Mediation, Conflict Prevention and Peacebuilding

Lord Hastings of Scarisbrick Excerpts

Thursday 29th October 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hastings of Scarisbrick (CB)]

My Lords, I join other noble Lords in thanking the noble Lord, Lord McConnell, for his permanent passion and pursuit of these issues. We know that he digs away when many of us would rather sleep, and we are grateful to him for this debate. I also thank my noble friend Lord Griffiths of Burry Port for his heartfelt and painful speech—many aspects of it were difficult to hear but many of our private conversations have expressed the horrors that he has described well today. The whole House owes the noble Lord respect, given that he has lived and served in Haiti, and continues to advocate for it. Thank you.

I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Chapman, for referring to President Santos. I will be with him in Cape Town next Friday. President Santos will be delivering the 24th Nelson Mandela lecture, in which he will pose the important question, “When is silence complicity”? He will ask us to consider what has happened to our voices as nations and our voices as leaders. He is a Nobel Peace Prize winner, who has worked strenuously to bring opposing forces together. In other meetings I have had with him around the One Young World Summit—it takes place in Cape Town next week and I am there as a trustee—he has been strident, as also the leader of the elders, that the voice is vital to the piercing power of the impact we seek to find.

One of the other elders, Desmond Tutu, said that if we are neutral in situations of injustice, we have chosen the side of the oppressor. That is a painful thing to hear because I suspect that many of us, both in the previous Government, including the long-serving and honourable Ministers who saw out many who found the exit, and in this current Government, look at our governmental processes and wonder where is the voice? To what extent are we silent in the face of evil events? Albert Einstein reminded us that the world will not be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watch them without doing anything. Will the Minister reflect on the extent to which we are we watching but not commenting? Are we seeing but not speaking? Are we afraid to express our voice in public? Martin Luther King Jr reminded us that

“In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies but the silence of our friends”.


I was thinking about the last time there was a governmental conference on one of the most difficult and intractable wars currently under way, which is in Sudan—probably the most vile of all the current wars. We must give credit to the former Foreign Secretary David Lammy for holding a conference to address those concerns, but subsequent Foreign Secretaries, certainly to my awareness, have not done so. The point ably made by the noble Lord, Lord Ahmad, was that we keep swapping around Foreign Secretaries, Defence Secretaries and Ministers who are meant to carry memory, and the memory should help us to continue mature conversation and enable us to make better decisions. If we constantly refuse to hear because the voices have gone silent, we are complicit. We must ask ourselves why. To what extent has Britain lost its backbone?

Last night, I pointed out to the students that I have the joy of teaching at an American business school—I teach online, as I could not have got from here to there for this debate—an article that appeared in a local South Carolina newspaper by the former executive director of the World Food Programme, David Beasley, on 20 October. He is a great personal friend, and I was pleased that the university I represent gave him the Stephen R. Covey leadership award three years ago for his life of principles.

In this article, David Beasley, who was also a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize for his exceptional work in leading the World Food Programme, takes the question to the very heart of what I want to think about. The title is:

“Before America can be great, she must be good”.


He is currently running a campaign called “Make America Good Again”. That is not the business of this House, or the House down the Corridor, but it is a very important point.

I listened intently to yesterday’s—may I say, tinkering—Budget. Some may have loved every bit of it, but I went through the Budget book this morning and looked up what is said about foreign affairs, defence and conflict resolution—helped by AI a little bit, I must say, especially for “conflict resolution”. There was nothing. A lot is said, quite rightly, about £10 billion for Ukraine and the acquiring of weapons and structural systems, but not about conflict resolution. Maybe we have given that up. Buried away somewhere in the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office there is a group of civil servants beavering away, advising Ministers, but we do not know how many and we do not know what they are saying.

We do not seem to express a strident voice that really matters on the global stage on these issues. I am going to say something dangerous: the United States President has invited the Russian President to attend the G20, which will take place in the United States. I hope every grown-up European politician, and our own Prime Minister, will take that as an opportunity for dialogue—not to run away and simply not be seen but to have communication, to shake hands and to be present. That is an easy response. Trust between opposing powers is built only when we meet.

I also spoke to my students last night about the work of Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat. Everyone in this House remembers 1977 and 1978 because we were all around and very old at that stage.

[Lord Khan of Burnley (Lab)]

Oh!

[Lord Hastings of Scarisbrick (CB)]

Okay, maybe not—let us allow youth to speak. We all remember what it took for President Carter to sit for 23 days with Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat at Camp David, to discover a peace between Egypt and Israel that has held to this day. The same can be said of Northern Ireland and South Africa: whether we like it or not, dialogue is essential, even with opposing people, powers and those of a vile disposition, as we see it.

I will meet President Santos next week for the third time. I have been in Colombia three times and the last time I was there I went to Medellín, the town in which Pablo Escobar managed to conduct his vile campaigns of police and army corruption and destruction. I witnessed 20 women telling stories about the killing of their husbands and sons. Then I witnessed 20 of Escobar’s men step forward to apologise. The necessity of facing what we do not want to hear, and dealing with others because we must, is what I call “heart power”. We say a lot about soft power and hard power, but we need heart power to solve conflicts and bring people together. That requires guts, and I hope the Minister has them.