Embassy of China: Proposed New Site
Lord Hannan of Kingsclere Excerpts(1 week, 2 days ago)
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Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
Noble Lords might be interested to understand that the Government of China have seven different locations around London although, of course, they have only one embassy. In the future, these sites could well be in one place, which would make it a very large embassy but China is a considerably large country with considerable interests. We want to develop our relationship with China. We want to co-operate, compete and challenge as appropriate but, more than that, to be consistent in our approach. We think that is the best way to raise the issues we have diplomatically and to tackle the growth challenge, as well as the climate challenge that we wish to see addressed.
Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)
My Lords, when the Chancellor of the Exchequer came back from her recent visit to China, she boasted about having got £600 million of investment over 10 years. This is about what our bloated government spends every 12.5 hours. If that is all that the Chinese are ponying up, why do they need such a big embassy?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
It is not for me to say how much real estate another Government might wish to have as their presence in London. As I just pointed out, at the moment they have seven locations here. Some consolidation is clearly desirable, as I think we can all appreciate.
Colombia: Bilateral Investment Treaty
Lord Hannan of Kingsclere Excerpts(2 weeks, 4 days ago)
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Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
The United Kingdom is absolutely committed to supporting Colombia in the peace process, and enormous progress has been made. We see these things as separate. I think Colombia has faced 26 cases since 2016. Only four of them have been brought by the UK, so we hope that we can continue to trade with Colombia and to invest in Colombia—it is an important partner for us—and to support it as it moves forward with its peace process.
Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)
My Lords, the arguments against the ISDS do not come just from the ecological lobby; there is a democratic argument against them, and there is an argument that they give some foreign companies an unfair advantage over domestic ones. None the less, as the Minister correctly says, they are a necessary way of attracting investment. Can she confirm that, wherever we decide to draw that balance, we should apply it consistently across all our trade deals? It would be neither credible nor sustainable to start changing them because of lobbying from one particular country, which would then encourage every other trading partner to do the same thing.
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
I think so—but there is a difference between being consistent and having a cut-and-paste approach. Every context is unique and Colombia is a particularly special partner for us, for reasons that noble Lords will understand.
West Papua
Lord Hannan of Kingsclere Excerpts(2 months, 3 weeks ago)
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Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
Whenever possible, influence should be gained through a good relationship and, sometimes, by being a critical friend. The noble Lord’s points about the wider Indo-Pacific and the security situation are things that a responsible Government here in the UK need to take into account.
Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)
My Lords, I am very grateful to the Minister for her answers to the noble Lords, Lord Spellar and Lord Watts. Will she take this opportunity to congratulate Indonesia on having last month deposited its formal application to join the CPTPP? Will she congratulate it on, like us, having had a recent democratic and peaceful transition of power, where the new Government keep the same trade policy towards the Pacific bloc as the previous one? Will she take this opportunity to confirm that we will not engage in the kind of protectionism disguised as environmentalism that has led the rapeseed oil industry in Europe to come up with, effectively, a sabotage of any trade deal, thereby opening the door towards the UK being Indonesia’s chief trading partner in this part of the world?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
We note the approach to the CPTPP by Indonesia. We believe in free trade and we want to strengthen our trading relationship with partners through the CPTPP, as the noble Lord would expect.
China: Human Rights and Sanctions
Lord Hannan of Kingsclere Excerpts(3 months, 1 week ago)
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Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
I am frantically looking through the read-out of the exchange to see a reference to Tibet. I assure the noble Baroness that the Foreign Secretary raised a number of foreign policy and security matters, particularly issues around human rights. As she would expect, you do not get an instant result in these sorts of exchanges—diplomacy is about consistency and it takes time. But we are now in a period where we want a consistent, stable and pragmatic relationship. For 14 years, the relationship has blown hot and cold, and we have not had that stability and consistency. So that is the approach we will see from this Government.
Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)
My Lords, the Chinese state is not the first autocracy in the world and it may not be the most repressive, but it is by far the most technologically advanced. The ways in which the People’s Republic uses face recognition technology, surveillance technology and apps that monitor your phone is without precedent, as is the way it uses notionally private companies, such as Tencent, Weibo and Alibaba. Has the Minister’s department made any assessment of whether this kind of surveillance state could be exported; in other words, whether China’s allies and client states might be offered the package of a panopticon state to use on their own citizens?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
My Lords, we are concerned about surveillance and threats to, for instance, BNO passport holders or others here in the UK, and we monitor that extremely closely. We take our responsibilities towards human rights, compromises of freedom of religious belief and other issues of privacy very seriously.
British Indian Ocean Territory: Negotiations
Lord Hannan of Kingsclere Excerpts(3 months, 4 weeks ago)
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Lord Kennedy of Southwark (Lab Co-op)
We will hear from the Lib Dem Benches now.
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
The security of the marine conservation area is very important; I think it was Foreign Secretary Miliband who instigated it. We will see it continue, and Mauritius has agreed to that.
Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)
My Lords, Mauritius was paid the then immense sum of £3 million in exchange for this agreement in 1965, and treated it as a final settlement. In 1972 it was then paid again, if memory serves, £620,000 for the resettlement of the Chagossians—moneys which I am afraid it hung on to until their value had been eroded by inflation, which may explain why Chagossians are not enthusiastic about Mauritian sovereignty. It does seem extraordinary that we have given away this prime strategic location, the so-called Malta of the Indian Ocean, not only for nothing but somehow managing to pay for the privilege. I think I have heard three or four Ministers today talk about this black hole. Is it really credible, when we are hearing about that, that the Government will not disclose either what we are paying to the Mauritians or what we are putting in the fund for Chagossian resettlement?
President of Iran: Death
Lord Hannan of Kingsclere Excerpts(8 months, 2 weeks ago)
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Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon (Con)
My Lords, as the noble Viscount will have noted, I made reference to Iran’s destabilising activity. We have all, not least within the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, been fully seized of the challenges we are facing in the wider region. That said, I know we were at one when we saw the tragedy of Mahsa Amini and the suppression of human rights in Iran. I speak as the UK Human Rights Minister in saying that it is important that, while this was clearly a horrific accident, our thoughts remain with the Iranian people as they continue their struggle for human rights and dignity within Iran.
Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)
My Lords, my noble friend the Minister just used the phrase “adhere to international norms and standards”, talking about internal elections. Can he think of any regime that has less adhered to those standards in its foreign policy and in its disrespect for territorial jurisdiction and national sovereignty, from the siege of the US embassy through to sponsoring attacks as far afield as London and Buenos Aires, through to this most recent horrific attack on Israel? Does my noble friend the Minister see any prospect for regional peace as long as we have that regime there, in Leninist terms, exporting its internal contradictions—in other words, trying to replicate its revolution far afield?
Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon (Con)
My Lords, my noble friend articulates the extreme and intense challenges that many in the region face, not least from the destabilising activity of Iran. We have seen this in the context of the current conflict in Gaza, in support for Hamas, and through support for Hezbollah and for the Houthis in Yemen. We are determined to ensure that peace, security and stability must come when we see progressive Governments across the piece, but equally people committed to ensuring that peace, security and stability can be achieved only when it is for the whole region.
UK-African Investment Summit
Lord Hannan of Kingsclere Excerpts(9 months, 2 weeks ago)
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Lord Benyon (Con)
We have a range of tools in that respect, but it is mostly done through our ODA money. There is a lot of support particularly for women and girls. I refer the noble Baroness to the White Paper that was published towards the end of last year, which addresses precisely the point of trying to increase female empowerment and supporting women and girls; if you are doing the right thing for them, you are usually doing the right thing for everyone. The most important aspect of raising Africa out of poverty is to see more stability in the region. There are some horrendous conflicts going on, and we are active in trying to resolve them.
Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)
My Lords, some of your Lordships will remember the great tomato shortage of last year when our supermarket shelves were bereft of those crimson globes. What noble Lords may not know is that we were still imposing tariffs and quotas from our largest source of tomatoes, which is the Kingdom of Morocco—quotas and tariffs that we inherited from the EU that were designed to protect Spanish growers but that serve no function even from a protectionist point of view because Moroccan tomatoes are counterseasonal to our own. Will my noble friend the Minister give us some hope that we are going to end these ridiculous restrictions, not as a favour to our allies in Morocco, although they are old allies, but as a favour to ourselves that may incidentally benefit our good friends in the Kingdom of Morocco?
Zimbabwe: Sanctions
Lord Hannan of Kingsclere Excerpts(11 months ago)
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Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon (Con)
My Lords, the noble Lord knows I agree with his last point, not just in Zimbabwe but everywhere. Countries—indeed, Governments—can learn and progress much faster and more inclusively with the engagement of civil society. In that sense, the British Government and others are sometimes accused of interference in domestic politics. That is not our intention. Our politics is to ensure that the rights of people and communities are protected. That is the approach we take.
The noble Lord is right to raise the elections. He will be aware that several election observers were there, including from the Commonwealth. The Commonwealth’s report is still awaited, but some of the other points that were made—the EU report, for example, concluded that the elections were
“marked by a curtailment of rights and freedoms”—
really lay out the current challenges. Of course we will work with partners on how we can strengthen things. SADC has been raised, but Zimbabwe also has aspirations for the Commonwealth. That provides an opportunity to raise human rights as a key component.
Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)
My Lords, I was impressed by my noble friend the Minister’s response to the noble Lord, Lord Oates. Sanctions must be a scalpel, not than a sledgehammer, but I wonder whether he has made any assessment of the attitude of the Government of South Africa. Any sanctions regime in Zimbabwe depends on the collaboration of that Commonwealth state, and so far the ANC Government have been conspicuous in their opposition to any sanctions, even against the worst kleptocrats in ZANU-PF. Is this just regional solidarity, or is there a danger that they would like to do something similar at home if they thought they could get away with it?
Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon (Con)
My Lords, I often say about sanctions that I will not speculate about what we are going to do; I will not speculate on the intention of another Government. We have a strong relationship. We do not agree with South Africa on everything we do or it does, but I recently met with the Foreign Minister of South Africa and we had a very productive and candid exchange.
Climate Change: Impact on Developing Nations
Lord Hannan of Kingsclere Excerpts(1 year ago)
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Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)
My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, reminded us that 2024 is an election year, and not only for us. More human beings will have the opportunity to cast a ballot in this year than ever before in history. That must be good news, not only intrinsically in itself but from the perspective of climate change.
One of the odd things, although it is rarely noted, is that the democracies are the countries taking the lead in global collaboration. You might think, from first principles, that this would be one of those areas where you could have a benign dictator doing things that would be unpalatable to the electorate, but that is not how it has worked out. Our country has become the first to halve its carbon emissions from the peak—the only developed country so far to do so. We do not see any equivalent action from Russia, China and so on. The spread of democracy, as well as being a good thing for the people of those countries, is good from our perspectives.
However, when we drill down and look at some of those elections, we see that the picture looks rather different. We had the first big election last weekend, in a country with a big population: Bangladesh—I think it has something like 170 million inhabitants. The UK, the US and the European Union have all said, with reason, that it was not a free and fair election. That is unsurprising: the opposition party there, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, which used to alternate with the Awami League in office, has been broken and exiled and its leaders chained. We have the next big election coming up on 8 February in Pakistan, where it is a similar story: Imran Khan has been imprisoned and the PTI party has been broken, with its leaders arrested or exiled. We are moving towards a situation where more and more countries are voting but it is in a performative and perfunctory way. The chief benefit of democracy—namely, the ability peacefully to change your leaders—is being lost.
This ties into our aid policy. Bangladesh and Pakistan were immense recipients of our aid, particularly under the coalition starting with David Cameron’s premiership. There have obviously been cuts since Covid but, just before Covid, Pakistan was getting £330 million-plus a year and Bangladesh more than £200 million. Yet that massive increase in aid coincided with a decline in democracy—they were imperfect democracies, but they are plainly in a worse place now than when that aid money began. I am not saying, by the way, that that aid was useless—it may have had all sorts of good effects in promoting girls’ education or whatever—but it did not correlate with any democratisation.
If we are not using aid as a way of spreading democracy, and therefore getting all these other public goods that we get from it, what can we do? Democracy has been in retreat, globally, probably since the financial crisis. We can measure it in all sorts of ways. The Economist Intelligence Unit has a thing called the Democracy Index. It was expecting a bounce-back in 2022 as the Covid restrictions were lifted, but did not find one: there has been a continued loss of freedom. The International IDEA found the same thing: it saw six consecutive years of decline in democracy. Freedom House says there have been 17 continuous years in which more countries have ceased to be free than have become free. This correlates to the increase in autarchy and self-reliance, as its defenders would call it, since the banking crisis. Just like between the two wars, protectionism and authoritarianism go hand in hand. Indeed, autocrats are as much products as sponsors of economic protectionism.
What can we do if not use our aid budget? I put it to noble Lords that one thing we can do is recall our historic mission as a nation and try to spread globalisation as an instrument of poverty alleviation. It was the single most effective way of doing that. After the Second World War, we saw billions of people lifted out of poverty as their countries ceased to be autarchic and joined global market systems.
This is a much harder argument to make now than it was pre-Covid. We have mercantilist and protectionist policies in Washington, Brussels and Beijing—indeed, sometimes it is being done in the name supposedly of fighting climate change, as with the absurdly misnamed Inflation Reduction Act in the US. If our country has one historic dream and task, it is to raise our eyes above that and to be the place that drags the rest of the world to greater prosperity. It was the elimination of obstacles to trade that lifted this nation to a pinnacle of unprecedented wealth and happiness in the 19th century. It is our task once again, now that we have the opportunity, to do the same, and to lift the rest of humanity with us.
Abraham Accords
Lord Hannan of Kingsclere Excerpts(1 year, 4 months ago)
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Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)
My Lords, the prophet Abraham, after whom these accords are named, is remembered five times a day in the prayers of devout Muslims. He is a towering figure in Islam. He has the title Khalilullah—friend of God—and is seen as the ancestor of Moses, who watches over our proceedings stony-faced, Jesus and the Prophet Muhammad. However, he himself is not seen as Christian, Jewish or Muslim. He is rather a sort of primordial monotheist who lives instinctively within divine law and recognising divine justice.
In the Jewish and, by extension, Christian traditions, the salient fact is that he is a wanderer who settles down. The Bible says that Abraham
“spake unto the sons of Heth … I am a stranger and a sojourner with you … give me … a buryingplace with you, that I may bury my dead out of my sight”.
The return of Jews to Israel was with an overriding wish to be welcomed home—to have nothing more than peace with their neighbours. Finally, that prospect is on the horizon. It is a great cosmic irony that, just as Israel is improving its relations with its Arab neighbours, it is worsening its situation with many western and European countries, but that is a topic for a different debate.
I think these accords came about because other Arab states realised that it was no longer feasible to give an effective veto to the most hard-line elements in the Palestinian leadership. They saw that, even when offers were made, as under Ehud Barak or Ehud Olmert, that would have given 95% or an equivalent of 100% of the territory with land swaps and control of east Jerusalem, that was not enough and they decided to go further, over the heads of some of the Palestinian leaders but in the interests of the Palestinian people. That creates a new situation and a new opportunity, if Israel will now have the imagination and generosity to grasp it and if Palestinians will come on board with the process.
I am not saying for a moment that this is easy, but imagine a situation where there are no physical barriers around the Palestinian territories; where that country can be integrated into the world economy and can trade its way to prosperity—an embourgeoisement of Palestine, if you will; where you will have a propertied class that will not tolerate lawlessness or freelance rocket launchers but will want to remain on good terms with its customers, most of whom will find themselves in Israel. As Milton Friedman said, there is nothing like trade to make people who do not get on get on.
I appreciate that taking down the barriers to get there is not an easy thing, but is it not worth the effort? Is it not worth at least considering the Palestinians as an entity capable of making their own decisions—whether they want confederation with Israel or with Jordan or whatever—and recognising them as a unit? Surely Abraham has buried enough of his dead out of his sight.