Mount Pleasant and positioning aircraft and radar for deterrence and protection. Soft power on that occasion lacked the deterrent of robust and timely further action, and we paid a dreadful price in lives lost, young individuals scarred for life and tragedy for the families involved.
Moving forward to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait and the first Gulf conflict, Saddam Hussein’s presumption was that the reduction in military capability, as the US and Britain sought to benefit from a peace dividend following the end of the Cold War, made it less likely that we would embark on hostile military action. Between August 1990 and February 1991, this perception of his must have been strengthened in spite of sizeable deployment of coalition forces into theatre, as the US, with our active support, sought to find a non-military solution. Nothing budged Hussein until his forces were attacked by air and, finally, by ground forces.
We lost six Tornado aircraft in that conflict, but there were adequate numbers to sustain our operational tempo. Today, there seems little dialogue with ISIL and we and our allies have embarked on a muted application of force. Is it not sobering to realise that our total offensive contribution to this ongoing operation, apart from some UAV sorties, is just six Tornados? Even with the life extension recently given to the Tornado force to remain at three full squadrons for a further year, there is no continuous capability for an air combat force to remain deployed globally, as a deterrent or for use, as far and as wide as it has been. Other tasks may become more pressing.
I have chosen the Tornado force to illustrate my point, but similar analogies may be made for naval and Army forces. All three services are shadows of their former selves of even a couple of decades ago. The Air Force that I was privileged to lead in the mid-1980s was 100,000 strong. Today, it is down to close on 30,000 and force numbers have declined in proportion. Does this ORBAT any longer have a hope of being the big stick or iron fist that history teaches us is an essential long-stop to soft power and other non-military engagement with recalcitrant opponents?
I repeat that of course I welcome all steps—any steps—that can resolve difficulties between nations without recourse to war and bloodshed. However, these have far greater hope of success if the stick and fist are first class and sizeable enough to carry weight in the minds of those we seek to win over. We deceive ourselves if we believe that today’s force levels are still adequate to foster and promote the success of soft power in conflict prevention. President Putin’s annexation of Crimea, so robustly decried by our Government and many in the West as unacceptable, is now a fait accompli. The strategic prize for Russia must surely outweigh any or all inconvenience caused to its economy, or even individuals, by sanctions, which are the most that NATO and the EU seem capable, or willing, to call upon. The labours of those who diligently seek to solve problems with soft power might be more productive if those who bear responsibility for defence consider the adequacy of the available strengths rather than assume that all is well because we input some now very small amount of GDP on defence capability.
I applaud the efforts and enthusiasm of the most reverend Primate and other noble Lords. I hope that more will be done for the Armed Forces to give him and others the deterrent muscle of “big stick” and well tempered “iron fist” to promote success—the success that a combination of hard and soft power, or “smart power”, may bring. Hard power, it has been said, begets soft power.
Lord Wei (Con)
My Lords, I am most grateful to the most reverend Primate for tabling this debate and commend him and the Church of England worldwide for the strenuous efforts it makes to advance reconciliation between conflicting groups, both here in the UK and abroad. I declare my various interests as laid out in the Lords register.
When I first reflected on the notion of soft power after coming into this House, it led me to a curious starting place: trade. We often think of soft power in terms of non-profit, diplomatic and associational activity alongside the marketplace—many of which were expertly set out in the excellent report by the Select Committee chaired ably by the noble Lord, Lord Howell of Guildford. However, I have been intrigued these last few years by the power of dreams—specifically, commercial dreams that have criss-crossed the world over the centuries as a means of enabling countries and cultures to communicate and connect across language and other barriers.
For example, the European or continental dream emanating from the courts of kings and nobles in France, Italy and beyond, find their expression still today in the luxury wares and fashions that fill high streets around the world. Our own British dream, developed quite consciously and wisely as a means to make our own Royal Family and leadership more accessible in dangerous times, finds resonance today in the goods and products so sought after around the world. The American dream followed, and many others are being built.
Each dream identifies iconic products or artefacts in areas that have universal appeal, allowing them to say something of their host culture that words alone cannot convey, and often specifically in four areas: food and drink, housing, clothing or fashion, and communications, which covers both transportation and now IT. So whether you are drinking a Coca-Cola or Earl Grey tea, driving a Mini or a Cadillac, wearing Armani or Savile Row, and so on, millions are able to partake in both high-end and everyday products and services that enable them to have a taste of another culture from somewhere around the world.
What, one might ask, has this got to do with conflict prevention? Actually, a great deal. American products after the world wars were provided to starving populations once fighting ceased, and created a warmth towards America that persists today in many parts of the world. The role of entertainment—specifically sport, which, I would argue, is a part of the British dream—exported around the world, created a valuable means ultimately of enabling friendly competition between nations, as a way of building relations and avoiding conflicts which might otherwise get out of hand.
Most importantly, each of the dreams in its purest and admittedly stereotypical form, certainly at the outset and at its best, encodes a set of values that belies the simple functionality of the products that make them up. So with the old European dream one can pick up consciously or subconsciously an understanding of quality and craftsmanship, of honour and tradition. With the British dream there is civility, good humour, fair play and, increasingly today, modernity, social responsibility and community. With the American dream there is freedom, prosperity and aspiration.
The Chinese dream is currently under development. I would love to see one emerging in the coming years that builds on the idea of a strong, increasingly prosperous nation rising again on the world stage—important as this concept is—to incorporate through its entrepreneurial and commercial products the values of care for, and harmony with, nature, of family and of respect for others, which I think expresses the best of historic Chinese civilisation’s values over the millennia.
In their best form these values—carried as they are within the dreams and the artefacts that represent them—can, when well executed, deliver more understanding and help prevent conflict more than a hundred conferences or acts of diplomacy, vital as these are. This is because, by facilitating everyday the subconscious admiration of another nation or group’s culture, we create a safe space for dialogue and for focusing on the positive, and step away from division.
Of course, the transmission of values, whether via commercial products or in a more general way through discourse, dialogue, and diplomacy, can be a powerful form of soft power in and of itself, which is why so much energy is poured into related think tanks, education, global broadcasting, national councils, cultural initiatives and so on. However, we have to evaluate whether value transmission is always in its rawest and least-nuanced fashion beneficial to the cause of preventing or reducing conflict, whether armed or not.
I will take democracy as one example. In most circles, and not least in this, the Mother of Parliaments, democracy is our most cherished export, a part of the British dream—and quite rightly so. At times, however, the value that democracy represents when universalised and imposed on other countries prematurely can sometimes do more harm than good, not least to the long-term peaceful cause and development of democracy in such countries themselves. We need to remember how long it took for our own democracy to develop, and remember that stable ones are not built overnight.
Indeed, there are values embedded in each of the dreams I have mentioned which work against peace and understanding and which can undermine the health and well-being of the consumers who partake of them—from the colonialist mindset that parts of the old British dream can convey, to the materialism and literal overconsumption that the American dream now often evokes, or the unequal decadence and faded grandeur of the European dream, and so on.
The key to whether values carried by such dreams or transmitted directly have a positive or negative impact ultimately comes down, of course, to people. And here is the rub: our soft power and that of other cultures derive not just from our products and cultural artefacts, and not even just from our values, but from the behaviour and mindset of the people who promote these values and artefacts to the world.
You may be a politician looking to secure votes here, who seeks to champion values overseas—whether those of democracy or freedom from bureaucracy—but in your heart you care more about how this might play with your own voters than with the countries that you are talking about and the people in them. Your words for a domestic audience can end up increasing conflict and have adverse consequences overseas, especially in an age of social media. Conversely, you might be a journalist or editor who rightly decides to not over-report the executions that are happening in the Middle East to help save lives by not escalating the cycle of violence in the region. In each case, it is the person who determines through their actions and words whether the values they champion end up causing conflict or preventing it.
It is all about people in the end, and their motivations. Here there is a particular poignancy because, noting that Christmas is just round the corner, there is a person, in Jesus Christ, whose soft power, if you like, has persisted to this day and shaped nations, not least our own; and whose example, if followed—perhaps with a bit of help from above—gives us a guide to how to prevent unnecessary conflict and how to be the kind of people who promote peace, not violence. While war is sometimes unfortunately necessary when the cause is just, the harder battles are always in winning and establishing peace and avoiding the conditions which will lead to wars in future.
As has been mentioned, Jesus took a successful system based on war and conquest, that of the Roman Empire—and specifically a form of governance the Romans used called ekklesia, from which we derive our word church or assembly—and encouraged his followers to represent him by helping to peacefully bring his values of love and blessing to the world, using the trade routes that were the Roman internet of the day to shape history to the then ends of the earth. He did this not by confining himself and his message of salvation to one country, city, or even building, but by positively influencing the very people who shape culture and values, and who oversee how these are transmitted locally and globally, and who through trade and commerce shape the narratives—the dreams to which people aspire.
Some might argue that faith, whether Christian or other faiths, is a historical source of conflict, and should be kept out of any debate about soft power. I would argue that again we need to understand the nuance. The kind of faith that underpinned Jesus’s notion of ekklesia, of his church throughout a city making peace and caring for the needs of its citizens—young, old, masters or employers—is the kind that brings peace, and which can help steer the right values and the right artefacts in the right direction. The kind of faith that seeks to make conflict itself a goal, and specifically violence, is attractive when people of peace, the ekklesia and others who share similar values to it, are absent or have been ignored, and represents a kind of last resort for the desperate as law and order breaks down, dreams are shattered and opportunists looking for short-term gain rise up and start to wage both a narrative and physical war.
Today we live in a world of conflict—not just the kind of conflict expressed through physical war but of many kinds, increasingly afflicting our world. Much of it is viral—spreading quickly, fuelled by perceived inequality and injustice. We need people who can follow Christ’s lead and take a stand for winning the peace, not just the war, whose values are positive and who can help prevent conflict, and whose everyday lives, products and narratives, instead of sowing division, promote understanding, restraint and tolerance.
Lord Boateng (Lab)
My Lords, we owe the most reverend Primate a debt of gratitude for enabling us to engage in what has been a worthwhile and stimulating debate, just as Africa and the wider world owe his church and the ecumenical movement a debt of gratitude for the outstanding work they are doing on conflict resolution in southern Sudan as we speak, and in Nigeria. Those are two area of Africa with which I am well acquainted.
As I think we have all gathered in the course of this morning’s debate, the reality is that the term “soft power” does not do justice to the cause that it represents. The values that underpin the communication and promotion of that vision—conflict resolution, peace, justice and reconciliation, which form the basis of sustainable development—are not, in fact, soft options. They are anything but that. They are tough and require tough thinking. They require courage on the part of the participants. My experience, whether as Chief Secretary, as a high commissioner or indeed on the front line in Africa today, teaches me that, in addition to those things, they require resources—resources applied on the ground with vigour and determination.
I want to share one or two thoughts on resources with the House. I fear the reality is that the resources for the exercise of soft power are, all too often, simply not there. They are certainly there much less readily than for the application of hard power. When I think of the chaos and suffering caused in the southern Sahel region of Africa by the application of hard power in Libya—a direct result of which has been the destabilisation of large parts of Mali and the fanning of the flames of dissent in so many countries bordering the Sahel—I think of the readiness with which money was found for it, and of the struggle now being experienced in the regions most affected by the deployment of military activity in Libya to find resources to build peace and address the underlying causes of conflict in the southern Sahel. Yes, those causes undoubtedly lie in religious division, but above all they find their basis in a sense of despair and hopelessness, on the part of a youthful population, to find any form of gainful employment, even when they have an education. Boko Haram, in its attack on western education, is fuelled by the reality in Nigeria and so many other parts of Africa: even when people have that education, there are no jobs. We need to realise that, in the application of soft power, we have to will the resources and find the resources to make a difference on the ground.
It is ironic that, even as we speak, the other place is debating and reflecting on the importance of putting into law our cross-party commitment, for which this country and our two Houses are to be commended, of putting 0.7% of GDP into overseas development assistance. I am bound to say this: we are going to be required to spend an additional £1 billion of overseas development assistance if we are to meet that 0.7% target. I very much hope that we will spend that money and that we will put into law that commitment to 0.7%. However, it is ironic that, as we do that, the British Council, the World Service, NGOs, the churches and so many other instruments of soft power are scrabbling for resources. This is not because of the deficit, but because we do not seem to be able to find a way of translating that ODA, through instruments of soft power, into making a difference on the ground. That is a challenge.
The most reverend Primate spoke, in the context of the next strategic defence and security review, of hoping to avoid another “rumble in the jungle” between the Treasury and the MoD. The wolf may lie down with the lamb, but I must share my experience with your Lordships. I feel quite at home in the jungle. That has nothing whatever to do with the fact I am a Hackney boy—we know how to defend ourselves. It is because I spent three and a half years in the jungle of the Treasury and in Whitehall as Chief Secretary to the Treasury. I see a number of colleagues looking at me with a certain degree of—how can I put it? Trepidation is the wrong word, but there you are. We had our battles. Battles are the nature of what takes place in Whitehall when we look at public spending. It is right that there should be a rigorous approach to public spending. I fear that my experience has been, all too often, that it is an issue not just of one department losing out over another, but of failure on the part of our systems to require departments to work together. That happens time and again: the silo mentality, the determination to protect departmental budgets at all costs.
In that particular rumble in the jungle, DfID is no innocent. It is a department that has, for very understandable reasons, been jealous of the definition of ODA. As a result, it is extremely reluctant to spend money through the agency of other departments. We will have to do that. If we have this extra £1 billion that needs spending—and we have—I suggest it is much better to spend it through the MoD, the FCO, the Department of Health, the British Council and the World Service than simply to say, “We’ve got this money. Let’s just send it off through some other multilateral organisation outside the UK”. That really is not the way forward. The money is there; this is not a deficit issue. This country and all sides of the House are to be commended for their generosity in that respect. The question is how we spend that money. I will make two or three points relating to that.
The first concerns the ring-fence. We must be prepared to ring-fence the budget of the British Council, as was previously the case. Since the ring-fence was removed, not surprisingly the budget of that organisation has been consistently reduced. I fear that the figures speak for themselves. In the last year for which the British Council has figures, grant in aid from the FCO was reduced to £171.5 million, which represented 22% of the council’s total income. Five years before that, FCO grant in aid was £189 million, which represented 34% of its total income. Therefore, one can see the way in which the British Council’s budget is being consistently squeezed. The corporate plan for 2014-16 sees that amount decrease to 16%. Therefore, only 16% of the British Council’s budget will come from the FCO; the rest will have to come from elsewhere. The reality is that that elsewhere has been commercial activity related to the teaching of the English language.
I am second to none in my belief in the promotion of the English language. One can see in the register of interests that I am deputy chair of the English Speaking Union. I believe the promotion of the English language to be a good and vital thing, but it is not simply the promotion of the English language through commercial teaching that the British Council was set up to achieve. It was, should be and is at its best when it promotes our values and our vision—values and vision which underpin successful and sustainable development, as well as conflict resolution, and which are all about the substance of genuine and sustainable peace. This is not airy-fairy stuff; this is practical work that the British Council is delivering now through the Active Citizens programme and through the work that it is doing in Syria and Nigeria. However, it is all work that is under threat and underfunded, and where, I fear, we do not see evidence of spending supported adequately or sufficiently by overseas development assistance as it might be.
I am afraid that the Conflict Pool is not working. You have only to look at the report of the House of Commons International Development Select Committee, which makes that point. It points to the good things that the Conflict Pool has done but says:
“It has proved effective at … supporting worthwhile conflict prevention initiatives and has delivered some useful … results”,
but,
“it lacks a clear strategic framework and robust funding model”.
If we are serious about soft power and about the subject of this debate, we have to give the Conflict Pool a robust funding model. We have to make sure that the different government departments work together and are able to apply to that pool for the resources that they need to do the job. That includes the Foreign Office. We cannot talk about soft power while globally our reach is being diminished. The number of people we are able to deploy to advance our vision and our values is decreasing. They are hard-pressed but they do great work, as the most reverend Primate pointed out and as a number of your Lordships know from their own experience. The work that they do is absolutely essential to the deployment of our soft power.
The same applies to the MoD and our diplomatic reach in terms of our military attaches, who are engaged in the day-to-day business of promoting peace and conflict resolution on the continent of Africa. Our capacity now to deploy MoD personnel to that end has been seriously depleted, and our capacity to support the Kofi Annan International Peacekeeping and Training Centre has all but disappeared. You have only to examine the core curriculum of that training centre. It includes a police mobile training team, a conflict prevention course, an election management course, peacekeeping logistics and a rule of law course. This is what soft power is about, and we have to find a way of getting through the thickets and the jungles to which our spending processes are all too often subject in order to make sure that that precious resource is deployed.
This is not an issue that divides this House or our country; it is an issue that I fear requires us now to grasp the day-to-day business of making sure that we have, as the Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy recommends, a security and strategic review next year leading to a new security strategy. However, we need to make sure that that is linked to the comprehensive spending review, to resources and to a change in the model of funding of our activities in this area. We have a great opportunity. There is much to be done. We have to seize the moment.
Lord Maclennan of Rogart (LD)
My Lords, I, too, thank the most reverend Primate for initiating this debate, and I greatly admired the way in which he opened our deliberations. I also thank the committee and its distinguished chairman, the noble Lord, Lord Howell of Guildford, for the report, which is extremely timely.
The interdependence of the world that we live in is becoming increasingly clear. This country is taking measures to deal with violence, and violence stimulated from abroad. We are spending money on that. The interconnection of world powers is becoming increasingly clear to every citizen, and I believe that the citizenry of this country would welcome a review, initiated by the Government, of soft power and the persuasion of others to avoid violence. We need positive plans. If in the next year we are considering defence and security, this is an extremely important part of it.
Recently, this House had the honour and advantage of hearing from the Deputy Secretary-General of the United Nations, Mr Jan Eliasson, who has had very great experience in the United Nations. He talked to us about the fact that the UN should not now be solely occupied by the member nations but that it should recognise that there are cross-boundary concerns, beliefs and objections which should be taken into consideration in planning for world peace.
It is a good thing that 0.7% of our GDP is being made permanent. I hope that this country will grow in such a way that it could even exceed that, but it is a notable achievement and it is not one that the public object to.
I want to come back, eventually, to the points made by the Deputy Secretary-General, but others have spoken about the value of the Commonwealth, and that institution could do even more than it does at present. The two British institutions that are particularly directed towards extending to other countries our understanding of the values that we need to put in place to avoid violence and our rich culture are the British Council and the BBC World Service. The noble Lord, Lord Boateng, spoke well and forcefully of the pressures that are felt by the British Council and I will not go into them in great depth. But it is a marvellous organisation, which at one point was led by the deputy secretary of the department in which I served as a junior Minister. I learnt a great deal from him.
We really need to give serious attention to the BBC World Service. The budget rose in April of this year by £6.5 million to £245 million, but in 2010, the Foreign Office cut BBC World Service funding by 16%, leading to the departure of about one-fifth of its staff. The licence fee might prove a more stable source of funding than the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, but the licence fee itself will come under consideration by the Government. It has to be underpinned at a distinctly higher level. Again, I believe that the British citizenry would accept that and understand that part of the money is to underpin our society.
In 2005, the BBC provided services in 43 languages. Today that figure is down to 28. I recognise that English is becoming a world language, but we should be targeting people who do not necessarily speak English. Of the languages that are spoken, a television service operates for the Arabic and Persian languages, with a smaller service on IPTV—television via the internet—for the Russian language. A radio service exists for 18 other language services. In contrast, Chinese state journalists broadcast in more than 60 languages.
The audience for the World Service grew in 2013 thanks to its Arabic and Persian TV stations. It has adapted to growing competition by creating more programming for local partners to air, and its audience online, although small, is picking up. This is vitally important.
The global audience estimate measures the combined reach of the BBC’s international services—the BBC World Service, BBC World News, BBC.com/news and BBC Media Action—across the world. Russia has recently shown the biggest growth for a single market, with the audience more than doubling to 6.9 million weekly, as people turn to the BBC for trustworthy and impartial news. The BBC’s Ukrainian service also reflects this trend, with its audience more than tripling to more than 600,000 over the past year. BBC World News TV shows an increase of 5 million viewers, taking its weekly audience to 76 million. The Indian audience has grown and shows signs of recovering from the past few years of decline. This comes thanks to investments in digital and TV for the Hindi service, including the launch of the “Global India” programme on TV, which brings in 6 million weekly viewers, and an increase in World News viewers.
Before I conclude, I want to say that Governments are not the only people who should be expressing and supporting soft power. We recently saw a very important visit by the Pope to Turkey where he issued a joint statement, along with the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I, which showed an awareness of the ecumenical nature of religion. They said:
“We express our common concern for the current situation in Iraq, Syria and the whole Middle East. We are united in the desire for peace and stability and in the will to promote the resolution of conflicts through dialogue and reconciliation … The grave challenges facing the world in the present situation require the solidarity of all people of good will, and so we also recognize the importance of promoting a constructive dialogue with Islam based on mutual respect and friendship”.
I am delighted to hear that, because the Abrahamic religions should be speaking out together against the appalling violence and calamities that we have seen in Iraq and Syria. There was a convention in Abu Dhabi on 14 September in which a response was issued by the Islamic people’s scholars and imams entitled This is Not the Path to Paradise. It was a long declaration that was inadequately noticed. It contained a verse from the Koran saying:
“When he is empowered, he sets out to do violence in the land, destroying crops and livestock. But God does not love violence”.
Further on there is another quotation from the Prophet Muhammad:
“Beware (or Woe unto you)! Listen! Do not revert back to disbelief after I have gone”—
that is by,
“some of you killing others”.
We need a coming together of religions to voice their common message in favour of peace and kindness to mankind.
Lord Parekh (Lab)
My Lords, I begin by thanking and congratulating the most reverend Primate on securing this debate and introducing it with very considerable eloquence and wisdom. Today’s debate could not have been more timely and morally more engaging. Over the past few years we have become so used to violence that we resort to force every time we want something. This is true of private individuals and groups and, sadly, it is also true of nation states and Governments. When nation states and Governments intervene violently in the name of “humanitarian intervention”—paradoxically so called—sometimes they end up causing more direct and collateral damage than the harm they are seeking to prevent. We need, therefore, to explore non-military alternatives to the use of violence, which is precisely the theme of our debate today.
Before doing that, I want to question—or if not question then certainly interrogate—the concept of soft power. I have said on several occasions in your Lordships’ House that I feel slightly uneasy about the notion of soft power for two simple reasons. The first is that it traps us in the logic of power. We seem to think that soft power can or should achieve more or less the same things as hard power except that it does so by different means. In other words, soft power refers to a different modality, but it does not question the logic of power itself. The second difficulty is that I am not entirely sure what it includes. We talk about persuasion and getting people to think in a certain way, but what about, for example, economic sanctions? Do they constitute the exercise of soft power? What about threats of a non-military kind that one nation might make to another? The arm-twisting that goes on—does that constitute soft power? We need to be careful to ensure that soft power is not understood simply as a negative category—anything that is not hard power—but that it is understood as a positive concept capable of being defined on its own terms.
Once that is done, some difficulties arise. If we engage in certain charitable and philanthropic activities such as supporting NGOs, educational programmes in schools and so on, we somehow begin to think that we have acquired the right to exercise soft power. If the countries in which we invest in these ways do not oblige, we feel cheated. We then ask ourselves what it is that we have been doing, and why. The example of Nelson Mandela was cited a little earlier. Here was a man of whom I would hesitate to say that he was exercising, consciously or unconsciously, soft power. Why does he matter to us? Why does he have such influence? It is because he exemplified a certain way of life and certain ideals, and those ideals speak for themselves.
From a religious perspective—I am not a religious person but inevitably this debate has a religious character—ideals can speak in a quiet way often without being articulated and without being turned into instruments of power. We in Britain do have considerable influence—I will not use the term “soft power”—because we exercise a certain moral authority. However, the notion of moral authority is in danger of being subsumed into and misunderstood as soft power. Beyond the soft power which comes through the kinds of things we have been talking about, there is a certain kind of influence and authority that both individuals and nations can exercise. In our case, we have exercised and continue to exercise a certain kind of moral authority. When we speak, people listen. They may not necessarily agree with us, but they will listen because they know that it is a voice of maturity born out of great historical experience and a talented people who are given to critical debate and therefore to arriving at their views through critical reflection. Ultimately, it is what we stand for which matters, and thus it is how we organise our political life and culture that will give us our moral authority.
The danger, which I began to perceive while listening to the speeches of quite a few noble Lords, lies in the debate about how to connect soft power with the prevention of conflict. The debate is increasingly concentrated on how to accumulate and use soft power, while the prevention of conflict is quietly falling from view. If we are not careful, the language of soft power can be very seductive. It is also worth bearing in mind that soft power can so easily be lost. Britain stood for something very important and exemplified some great ideals. We made a disastrous mistake in the case of Iraq, with the result that lots of people all around the world began to ask what has happened to this great country. It is capable of great wisdom and maturity, so why did it have to follow the American lead? Everyone—Nelson Mandela, the Holy Father in Rome and many others—all said loud and clear that that was not the way to go. That voice included the Jewish community, as the Chief Rabbi said that it was not the way to go, and yet we went. The damage that did to us was great. It wiped out all the years spent building up our moral authority, or what some might like to call soft power.
The first thing to bear in mind when we talk about soft power is that it is, first, a slightly nebulous concept and, secondly, it can easily be undermined by the misuse of hard power. Ultimately, moral authority is achieved because people trust us. They must trust our intentions, that we mean well, and they must trust our judgment, our capacity to arrive at the right kind of view. Trust in our intentions and trust in our judgment take years to acquire, and once they have been acquired, we must ensure that we do not follow a foreign policy or act in a manner which is so partial that it wipes out whatever moral authority we happen to have.
I turn now to a question that has not been touched on, which is the question not just of preventing conflict but of moderating conflict. Human beings being what they are, tainted by original sin, will continue to fight, so what we can hope for is not the creation of a world free of conflict, but one in which they can be managed, moderated and, it is hoped, minimised. Religion has played a very important part in conflict—some data that I looked at recently suggested that, of the about 78 conflicts that obtain in the world today, around 50 or more can be traced to religion in one form or another. Religion either creates conflict or accentuates it, and precisely because it is the source of the problem, it has to be the source of the answer. Most of these conflicts occur in transitional societies in which people who are used to a particular way of life are embracing modernity and all the tensions that that can create. They hold on to their religious institutions, practices and values in order to give them an anchor and a sense of identity. Religion plays a particularly important role in transitional societies.
As I say, religion can become a source of conflict, but it can also be the source of resolving it. I want to explore two or three ideas of how we could lead a movement in that direction under the leadership of the most reverend Primate, who has a great deal to say on these matters and who brings with him his great historical experience. I think that we could take the lead in this direction, but how could that be done? Let us look at how religion has played a part in, for example, suicide bombings in the Middle East. Muslims have debated for years whether that is a right thing for a Muslim to do: is it permitted by the Koran? It was only after three or four years of serious jurisprudential debate that imams in Beirut and Cairo said, “Yes, it is consistent with Islam”, and people engaged with it. You could see how much even suicide bombing depended on religion to give it legitimacy.
Therefore, in order to ensure that religion plays a creative role, I want to suggest that we might do three or four things. First, religion should be encouraged to build bridges between and within communities. That is extremely important. It should also learn to challenge dubious interpretations of religion, as in the case of IS. It is very striking that in the case of IS some Muslim leaders in the Middle East have taken the lead, challenging those who try to hijack religion.
I am also persuaded by a slightly different argument that people have made. In the case of Nigeria and one or two other places—for example, Buddhist monks in Cambodia supporting Pol Pot’s regime, or Serbian churches blessing Serbian nationalists who then went about killing Muslims—religious leaders could have said, “Those who engage in certain kinds of activities will be excommunicated”, or, “They will not be entitled to funeral rites in the same way that suicides and convicted murderers are not”. Religious communities have powerful sanctions and people who have worked with terrorists report them saying, “If we had been told or if we had ever had any doubt that this activity would deny us a place in heaven or that it was against our religion, we would not have engaged in it”. They were looking for some heavenly place and the heavenly place would be denied to them. If church leaders were absolutely clear and said, “Those who engage in it will not be given a decent Christian”—or Muslim or Hindu or Buddhist—“burial or cremation”, I think it would have a profound effect and I am surprised that many churches and religious institutions have not taken a lead in this.
Finally, because religious leaders generally tend to be trusted and are seen as people of good will, well meaning, with good judgment, they should play a creative role in bringing various groups together, making their concerns mutually intelligible and ensuring that people are able to talk to each other in a common language. Here we have a wonderful example: South Africa would not have been—pre or post-apartheid—what it is without the role played by Bishop Tutu and many religious people. There is also the role played by the then Archbishop Monsengwo in Congo, by the Sant’Egidio community in Mozambique and Burundi and by Bishop Belo in East Timor. These are some examples of where religious leaders, guided by religion but politically savvy and politically sophisticated, have been able to bring various groups together.
I feel slightly uneasy advocating some of those things because there is a question about whether the close relationship between the state and religion in this way might not create conflicts for secularism, but I think that can be tackled at a different level in a different way. The time has come for us to recognise that religious institutions play a significant role in creating conflict and that they can, therefore, be persuaded to play equally significant roles in dissolving conflict. Therefore, rather than avoid them, states and Governments need to collaborate with them.
Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB)
My Lords, the whole House is indebted to the most reverend Primate for the way in which he introduced this debate. In Liverpool we were well aware of the talented and inspiring man that we had as Dean of Liverpool Cathedral. I think now the whole nation is beginning to understand the unique combination of experience and gifts that the most reverend Primate brings to the role that he now plays.
During his opening remarks, the most reverend Primate talked about the cost of deploying a battalion and it brought to my mind the famous exchange involving Stalin, who asked, “How many divisions does the Pope have?”. The answer, I suppose, came in the form of the Polish Pope, Karol Wojtyla, and the events at the end of the Cold War—in the transformative effect that the churches in all their denominations played in bringing an end to the former Soviet Union and the tyrannies that existed during that time.
The most reverend Primate also talked about the role of the BBC World Service and the British Council in promoting values, both institutions being extraordinary exemplars of soft power. I will return to that subject, as others have done, in my remarks. Earlier this year, in February, I introduced a debate on their role and I argued that the Government needed to combine soft power with hard power in a foreign policy based on what might be described as smart power.
In the face of terrorism, war and dictatorship, there are of course times when hard power—military force—needs to be deployed. There are times when the use of financial power is needed, to cut off sources of funding for those who seek to do us or their own people harm. There are times to provide funding and resources to those struggling for freedom or survival. There are times when political and diplomatic pressure is essential, and the work of our intelligence services in ensuring that we are aware of dangers before they occur is always vital. But soft power—a concept first articulated by the American academic Joseph Nye, as we have heard—should never be underestimated. When combined with all the other tools that are available, it can contribute to an intelligent, creative, practical and principled foreign policy.
Several months ago, the British Academy published an excellent report, which concluded that:
“UK foreign policy is too often conducted in a compartmentalised manner”,
which was a point alluded to by the noble Lord, Lord Boateng,
“with the would-be benefits of soft power either judged to be outweighed by security concerns”,
which was a point referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Howell of Guildford, and by the excellent Select Committee report,
“or simply never taken into account”.
The report concludes that soft power is,
“likely to become more important in international relations over the coming years. UK governments can help themselves simply by recognising this, and by providing enough resources for the development and maintenance of its long-term assets”.
More than 80 years after its establishment by Lord Reith, today the BBC World Service has a global audience of 265 million people, as the noble Lord, Lord Maclennan, reminded us. It transmits in English and 27 other languages. Often it is the only lifeline to honest reporting of news and current affairs. That was certainly true for the millions living behind the iron curtain in eastern Europe during the Cold War. It was true in Burma, throughout decades of brutal military dictatorship. When I visited Daw Aung San Suu Kyi in March last year, she told me of the vital role that the World Service played, not only as a source of information and hope for her during her long, lonely years under house arrest, but as a source of ideas for the people of Burma. During my visit I gave a lecture at the British Council library in Rangoon, which throughout the worst of those years was always a place of hope for the people of Burma. I know that last month the Member of Parliament for Enfield Southgate, David Burrowes, delivered another lecture there on parliamentary democracy, human rights and civil society.
In building Burma’s democracy, Aung San Suu Kyi particularly points to the role that the World Service has played in disseminating information, broadcasting truthful news bulletins and programmes that could be relied upon, and sustaining morale in the darkest of times. Yet, as we have heard, funding and the mandate of both the World Service and the British Council risk their effectiveness. In 2010-11 the Foreign and Commonwealth Office grant for the British Council was 27% of its income. In 2013-14 that grant is forecast to be less than 20% of total income. The proportion is projected to decrease further, reaching 16% of total income by 2015-16. Meanwhile, of course, the World Service has seen its mandate changed and its capacity reduced.
I will give your Lordships one example of the effect of depleted resources. I want to talk about the use of soft power in North Korea. I remind the House of my non-pecuniary interest as co-chairman of the All-Party Group on North Korea. Although I readily concede that there are significant differences between Burma and North Korea, there are also legitimate comparisons, and I regret that our now more resource-driven approach has led to very different outcomes.
Your Lordships will recall that in February, a United Nations commission of inquiry report found that the North Korean Government were guilty of crimes against humanity, including enforced starvation, torture, sexual violence, forced labour, political prison camps and public executions.
Bringing to light the most devastating and relentless catalogue of crimes against humanity in the post-1945 era, it is salient to note that these abuses were all committed while the UK pursued a soft power approach towards the country through a mix of cultural, educational, and exchange projects, some of which I have seen first hand on my four visits to that benighted country. On North Korea, we need to ask ourselves some hard questions about what works and what does not.
The last time there was a war on the Korean peninsula, some 3 million people lost their lives, including 1,000 British servicemen—probably more, I suspect, than in Afghanistan, Iraq and the Falklands combined. As the transition from military dictatorship to thriving democracy and market economy in the Republic of Korea has demonstrated, a peaceful, united Korea need not be a pipe dream. It is worth mentioning in the context of today’s debate that not only were there all those civilian and military casualties, but the former Anglican Bishop of Korea, the late Monsignor Richard Rutt, in his booklet The Martyrs of Korea, estimated that around 8,000 martyrs had died for their Christian faith in Korea during that period. As evidence has demonstrated in both the report issued by the United Nations and in testimonies given only a week ago in this House—which will be included in a report to be published by the All-Party Parliamentary Group on International Religious Freedom or Belief—those deprivations of religious freedom and offences against Article 18 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights continue to this day.
Change on the Korean peninsula will not come about simply by accident or as a result of simple, short-term interventions. When we think about soft power in that context we should ask ourselves two questions: who should we be looking to influence in North Korea and how can we engage North Korea in a responsible and effective manner?
In many ways, North Korea is an exception to so many rules—I readily concede that. Decades of international dialogue and pressure have had precious little effect on how the regime conducts itself in the international arena. The report by the United Nations that I referred to describes it as a “country without parallel” in its abuse of human rights. Measured against the universal declaration, if that were to be its benchmark, it is in breach of pretty well every one of its 30 articles. Years of sanctions have failed to curb its desire to develop nuclear weapons, and criticism of its human rights record has not, thus far, satiated its appetite to continue to commit the most egregious abuses in modern history.
Some 111 members of the General Assembly have just voted for the Security Council to consider referring North Korea to the International Criminal Court for those crimes against humanity. This is a superb example of a non-military approach, using the tools of international diplomacy and insisting on the upholding of international law in safeguarding universally accepted human rights. Even if a member of the Security Council decided to exercise a veto, perhaps fearful of its own record on human rights, the world’s verdict has already been recorded through the General Assembly. It cannot be doubted that the prospect of a Nuremberg moment—whether at the ICC or a specifically constituted regional tribunal awaiting those who have been responsible for the deaths of 300,000 people in those camps, and for the 200,000 who are estimated to be in them today—has already concentrated minds. I commend to the House the energy and commitment that the Foreign and Commonwealth Office has invested in securing that outcome. Perhaps the Minister will give us an appraisal of what is likely to happen next.
In the longer term, we should have some idea of how we are going to engage not necessarily the regime but North Korea generally. Other noble Lords have referred to the use of the diaspora. We have 800 to 900 North Koreans living in this country now; there are 25,000 North Koreans who have escaped and are living in South Korea. We must enable them to be agents for change and we should deploy resources, as the noble Lord, Lord Boateng, said, from within the ODA budget. They should be deployed across the piece, not in silos, to bring about those objectives. At a recent meeting of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on North Korea, it was suggested that we need off-the-tracks lines of engagement. Breaking the information blockade should be one of those objectives, which is why I deplore the decision of the BBC World Service thus far not to broadcast to the Korean peninsula, unlike what happened in Burma.
These are not random thoughts and ideas. In the debate that I initiated earlier this year I mentioned an important book by the former US ambassador to Hungary, Mark Palmer, and I want to highlight it once again as I conclude. Mark Palmer was a notable advocate of soft power. He set out a detailed plan for how dictatorships can be challenged and freedom advanced using non-military means and the exercise of soft power. His book, Breaking the Real Axis of Evil: How to Oust the World’s Last Dictators by 2025, is one which I commend to the Minister and to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.
During our recent debate on dealing with the rise of Islamic State in Syria, I said that simply relying on military responses is not enough, and I quoted Einstein’s definition of insanity. He said that insanity is when you do the same things over and over again. In thanking the most reverend Primate for giving us the opportunity for today’s debate, I suggest that, instead of condemning the world to insanity, we need painstakingly to develop approaches which combine intelligence with a fearless passion for promoting human dignity, human rights, respect for difference, the protection of minorities and the vulnerable, and the upholding of the rule of law.
Baroness Hooper (Con)
My Lords, I understand that the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Chester is unfortunately unable to be with us due to ill health, and I much regret that we are missing his intervention.
In thanking the most reverend Primate both for giving us this opportunity to debate a vital issue and for his own thoughtful contribution, I congratulate him on his good timing. He referred to the fact that today is the first anniversary of Nelson Mandela’s death. When we celebrate the importance of Mandela’s legacy of forgiveness, we see a great example of soft power. Another remarkable individual who led by example was Mahatma Gandhi. Having only recently seen the film so brilliantly directed by the late Lord Attenborough, I feel that he, too, falls into that category of soft power exemplified by virtue to which the most reverend Primate referred. Another event today was the announcement that the British Museum has made a loan to the Hermitage Museum in Russia—two great institutions with international collections visited by millions from all over the world. I will return to that theme later on.
As a lawyer, I like to have clear definitions, but soft power is difficult to define, as the noble Lord, Lord Parekh, mentioned, and as the debate has shown. Rather, it comes from a multiplicity of actions and activities and is a slow process. Sometimes, too, it is difficult to recognise soft power in action, because of this multiplicity and because it does not often hit headlines—that, of course, is because it is often good news. Conversely, when conflict or war occurs, and a resolution is required to end it, it is evident what steps are being taken and it is headline news because it is bad news.
Measures which prevent terrible things from happening may be accepted, but they are not always recognised. That is particularly pertinent this year, when we are looking at the events leading up to the outbreak of the First World War. We can see that had more soft power been at work behind the scenes some of the horror and tragedy of that war might have been avoided.
Two things in particular emerge from this debate and from thinking about it which are within the province of soft power. One is the need for respect. Anything that teaches us to respect another person or another country, its culture and traditions, must create a barrier to conflict. The second point to emerge is understanding. I believe that that extends beyond language to culture, religion and knowledge of each other’s history and evolution. We heard from the most reverend Primate about the role of the Church of England, which must be congratulated. As a Roman Catholic, I concur with what others—most recently, the noble Lord, Lord Alton of Liverpool—have said about the benefits and personal comfort that a shared religion can bring. Nevertheless, we must recognise that schisms and wars between the Christian churches have led to greater atrocities, so today’s message of tolerance, peace and dialogue should be welcomed and underlined.
The other great institutions that play vital roles in the area of soft power, which have been referred to by many of your Lordships today, must include the British Museum. I return to today’s announcement of the loan of a particularly controversial part of the British Museum’s collection to the Hermitage Museum. As the director of the British Museum, Neil MacGregor, has just completed a very successful history of our relationship with Germany in his BBC series, seen through the objects in the British Museum, I very much hope that he may be able to do the same with Russia. As my noble friend Lady Williams of Crosby pointed out forcefully, it is vital to avoid slipping back into a Cold War climate.
Another great institution that has been referred to and which can be a force for good is, of course, the BBC. Another is the British Council, and I should like to dwell on the council’s work both as vice-chairman of the All-Party Group on the British Council here in Parliament and because I have just returned from a fascinating visit to South Africa under the British Council’s auspices. I saw there from the inside how the British Council’s global diversity teams work together to pool their knowledge, exchange best practice and refine policies to create better understanding of this country and our values.
There can be no doubt that the British Council’s work in promoting the teaching of English is most valuable. The importance of that is not just in trade and economic advantage, although that in itself is important. Let us not forget that the common language of the United Nations peacekeeping forces is English. That has to be a force for good. The work of the British Council in educational exchange and training is not only first class but increasing, despite the budget limitations that have been referred to. In this context, I again agree with my noble friend Lady Williams that we need a better way to welcome international students to this country—a role that the British Council used to perform with its international houses in each university city. I hope that it can be urged and supported in some way to recreate a welcoming institution of that sort.
There is so much that it is tempting to say but which time does not permit, and I have not even touched on the importance of the Commonwealth—although others have and others no doubt will. I take this opportunity to thank both the British Council and the BBC—and our Library for the excellent, helpful briefing notes that it produced for this debate.
Before finishing, I must refer to the work of the Inter-Parliamentary Union and the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association, to which the noble Lord, Lord Anderson, referred, in establishing and encouraging good relations with other parliamentarians around the world. That is not only through direct bilateral exchanges, which are so valuable for those who participate in them—who, I hope, bring back to your Lordships’ House and the other place information about and understanding of those countries—but through the themed conferences which have taken place of late here in Parliament. Most recently, there was one on democracy and development, another on drug trafficking and another on the arms trade—all issues which require international effort and which could, because of the forces they generate, cause conflict. Those are all good examples of soft power at work which are not always known or appreciated but which this debate enables us to mention.
In conclusion, I return to the words of the most reverend Primate at the outset of this debate—I may not have his words exactly: future decisions to resolve disputes and prevent conflict should consider both soft and hard power, not just hard power.
Lord West of Spithead (Lab)
My Lords, I, too, thank the most reverend Primate for instigating this debate on the role of soft power and non-military options in conflict prevention. The debate is indeed timely and relevant. We are in an extremely chaotic and highly dangerous world that is likely to become increasingly unstable over the next decades, not least within the context of possibly irreversible climate change and ever-increasing competition for resources of all kinds among a very rapidly expanding world population. There are of course many other transnational issues, including changing demographic patterns, imbalance in wealth, disease, the aggressive international growth in terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, drugs and criminalised activity, which also have considerable potential to affect both the international system and our own national security and interests. With these issues comes the potential for big shocks, in an increasingly interconnected world, to overturn or radically modify existing assumptions about partners, vital interests and safeguards. The Arab spring is a manifestation of this unpredictability.
As we have seen over the past 15 years or so, even well established alliances and partnerships have looked decidedly discretionary when the pressure has come on from either internal or external sources. We cannot assume that the idea of a multilateral, rules-based world for diplomacy and economics will necessarily survive the population and resource pressures of the early decades of this century. Sadly, we are entering an age in which illiberal power is growing and liberal power is declining. I believe that it is a world made more dangerous by Europe’s refusal to invest in hard power.
It may well be that collaborative structures and co-operative processes will allow constructive international engagement on many, if not all, of the issues that I have mentioned. However, our human record, in circumstances of intense competition across all dimensions, has not been good and it might be imprudent to be lulled into a false sense of security. Indeed, our historic experience indicates that the transition from a US-dominated world to a more multilateral world could be distinctly uneven and contain some unpleasant surprises. So keeping our armour bright, particularly those elements which provide assurance of our ultimate survival, may prevent, contain or mitigate the consequences of a uniquely threatening combination of global and strategic risks—particularly in relation to such unquantifiable, unforeseen shocks as the imbalance of population and resources and the actions of opportunistic and possibly desperate regimes, some of which we have heard mentioned.
I agree with the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Craig, that we have cut spending on hard power too far. But while hard power is vital so, too, is that of influence, fairness, integrity, ideas, aid, culture, behaviour, persuasion and law. Indeed, without them hard power is actually an evil. The things that I have mentioned gather under the banner of “soft power”, although I prefer “influence and persuasion”, as mentioned by the committee that looked at this. We in the UK are actually very good at this.
I believe in our values, as I am sure all in this House do. Indeed, I have fought for those values, which are exemplified by the BBC World Service, which a number of people have touched on. It is an exemplar of British values, yet editorially and operationally independent of the UK Government. This independence is understood and highly valued by audiences around the world. As was said, its global news services are the most trusted in the world, reaching over a quarter of a billion people every week—more than any other international broadcaster. It is hard to overestimate its worth in both conflict prevention and promoting our values. We as a nation should be very proud and must ensure that it is adequately funded and supported, which I am afraid that it is not. Another source of pride, already spoken of by a number of speakers, is the British Council, which creates international opportunities for the people of the United Kingdom and other countries and builds trust between them worldwide, which is so important.
“Influence and persuasion” includes many other things. We have heard talk of religion; the Anglican Church and the Catholic Church have of course done an immense amount within this area. It also includes diplomacy and aid; our legal system, which is admired worldwide; and education within this country, with our excellent universities and the need to educate foreign people within them. That is so important and has been touched on by others. The visa issue is so crucial but I will not go into that, as it has been covered.
The training of other nations’ military is very important, as we can imbue them with standards which we believe are important. That needs to be done. There is also the maximum leverage from the universality of the English language; again, that has been touched on by many people and it gives us a crucial thing that we can use globally. There is the Football League, which I think someone touched on. Amazingly, I was speaking to a friend of mine the other day who was in the badlands of northern Somalia, doing very good work to try to make the place better. He felt very worried at one stage but got into a talk with a local bad guy and this chap knew all about the Football League—more than he did. They got talking about that league, which touches parts we never thought it would. There is the whole issue of the arts, popular culture, fashion, music and films. These things must be doing good because they terrify autocratic regimes. Clearly, what they do is wonderful and we are good at these things.
There is also the use of bilateral and alliance relationships, not least the Commonwealth, which was so well and clearly mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Howell of Guildford. I agree entirely that we do not get the maximum leverage out of it that we really should. All these things are crucial and can make a real difference, furthering the interests of our nation, enhancing our wealth and, by fostering world stability, helping to ensure our security but also the safety and security of those poor people globally who are in nations wracked with conflict. However, this soft power is weakened, if not powerless, if there is no hard power—and the will to use it—to back it up.
Influence and persuasion invariably have one thing in common: they take time to have an effect. In many situations, though, time is sadly lacking. More often than not, the military are required to buy time for other forms of influence and reason to work. Without sufficient hard power in many shattered strife-ridden states, there is no opportunity for aid and dialogue to even start until stability has been enforced, and for that you normally need the military. So I agree with the most reverend Primate about the significance of the work being undertaken by the church, members of civil society, many individuals and all aspects of influence and persuasion working on issues of conflict prevention and conciliation. Without hard power to back them up, though, as he recognised in his opening remarks, I am not convinced that they can achieve much.
Times have changed since Nelson said that the best negotiators in Europe were a squadron of British battleships, but often a strong military presence—particularly maritime power, I have to say—can forestall conflict and prevent war. We must look at hard and soft power as complementary. I like the term “smart power”, coined by the noble Lord, Lord Alton of Liverpool. They need to be looked at as a spectrum. In next year’s national security strategy and strategic defence review we must do that. However, both need sufficient funding if we are to remain safe and secure, which is the prime aim of any Government, as has been said by this Prime Minister, the Prime Minister before him and the Prime Minister before that. To enjoy our education, health service and welfare systems, we have to ensure that they are sufficiently funded.
Lord Hylton (CB)
My Lords, I am grateful for this debate because it gives me a chance to mention proposals for conflict prevention in Northern Ireland and Bosnia, and to explain a new vision for the Mediterranean region. All three will, I trust, help to forestall conflict and acute suffering.
I know from my own family experience how deeply divided society in Northern Ireland still is. There are visible signs of this in most towns and cities. Power-sharing institutions struggle to work smoothly. For these reasons there is a proposal for a professionally assisted conflict analysis process to sit alongside political negotiations, or perhaps to follow them. It would examine causes rather than symptoms of division. The process could go on to look at the needs of the segments of society, including their identity needs and shared needs. This concept has been put to the Secretary of State and to the First Ministers, but so far without response.
In Bosnia, the proposal is to form a wide coalition to foster a national dialogue on the country’s future. This might be facilitated by an independent third party called the Soul of Europe. This English charity, in which I declare an interest as patron, has already helped Bosnia over the rebuilding of a world-famous Ottoman mosque and a war memorial in the former Omarska concentration camp. A very committed Bosnian has stated:
“We need help, but in a way that enables our citizens to be heard”.
He went on:
“The people of this country really want to move towards the European Union”.
This aim may be frustrated by the present dysfunctional constitution—no doubt, the only one that could be agreed at the Dayton conference in 1995. The layers of government and bureaucracy now hold up economic development and the common good. A national dialogue would, I hope, point the way ahead while respecting all minority voices. Civil society is demanding change. As the Bishop of Banja Luka has said, people want a new way of organising the state. The external costs of a national dialogue would be of the order of £30,000 for one year. That is a tiny sum compared with the cost of flood defences or the cost of a possible renewed conflict of a violent nature. I mentioned this proposal in your Lordships’ House on 21 October at cols. 612-13 of the Official Report.
I turn now to the Mediterranean. On the north side, there is high unemployment, from Portugal across to Greece, especially among young people. The same is true on the south side, from Morocco to Syria and Iraq. Refugees and migrant workers from the Sahel and the Horn of Africa make the situation even worse. We have seen how thousands lose their lives trying to cross the Sahara desert and the Mediterranean Sea. Surely we need a new deal for the region, one that would cope with the bulging young generations in north Africa and the Middle East. These are the people who lack jobs, careers and the prospect of being able to marry. In frustration, they may well become jihadis. I am told that 3,000 have already left Tunisia in order to fight.
The Barcelona Convention of 1995 tried to think constructively. It led to the Mediterranean action plan, which produced agreements on sea pollution, protecting the coast and exploring the continental shelf. This was all useful intergovernmental work, but I doubt that it fired the public imagination to any degree or created many jobs. I argue now that there is much more to be done by Governments to prevent human trafficking and loss of life. More still is needed by way of public/private partnership and investment, for example, in solar technology. Every city from Casablanca to Karachi should have its own Turquoise Mountain Foundation. That is a project initiated in Kabul by the honourable Member for Penrith and The Border. It has provided work skills for the young and helped to revive traditional crafts. I have seen projects in the Gulf emirates on information technology and social sustainability. These should be replicated much more widely. Oil and gas profits from the Gulf and Saudi Arabia could flow through their sovereign wealth funds into massive projects to widen the Suez Canal, for example, or to create a new regional hub in Gaza. The last could include an electricity generating ship, which has already been offered by Turkey, a Mulberry-type harbour and the desalination of water.
I call for moral imagination and political will. There should be fewer Shards of Glass and Cheesegraters in London and more investment north and south of the Mediterranean. Real human needs would thus be met, conflicts would be prevented and peace would have a better chance. People-to-people links should also be set up through sport, which has been mentioned, and exchanges of all kinds.
Will Her Majesty's Government be bold and take the initiative once more in Northern Ireland, Bosnia and the whole Mediterranean region? Will they explain the benefits of such far-sighted moves to our EU partners? Arabia, India, China and the United States also have interests in the kind of stability on which I hope we can all agree.
Lord Cormack (Con)
My Lords, I am delighted to follow the noble Lord, Lord Hylton, not least because he talked about Bosnia. I well remember in the early 1990s he and I were allies. I was almost the sole voice in the Conservative Benches in the other place, and we persisted. A very notable historian, Brendan Simms, wrote about what he called Britain’s “unfinest hour”. I sincerely hope that will never be repeated.
We are all enormously in the debt of the most reverend Primate not only for choosing this subject but for the manner in which he introduced this debate with a degree of compassion and precision combined with elegance of thought and language. Like the noble Lord, Lord Parekh, and others, I am one of those who is slightly uncomfortable with the word “soft”. I think it is probably a generational thing because I grew up at a time when to be called soft was to have the most pejorative of adjectives attached to one, and to be a softie was the worst thing imaginable. What we are talking about is of course benign influence and enlightened authority, encapsulated in the words “soft power”; we all know what we mean by that.
A Member of your Lordships’ House wrote those famous words:
“Beneath the rule of men entirely great
The pen is mightier than the sword”.
The second of the lines of that couplet is frequently quoted, but the first is more important; in other words, it says that true enlightenment fosters peaceful development and benign rule.
A paradox runs through our history, does it not? All the great faiths are devoted to peace and harmony, yet every one of them has fallen short through the centuries by being divided and by having always within it—we see it today—a group of people who so passionately believe that theirs is the only interpretation that they will brutally suppress all others. Cromwell, who was himself not exactly a hero in the island of Ireland, wrote those famous words to the Scottish Covenanters:
“I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken”.
We all need to direct that counsel at each other from time to time.
When I go home today I will go back to the shadow of Lincoln Cathedral. When I enter that glorious building, as I do so often, and will, God willing, tomorrow, I walk in—probably very appropriately for a politician—through the Judgment Porch and see two things. First, all around are marks on the pavement where once monumental brasses rested, and just beneath the great east window is the shrine of St Hugh, which was a centre of pilgrimage throughout the Middle Ages. The brasses were ripped up and the shrine despoiled and defaced by those who believed that they were better Christians than those who had installed them. That says a lot.
When I was reflecting on this debate—what an interesting debate it has been—I recalled a sort of kaleidoscope of memories. I thought of a day in Bucharest shortly after the fall of those ghastly tyrants, the ceausescus, when I was privileged to be one of a small group that was asked to conduct some seminars in democracy. I well remember talking to a group of young people after one of those sessions, who talked to me in faultless English and with a burning desire to be part of a democratic structure. I said to them, “How did you keep the faith, and how do you speak this wonderful English when you’ve never left Romania?”. The answer came in two words, which have occurred often in this debate: “World Service”—the BBC World Service. They had listened to it at some peril, but it had been their line to civilisation and democracy and had inspired them. Perhaps things have not worked out in Romania as well as they might have done, but at least it is a democracy and part of international groupings to which we belong, and a country of rich history and real potential.
I also remember Epiphany of 1990, when I was a member of another small group that was staying in an hotel in Moscow—we had not been allowed to go previously—which had been reserved in the old, bad days for leaders of delegations from the Soviet bloc. The furniture was heavy and the décor was not inspiring; the food could have been better. However, there was something very miraculous—and I use that word deliberately in the presence of the most reverend Primate—because we were part of a group that was able to celebrate the mass and Epiphany. The celebrant was a somewhat unorthodox Roman Catholic priest, Father Ted Hesburgh, president of Notre Dame University in the United States and chairman of President Kennedy’s Civil Rights Commission. He gathered around him all of us who were there who were Christians. There was Rosalynn Carter, wife of President Jimmy Carter, Madame Giscard d’Estaing, a very notable Dutchman called Ernst van Eejhen, and me and one or two others. I helped to serve and read the epistle and Rosalynn Carter read something. As we celebrated that service, the sun came through over the Kremlin and, at the end of the service, we gave a symbolic Bible to one of our number, a man called Andrei Grachev, who was President Gorbachev’s chef de cabinet. It was an enormously moving and very symbolic occasion.
It is for that reason that I was so moved this morning, and taken by the remarks of the noble Baroness, Lady Williams of Crosby. If we wish to exercise a benign influence and soft power, it is by lending from the British Museum and by treating the Russians as a nation whose stability is as important to us as it is to them. It is not by echoing the rhetoric of the Cold War and refusing to recognise that a great nation, often invaded, has legitimate interests on its own doorstep, even if it has exercised its power recently in a rather crass and unfortunate manner. We have to think of all these things.
One or two noble Lords have talked about students. I happen to have the privilege of being a senior member of St Antony’s, Oxford, a great postgraduate institution. All around the world there are St Antony’s graduates in positions of high authority and influence in their countries. If there were ever a demonstration of the effective exercise of soft power, it is that—that through our universities these young men and women have gone back to attain positions of high influence in their own countries. We must do everything that we can to encourage foreign students to come here and to take on the responsibility of public service when they go back to their native countries. There is no better ambassador for the values that we like to think that we embrace than somebody who has embraced them here, in one of our educational institutions.
In less than three weeks’ time, it will be Christmas Day, and many of us who have been moved by the sea of poppies in the moat of the Tower will be thinking and reading of the Christmas truce. There is a very good book that has recently been republished on the Christmas truce—an excellent stocking filler—but I am terribly sorry that I cannot remember the name of the author, or authors. The book refers to those moments in 1914 when, for a very short time, those who had been engaged in a great and terrible conflict were briefly united by their Christian faith and one of the great Christian festivals. My noble friend Lord Wei talked very movingly about the importance of the Christian faith in what we are seeking to achieve. I am slightly surprised that no one has yet quoted the supreme text on soft power—the Sermon on the Mount.
As we look back and read about the Christmas truce and reflect on a century of appalling conflict, I suggest that we do two things. First, those of us who are privileged to live in the affluent West and who recognise that the engine of economic progress is capitalism also have to recognise that, if capitalism is to survive, it must be responsible capitalism. Only last night I attended a ceremony in the Locarno Suite, where Mr William Hague, the First Secretary of State, distributed awards for responsible capitalism. I was much involved in that scheme, which was arranged under the auspices of the FIRST organisation. Our first chairman of judges was Lord Dahrendorf and the present chairman is the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf—our colleague and friend in this House. It is important that we do all we can to encourage, and recognise the crucial importance of, responsible capitalism.
I want to mention just one more thing very briefly that I mentioned last week. I hope that the most reverend Primate will forgive my doing so as he was not able to be present at our debate on religion and belief. I said that next year, when we commemorate the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta, it would be marvellous if, under the leadership of the most reverend Primate, the Church of England—the established church of this realm—were to bring together leading representatives of all the faiths to define a new great charter for the 21st century, encapsulating what most would consider to be true values to which all faiths at their best subscribe. If that could be done, there could be no better conclusion or legacy for this debate, which was so splendidly and brilliantly introduced by the most reverend Primate just three hours ago.
Baroness Kinnock of Holyhead (Lab)
My Lords, at the outset, I pay tribute to the most reverend Primate for initiating this debate and for his thoughtful, comprehensive and, indeed, challenging analysis.
As troops return from Afghanistan after 13 years’ engagement, and advisers and the RAF have to return to Iraq, we recognise, with great regret, that there is little reason to feel that the wars of this century have been won. Syria, Gaza, Libya, South Sudan, Sudan, Central African Republic, Ukraine, and other areas afflicted by armed violence, all compel us to focus on the extent of the enormous challenge posed by conflict prevention and, indeed, on the need to develop effective and diverse approaches when there are so many fragile states, porous borders, sectarian rivalries, pervasive inequalities and such extreme poverty, organised international crime and, of course, easy access to weapons. The list is a long one and it presents huge challenges, as efforts need to be made to end the terrible suffering and misery which are occurring.
Given these conditions, I begin my contribution to the debate with two basic points. First, soft power is not a soft option, and deploying it is arduous, painstaking and sometimes heavy with risk. To be effective, it must have the qualities of sincerity, patience and, importantly, mutuality. If it is opportunistic, propagandising or patronising, all experience shows that, while it might temporarily benefit some individuals, it will be open to suspicion and rejection and become ineffectual.
Secondly, when the use of soft power is undertaken creatively by, as many other noble Lords have said, the British Council or the BBC World Service, persuasively by bilateral or multilateral diplomacy and influentially through development support, it is cheaper, more durable, more merciful and more protective than the force of arms. There needs to be more support for cultural exchanges and dialogue, especially to counter religious sectarianism, and more support for the need to ensure that every effort is made to allow access to balanced and objective information. I know how valued and important the BBC World Service is, as is the British Council, and the budgetary cuts inflicted on them in recent years are both short-sighted and counterproductive. Meanwhile, as many British and other military leaders have testified, achieving stability, reducing tension and proving that military intervention has had enduring positive results all require the sustained exercise of soft power. This is needed to reassure, enlighten, open opportunities, foster understanding and, above all, win trust in hearts and minds.
It is, of course, vital that those who seek to employ soft power in relations with other countries and systems must manifest consistency in their own country. The domestic record of the UK on civil and human rights is clearly a crucial component of our ability to effectively implement soft power in efforts to prevent conflict, support human rights, and promote good governance and civil stability. For instance, President Kenyatta of Kenya is currently arraigned at the ICC on suspicion of war crimes, and has quoted our Prime Minister’s intention to scrap our Human Rights Act as evidence of other countries’ resistance to regional accountability institutions in favour of what Kenyatta calls national sovereignty. With instances such as that in mind, can the Minister tell us whether the Government have made any risk analysis of the effects of leaving the European Convention on Human Rights on the UK’s ability to credibly champion these issues internationally?
Much the same considerations apply to our national commitment to reach the UN target of dedicating 0.7% of GNI to international development. It is justifiable in itself but it is also central to any sensible effort to earn—a vital principle; I stress, earn—the confidence and trust of people in developing countries. I therefore welcomed the 2010 Conservative manifesto commitment, repeated in the coalition agreement to enshrine the 0.7% in law. It has not happened, and all attempted explanations of delay have been, to say the least, unconvincing. Surely, there should be no real impediment to progress in this Session, and I must ask the Government, even at this late stage, to urgently redeem their pledge by ensuring that Michael Moore’s Bill is given the time necessary for it to be enacted before next year’s election.
For many years, the European Union—proof in its very existence of the success of soft power—has exercised what my noble friend Lady Ashton has called,
“soft power with a hard edge—more than the power to set a good example and promote our values. But less than the power to impose its will”.
It is important to note that the UN Security Council recently commended the work of the European Union and the strong co-operation on mediation, including, for instance, in the western Balkans and in efforts to find a negotiated solution on Iran’s nuclear programme. I echo the former Commissioner for External Affairs, the noble Lord, Lord Patten of Barnes, who defined EU soft power as,
“a weapon of mass attraction”.
That was certainly evident as the Union prepared for, and went on to achieve, enlargement to the east and south since 2004. That is continuing. Beyond Europe, the EU’s extensive trade agreements and its active policies on development and humanitarian assistance, diplomacy, foreign and security affairs, social and consumer standards, and human rights, provide the Union with substantial credibility as a soft power.
Policy divergence between member states is natural in a community of democracies and can at time impede full effectiveness at times, but when the European Union was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for its soft power achievements in 2012, I believe that was a deserved accolade. As the respected NGOs Saferworld and International Alert have emphasised, the EU,
“recognises the linkages between underdevelopment and conflict and is one of the leading international bodies affirming the importance of and enhancing capacity for peace building and conflict prevention”.
Clearly, the ongoing realities of multiple international tensions and increasing global interdependence mean that it would be a great folly and an act of self-harm for the UK to withdraw from the European Union and thereby diminish the constructive influence that our country exerts on and, more widely, through the Union.
I conclude with some specific questions. Does the Minister agree with Nelson Mandela—he has been mentioned several times today—who said that investment in education, especially for girls, is the most transformative advance society can aim to achieve? Will the Minister argue for more support for human rights defenders? They are courageous women and men who try to make changes in their countries from within—Somali bloggers, Zimbabwean activists, Saudi and Afghan women.
The challenge is to determine how we use power wisely and proportionately. We must learn from the terrible lessons of Iraq, where no serious effort was made to construct a stable state and society by the comprehensive use of soft power in the wake of war. In Rwanda, the tragedy was that early warning was neglected and ignored. The international community failed to mobilise its response until it was too late. Soft power requires eternal vigilance. In both these examples, and in many other cases, such vigilance would have huge benefits in saving lives, restoring stability and safeguarding the future.
Lord Alderdice (LD)
My Lords, like other Members of your Lordships’ House, I thank the most reverend Primate for securing the debate, but also for the manner of his speech and the leadership and encouragement he has given over quite a number of years to those of us who are interested in, and committed to, addressing conflict in non-violent ways. Many people from outside your Lordships’ House will read his speech and continue to be encouraged, as they have been in the past, by the approach that he has taken and by the active way he has engaged in these matters. I declare an interest as the director of the Centre for the Resolution of Intractable Conflict, based at Harris Manchester College, Oxford, and of a new centre we are developing in Belfast, the Centre for Democracy and Peace Building.
At the start, I want to make clear that, as someone committed to this kind of work, I take the strong view that military and security roles are extremely important. As the noble Lord, Lord West of Spithead, said, it is quite true that military options on their own, without what we are calling soft power, can lead to wickedness and tragic results. However, it is also true that soft power as we describe it can often be wholly ineffectual and sometimes little more than a description of a wish list.
If one speaks to those involved in, for example, policing and military operations in most parts of the world, thoughtful people in our own services will say repeatedly that there is no security solution to this particular dilemma but there is a security role. I make an analogy with my medical background. Pharmacology rarely cures problems but, without that back-up, psychology rarely leads to the kind of cure that we want to see. We have to contain the problems but not leave it there; we have to find ways of working through them. Sometimes we can stop when we have contained them, only to regret the fact that it all goes to pieces again. We have many examples of that.
I make it clear that in everything that I say—and I am going to focus on the non-military side, which is the subject of our debate—the military and policing role is critical. If there is one great failing of the United Nations system, apart from our difficulty in reaching agreements with each other, it is that its lack of capacity to implement its decisions means that increasingly our people look at the UN not as a force for hope for the future but as a disappointment and a broken reed. There are issues there about the appropriate use of force that need to be properly considered.
Other noble Lords have given us a list and a description of some of the important institutions of soft power in this country, and they are extremely impressive. The Commonwealth was mentioned by my noble friend Lady Williams of Crosby and the noble Lord, Lord Howell of Guildford, who is a stout defender of the importance of this quite extraordinary institution and network of relationships. Also mentioned was the British Council, which, tragically, is probably known much more widely in other parts of the world than in the United Kingdom, where it ought to be valued much more. The Foreign Office, the Department for International Development, the BBC and our English language have also been mentioned, but there are many others that have not.
It is interesting that your Lordships’ House has not been mentioned, yet it is a source of significant influence. A young colleague from Colombia was listening to a debate in your Lordships’ House earlier this week. He said, “You probably don’t think about it but there are other countries in the world that are probably going to implement the legislation that you have been discussing in five years’ time”—precisely because they look to this place because of the moral integrity that has, at least in better times, been a mark of this place. Gladstone was committed to democracy as,
“trust in the people qualified by prudence”.
I have always regarded the other place as “trust in the people” and your Lordships’ House as the qualification, “by prudence”—but the second is very important, too.
There are other elements that I would like to pick up. I do not want to focus on the institutions but, rather, on what is at the back of this. One is the notion of common law and the way we conduct ourselves. This is a remarkable contribution, but sometimes it is not well understood by liberals. Many liberal colleagues focus on the importance of creating law, institutions and regulations which hold people to important principles. The institutions themselves do not necessarily hold people to important principles, and in fact can mislead people into thinking that they are the key issue. Frequently, people come to me from other parts of the world asking for a description of the processes that we have and the institutions that we created in my part of the United Kingdom. I say, “I’m not going to tell you about that. You can read about that in a book—but simply adopting them won’t solve your problem”.
In the same kind of way, tragically, the European Union, of which I am strong supporter and defender, has in many ways lost its purpose. Why is that? It is because its purpose was to make sure that there was not another horrible war in Europe. All the things that we have put in place—the euro, economic co-operation and all the structures and bureaucracy, including the European Parliament—are for the purpose of making sure that we do not have another war. Yet, tragically, within Europe these institutions have themselves become the purpose for many people, and, sadly, many political colleagues see them as a way in which we can sit at the top table in political terms. That is not the purpose and it is one reason why the people of Europe are disenchanted—because that is not what it was about.
In the same kind of way, just because you pass a clinical room that says “Therapy Going On Inside” does not mean it is so just because there is a therapist and patient. They may simply be going through the motions. It is very important that we distinguish between the purpose of the enterprise and the mechanisms through which we can have things happen.
All of the things we have been describing are the mechanisms, so what is at the back of them? Common law helps us because it helps to facilitate relationships between groups of people. If one key thing came out of our experience at home, it was that finding peace was not about putting into place institutions; it was about dealing with historic disturbed relationships. We constructed a peace process that had three strands of three important sets of relationships and everything came after that. The key thing about common law, which distinguishes it from civil law in many ways, is that it looks to a degree of flexibility within structure that enables people to deal with relationships appropriately.
I will give an example from my own experience. We put into place certain rules and regulations for how the Assembly Chamber might operate in Northern Ireland, but it was clear that there were times when it was more important to give one group of politicians room and space than another. For example, if there was a big bomb in a nationalist area it was important to give more nationalists the chance to speak about it than unionists—and vice versa—rather than simply hold to a rule that says, “You have to have this number of minutes for this and this person”. If it was done in a context of concern and relationship, it was not only possible but an enrichment and people felt that something worthwhile was happening, whereas if we had simply stuck to the rules rigidly, everybody would have been frustrated. That approach, which is a characteristic of your Lordships’ House and of the culture of this country, is absolutely crucial.
If there is one thing that this country has lost over a number of years, it is a degree of confidence in its own culture and the things that are important about it. When we think about relationships between people we think about the personalities of those who are involved. In a way, the culture of our community is the personality of this whole country—the personality of the whole group. I do not mean the symbols of culture such as art, flags and all those kinds of things but the way of being in the world of our community and country—a way in this country that was characterised by a degree of stability, integrity, respect, ethical behaviour and rules that were there for the purpose of relationships, not in order to dominate relationships. It was characterised by an attitude and approach that was open, not nationalistic but international, and respectful of people with different faiths and different approaches.
However, that did not mean that the faith of the people in this country was something that they did not believe in because it was just one of many. On the contrary, it was that degree of certitude, commitment and faith that made it possible to be open to others who had a different approach. Maybe it was even the fact that this island was not invaded for most of a thousand years that gave us the possibility of having that kind of confidence and being outgoing to others. In a sense, some of this has been lost as people have begun to feel that it is all about everybody having the same values—and we do not. There are those cultures that promote female genital mutilation. I do not accept that such a culture should be allowed to survive and thrive. We should speak against it. We should not necessarily attack it militarily, but we should try to make a change and realise that our values have something very important to contribute.
I finish by speaking of two things. First, the most reverend Primate has shown great leadership. I will give an example of a place where I think religious leaders could do so. In Jerusalem, at the moment, there is a deep split between Jewish nationalism within the country and—largely but by no means exclusively—Islamic Palestinians. But Christians have a stake in Jerusalem. If His Holiness, the Ecumenical Patriarch and the most reverend Primate were together to say to the Israeli Government and Palestinians, “This is not just a fight between the two of you. We have a stake in this as Christians throughout the world”, you would change the psychological dynamic from a fight between two to a relationship with a larger body of people who have a say—not because they want to govern or to rule, and not because they want to send in the legions of His Holiness, but rather because they want to change the dynamic into something fruitful.
I shall finish by saying this. I have mentioned your Lordships’ House as an example of our culture. I suspect that relatively few places in the world have a Parliament in which religious leaders sit as of right—but there is one at least, and it is Iran. It may be the case that your Lordships’ House in this country has a very particular role to play at this time, when hard power and military might are absolutely impotent in dealing with the challenge of the relationships between East and West, between Iran and the western world. With our experience we can show respect for others who have a different religious perspective but who value matters of ultimate faith and transcendence. We could show them, by building and developing relationship, we can make a difference. The most reverend Primate has given us the leadership; I trust we will follow.
Lord Williams of Baglan (CB)
My Lords, this has been an extraordinary debate and, like other colleagues, I pay tribute to the most reverend Primate for initiating it. Not only is soft power a concept of critical importance in addressing global conflict, it is an area where the United Kingdom excels, from our vast array of NGOs working in almost every conflict corner of the world, from Gaza to Afghanistan and South Sudan to Gaziantep, to great organisations like the British Council, the British Red Cross and the BBC World Service, once referred to by my former boss and Secretary-General of the United Nations, Kofi Annan, as “Britain’s greatest gift to the world” in the 20th century. I declare an interest as I am a trustee of the BBC and responsible for, among other things, the World Service.
Before I speak in greater detail about the BBC World Service, I want to pay tribute to the hundreds of UK-based NGOs working in conflict zones globally. In this, we have a long and proud record and very few equals. Our NGOs have met the needs and assisted the victims of war: the refugees, the wounded and the sick, the children and the elderly. In times of conflict, they have always responded. Save the Children was founded, remarkably, in the year after the end of the First World War, 1919. Its organisers and founders insisted that it would meet the needs of children not just in London, but also in Berlin. That was an extraordinary principle for the time. The Second World War saw the founding of another great NGO, Oxfam. It was established in Oxford in 1943 in response to the appalling famine in Bengal. Another great British NGO, Amnesty International, was founded in 1961 at the height of the Cold War to work for prisoners of conscience and against torture throughout the world. I am proud to have been head of the Asian department of Amnesty in the 1980s.
I also declare an interest as chairman of an NGO, the Mines Advisory Group, which now works on all continents clearing mines, bombs and unexploded ordnance. As someone who worked for the UN in Cambodia, the Balkans and the Middle East, I have too often seen the human tragedies that stem from the use of such weaponry. I mentioned my service in Cambodia. The noble Lord, Lord Parekh, who is not in his place, referred to the role of Buddhist monks possibly in support of the Khmer Rouge. In that respect I have to set the record straight here, and as an academic I think the noble Lord would appreciate that. The murderous regime of the Khmer Rouge went out of its way to kill Buddhist monks and to suppress their religion. Very few monks survived other than those who managed to flee overseas.
I turn now to the World Service, which, from next Monday, will be directed for the first time in its 82-year history by a woman: Fran Unsworth, a journalist and editor of immense experience. I am sure your Lordships will all join me in wishing her well in leading an institution greatly respected throughout the world. But I would be less than honest if I said that the World Service did not face substantial issues and problems in trying to meet the many needs with fewer resources. Noble Lords will be aware that since the 2010 financial settlement the World Service is funded now from the licence fee and not, as during the previous 70 years, by a grant in aid from the Foreign Office. The support of this House and the other place will be critical in ensuring the independence, stability and work of the World Service in the years to come.
The World Service reacts to conflict in many ways; first and foremost, through its coverage of the wars, insurrections and riots that still blight our planet. Its coverage of the war in Syria, now in its fourth year, has been exemplary and I take this opportunity to praise the work of courageous and outstanding journalists such as Lyse Doucet, Jeremy Bowen, Paul Wood and Ian Pannell, who have brought the brutal realities of that war home to us, as well as the inability of the international community to come to a resolution of that war. Those British colleagues that I cited are joined by many other colleagues in the Arabic Service.
It is not only through coverage of man’s inhumanity to man that the BBC World Service responds. In Rwanda, after the genocide of 1996, the BBC established a service for the first time in the Kinyarwanda language. Colleagues will have heard, perhaps, of the vile propaganda of Radio Milles Collines, which stirred up racial hatred and contributed to one of the worst genocides of the 20th century. We in the BBC and the World Service felt that the BBC had to react positively in the wake of that appalling genocide by establishing a Kinyarwanda service, which still plays a critical role in that country and in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo.
In that spirit, the BBC has also set up a College of Journalism focusing on three key aspects: skills, language and values—and I emphasise values. In addition to English and French, the college now has websites in Arabic, Burmese, Chinese, Hausa, Urdu and Turkish. Even in these straitened times, we still have the capacity to respond quickly to emerging situations. On 22 May this year, the Thai army carried out a coup d’etat, closing down the free press in that country. Within little more than a month, with the approval of the Foreign Secretary, we had reopened a Thai language service that had been closed 10 years earlier, operating online and through social media, returning impartial and accurate news to that country.
Another country I want to mention, which has already come up in the debate, is Burma, or Myanmar, as it is now called, where I recently chaired a conference on transition and reform for Chatham House. The BBC has broadcast in Burmese for 75 years—through the period of colonial rule, Japanese occupation, military dictatorship and now, I hope, a transition to representative government. Two years ago, censorship of newspapers was still in place and the BBC could not operate officially. Things have changed at such a pace that a few weeks ago the BBC’s Burmese Service launched its own-language version of a “Question Time”-style format. The BBC now has a permanent presence in Rangoon. In the rapidly changing media market of the country, its weekly audience stands at 6.8 million. The Burmese Service operates not just on short wave radio but also through FM rebroadcasts, social media and mobile telephones. In April this year, it launched a limited television bulletin which is broadcast via partner channel, Myanmar National Television.
At the end of October, British troops finally left Afghanistan, but the BBC remains broadcasting in English as well as in Dari and Pashto on radio, television and online. There is a celebrated drama in Pashto called “New Home, New Life” which recently celebrated its 20th anniversary. It has chronicled the story and the tragedies of Afghanistan in the past two decades and delivered priceless information to its vast Afghan audience. One positive example from that is that the incidence of land mine accidents has gone down, which has often been related to the attention paid to the dangers posed by that weaponry through this drama. In Afghanistan alone, the World Service has an audience of 6.5 million. Its radio audience is an estimated 35% of the Afghan people.
I express again my thanks for the very many kind words about the BBC World Service. I was particularly moved by the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, referring to his experience in Bucharest months after the overthrow of the appalling Ceausescu regime. I am sure that many of your Lordships have over the years experienced similar feelings. I cannot underline enough that your continued support is vital for the World Service not only to retain its audiences but to project the best of British values.
The Lord Bishop of Derby
My Lords, I, too, congratulate my colleague the most reverend Primate—or perhaps I should say from these Benches my honourable friend—on his securing this debate.
I am attracted by the comment made by the noble Lord, Lord Howell, about persuasion, but I think that there is something important about the very paradox of the phrase “soft power” that we need to take seriously. I start where Professor Nye starts, by saying that it works through “attraction rather than coercion”. He is clear that attraction works slowly. That is why it was very important to hear the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Wei, about dreams. Soft power needs to be attached to a narrative of hope.
The context for this discussion is a world characterised by the dissolving of boundaries and certainties. We are seeing the dissolving of boundaries politically, morally and militarily. Hard power, which has often maintained boundaries, has really been in decline since the retreat of Napoleon from Russia, when he was attacked on the way by what we now regard as terrorist forces. Conflict today rarely involves recognised nations, armies in uniforms and a contained conflict; it involves, as we know, terror groups that fade into society. They make an occasional strike. The conflict is not about victory or defeat; it is about fear, uncertainty and instability—the impossibility of having a dream or a hope.
That is the context: it is messy and it is complicated. This whole debate shows that we have to accept that the soft power that we are grasping after, as hard power is being exposed to have severe limitations in the world in which we live, will be messy and complex.
We need to look to soft power to push hard power out of its comfort zone. We too easily look to military might as a fallback position. As the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, said, the whole amazing story of Jesus Christ and the Roman Empire is a very powerful illustration of what soft power can do; or, as the noble Baroness, Lady Kinnock, said, it is about hearts and minds and not simply crushing people in a world where you can rarely do that because they just move on and create chaos elsewhere.
I want to do two things: offer a couple of examples of soft power that might give us hope and something to think about, and reflect on how soft power needs to work in our world. My colleague the most reverent Primate is far too modest to say that he is on the forefront of the exercise of soft power at this very moment. On Tuesday, I was privileged to accompany him to Rome for an event about challenging slavery, which we in this House engage with this week and next week.
At this event, besides the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury were the Pope and the leaders of Orthodox Christians, of the Jewish faith, of Muslims—both Shia and Sunni—and of Hindu and Buddhist communities. In one sense, represented in making that statement against slavery were people whose values, visions and hopes connected with 90% of the world’s population. That is an amazing possibility for what we are talking about: soft power gathered to challenge the evils of slavery.
Let me give you another couple of smaller examples. I am privileged to be a trustee and director of Christian Aid. We work in partnership with colleagues in other countries from the bottom up. We are involved at the moment in Colombia, which is one of the most violent societies in the world. With partners, we have been able to set up what are called humanitarian zones—spaces that people recognise amidst the violence where there can be some security and stability. The state has recognised the value of these and has helped to set up a whole network of humanitarian zones within a violent society. That is a small-scale example of soft power creating a narrative of hope within the complexities of conflict.
Another area that we in Christian Aid work in is in Palestine/Israel, where we send people called ecumenical accompaniers. People go from this country to train for three or four months and to live on the West Bank or in Israel. By their presence they give protection and they support Palestinian and Israeli peace activists, and when they come back they are advocates for that kind of experience, that kind of narrative, that kind of working together. Soft power will often work through very small engagements, but ones that add up to a narrative that can be encouraging.
My last example comes from Rome on Tuesday, where I met one of the Shia leaders of Muslims in Iraq. He told me how the previous week he had been on a journey with fellow Shia Muslims to take food to Christian communities that were in great need. He has invited me to see this work and to bless it. That is just another little sign of how hearts can connect in a narrative of hope and a dream of goodness that give a different model and build from the bottom up in a situation where hard power is enormously frustrated in making a decisive difference.
I am going to risk finishing with a little reflection, which might seem rather unlikely, from my experience of being an Anglican. I want to tease out some things about the Anglican tradition and soft power. I need to make clear that neither the most reverend Primate nor I have any real levers that we can pull to make things happen. Everybody thinks that we can and they write to us, but in my diocese and in the Church of England across the communion we have few levers that we can pull in a hard way and something will happen. We have to work with what you might call soft power.
A few years ago I was invited to write a book about Anglicanism, and I had to think about what Anglicanism is; we might have a debate on that one day. I came up with the definition that Anglicanism is fundamentalisms in dialogue: that is, people who believe things absolutely passionately, think that the other lot are totally wrong and are not in an explicit dialogue but are somehow held together. The root of that is Jesus’s teaching that you should love your enemies, which is the great text of soft power. There is a presupposition that you will have enemies. Human beings fall out—we have heard about original sin—but you somehow have to love your enemies. It is hard to do that through hard power but it is what soft power is about. Fundamentalisms often contain a very important truth that just gets overembroidered. The art is to take seriously the fundamentalism in somebody but be willing to challenge the embroidery that stops others getting a look in.
From that experience, I can see four marks of soft power. The first mark in this attempt to love the enemy is to trust in a bigger overview. In our Anglican tradition, that is what episcopal oversight is: we stand for the overview of the whole church with the local and little fundamentalisms. In the world, I guess that the dream of a bigger overview is the dream of the United Nations and how we can have a bigger scene within which to operate.
The second mark of soft power is to trust in the dignity of everybody, even the fundamentalists who you find it very hard to engage with. For Anglicans, the scriptures give us countless texts and teaching—a common text about the dignity of all human beings. I guess that, in the world, the equivalent would be things such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. There are common texts that challenge us to see the dignity of every human being, whatever their fundamentalism or approach.
The third mark of soft power is to trust in the hope for goodness that is in human hearts. I have been involved in Derby with the families of those who have gone to fight for ISIS. Of course, I do not agree with that but some of these young people see that their hope for goodness in their hearts can be best expressed like that. They are not going to kill people; they are going because they believe that that is the way to get a better society. How can we somehow connect with the hope for goodness in people’s hearts? As Anglicans, we do that through what is called common worship. If you go into Anglican churches there is an enormous variety and it does not look common at all. But there is a commonness about the hope for goodness that God can raise in human hearts. I guess that, for politicians, that is the art of setting a tone to raise what I would call public spirit—a spirit in the public who have hopes and dreams for goodness.
The fourth mark of soft power is a willingness to learn new things. For us as Anglicans, that is in struggling to use our reason to try to see what God is trying to teach us. We see through a glass darkly; we can always see new things. That is probably the biggest challenge to hard power and politics, as it is often caricatured through parties and ideologies: the courage to be shown something new and to learn and change, breaking out of the paradigm in which you have been set.
Those would seem to be some marks of how soft power might operate for people like me, as an Anglican, and people like us in a world with high aspirations through soft power. However, it is going to be messy, so I will finish with some questions for the Minister. How seriously can government take the importance of fundamentalisms and have a politics that is generous about seeking the core truth in even the most extreme views, by taking away the embroidery because we recognise the common dignity in human beings? How seriously can government operate soft power through partnership and not partisan power or, as we say in our Prayers here each day, not through “partial affections”? How seriously can the Government work with agents such as the church, faith groups, Christian Aid and the Anglican communion—people who are making small steps to operate soft power and probably need encouragement? The Government probably have the courage to invest in small steps and not big systems all the time.
My last point is that the criteria for government investment in soft power is dominated in our world, inevitably, by what people call smart objectives. As the noble Lord, Lord Wei, said, we need to have dreams and faith. We need to trust in messiness and taking a punt on small things that could have heart-to-heart consequences for our relationships through human beings with other nations. That is a bold thing for government but it is how soft power would need to operate. As hard power is exposed as having severe limitations in the modern world, we need to invest in this kind of approach seriously and heavily.
Baroness Berridge (Con)
My Lords, I, too, thank the most reverend Primate for this debate, the particular title of which has invaded my thoughts rather like the title of an essay that one has been set. Although implicit, it is not specific about our considering only the UK’s soft power and non-military options. The hyperconnectivity of the world affects nations as well as citizens. Who our allies are and what they are saying will affect our soft power on the international stage.
The title also points to soft power being used for a purpose beyond maintaining our own economic and political status in the world, to a purpose that benefits us all but primarily those in potential conflict zones. The masterful report of the Select Committee speaks of the UK playing,
“a responsible and progressive role in building global peace”,
and security, but most of the report is about our soft power mechanisms, its role with hard power and retaining our global position primarily for the benefit of our citizens, so any later debate on that report alone would be distinctive and valuable.
As I thought about this, I was also struck by the triumvirate nature of today’s debate, which differs from the procedure in the other place. Involved today we have the most reverend Primate from our established church, the Government and Opposition at their Dispatch Boxes and the most reverend Primate’s parliamentary colleagues. It was this that made me see a lacuna in the report and our thinking around soft power.
The report is comprehensive in outlining the breadth of mechanisms, from excellence in science and sport to the BBC and my own profession, the law. However, it is not only the Anglican communion and faith communities domestically and globally that are not considered in any depth in the report by the Select Committee, but the nature of the world that we are engaging and trading with. It is a deeply religious world. Some 84% of the world’s population have a religious faith and, for the majority of those people, it is beyond ticking a box on a census form. Go to the academy or the policy world at the moment and it is religion and foreign policy, and religion and its involvement in conflict, that you will find on the agenda. Visit the boards and senior management teams of many multinational companies and you will find religious literacy on the agenda. I know that Her Majesty’s Government have made a beginning in addressing this issue, but could the Minister please outline what assessment the Government have made of the religious understanding of civil servants in DCLG, the MoD and DfID, as well as the Foreign and Commonwealth Office? Is there a strategic plan and programme across government to fill any gaps in that knowledge and understanding?
What of the soft power of the UK’s religious institutions, which has not yet been adequately explored in the report? Soft power is intensely relational and not easily measurable, but no one can doubt that we will benefit in the world from the world tour of the most reverend Primate visiting his fellow Primates in 32 countries. The enormous banners on the streets in Ghana declaring “Akwaaba”, meaning “Welcome” in Twi, are testament to this. Over the past decade or so, the established church has also illustrated how it can be the guardian of religious pluralism and tolerance here in Britain by facilitating interfaith dialogue. With the requisite diplomacy and creative thinking, surely there is a role for this beyond our shores in conflict prevention.
I was pleased to hear the most reverend Primate mention the little-thought-of country, the Central African Republic. Perhaps the measure of how little it is thought of in the context of this debate is that when the noble Lord, Lord McConnell, and I visited it last month, there were no advertisements for Coca-Cola or Nestlé, and I saw no presence of the FA Premier League. The only consistent reconciliation work to try to avoid full-scale civil war there over the past three years has been an interfaith platform of Protestant, Catholic and Muslim leaders. With little resource but great courage, they have toured the country and, at times of conflict, the Catholic Archbishop of Bangui has given sanctuary in his own home to the nation’s imam.
In addition to the idea of future aid by the UK being delivered via CAFOD, the Muslim Charities Forum and World Vision, all of which work in CAR, I join the noble Lord, Lord Alderdice, in saying that these need to be supported by UK religious leaders. That could be strategic. As I mentioned, the most reverend Primate has probably clocked up more air miles than the Foreign Secretary recently, but the sheer presence of him, Cardinal Nichols, perhaps a leader from one of the black-led denominations and a British imam in this unknown country could be significant. I am not saying that our interfaith dialogue has been perfect—the history of the church overseas bears some of the same issues as our colonial past—but attempts to facilitate such invitations working with DfID must be worth trying.
I also think our interfaith work here would be strengthened by learning valuable lessons overseas to apply at home. I hope that, if the Select Committee is reconvened, there will be an exploration of religious soft power. Obviously many of the countries on the cusp of conflict correlate with those where freedom of religion or belief is barely visible for their populations. I declare an interest as chair of the all-party group. This week, accompanying the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay, to the Holy See brought home to me, as the most reverend Primate had previously warned me, the enormous soft power of the Pope, whose global leadership is so inspiring and whose global institutional reach is on a scale that makes Anglicans pale into insignificance. As I understand it, he also has more central levers at his disposal than the most reverend Primate. Indeed, there is a network of a million people in Catholic religious communities around the world, many of them specialists in education and healthcare. Most of their work is unseen.
In preparation for that visit, as I am a member of the Anglican communion, I read Vatican II. It states clearly that religious institutions also have a responsibility to protect and promote religious freedom. It is not just a matter for Governments and the United Nations. Our experience here gives us humility but a clear voice in that arena. Most of the mistakes being made today in the world—connecting religion too closely to the state in breach of Article 18, such as in Vietnam and China; making the state mono-confessional, such as Georgian Orthodoxy or, in the extreme, in Iran; and religious intolerance leading to the killing of the other, such as with IS in Iraq—have been made at one time or other in our history.
The English church in its historic denominational diversity has particular constitutional expertise to offer in this area. As my noble friend Lord Cormack mentioned, next year we will celebrate 800 years of Magna Carta, in which the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Stephen Langton, and his bishops played a key role. In fact, clause 1 of Magna Carta states that,
“the English church shall be free”.
Although that was, of course, not realised for many centuries, it was an important statement of freedom of religion to King John and Pope Innocent III.
In any future Select Committee report, I hope to see recommendations for the most reverend Primate and the established church in relation to their role in soft power. Perhaps the most reverend Primate is rueing the day when he brought our attention to its absence in the Select Committee’s report. I know that my noble friend Lord Cormack laid out quite a grand plan in relation to Magna Carta. To cut that down to size, perhaps, it would be useful to see a project that explored the correct principles regarding a connection between any religious institution and the state. There is a particular, unique role that our religious institutions can play in that regard, which would be important in conflict prevention when speaking to other Governments and religious institutions overseas and which could enhance religious freedom.
There has also been a surprising entrance of soft power in this context with the intervention of His Royal Highness Prince Charles, whose courageous speech a year ago gave so much encouragement to Christians suffering in the Middle East, as did his personal visit to the Coptic Orthodox Church Centre in Stevenage and the Syrian Orthodox communities here in the UK. After the events connected with IS in the summer, his continued support in a video message for the launch of the Religious Freedom in the World report of the Catholic agency Aid to the Church in Need was much appreciated. Sometimes I think that we forget that Britain’s wonderful diversity often means that the relatives of our citizens are being killed in these conflicts.
As Professor Anholt testified at paragraph 292 of the report,
“the aim is to prove the utility of the country to humanity and to the planet, rather than brag about its assets or achievements”.
Similarly, Peter Horrocks from the BBC World Service said that that station is the “world’s radio station” and therefore,
“can attract people to Britain precisely because we are not pursuing a British agenda”.
The global situation today means that the UK must pour out its power and influence for conflict prevention rather than trade, for the benefit of others, not ourselves. The by-product of using our influence this way is that we will see our global status enhanced rather than decline, which of course includes our trade balance and our security.
Lord Judd (Lab)
My Lords, like other noble Lords I am extremely grateful to be able to hear and participate in this debate. We should all be appreciative of the most reverend Primate for the way in which he has given us this opportunity. This has been a refreshing debate, because for once we have talked about strategy rather than about our constant preoccupation with tactics. Our species is lost if we cannot reassert the primacy of strategic considerations, towards which tactics are a means of travel.
This is about conflict prevention. I see a great paradox in human society at the moment. On the one hand, we are more and more conscious of our total interdependence with others across the world. On the other, there is a growing sense and yearning for personal identity and significance. Sometimes we talk, for example, in the context of our own society, about the issues of Scottish nationalism. However, we overlook—I declare an interest as a half-Scot; I am very close to my Scottish family—what people yearn for, which is the sense that they matter and belong, and have dignity and identity. That is of course central to any concern about conflict and its prevention.
However, if we are talking about peace, which by definition we must be, sometimes the language we use becomes too easily confused. We talk about peace enforcement, peacekeeping and peacemaking, but over my lifetime I have become interested in what I see as the greatest challenge, peacebuilding, which is quite different. That is about finding the bricks with which you build the security for the future, and it requires infinite patience. There will be many set-backs, but the danger is that we get into an impatient management mode in which we want to manage a solution and, in a sense, want to find a solution to other people’s problems, get them to buy it, and then enforce it. That is destined to lead to greater and greater trouble in the future. We need solutions that belong to the participants in the conflict. That means building relations of solidarity. Solidarity is a very important concept, because it is not about talking to or about other people but about talking with them, listening and learning from that experience.
The noble Lord, Lord Williams of Baglan, referred to the immensely important part played by the NGOs—and again I declare an interest, because that has been very much part of my life. I think that he is right to emphasise why they matter so much, because, although they are not all perfect, at their best they are close to the people. The advocacy that they bring into deliberations is that based on experience and engagement, and their strength is that they really are in a meaningful relationship with the people about whom we are talking. Governments of all persuasions have failed to see the vital importance of this aspect of NGO activity—that they bring an unrivalled contribution to the quality, content and integrity of the debate.
The most reverend Primate referred to the issue of visas, and I am very glad that he did. One issue here, it always seems to me, is that we fail to realise that a relevant centre of higher education in the nature of the world in which we live must be an international community. It is not just about having overseas students here and the contributions that they make to the finances of a university. The quality of the education is related to its being an international community, in which people from completely different backgrounds are learning and studying together and informing each other from different perspectives. To do anything in administration that hinders the process of developing these flourishing institutions as centres of international co-operation and understanding is to be very detrimental to our future.
On a more local level, I happen to be a patron of a very interesting local organisation based in Marlborough, set up at the time of the Brandt report, which has kept going extremely well. The point about the Marlborough Brandt Group is that over 20 years it has brought people from the Gambia in West Africa to Marlborough to work there on Marlborough’s social problems and challenges. Behind the façade of the college and all the rest, there are a lot of challenges and social problems in Marlborough. Young people from Marlborough have been going to work in the Gambia. That programme has recently had to stop because they simply cannot cope with the difficulties of getting visas for the Gambians to come to this country. It is at moments like this that we have to ask ourselves what on earth we are doing, cutting off our noses to spite our faces. If anything is an illustration of practical co-operation, that is it.
If we are talking with the NGOs, they would be the first to make the point—and my noble friend Lord Boateng referred to this in a powerful and effective speech—that it is all about a matrix. It is a matrix of climate change and social issues, as well as refugee, migration and economic issues, along with issues of land and water resources and health and security. There is a need for security sector reform, because everyone needs to have a stable society. Of course, the security sector will be necessary—but it must be one that is trusted and in which there is real accountability. So security sector reform is a vital part of our approach.
Underlying all this is the issue of human rights. You can put it very simply—in the absence of any serious human rights issues, there is a chance to have a stable, secure society. If there are human rights issues of any significant nature in society, you are on the road to instability, extremism and tension. Therefore, we must stop seeing human rights as a possible option; we must see them as an absolutely indispensable cornerstone of stable society. That is why the international approach to human rights is so important and any talk of repatriation of human rights is nonsense, because what matters is that these are rights of mankind across the world. They are not just British rights or French rights or German rights but the rights of people wherever they are. If we start to dismantle that principle, which Eleanor Roosevelt, Churchill and others regarded as being so important in the aftermath of the Second World War, what on earth are we doing to the cause of peace and understanding in the world?
The Government are coming to terms with interdepartmental co-operation and are to be commended for that. I am very interested in the concept of the new Conflict, Stability and Security Fund, which is to be introduced in April next year. However, we need to make sure that this is not just—how shall I put it?—a formal response to an issue that has been identified but is an effective muscular response. As my noble friend Lord Boateng said so well, this means that departments have to stop thinking as departments and start to think about being part of a common cause, and of how one carries that common cause forward.
An issue that I do not think has had much attention today is that of arms control and the Arms Trade Treaty. We have to stop thinking that arms are part of our export business and that we can get on with making money for Britain and providing employment in Britain unless there is an overriding reason not to do so. Surely everything we are experiencing in the world demonstrates that arms in the wrong hands are immensely dangerous. Arms are dangerous things to make and you should export them only where a cast-iron guarantee can be given—if that is possible—that they will be used to maintain peace with close allies who can be trusted and that people will be accountable for what happens with them. The whole balance of the assumption behind the operation of the arms industry has to change in that context.
I always thought that one of the finest assets of the BBC was Bush House, as the quality of what was broadcast across the world was due to the quality of the work that was done there. The quality of the community in Bush House reflects what I said about universities in that great experience and learning came together to back up the quality of the journalism. I hope that we will manage to maintain that tradition under the new arrangements. I am not always sure that that is the case. I get worried when I receive letters from the BBC saying, “You will be cheered to know that our audience has increased by this amount”. Of course, I am cheered; I am glad to hear that. However, sometimes the value of the BBC is demonstrated in areas where there may not be a very high listening audience but where the listening audience that does exist is crucial. The BBC, with its objective reporting and wide understanding of the world, is a lifeline for sane, decent people.
As regards the contribution of the British Council to education and cultural exchange, cultural exchange enables us to understand others’ backgrounds so much better. The way in which people across the world have loved Shakespeare as the result of the British Council’s efforts is not to be underestimated.
I conclude by referring to the observation that I was so glad the most reverend Primate the Archbishop included in his interesting opening speech. In all this we have to look at ourselves and what is happening in Britain. Whenever there is a miscarriage of justice, or an unjustifiable action or manhandling in the forces, police or border authority, it is storing up insecurity for the future. It is essential, given the personal experience of people’s treatment by one of these authorities, that standards of decency, care, concern and compassion are there all the time. They are important for the people concerned but if they are not there, we may have bright people going home, alienated and aggravated, and becoming potential recruits to extremism and the rest.
Perhaps I may make one important—for me, anyway; I am sure it is for others— point about all this. We must be very careful about slipping, under pressures and provocation that I do not underestimate, into the concept that somehow the Home Office, which is the equivalent to the ministry of the interior in many countries of the world, is moving into positions of responsibility in our universities. This matters not only in terms of academic freedom, which we have treasured in our society, and the autonomy of universities in that context, but what is the example we are setting to the world? To the world, it is quite normal for interior ministries and the Home Office to do that. Of course the issues are huge, but let us pause for a moment and ask ourselves what we are really doing.
Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer (LD)
My Lords, I am grateful to the most reverend Primate for his introduction, and for mentioning nightmare scenarios and the power of diplomacy, because I want to talk about the essential use of that power to prevent the ultimate nightmare scenario.
I am talking of an issue on which the UK has a particular moral responsibility to engage because we are a nuclear weapons state. As such, we need to engage all our energies in diplomacy to resolve extremely pressing issues. It was back in 2009 that the International Commission on Nuclear Non-proliferation and Disarmament said in its report:
“So long as any state has nuclear weapons, others will want them. So long as any such weapons remain it defies credibility that they will not one day be used, by accident, miscalculation or design. And any such use would be catastrophic”.
We had another illustration last week, for those in your Lordships’ House who went, of the likelihood of just accidents, not even by design, when Heather Williams from Chatham House came to present its report, Too Close for Comfort: Cases of Near Nuclear Use and Options for Policy. Eric Schlosser, who undertook a study in the United States on similar issues, shared a platform with her.
Just how close we are to the brink of that catastrophe is something that the 15 people who wrote the international commission’s report were very aware of. They were absolute realists and included senior figures of wide experience such as William Perry, former US Secretary of State for Defense; General Karamat, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of Pakistan; General Naumann, former chairman of the NATO Military Committee; and, from this House, my noble friend Lady Williams of Crosby. The year in which they published their report, 2009, was a year of optimism, because President Obama made his speech in Prague. The Inter-Parliamentary Union, which the noble Baroness, Lady Hooper, mentioned, unanimously passed its resolution on nuclear non-proliferation. I must declare an interest as a co-president of the international grouping of Parliamentarians for Nuclear Non-proliferation and Disarmament. However, during this time of optimism there were some moments of pessimism. In 2010, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference did not succeed nearly as well as it should have. Most unfortunately for the UK, it fell exactly at election time, so the political lead was lost. One of the unseen fallouts—if I may use that ghastly pun in this context—is that the UK will not be able to take a strong lead in the 2015 conference either, because it will fall at election time. All focus will be on elections and the subsequent forming of a Government. As we are a nuclear weapon power, that is particularly unfortunate.
I appreciate that for this Government, and no doubt the next, disarmament and non-proliferation remain, theoretically and rhetorically, high priorities. However, having had many conversations with my fellow parliamentarians on PNND, I do not think that that is how the rest of the world sees us. I suspect that they do appreciate all those aspects of soft power that I, too, appreciate, which noble Lords have spoken about, such as the World Service, the British Council, and economic and trade issues. However, that is a paradox. We are talking about this while still holding a very big stick behind our backs.
The rest of the world, fed up with the fact that the UN conference on disarmament is widely recognised as moribund because the P5 will not engage and solve that paradox, commenced two initiatives post-2010. First was a UN open-ended working group to try to get a work programme agreed for the conference on disarmament. Sadly, the UK refused to take part. The second initiative was a new fact-finding series of conferences on the humanitarian impact of nuclear weapons. The first was held in Norway in 2013, which, again, the UK, along with the USA and France, did not attend. I had hoped that the UK might attend the second one in Mexico. However, my hopes were dashed when, in reply to my Question in this House in November last year, my noble friend, who is replying today, said:
“We continue to have concerns that the initiative would divert attention from the 2010 action plan agreed by states parties to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty”.—[Official Report, 6/11/13; col. 218.]
Next week, starting on Monday, we have the third conference on the humanitarian impact of nuclear weapons, held in Vienna. I especially welcome the US’s very recent decision to attend the third conference. I hope that my noble friend will have better news for me today and that the UK has decided to finally attend these conferences.
There are many things we could do at a diplomatic level to move the agenda on and move to a safer place. On the second of this month, at the UN General Assembly, there was a draft on achieving a nuclear weapon-free world and accelerating the implementation of nuclear disarmament commitments, which the assembly had called for. A recorded vote was held. Unfortunately, although 169 countries voted in favour, the seven usual suspects voted against. They were: North Korea; Israel, which still refuses to acknowledge that it has nuclear weapons; India, which has not signed the nuclear non-proliferation treaty; France; Russia; the US; and, of course, the UK.
If we continue not to put our diplomatic force behind efforts to make the world a safer place at least in terms of de-alerting, we will have a lot to answer for. Unfortunately, the article that talked about de-alerting was one on which we abstained. It is difficult to understand why we should want to abstain on something like reducing the hair-trigger quality of our nuclear weapons, allowing them to be launched at any moment, when the threats against us—
Lord West of Spithead
I am sure that the noble Baroness is aware that our missiles are no longer on that hair trigger. We have set an example, which has not been followed by anybody else. We have gone down to one system only and have reduced the number of warheads dramatically. We have been honest about how many warheads there are. If the rest of the world had followed suit, things would be a lot better, but we certainly do not have missiles either targeted or on a hair trigger.
Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer
I thank the noble Lord very much for that, but it is particularly curious that we could not then vote in favour of the paragraph in the General Assembly’s resolution. I hope that he will join me in encouraging the Government to change that vote the next time it comes round.
In conclusion, however good our soft power is, we will come back to the fact that the rest of the countries in the world will see the P5 as those who, as I said, hold a big stick behind their backs but talk in very different terms when face to face.
Lord Ramsbotham (CB)
My Lords, I join other noble Lords who have thanked the most reverend Primate for this very important debate. I also congratulate him on his very thoughtful and masterly introductory speech.
I declare an interest as a very chastened member of the soft power Select Committee, so ably chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Howell. As the son of a bishop, I have been taken to task, quite rightly, twice today—by my wife and by the most reverend Primate—for the fact that the church is not included.
One memory that I have of that committee is the evidence given to us by the high commissioner for Mozambique, who explained why Mozambique applied to join the Commonwealth and laid out very clearly the values which many noble Lords have expressed as being particularly British. However, I do not intend to say more about soft power at the moment; I intend to concentrate on a sentence in a letter that the most reverend Primate sent to me on 21 November. It said that the relationship between overseas conflict and the radicalisation of communities in the United Kingdom, and what we can do to limit that link, is also an issue for him and his colleagues on the Bishops’ Benches.
At the time, I was reflecting on the re-emergence on the world scene of one of the giants of the ending of the Cold War, Mikhail Gorbachev, and what he said in public on the occasion of the anniversary of the falling of the Berlin Wall. I very much agreed with the noble Baroness, Lady Williams of Crosby, when she said that it is essential that we increase our understanding of Russia. Gorbachev said that the world was on the brink of a new cold war and that trust should be restored through dialogue with Russia. He said that America was still intoxicated by its Cold War “triumph”—whatever that meant—pushing everyone to take an anti-Russian position and that triumphalism was the reason why the global powers were unable to cope with the conflicts in Yugoslavia, the Middle East and, now, Ukraine. However, he ended by saying that it was too late to ratchet down the confrontation and that we must go back to the starting line from which we began building a new world both in Europe and elsewhere.
That caused me to go back in my own memories. During the Cold War, I was a soldier. In 1985 I was commanding an armoured division in Germany based on the side of the Möhnesee, which many people will have heard of. It was an extraordinary year. It was 40 years after the end of the war and the Germans have an extraordinary belief that two generations absolves you from any connection with what went on two generations before. The very remarkable mayor of Dortmund, which was a large town very near us, asked whether I would take part in a ceremony where all the political parties would mark 40 years of peace. I did so and said that we had made our contribution. I then asked him whether there was anything that he particularly felt the British should be thanked for. He said that it was interesting that immediately after the war we, the British, as opposed to the Americans, made the Germans responsible for the administration of Dortmund. By giving them something to do, it gave them back their pride, and pride is important in the development of a nation.
I never forgot that. In 1990 I happened to be in Hungary watching a Russian division being taken back to Russia by train. In the first part of the train were coaches of soldiers and then came all the equipment. The back part of the train consisted of trucks on which there were drainpipes, bits of wood, windows and doors. They knew that when they got back to Russia there would be nothing for them. It was quite clear that the pride had gone out of them. In 1993, I was asked by the head of the Russian army to go to Russia and advise on setting up a contract as opposed to a conscript army. I was taken to a place called Tver, which is halfway between St Petersburg and Moscow. I was taken to see a division which had been kicked out of Poland at 24 hours’ notice. The soldiers had been removed to this place and all their equipment had gone missing. They were living alongside families in rooms separated by blankets—there were four families living to a room. They asked what I would do if I were in a division living in Russia. I told them how we would live and how we would assimilate with the community. It was the most extraordinary day because we then went to see the mayor and asked whether he could arrange that. At the end, the general threw his arms around me and said, “Thank you so much helping the Russian army”, and I reflected that I was teaching it how to live in its own country. The tragic thing was that pride had gone. It is very important that we do not do anything to triumphalise over what the Russians are going through. We should remember that they see these sanctions as war.
I was also involved at that time with the United Nations, which picks up on what the noble Lord, Lord Alderdice, was saying. I was co-opted by Kofi Annan into a committee trying to revive the old military committee to give some co-ordination to the peacekeeping operations that were developing all over the world. What was interesting was that we discovered that although peacekeeping operations were going on and contingence was being made, there was no co-ordination of the post-conflict reconstruction or humanitarian effort at all. One of our recommendations was that when a special representative was appointed he should have two deputies—a force commander and a humanitarian commander—and they must be equals. The military was trying to develop wider conflict prevention somewhere else by stopping someone in a country or assisting in the post-conflict reconstruction, because there could be no reconstruction and redevelopment until whatever opposed them had been removed.
I also declare an interest as a member of the Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy. I was very pleased to hear the most reverend Primate say that soft power must be included in hard power when we are looking at what the national security strategy is. I could not agree with him more. I hope that it does not just develop into a scrap between the MoD and the Treasury, as the MoD is merely one of the players in this. It is desperately important that all the other players should have their say.
I have been thinking about the youth of this country. I took from my bookshelf a very remarkable book written by a godmother of mine, Amy Buller. It is called Darkness Over Germany and it was written during the war. It explains the almost religious grip that Nazism had over the youth of Germany. In it she said:
“If every Nazi were slain tomorrow, we should be left with the deeper and more terrible phenomenon of a German youth in desperate need of a faith … That need must be met primarily by Germans themselves, for it is obvious that, in such a situation, healing must come from within ... That these Germans will need and indeed seek the co-operation of other nations is clear, but the United Nations must show signs that they, in their several countries, know how to meet the needs of their own youth”.
She went on to describe a conversation with one of her students, who asked her:
“‘Didn’t you say that, however well the Nazis had organised, they would never have called forth that dynamic energy and passionate devotion of youth, unless they had somehow given answers, however false, to the more fundamental spiritual needs of youth?’”.
To which Amy replied by saying:
“‘Recognising that these things would not call forth the fanatical allegiance of the youth of this country, we may fail to realise the significance of the spiritual bankruptcy and real destitution underlying it all, for that is something which is evident to the whole of Western civilisation, though in more insidious forms and subtle dress. The real tragedy of the Nazi betrayal, not only of Germany but of Europe, is that it claimed to have given a radical answer to some of the most fundamental problems of our age. It is of the utmost importance that we should understand the problems that they were trying to solve, and then analyse, closely, the fallacious and heretical character of their answers. To a generation without faith, the Nazis gave a brutal philosophy, and millions of lives have been sacrificed to free the world of this false answer to real need, but let us not fail to understand that it was caused by real need. We are now faced with the greater task of bringing healing to the nations including our own. I am convinced this cannot be done without a faith in God adequate to the tremendous task of reconstruction’”.
Of course, we are dealing with different fundamental spiritual needs, but if we are to play our part in trying to provide the answers that our youth require to today’s problems, it is vital that we understand and repair our national strengths and weaknesses with regard to the protection and projection of the values that we as a country maintain. That includes our political masters, who I hope will read, mark and learn from what so many noble Lords have contributed to today’s debate, for which they and the whole House must thank the most reverend Primate.
Earl Attlee (Con)
My Lords, when I saw the subject for today’s debate and noted that it was being promoted by the most reverend Primate, I did not hesitate to put my name down to speak. I intend to adhere to the subject of the debate, but would observe that soft power also has utility in ordinary treaty and commercial negotiations, and not just in conflict situations.
The noble Lord, Lord Boateng, talked about the funding of soft power. I thought that we could perhaps divide it into direct and indirect soft power. The good news is that indirect soft power arises automatically from our JROL, culture, values and vision, as referred to by many noble Lords. So, of course, there is no marginal cost for indirect soft power. As we were reminded by the most reverend Primate, direct soft power is orders of magnitude less costly than hard power.
The noble Lord, Lord Parekh, asked: what is soft power, and is moral authority soft power? He made me consider whether there was a spectrum between indirect soft power and direct soft power, ending with sanctions, before getting into hard power. I very much enjoyed the speech of the noble Lord, Lord West. I agreed with everything he said and I look forward to a full debate on defence—that is, hard power—for precisely the reasons that he laid out.
The most reverend Primate and others touched on visas, but we must not forget that one of the effects of our soft power is that the UK is one of the best places to be in the world. For that reason, we have to be far more cautious than most other countries before granting a visa. Nevertheless, if I had picked the short straw of having to be an Immigration Minister in the Home Office, I would pay very careful attention to this problem.
Many noble Lords referred to the importance of students in our soft power stance. I entirely agree. When I was in the Government and at the Home Office, I could not detect anything to the contrary. But what we cannot escape from is the fact that our student entry route was being abused to a gross extent. I have no doubt that we had to tighten up on that abuse.
The most reverend Primate talked about the SDSR and the hard and soft power interface—or perhaps balance. I do not believe that one needs to be pursued at the expense of the other. In the SDSR, they should be considered together. The beauty of soft power is that it is not expensive. The issue is how to exercise it effectively. With hard power, the issue is: how much do we need, are our capabilities in balance, and can we afford what we think we need?
Many noble and gallant Lords have attended the Royal College of Defence Studies. I was honoured to attend in 2008 as part of the Armed Forces Parliamentary Scheme. In the previous SDSR, the RCDS was retained because of its very significant role in conflict prevention. Each year half of the intake of about 30 members are from overseas, and the whole emphasis of the course is to think at the strategic level to understand the causes of conflict, how to cool things down and how to de-escalate, and, picking up on the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, to understand the position of your opponent.
The RCDS attracts the very best lecturers and presenters. Only the very best are invited back. I understand that my noble friend the Minister had addressed the RCDS many times before I heard him present there. I know that he cannot make any undertakings regarding the next SDSR and the RCDS but I hope that he can acknowledge its most important role in worldwide conflict prevention and reduction.
This week I received a very interesting document from Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs. It told me how much I had earned and how much income tax and National Insurance I had paid in the previous financial year. My overall earnings were just under £100,000, but I should point out that that included a sizeable accommodation allowance. My actual salary was about £63,000—about the same as a head teacher, I believe. The document also showed how the Government had spent my contribution. The biggest expenditure by a long way, at about £8,000, was welfare, followed by health at just over £6,000, education at £4,300 and pensions at £4,000, while national debt interest was £2,300. Defence—in other words, hard power—was £1,700. There followed a number of relatively modest spending areas.
There was also a pie chart, which was even more illuminating. It showed the 25% slice for welfare, 13% for education and so on. The noble Lord, Lord Pearson, is not in his place, but the very smallest, wafer-thin slice was for the UK contribution to the EU budget. The next, very slightly bigger slice was overseas aid—that is not surprising, as my contribution to it was only £379 compared to, as I have said, £8,000 for welfare.
One could either double or entirely eliminate the overseas aid budget and it would not make the pie chart look any different, because, as we know, we spend only 0.7% of GDP on it. For that reason, I think that my right honourable friend the Prime Minister was right to ring-fence the overseas aid budget. It is nothing to do with the deficit; we can afford it.
The other place appears to have been voting all afternoon and I understand that it is considering a Bill to enshrine the 0.7% rate in legislation, but your Lordships know perfectly well that it would be an unobjectionable but pointless provision since a subsequent Finance Bill could change it. If I am wrong on that, a Bill with that purpose certainly could, as this Parliament cannot bind the next. However, I am personally committed to 0.7% of GDP being spent on overseas aid.
Lord Elton (Con)
If your Lordships will spare me a moment, I would like to add a footnote to the debate which I think has not been mentioned before, certainly not in the 20 speeches that I have listened to.
It is based entirely on a subjective, personal observation but one in which I have considerable confidence. It is that wherever there is a conflict resolution effort going on in the world there seems to be a Norwegian, and very often they have started it. At this point, I declare a shadow of an interest: my mother was Norwegian. I saw the Norwegians at work when I was part of the successful international effort to secure a treaty banning cluster munitions. I am raising this point because I discovered that the Norwegians have conflict resolution as an academic subject both in their schools and in their universities, so they have a fund of people qualified to do the work that we have been talking about. I wonder whether the most reverend Primate or the Minister on the Front Bench would give thought to our doing the same in this country.
Baroness Morgan of Ely (Lab)
My Lords, I thank all the people who have participated today in this most illuminating debate. I thank in particular the most reverend Primate for introducing this most important subject. I am sure that at some point we will have the opportunity to discuss in more detail the specific points raised in the report written by the noble Lord, Lord Howell, and his Select Committee. I shall therefore try in this debate to restrict my comments to three or four key issues, but I again thank the most reverend Primate for an introduction that was carefully constructed and intelligently thought through.
When I was 16, I won a scholarship to study at Atlantic College, an international sixth-form college based in south Wales. I had no idea at the time that this college was a part of global approach to the development of soft power. It was established as a response to the Second World War and the idea was to promote international understanding and world peace among the 350 or so students there representing some 80 different nationalities. Before that, I do not think that I had come across many people from different parts of the world. We were a very different kind of place then, and it is enlightening to think of the way that our society has changed. Despite the fact that we now live in a multicultural, much smaller world, there is still a need for us to understand each other’s cultures, ways of life and motivations. If we start with this, we are already a long way down the path of avoiding conflict.
What is soft power? I have heard a lot of noble Lords say that they are uncomfortable with the term. It is about co-option rather than coercion. It is a means of achieving desired outcomes without recourse to threats or military power. The British Council, the organisation that has done such magnificent work in the area of soft power, defines it as,
“the things that make people love a country rather than fear it, things that are often the products of people, institutions and brands rather than governments”.
Soft power is being prioritised as a foreign policy tool by other countries. China, for example, has opened 300 Confucius Institutes since 2004 and aims to have a thousand institutes in operation by 2020. We in Britain have an in-built advantage over other nations as two of our most notable soft power tools, the BBC World Service and the British Council, had decades to establish global reputations for excellence. We must not throw this advantage away but we must be aware that others are catching up very quickly. Just look at the growth of Russia Today TV. According to the Broadcasters’ Audience Research Board, around 2.5 million Britons tuned their televisions to Russia Today during the second half of last year. It boasts the most popular news channel in Britain after the BBC and Sky, so we have to understand that we cannot let this advantage run away from us. It is particularly important for us to consider because the funding cuts to the World Service have already meant closing 22 bureaus, including cutting the radio service to Ukraine. I will need to elaborate a bit more on these two institutions when we discuss the other report.
Soft power is about the representation of ideas, of a way of life, of attitudes and values, some of those in Britain being tolerance, openness and respect for law, and as the noble Lord, Lord Parekh, suggested, what we stand for is what matters. Its real impact can only be long term, but it is absolutely worth the investment. As my noble friend Lady Kinnock said, soft power cannot be seen as the soft option.
One of the other key tools in the area of soft power needs to be protected at all costs. Nobody can doubt that one of the main keys to the future influence of this country globally is its international development funding. Any reduction in the commitment to spend 0.7% of our GDP on development aid would wound not only our international partners but the UK. As long ago as 1969, the Labour Party was committed to that 0.7% target, and since 1970 it has appeared in every one of our manifestos. I am delighted to report that it has now been passed in the other place, so we hope that the Minister will give us an assurance today that time will be made for this in this House in the new year.
To give credit where it is due, the coalition Government have been committed to ring-fencing the development aid budget, despite real pressures from less enlightened members in the Tory party. So we urge the Government now and in the future to hold their nerve on this important issue. I also ask the Minister to indicate whether the Government will conform to the £1 billion extra funding estimated by the Office for Budget Responsibility today as the amount needed to reach that 0.7% target.
The then Secretary of State for International Development said just two short years ago:
“For under 1% of gross national income this is a tremendous investment, not only in the future stability and prosperity of some of the poorest and most dysfunctional parts of the world, it’s an investment for Britain in Britain's future prosperity and stability and security”.
Those two years have seen increased problems faced by some of our international partners. Their interests have become our interests, their prosperity our prosperity, their stability and security our stability and security, and we have become more inextricably bound than ever before.
Sadly, some shrill voices are determined to see the foreigner, both in their own country and here, as a drain on our resources when the truth is that they are assets and allies for present and future prosperity. Those voices even fail to recognise that the consequence of investing in international aid is not just mutual growth but a reduction in migration, as people are able to flourish in their home countries. The less that we give, the greater will be the number of people from around the world needing food and shelter in our country. Yes, there is an issue with immigration in the UK but we need to place this immigration into a global context. There are 42 million forcibly displaced people around the world today but four out of five refugees are housed in the developing world. Pakistan alone takes in 1.7 million of them, more than the 1.6 million taken by the whole of Europe. The Lebanon has taken in 1 million refugees from Syria, which had a population of 3 million. The least that we can do is therefore to pay our fair share to help those countries carrying the biggest burden.
Where are we failing and how can we do better in relation to our soft power influence in the world? The Government in the UK are in real danger of sending out mixed messages on our values. When it comes to developing the UK’s strategic narratives on soft power, it seems to be necessary to stress again and again that they must reflect reality and should not be undermined by concrete political action or even debates. The committee of the noble Lord, Lord Howell, stressed that the UK would find it difficult to portray itself as an open, tolerant country and promote these ideas in conflict-prone areas at the same time as engaging in an increasingly vitriolic debate on immigration.
One of the other points to note is the shift in power networks going on through the world. The rise of non-western countries is altering the international balance of power and influence. The UK has a huge advantage: the country’s history and experience of global reach now present it with an enviable opportunity to work with others in shaping the world. The Government must communicate openly and actively with both old allies in the Commonwealth and new partners around the globe. However, we must also understand how crucial the EU is in promoting the kinds of values that we espouse. My noble friend Lord Anderson underlined the point that the support for the European Convention on Human Rights is absolutely critical to that value system.
We cannot fail to have noticed that upheavals in the Middle East and parts of Africa are increasingly being determined by more extreme forms of religious beliefs. The most reverend Primate was correct to point out that this is an ideological, even a theological, struggle which cannot simply be won by violence. It is therefore essential that we have within the Foreign Office a ream of top-flight advisers in important areas such as ethnic and religious issues, as suggested by the noble Baroness, Lady Berridge. Awareness of the sensitivities and an understanding of cultural, ethnic and theological diversity is vital to the proper exercise of soft power, and an understanding of how and why religions help to create—or attempt to eliminate—tensions and conflicts should be a prerequisite of the locally based diplomat. A failure to grasp the complex internal divisions within religions, as well as between faiths, and how these are often connected to ethnic groups, civil strife and international conflicts is critical to solutions, whether it be in Ulster or Nigeria. The most reverend Primate was also correct to draw attention to the fact that religion was not mentioned in the Select Committee’s report.
In conclusion, it is worth emphasising the link between soft power and hard power. The suggestion by the most reverend Primate to explore this during the strategic defence and security review merits serious consideration. To this end, I want to pay our respects to the members of Her Majesty’s Armed Forces for the outstanding service that they provide as they travel the world to deliver the more practical and life-saving aspects of soft power on our behalf, when as a nation we respond to natural disasters and human folly. Their role in the world, helping countries to restore normality, replace infrastructure and rebuild communities, often in the most challenging and dangerous environments, gives us all a deep sense of pride.
I heard this week a story recounted by a young airman who has served several tours in Afghanistan. He told how it was so important that they walked around among local people wearing what he called “soft” clothing—he meant his beret rather than a helmet, and an absence of heavy body armour bristling with weapons. The corporal said:
“It’s about hearts and minds, that’s where we British do well. That’s where the real battle has to be won—hearts and minds”.
Ultimately, we will not defeat terrorism with arms. It has to be with hearts and minds.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)
My Lords, the most reverend Primate has given us the basis for a fascinating debate, starting with his own very helpful speech. The Government of course strongly support its underlying premise that soft power and non-military actions have a critical role in preventing conflicts and in building stronger societies, state structures and economic development. We are indeed deploying smart power as well as we can, which brings together all the tools at our disposal. That must be the cornerstone of our approach.
This year, sadly, we have seen an unpleasant increase in the number and intensity of high-profile armed conflicts around the world: some new, as in Ukraine, some revived and continuing, as in Libya, and some with a new and dangerous slant, as with the rise of Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, while prospects for lasting peace in the Israel/Palestine conflict appear dimmer now than at the start of the year. The UK has been at the forefront of efforts to resolve these and other conflicts by peaceful means. Such is the complexity of modern conflicts, most often involving rather more non-state actors than state actors, as in the Sahel and across the Middle East, that we and like-minded members of the international community need to use the full range of tools available to us to try to restrict, contain and end these conflicts.
Conflict prevention is much more difficult than post-conflict reconstruction. The unexpected outbreak of the Arab spring in Tunisia, which no one, even in Tunisia, had suspected, is a perfect example of how difficult it is to anticipate just where conflicts might break out next and do one’s best to anticipate it. The noble Lord, Lord Boateng, pointed out the unanticipated spillover of the NATO and Gulf states intervention in Libya. We have to remember that that intervention was in large part intended as a humanitarian one to prevent the large-scale killing that was threatened within Libya at that time. The subsequent collapse of state and society into conflicting militias and the dispersal of weapons across the Sahel from abandoned military bases across the country was not foreseen. Sadly, as he rightly says, we are now faced with a huge problem of ungoverned areas within what we think of as states, albeit very weak ones, with which we now have to deal. Peacekeeping, post-conflict resolution and the containment of conflict have therefore to be our major preoccupations.
The Building Stability Overseas strategy, which has been mentioned, is the Government’s strategy to help to shape a stable world and tackle threats at their source. It has three areas where the Government wish to focus efforts: first, early warning, improving our ability to anticipate instability and potential triggers for conflict, so far as we can; secondly, rapid crisis prevention and response, taking fast, appropriate and effective action to prevent a crisis or to stop it from developing further; and, thirdly, investing in upstream prevention by trying to build strong, legitimate and robust societies in the many fragile countries and weak states around the world.
We fund this partly through the interdepartmental Conflict Pool. Again I have to say to the noble Lord, Lord Boateng, that there is a great deal of cross-departmental co-operation in this, and it is improving. The National Security Council has now agreed to reform decision-making on the UK effort within fragile states. A new Conflict, Stability and Security Fund will therefore replace the current Conflict Pool in April 2015. That will have £1 billion, of which £100 million is new additional money. It will operate across several different departments and include work focused on reconciliation, intercommunity dialogue and weapons reduction and support focused on strengthening other countries’ institutions.
I welcome the general support for the size of our current development budget. It focuses on long-term development but deals with short-term and immediate humanitarian assistance. With the Norwegians and some others, we are now a leader in world development, and we are very proud of that. DfID has been scaling up its work in fragile and conflict-affected states and in the previous SDSR committed itself to investing 30% of total UK ODA in fragile and conflict-affected states. A great deal of effort goes into those many fragile countries across the world.
In addition to that, some of the ODA is being spent in other departments. I was in Istanbul at the weekend where the noble Lord, Lord Janvrin, the UK trade envoy to Turkey, had just launched the UK’s Newton Fund, which is a DfID-funded but BIS-administered fund for promoting scientific and technological collaboration between British scholars and scholars in the developing world. I can assure the noble Lord that there is increasing co-operation across Whitehall to promote our broader developmental objectives.
On defence engagement, which a number of noble Lords asked about, the defence attaché network remains a key part of integrated UK support. I am told that in South Sudan we have worked extremely hard developing a Conflict Pool programme to try to support the evolution of what had been a guerrilla force into professional armed services. Sadly, there is a long way to go. In Ethiopia, we are bringing together defence engagement activity—the Conflict Pool and DfID’s development programme—to pull together the different dimensions of security and justice, as we all recognise that domestic policing is as important as armed forces. The noble Earl, Lord Attlee, referred to military training, the Royal College of Defence Studies and many others. We are similarly engaged in training on the ground in fragile states and also back here.
Others talked about the immense value of all sorts of education that the British are engaged in. As an academic, partly at St Antony’s, which has been mentioned, and at the London School of Economics, I am very conscious of the extent to which, as I travel as a Minister, I meet my former students, who include one Prime Minister at the present, the retiring president of the Commission, one Commissioner and various other people. It helps—and it also helps add to my credibility with the FCO from time to time.
The noble Baroness, Lady Kinnock, asked about the 0.7% commitment. I am glad that the Bill has now passed the other House. It is a little too early for me to say how we will respond, but I take her point and we will see what we can do in January and then on. The British Government are among the leaders in development aid. We are entitled to ask for more from others. The Deputy Prime Minister, when in Berlin last week, made that specific point to our German partners: we are doing well, but we expect others to come up more to the mark.
The most reverend Primate also mentioned the strategic defence and security review. I am struck that many noble Lords responded on that. Since I have already had to answer Questions in the House on what is happening on the SDSR, I welcome the surge of interest in that debate. The review is led by the Cabinet Office with a range of different departments, not just the Ministry of Defence, concerned with it.
I remind the noble Lord, Lord Admiral West, and other noble Lords that the 2010 strategic threat assessment had more non-military than military threats on its list of the most serious threats facing Britain. Those threats included: climate change; international criminal networks; terrorism driven by radical or violent ideologies; global epidemics; cyberattacks, including threats to critical national infrastructure; to which I would add global population growth, weak states, the spillover of civil conflict into state collapse and the surges of refugees as migrants towards safe countries such as the UK. I entirely agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, that part of the argument for development assistance is that it enables people to stay within their own countries rather than flee across the Mediterranean to safer countries like our own. Then there is hybrid war, and the information war, which again, as the noble Baroness said, the Russians are currently waging, as well as their attempts to subvert political parties and other institutions within our safer Europe.
We should certainly consider some of these very large questions. How do we best respond to such a much wider range of threats? What mixture of assets should we best invest in—how much military and how much non-military? How much do we invest in overseas issues of this sort in meeting those threats, in comparison with our investment in domestic education, health, welfare and other public services? There are no soft choices here; this is a matter of very hard financial—
Baroness Williams of Crosby
Before my noble friend completes his very helpful display of what the Government propose to do, I will ask him about a question that was raised by my noble friend Lady Miller and the noble Lord, Lord West. Given that it will cost nothing and that, as he knows, there is a meeting on the nuclear non-proliferation treaty in the spring of 2015, will he tell the House whether he would consider the United Kingdom Government throwing more of their weight behind the idea of ending very early warning? One of the real fears that many of us have is that as the Russian Government begin to lose their capacity to maintain the highest quality of inspection and maintenance, there is a great danger that, with such tiny periods of alarm, an extremely serious accident could occur.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
My Lords, the Government have already invested in considerable preparations for the next NPT review. I take the opportunity to answer the question asked earlier by the noble Baroness, Lady Miller. The Government have decided to accept Austria’s invitation to attend the Vienna Conference on the Humanitarian Impact of Nuclear Weapons, which will get under way this weekend. The UK will be represented by Mrs Susan le Jeune d’Allegeershecque, the UK’s ambassador to Austria and permanent representative to the International Atomic Energy Agency. I hope that is welcome news to all concerned.
In his opening, the most reverend Prelate talked about the importance of narrative. It is very important, with soft power, to talk about the importance of ideas. We all know that ideas shape the world in the long run, be they Christianity, Islam, the Enlightenment, communism, nationalism, fascism, or whatever; and radical Islam is now replacing the attractions of secular ideologies across the Middle East. We certainly need to think about our counternarrative. The traditional western and Anglo-Saxon narrative has been about open society, limited government, civil society, tolerance and human rights. The Reformation and beyond and the importance of non-conformity were not entirely appreciated by the Church of England in the 17th century, but it accepted them in the 19th century. I declare an interest as a member of the Liberal Party, which grew out of the alliance between the Whigs and the non-conformists.
We need to have a debate on what our national narrative now is. The other week I was in a seminar, off the record, with a fairly senior Conservative MP who said, “We can’t discuss the SDSR until we’ve decided who we are and where we think we are in the world—and we don’t know”. That is a real problem, and we all recognise that that is part of our problem. We need to get back to the question of what Britain is about. We have several contradictory narratives at the present moment. The excellent report on soft power produced by the British Academy earlier this year called itself something like the power of attraction—and that is fine, but, actually, the power of attraction means that we have enormous numbers of people of all backgrounds and levels of attainment wanting to come and live in Britain, which is something that we know many of our public no longer want to have. They want Britain to be a rather more closed society.
Part of our open society is that we accept that foreigners can buy whatever they want in Britain, and part of the popular reaction against globalisation in Britain is a sense that somehow we are losing our own country. So there is popular disillusionment with rapid change and continuing immigration. That suggests that politicians, churchmen and public intellectuals need to open a much more active debate about national identity. Gordon Brown as Prime Minister made one or two speeches on this, but we need to think about where we go from here. I am a member of the advisory board on the commemoration of World War I, and part of what we are trying to do through the programme of commemoration is to remind people where we came from. We did not stand alone; the Commonwealth, particularly the Indian Army, the West Indies Regiment and others, were all part of where we evolved from, into the multiracial society we are today.
Of course, it is also a matter of a national narrative and a sense of national identity that is changing and developing. Yesterday, I had an argument with a young woman, an official from the Foreign Office, who was being a little rude about the attitude to women in developing countries, and I reminded her that 75 years ago attitudes to women in this country were also pretty backward-looking from our current perspective. The transformation of the role and status of women over the past two to three generations in Britain and the other western states has been one of the most wonderful things that we have developed. Now we are trying to transfer those new British values to the rest of the world, and we recognise that the role of women is one of the keys to economic and social development—and also, incidentally, to population limitation. I pay tribute to the Foreign Secretary and the International Development Secretary for the work that they have done, including the work on the prevention of sexual violence against women—and also to the noble Baroness, Lady Helic, whom we have just welcomed into the House.
There is a lot more to do in this area. I am very happy to say that BIS now has a UK student outward mobility strategy, which was launched last year because British people do not go abroad enough. Lots of people come here, but we do not pay enough attention to making sure that our younger generation understands the rest of the world.
Multilateral work is how we have to approach much of soft power. There is little we can do on our own. We work closely with others. In South Sudan, for example, Britain and Norway are the joint chairs of one of the frameworks through which we try to negotiate, working closely with the African Union and the Arab League, doing our best to draw on Chinese participation wherever we can. International NGOs and NGOs based in Britain play a very valuable part in our endeavour. They are part of the soft power projection for Britain. Of course, we are very worried about the shrinking of space for NGOs to operate with Russia and in many other countries, including in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The Commonwealth has also been mentioned—the language, culture and history—but, fundamentally, the rule of law, which we need to make as much as we can of, with India and South Africa in some ways as our key partners. The successful development of the rule of law in that regard is flawed but, nevertheless, is making real progress.
I have many more notes but I shall be as rapid as I can. We welcome the role of the churches in promoting tolerance and understanding among faiths as well as within each faith community, and in talking about different paths to God, particularly among the three faiths of the Book—Judaism, Islam and Christianity. I note that Ibrahim—Abraham—is now becoming one of the more popular boys’ names in Britain. That should remind people that these are not entirely incompatible traditions. The Government can assist in this regard. There are now university centres for Islamic theology and one needs to take that further. I take the opportunity to praise the noble Baroness, Lady Warsi, for the work she did, and the speeches she made, on tolerance to Muslim audiences in Istanbul, Oman and Kuala Lumpur as well as for the speeches she made in Washington and Rome on interfaith understanding. That work, and the work on human rights, is being continued by my noble friend Lady Anelay.
A number of noble Lords talked about student visas and the whole problem with visas. We recognise that we have a problem. That is partly because so many people want to come to Britain. However, applications for university student visas continue to rise, as does the student overseas population in Britain. There was an 18% increase in visas granted for skilled workers and a 14% increase in visitor visas last year, so we are not going backwards on that. However, we are struggling to meet the pressure resulting from the number of people wishing to enter Britain.
Some noble Lords mentioned the BBC World Service. It may be better if I write to them on that very large subject. On the economic side, the Prime Minister has made it entirely clear that we are concerned about finding the golden thread that links conflict-free development with prosperity—namely, the absence of war, getting rid of corruption, the establishment of the rule of law, decent government and having markets that work. That involves us in a great deal of co-operation with others in fighting international corruption and criminal regimes.
The noble Baroness, Lady Kinnock, asked a number of questions, including whether the Government had undertaken a risk analysis of the implications of withdrawal from the ECHR. My clear answer is that of course we have not because the Government have no intention of leaving the ECHR, so no such analysis is necessary.
Lord Anderson of Swansea
Surely the question may not be one just of leaving the ECHR but of considering the judgments as purely advisory.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
I was involved in the Brighton initiative. We are concerned to reform and improve the quality of the court. I am happy to say that the last report I saw suggested that the backlog of applications under the ECHR has declined rapidly over the last two years, so British efforts to reform the Council of Europe have made real progress.
I agree that the European Union is the ultimate soft power element but we also have to recognise that popular disillusion with the EU is a common phenomenon in most member states. That is why the coalition Government, with others, are committed to a programme of EU reform.
The noble Lord, Lord Hylton, asked about a conference on Bosnia chaired by the Soul of Europe. I hope he will be reassured to hear that the FCO has written to the director of the Soul of Europe, informing him how he can access funding.
If I have not responded to other points made in the debate, I hope that noble Lords will forgive me if I write to them on those points. This has been an extremely valuable debate. I thank the most reverend Primate for introducing it and look forward to the next debate introduced by him, perhaps next year.
The Archbishop of Canterbury
My Lords, when I first came into the House, I was warned that, whatever you said, there was bound to be a world expert sitting within a few feet of you. Sitting through the 27 or so contributions to the debate has felt rather like handing in your homework at school and finding all your teachers simultaneously examining you. I am extremely grateful to those who have contributed some extraordinary and very powerful lessons and understanding. If noble Lords will excuse me, I am not going to try to reply to everyone because we have been going now for five hours and 20 minutes, and need to come to a halt. However, I want to sum up with four or five points that seem to be central from what has come out.
Underlying them is the question that the Minister raised—who are we and what do we think we are for in the world? That seems to be the common theme running through the debate. Given the need for those questions to be answered clearly from this debate, it has been answered clearly, at least in this House, that we think we should still be playing an active part in the debate. There was no contribution that one might call isolationist. If that is the case, as the noble Lord, Lord Judd, said eloquently, we need a strategy, and, as many noble Lords said—including the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Craig of Radley, and the noble Lord, Lord West of Spithead—we need resources to cover the whole spectrum from hard power through to soft power. That is so that not only can we resource soft power but build peace by carrying, from time to time, a “big stick”, to use the phrase that was quoted.
The second point that was powerfully made was the need for soft power to be people-centred and relationship-centred. I was particularly grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Wei, for his eloquent statement of that, and his imaginative picking up of the way in which early Christianity spread and, through the example of Jesus, of the power of love and sacrifice over the most powerful military power of its time—albeit it took 300 years. I pick up the point made by the Minister, who obviously thinks in centuries when he refers me back to the 17th century and to the actions of the Church of England towards the nonconformists at that point—for which I can only apologise. I seem to do this a lot. I might mention, in looking for an apology from the other side, that in the 19th century the Liberals got at the Church of England good and proper. The people-centredness and relationship-centredness of soft power is immensely important. Out of that, and the sense that soft power and all execution of power in the present day have to be centred around people and relationships, came expressions of caution about the use of power from the noble Lord, Lord Parekh, and others. It is people who change conflicts for good or ill, and it is therefore engagement with people that enables us to have an impact on conflict prevention, conflict mitigation, and reconciliation.
However, in many ways, the theme that ran most clearly through the contributions was “smart power”—the phrase used by the noble Lord, Lord Alton. The noble Lord, Lord Alderdice, referred to this also, linking soft and hard power with his immense experience of Northern Ireland and the huge contribution he made there. Communication comes up in so many ways. Good communication in many forms includes, as the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, said, the influence of the British Council and the BBC, and the implicit communication that comes through our visa policy, which the Minister has addressed. It would be interesting to know at some point whether the Government will consider the recommendation of the Select Committee report that students should not be counted in the issuance of visas in the same way as just another bunch of applications.
The broad application of smart power brings in such a wide range of actors—universities, trades, religion. I was glad that the global contribution of the Roman Catholic Church was mentioned. Where churches are engaged in conflict management or conflict prevention around the world, it is almost invariably with the Anglicans and the Roman Catholics together. It is one of the great privileges we have.
The question of human rights was raised eloquently. The point was made that, where there is instability through the oppression of human rights, you will eventually find the need for the exercise of hard power. Therefore, our campaigns on human rights—we can think of numerous campaigns in recent years, particularly by the Government, most admirably around modern slavery at the moment, which the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Derby referred to and has been leading on for the church—have been a major contribution. There are more than 30 million slaves globally. The rectification of that unspeakable abuse of human rights is something on which this country is taking a lead.
Out of that is the need for soft power to be inclusive, a point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Berridge, and others. Sport was mentioned. How could I have missed that after four years in Liverpool? When I arrived the first question I was asked was whether I was a red or a blue. I commented that, after eight years of conflict management, I was not going to answer that question. Sport can be found almost everywhere. We used it when I was a canon at Coventry. We had a football competition in central Nigeria between Muslim and Christian youth, which ended peacefully. I will not say who won.
The noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, also spoke about human rights and about how its absence increases instability. Finally on smart power, is the matrix approach, which the noble Lord, Lord Boateng, put so eloquently and powerfully: the mixture of soft and hard power, of health, of NGOs, of sport, and of the need for cross-departmental action, which has improved over the past few years. Those of us involved in the field have seen that happen. If I may say so to the Minister, there is quite a long way to go. There needs to be a lot more work on that. It is not only that there are resources for hard power and for soft power but how they are spent. The noble Lord, Lord Boateng, spoke on that at some length. The quasi-policing by hard power may create space for the exercise of soft power and to avoid draining areas of their historic populations—the great danger to Christians in the Middle East at the moment. Simply giving them asylum may end their presence in an area where they have lived for 2,000 years.
I was particularly struck by the eloquence of the noble Baroness, Lady Kinnock, who essentially spoke about mutuality. She mentioned the European Union and the Commonwealth. The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Derby spoke of the messy and complex nature of the exercise of soft power. Bringing that in requires international co-operation. It is never going to be tidy and simple. That brings me to the final point.
There seemed to be a theme running through the debate of the importance of flexibility. Regarding Libya, the point was made very powerfully that we went in there for humanitarian reasons and have ended up creating the best arms supplier for west Africa. Boko Haram is largely equipped from Libya. It is financed by other people but that is where it gets the guns. The Building Stability Overseas strategy and the Conflict, Stability and Security Fund, when it comes in next April, need to have a quickness of response and an ability to be immensely flexible in dealing with the unpredictability of conflict. That, again, is a crucial underlying theme. We often cannot prevent it because we do not see it coming. It springs out of the blue suddenly, and it would be foolish if we were to pretend otherwise. Not everything can be done but, as we are seeing in the enormous pain and struggle in South Sudan, there is always something that can be done.
This has been an incredibly educational debate. I apologise to those whom I have not been able to mention.