United Nations General Assembly 2018: IRC Report

Lord Judd Excerpts

Thursday 6th September 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Judd (Lab)]

My Lords, not for the first time, I find myself wanting warmly to congratulate the noble Lord and his team on having produced this excellent report. I always find them interesting reading and they have established quite a standard and reputation of their own.

It is particularly telling that, on this occasion, the noble Lord has re-emphasised the basic theme that we live in a totally interdependent world and have to find ways of working with that, fulfilling the opportunities that it presents and strengthening the international machinery for meeting the challenges.

It is also important that, in the report, the committee emphasises the importance of multilateralism. I have believed, for most of my life, that multilateralism is the most effective way of helping to build a better world. It would be very unfortunate if we drifted into a situation where we had competitive approaches coming from individual states.

I also thank the noble Baroness, Lady Smith of Newnham, because I totally endorse her plea for a world approach to migration. There is simply no way that we are going to sort this out in the long run unless we have a rational, global approach. I hope that the House will take that plea of hers seriously and that the Minister will respond to it.

As somebody deeply involved in UNA, I also say how much I appreciate the remarks by the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay. It is good to hear her, with her experience, saying and recognising those things. The work that UNA has done on issues such as sexual abuse has been very important indeed.

If we are talking about interdependence and multilateralism, I think that we can accept that, broadly speaking, the UK’s statements to the UN General Assembly have been positive and strong in support of these principles. Unfortunately, the UK’s conduct has, perhaps increasingly, failed to live up to the rhetoric through, for example, the arms sales to Saudi Arabia and the appalling suffering in Yemen and the UK’s dismissive tone—I find it so distasteful—when it comes to the majority of states that support the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. We may disagree, but we talk still in patronising, dismissive terms, which does not help at all.

One of the points which needs to be stressed is that the UN is not something separate from us; we are the UN, together with the other members. There has been a tendency, under successive Governments—I plead guilty to having been part of that myself in the past—to talk about the UN as though it were somehow a separate institution. It is our institution, it belongs to us, and when things are not going well—and sometimes they do not—it behoves us first to look at ourselves in the mirror and say, “What are we doing about the failures to try to put things right?” That comes across as a concept that is very much behind what this report is arguing.

There is also a tremendous need to involve the wider public in understanding the UN and their role in the UN system. After all, the charter speaks of,

“We the peoples of the United Nations”,


and we need to do more to make that a reality. It is therefore good that the present Secretary-General has himself emphasised this, and it becomes important as we approach the 75th anniversary celebrations of the UN. A good starting point—I know this is something believed within the UNA—would be to have a specific centre in the UN on which non-governmental organisations and others could focus in bringing their views and their invaluable experience into play in the deliberation of policy.

Above all, I thank the noble Lord and his team for the first-class work which they have done on behalf of this House.