NATO Summit

Baroness Stuart of Edgbaston Excerpts

Monday 22nd November 2010 Commons Chamber

[Ms Gisela Stuart (Birmingham, Edgbaston) (Lab)]

The Prime Minister mentioned the EU-NATO partnership and the fact that there had been discussions. The French press reports said that it was still completely unclear what we were doing. Can he shed any more light on what this now amounts to, post-summit?

[The Prime Minister]

There was a very lively exchange at the NATO leaders’ dinner on this issue. I am a pragmatist, and it just seems to me that, given that there is an EU mission to train the police in Afghanistan and a massive NATO mission to train the army and the police there, the fact that NATO and the EU cannot talk to each other on these issues because they do not have permission to do so, apart from in Bosnia, is simply crazy. One of the reasons for this problem is the fact that the issue of Cyprus is used by both sides in the debate, and the EU-NATO relationship is used as a proxy for that. I am sure that everyone in this House wants to see a settlement of the Cyprus dispute, but we should not allow that to bung up relations between the EU and NATO. An outbreak of pragmatism is required and, because this was discussed at the dinner, we all instructed our NATO ambassadors to go back and try to do better, so that we can try to unfreeze that conflict.