Queen's Speech

Lord Bishop of Salisbury Excerpts

Wednesday 26th May 2010 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of Salisbury]

My Lords, I, too, welcome the Minister to his new responsibilities, as I welcome the slender commitment in the gracious Speech—overshadowed as much of it was by a concern for economic survival—to “global collaboration” and to,

“nought point seven per cent of gross national income in development aid from 2013”.

I believe we must all hope and pray that a new-found determination among Members of your Lordships’ House to work together for the good of all will extend beyond the inshore politics of these islands and become again a model in tackling what I consider to be the most important question before us—how we are to live together in peace and uphold justice for all in this fragile and small globe.

I shall speak, first, of the dangers to this very high ideal. My fear is that preoccupation with the severity of budget cuts will divert attention from our proper concern for our ideals. First, there is the prevalence of failing states and the danger, in turn, of failing regions. This is not a local or European phenomenon but a worldwide one. Secondly, there is the changing character of conflict—to which the noble and gallant Lord referred when he spoke of the importance of our power—from conventional to irregular warfare. That undermines traditional military power and challenges past orthodoxies that military victory leads sequentially to human development and nation-building. Thirdly, there is the risk of irreversible climate change that threatens the very existence of some nations and contributes to conflict both within and between nations over competition for increasingly fragile and scarce resources.

Instead, it must be clear that we need a discussion that extends beyond considerations of national interests and the obligations of government to involve questions of national self-perception, international influence, national autonomy and moral purpose.

The Minister referred to the Sudan. The comprehensive peace agreement there has indeed survived the first elections and we await with bated breath the referendum early next year on the division of that country into two. The Minister also referred to China’s increasing interests there and elsewhere. However, it is not just the lust for oil which has destabilised that region that we should be concerned about; it is the basic commodity for life and growth—water—and the emerging struggle over control of the Nile waters between the Sudan and Egypt, most of which we assigned to Egypt in the 1950s when we were a colonial power.

As well as referring to reasons why we might find regions of the world destabilised in future and people going to war over something that we see only dimly over the horizon, I hope to turn our attention to the difficulties that the Government will find as they get caught between two points of view. The Foreign Secretary has already committed himself to a certain extent to a pragmatic way of moving forward, as he talks about serving our practical interests. But he is also on record in a speech to the IISS last September as accepting that if Britain’s ability to shape the policies and actions of others declines over the coming decades, it will become ever more important for Britain to set an example that can both inspire and challenge others, and that that may be a more significant contribution to make to the policies of the world. He said:

“Our values also include playing a pre-eminent role in the eradication of poverty and the spread of prosperity to less fortunate nations”.

I am glad to see the commitment in the gracious Speech to 0.7 per cent from 2013. However, if we accept that Britain’s approach to national security needs to be grounded in a set of values that define who we are and what we do, it is important to consider—when we are not driven so much by current emergency economic measures—the questions of who we are, what our dominant values should be and how they should inform our national security policy. The absence of clarity on those two related issues creates its own problems. In the absence of a values-based context, the default position when things get tough is likely to be fear-based. That crosses the very lines that we would have agreed not to cross if we had talked about values and identity first. It is easy to be driven by what seems to be an immediate threat, but only if we can step back and consider what we really think are the important contributions that we have to make are they likely to hold when we are under pressure.

I shall give a further example from the Sudan. I believe that in the future under government constraints, NGOs will find it increasingly difficult to obtain funding from DfID. In this context, as the Archbishops’ Council’s submission to the 2009 DfID White Paper argued, the Labour Government recognised the utility of working with faith communities but consistently shied away from working with the churches. We have to recognise that the major structural player in southern Sudan is not the fragile would-be Government of that region, but the churches that are responsible for funding and running education at primary and secondary school levels. It is an area that is twice the size of France but the number of its secondary schools is in single figures. That is the sort of pressure that the country is under, where partners with whom the Government are not used to working are the most reliable, not only in giving information about what is happening but in holding civil authority among a disparate and diverse group of nations and tribes in that troubled region.

I urge the incoming Administration to work with their partners—including some unlikely ones—not just to make a coalition between two political parties in this country but to think of other agencies with which they can work to bring effective, immediate and value-based decision-making to the forefront of our common life.