City-to-city Diplomacy

Lord Dykes Excerpts

Wednesday 26th March 2014 Grand Committee

[Lord Dykes (LD)]

My Lords, it gives me great pleasure to congratulate my noble friend Lord Dundee on his excellent speech which launched this brief debate and I am grateful to him for his suggestions. I echo the specific question put at the end of her remarks by my noble friend Lady Scott and I should be grateful if the Minister would include me in the answer to it. It is a very pertinent question.

In this period of austerity it will be very sad if twinning withers on the vine and the working synergies, which are even more important, profound and deep, are cut back by budget pressures. Their achievements can be made at the margin on modest amounts of money. Without sounding too boastful, I remind the Committee of what we did in Harrow when we twinned with the last significant untwinned town in northern France, Douai—the judicial centre of northern France many years ago—which was a great success. The figures we issued of how much that programme cost were very modest. That was when there was no austerity and we could do it.

Perhaps I may make one European point as my noble friend Lord Wallace is in his place as the duty Whip. I have always found it bizarre that the anti-Europeans on the right-wing side of British politics are happy if companies and corporations become international and global but they do not like countries in the European Union to join others and link up on all sorts of things. I find that strange because not only does each country then benefit from the collective strength of the whole Union but its own individual sovereignty goes up; it does not go down. There is no loss of sovereignty in net terms. Everyone gets stronger and so does the Union. That is an example which, on an administrative scale, can be done for cities, towns, villages and so on. We were very proud of its success.

I declare an interest: I live on the Normandy-Picardy border because I had to live in at least one country that was in the eurozone when we foolishly failed to join the euro many years ago. I notice that the town twinning is now mostly not with English towns but with German ones. I am sure that noble Lords will agree that probably one of the finest stories in post-war Europe has been Franco-German reconciliation, with really deep relationships developing now. There is no withering on the vine in the twinning that I can see in those areas. There is work and synergies of all kinds, from football teams to choirs to individuals getting married—an extraordinary development of very profound relationships that are European as well as in the sense of being proud of one’s own country. The two things go together.

In Harrow I had the great pleasure and privilege of having Bentley Priory, the RAF base, in my constituency, where the Battle of Britain was directed by Air Chief Marshal Dowding. Because of that, with our liaison function, we always had a USAF officer, an officer from l’Armée de l’Air in France and, indeed, visiting German officers from the German air force. One year I was particularly pleased when I persuaded the organisers of the September Battle of Britain cocktail party to play not just the marvellous Royal Air Force march but the Luftwaffe march as well. The whole gathering applauded when the Luftwaffe march was played. It could not have been done decades before then but it is done now because people want to get together and we must provide those examples and opportunities to them.

I do not think it is right to say that officials should not be involved. Budgets must be strictly controlled but you need intelligent, constructive officialdom, not excessive bureaucracy. You need private initiative. You need companies to be involved. You need intellectuals, students and teachers. Then you begin to make progress of understanding at the lower levels of human society—not lower in the sense of being low, literally, but the more modest levels of your own village, district, town or city—and then rising up through the political system as well, so that politicians are involved in espousing those things and not being suspicious of them or hostile to them, as is the rather sinister atmosphere developing among, I hope, a small number of people in this country, some of whom may be heard tonight in the exchanges that are coming between two significant political leaders.