King’s Speech

Lord Benyon Excerpts

Thursday 25th July 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

My Lords, it is a privilege to have been taken off the subs’ bench to conclude this debate for the Opposition. I will start where many others have, by welcoming the noble Baroness, Lady Anderson, and the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, to their places on the Government Bench. They have both proved themselves in this House and in the other place, and it is in all our interests that they succeed in government. We also welcome other Ministers to the Front Bench in the important area of the nation’s defence and international affairs. The noble Lord, Lord Collins, and the noble Baroness, Lady Chapman, who are not here, join a fascinating and highly inspiring department. I thank the many officials I worked with in the FCDO and at Defra over the last three and a bit years. With the FCDO, of course it is not just those in King Charles Street; it is also those working in Scotland, in agencies and in diplomatic posts abroad, who do incredible work on this country’s behalf, often, as I have witnessed, in very challenging circumstances.

I also thank the ministerial colleagues with whom I worked. It was a privilege to work with my noble friends Lord Ahmad and Lord Cameron, both of whom commanded respect across this House and across the world in equal measure. I take the opportunity to pay tribute to the elegant valedictory speech of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Worcester, and wish him well.

The gracious Speech at the start of this new Parliament comes at a perilous time for world affairs. I was too young to appreciate the Cuban missile crisis, but what we face at this time is as bad as anything that that generation of leaders faced. That crisis was of course a binary one between East and West, and today we face multifaceted insecurities and tensions that so easily spill over into conflict. The post-war rules-based order is weakened and autocratic rulers are on the rise. On page 17 of the international development White Paper, which I will refer to later, there is a horrific graph showing the change for the worse in the share of the world’s population living under autocratising regimes in 2022, compared with just a decade before. This is all happening at a time when narrow nationalism, which has so disfigured our past, is again rearing its ugly head across Europe.

It has been noted around the world that it would be very hard to get a cigarette paper between the views of the two main parties in this country on the biggest security issue of our time, Putin’s brutal and illegal invasion of Ukraine. We welcome the Government keeping in place our commitment to spend at least £3 billion a year on military support for Ukraine, and I know I speak for these Benches when I say that we will support the Government every step of the way as they support Ukraine in the vital coming weeks and months.

We need to make sure our allies are stepping up too. In one sense, Putin’s actions have had the perverse effect of energising NATO and the West, and the allocation of more resources to our collective defence. But all countries have their own agendas and domestic calls on finance. In that respect, the recent NATO leaders summit was encouraging, but words need to be matched by real and effective support for the Ukrainian people.

In government we were also a leading advocate for sanctioned Russian assets being used to support Ukraine, and for ensuring that Russia pays for the destruction it has caused. I urge the Government to push the international community to agree the most ambitious solution possible on these assets. While talking about Russia, I entirely concur with the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Purvis. I hope the new Government will continue to push for the release of Vladimir Kara-Murza, one of the bravest people I have met and a British citizen.

In relation to the Middle East, the priority is of course the need to end the Gaza conflict with a sustainable ceasefire as quickly as possible. From a position within the FCDO, I saw how the UK was and is an important—I should say vital—player in finding a lasting solution to this awful conflict. As a Minister, I would go from conversations with Ministers and officials that reflected the deep, complicated nature of the Gaza situation, and walk past protesters on the street for whom it was the simplest of matters. For them, there was only one side that was good and the other, which was bad.

The truths from which we cannot escape are that what happened on 7 October was barbaric, that Hamas is a vile terrorist organisation and that the continued holding of hostages is a terrible wrong. At the same time, it is also possible to hold the other essential truth in our mind: that the suffering of ordinary Gazans has been horrendous for them to endure and, yes, for us to witness, and that their suffering needs to be brought to a speedy end.

To my noble friend Lord Soames, who made a very powerful speech, and in answering the final remarks of my noble friend Lord Polak, I say that, if we look beyond the current Government of Israel and the brutal Hamas leadership, I can do no better than quote my right honourable friend the shadow Foreign Secretary, Andrew Mitchell, who said in the other place:

“We must not lose sight of the fact that this is, at its heart, a tale of two just causes, of two peoples’ legitimate aspirations for national sovereignty, security and dignity”.—[Official Report, Commons, 18/7/24; col. 222.]


The deal which the UK championed at the UN, which secured the consent of the international community, remains the way forward: a negotiated pause in the fighting, the release of the remaining hostages, the scaling up of humanitarian aid and help to bring about conditions that will allow for a permanent end to hostilities. We wish the Foreign Secretary and his Ministers well in dealing with what at times seems like an intractable problem.

My noble friend Lady Goldie, eloquently using culinary analogies, set out our position on defence at the start of this debate. I understand the Government’s desire to have a defence review, but I urge them not to reinvent the wheel. We take great comfort from the fact that the noble Lord, Lord Robertson of Port Ellen, is leading that review. He has been showered with accolades today, to the point where he might start to be worried that he can only disappoint from here, but I know he will not. He is held in enormous respect on all sides of the House, and I hope he leaves this debate with the words of the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Stirrup, my noble friend Lord Lancaster and the noble Lord, Lord Stevens, who made powerful contributions, echoing in his head. I do not have time to speak on all the threats his review must cover, but I underline the words of the noble Baroness, Lady D’Souza, and ask that the word “Taiwan” be included. China’s threats cannot be ignored, and the implications of military action in or around Taiwan are massive for the entire world.

I had what I felt was the best job in government as hybrid Minister in the FCDO and Defra. The nexus between, on the one hand, climate change and the degradation of nature and, on the other hand, global security is so relevant to this debate. I am sad that that role is not being replicated, but there are many more areas of government where those issues need to be joined up. In that context, I urge Ministers to read the excellent annual NATO Climate Change and Security Impact Assessment, published this month. In considering the defence and security of these islands, our allies and our interests around the world, we cannot ignore the impact a changing climate and the destruction of natural systems is having. Despite being outside the EU, our ability to work with it on security issues has never been more necessary. However, we watch with concern the desire by some to create an EU defence capability, which would be at NATO’s expense and would add a bureaucratic tier to the defence capability that would not be to our or Europe’s strategic advantage.

I shall conclude by talking about international development. I arrived in my post at the FCDO on the day last year when International Development in a Contested World: Ending Extreme Poverty and Tackling Climate Change, a White Paper on International Development was published. It sets out to do precisely that, and has been widely praised by NGOs, multilateral bodies and other Governments. We hope the Government will stay true to the “we will”s that pepper the document throughout and show real determination to deliver for the world’s poorest and most vulnerable.

It was a pleasure to work with Andrew Mitchell, the author of the White Paper and the moving force behind this reboot of what international development assistance should be about. He managed to combine compassion with effectiveness. His successors in the department need to study his methods and understand how he could cut through the Government-speak and the NGO-speak, and the consequent inertia that too often flowed from them, to keep focused on what development aid is supposed to do. He and my noble friend Lord Cameron, who was one of the architects of the SDGs, drove this policy area in the short time that they and we had together at the FCDO.

I want to tackle the issue of funding head-on. I was proud to be part of a Government, led by my noble friend Lord Cameron, who fulfilled our commitment to spend both at least 2% of GDP on defence and 0.7% of GDP on overseas aid. Of course I understand that, when a Government spend over £400 billion keeping people safe and in work during a pandemic, there are financial consequences. But, like many in this House, I was dismayed that international development assistance took such a significant hit. What Ministers had started to do, effectively, was to make each pound stretch further, to sweat the Government’s and multilateral development banks’ balance sheets, to help more of the world’s vulnerable and to move back to that 0.7% figure.

We will support the Government if they counter, in the way that we did, the rollback of the rights of women or LGBT rights and the disgraceful scrapping of laws against female genital mutilation. We hope the Government’s policy will show that we continue to stand up for the world’s poorest and most vulnerable, not just because we are a compassionate and civilised nation but because we realise that it is in our own national self-interest.

My great regret is that we could not lay the legislation to ratify the biodiversity beyond national jurisdiction treaty, which is a Foreign Office duty, before we left office. I hope Foreign Office Ministers will understand that we gave clear instructions that a Bill should be prepared by September and that the Bill should be taken through both Houses and the treaty ratified by World Ocean Day next June.

I conclude by saying that I am grateful to my noble friends Lord Swire and Lord Howell for mentioning the Commonwealth. We look forward to CHOGM and to the Government helping to make a success of that important meeting. I also thank my noble friend Lady Shields and others for raising the issue of AI and its important impact on global affairs.

Ministers will know that there is a huge knowledge and understanding of international affairs and defence issues in this House. I know they will want to debate these policy areas and keep this House informed. It is the job of all of us in this House to support the Government when they are getting it right and to hold them to account when they are not. On behalf of all on this side, we wish them well. It is in our interests that they succeed.