United Kingdom: Soft Power

Baroness Alexander of Cleveden Excerpts

Tuesday 15th July 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Collins of Highbury (Lab)]

I think my noble friend Lady Chapman has answered these points. There is part of a spending review and lots of decisions have not yet been made. We will get more detail in the next few weeks and certainly by November. However, I shall repeat what I said before on our soft power and our focus on economic development: ODA is not the only tool in our toolkit. When African leaders speak to me, and certainly those in the global South, they do not say they want aid; they say they want economic diversification, inward investment and value addition. Our City of London is one of the biggest providers of capital to African companies—it is those sorts of areas of soft power that we need to focus on. The partnership approach we are now taking is that we are listening to the continent and responding to it.

[Baroness Alexander of Cleveden (Lab)]

My Lords, I declare my interest as the vice-chair of the British Council. As has been acknowledged, the British Council is a vital soft power interest for the United Kingdom. I ask my noble friend the Minister to confirm that his department is now actively engaged in how to alleviate the Covid-era loan burden which was provided by the previous Government. Alleviating that Covid-era loan is vital to securing the financial sustainability of the council and its role in supporting British interests and soft power globally in these troubled times.

[Lord Collins of Highbury (Lab)]

I reassure my noble friend that we are working with the British Council on a plan to return it to financial sustainability. We are committed to a successful British Council that is financially stable, and our funding is over £160 million in 2025-26. FCDO officials are working closely with the British Council on a financial turnaround plan to ensure that its finances are returned to a stable footing and that the council can continue delivering for the UK for years to come.

Church of Scotland (Lord High Commissioner) Bill

Baroness Alexander of Cleveden Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 19th March 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Alexander of Cleveden (Lab)]

My Lords, like other noble Lords, I welcome this Bill and look forward to Lady Elish opening the General Assembly in May. By any measure, this is an overdue Bill. We have just five minutes each to canter through a history that began five centuries ago. It began in the 16th century with the declaration of Scotland as a Protestant nation, and continued into the 17th century, with the passing of the Claim of Right Act, which restricted Catholics’ access to public office; the 18th century, and the Act of Union; the 19th century, and the relief Act that swept away most of the anti-Catholic restrictions, but not this one; and the 20th century, when ugly sectarianism scarred Scotland. Today, we are repealing only this specific anti-Catholic prescription. The narrow scope, as my noble friend the Leader of the House has made clear, is because of the imminence of the General Assembly in May.

Lady Elish will be an outstanding Lord High Commissioner. She is only the fifth woman to hold the role in almost 500 years. Let us hope those odds also improve. As we have heard, the Lord High Commissioner attends the assembly as the monarch’s representative, because the monarch is not head of the Church of Scotland but simply a member. This reflects the core tenet of Presbyterianism, and the broader reformed tradition, that everyone is equal in the sight of God.

I have just three minutes left to raise a trinity of issues: the Churches, Scottish society and the future. First, the Churches: as we have heard, the Lord High Commissioner is a Crown, not a Church, appointment, but as my friend, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace of Tankerness, has noted, it is right and proper to acknowledge how sectarianism scarred the Kirk and Scottish society, most egregiously in the interwar years.

The journey to ecumenicalism has sometimes been a long one. I grew up in an ecumenical community dedicated to interfaith dialogue, and I recognise the continuing work and witnesses of the Church and faith groups of all kinds. Today’s mainstream churches want nothing to do with sectarianism. In our secular age, church people of whatever denomination invariably have more in common than anything that divides them. Sectarianism has been pushed to the fringes and is now a cultural phenomenon rather than a religious one.

So where does Scottish society stand? In the other place, it was the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster who piloted this Bill. He, like me, attended a west of Scotland secondary school 40 years ago, but on a different side of the divide. Later, as fellow students, we talked about sectarianism. Therefore, as a daughter of the manse, I learned about Irish music, the bookies and Guinness. These were stories that I did not share with my teetotal granny, who, like Keir Hardie, has signed the pledge at 17 and celebrated Hogmanay with ginger wine.

This enrichment from getting to know other communities and traditions has since accelerated. My children have just completed 12 years in Glasgow schools and witnessed little of the past tensions. As a Glasgow friend pithily summed it up to me last weekend, “Wendy, in our youth there were 50,000 people singing sectarian songs on the terraces; now it’s just 10,000”. The data bears this out. Today, religious hate crimes number 500 a year in Scotland, while race hate crimes hover around a shameful 4,000. Therefore, the best verdict on sectarianism is perhaps, “Down, but not yet out”.

My final word is about the future. This Bill—very belatedly—enshrines tolerance. We should all take pride that last year, Scotland had a Muslim First Minister and the UK had a Hindu Prime Minister. As we look around our world today, we must not only defend but celebrate difference.

There is something else to be proud of: this is a Scottish Bill—an exceptionally rare thing in Westminster these days. The passing of power to Holyrood a quarter of a century ago ended the era where Scottish legislation piled up at the end of a very long Westminster queue. Holyrood, of course, was the stage on which Lady Elish first shone. I wish her godspeed; we look forward to her Sermon on the Mount, and I hope the General Assembly impresses this most able of Lord High Commissioners with its wisdom, kindness and compassion.