Reconciliation: Role of British Foreign, Defence and International Development Policy

Baroness Brady Excerpts

Friday 14th December 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Brady (Con)]

My Lords, I too congratulate the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury on securing this debate and I pay tribute to the esteemed contributors we have already heard from. Reconciliation in conflict zones in the most difficult situations at the heart of ethnic, geographic and cultural hostilities is clearly a necessary condition for lasting peace, stability and the prosperity that must follow. The UN has set ambitious targets through its sustainable development goals. If we are to meet them, we must deliver prosperity in frontier and emerging markets. Without reconciliation, it is difficult to see how we will do that in a lasting way. However, while this country, global in outlook as it is, will surely play a role in helping to meet the UN goals, the central point I want to make today is that the role is a narrow one and that reconciliation is unlikely to be part of it.

Indeed, it is apposite that today’s debate has been called by the most reverend Primate. He has spoken eloquently both here and outside this Chamber on how religious institutions are often the only functioning organisations left during and after a conflict. The rule of law may well have broken down, along with any semblance of democratic government it may have supported, and so one can see a role for faith-based organisations emerging in that context. I do not, however, see a similarly prominent role for the UK Government and their aid budget. This is for two related reasons.

The first is that it is impossible to justify the use of taxpayers’ money on such farflung conflicts where their impact or relevance to the UK is all but impossible to identify. The second is that whenever we take on such broad and ambitious tasks, our track record is poor and we risk doing more harm than good. Let us take as an example the Conflict, Stability and Security Fund. It was set up to,

“tackle fragility in conflict affected countries and promote stability”.

The remit sounds important, of course, but even then it is vague and ill-defined. This was borne out when the Independent Commission for Aid Impact reviewed the programme and concluded that it suffered from,

“variable programme quality, weak results management and insufficient learning”.

I will not go into depth on the aid budget more generally; suffice it to say that when we are paying £50 billion a year in interest servicing our national debt and spending £14 billion a year on ill-thought-out and poorly executed aid policy in the name of an arbitrary spending target, I find that unjustifiable.

What should we be doing? In 2016, the Department for International Development published a building stability framework to look at how it makes decisions and, I suppose, how it prioritises resources. The report argued:

“The highest development returns lie in the long-term foundations for a future free of violence”.


That is hard to disagree with but it is also revealing. It implies that only when violence ends can prosperity begin. If we can end conflict, a failed state potentially becomes a prosperous one, which is a huge global dividend. It also begins, I believe, to define a narrower approach for what the UK’s role should be in such spaces; that is, to secure peace in those conflict zones. It is not about building infrastructure or supporting a path to democracy, although this needs to happen. It is simply about ending the violence once and for all, and this is better done through the Ministry of Defence than through international development.

Let us take the example of Iraq. It was exactly the failure to secure peace that meant it could not flourish as a country. No amount of aid money can change the reality that when bombs targeting civilians are part of everyday life, prosperity will never come. This is not even about democracy. It is simply protecting civilians so that they can resume their lives, and, as they do, the rule of law and associated institutions will begin to be established. After the rule of law comes infrastructure, commerce and, eventually, international trade, but until you have peace and the protection of all civilians, these things will not follow.

Where are the key opportunities to bring about peace? The UK Government should therefore act, but it is to our Armed Forces we should look, not the aid budget. Once peace is secure, multilateral development banks, infrastructure investors and NGOs expert in building institutions can engage and create the conditions for private sector investors. That is the correct hierarchy to events following a conflict and, what is more, it defines a clear role that the UK can play.

There has been much talk as to whether we could repurpose our defence spending to hit our 0.7% commitment on aid. I think that this is backwards. The 0.7% aid budget should be repurposed to help us deliver our 2% defence spending commitment under NATO. It may not burnish our so-called “soft power” credentials as much, but it will be much more effective in the long run both for us and for the conflict zones in question, and surely that is more important.