Continuity Agreement: Kingdom of Morocco

Lord Patten Excerpts

Monday 9th March 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Shipley (LD)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson of Balmacara, for tabling this regret Motion. He has raised some very important issues about the process for considering trade agreements with which we would concur.

I say at the outset that I have huge respect for the people of Morocco. Theirs is a wonderful country to visit and it feels very much a part of Europe. But with that international standing comes a responsibility to respect international legal judgments and to respect and promote democracy.

This year marks the 45th anniversary of the occupation of the Western Sahara by Morocco. I want to pay tribute to the work of the Earl of Winchilsea and Nottingham, who was a Back-Bench Liberal, and then Liberal Democrat, Peer for over 20 years until 1997, and who campaigned strongly to promote the interests of the Sahrawi people of the Western Sahara, many of whom became refugees.

As the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, said, in 1975 an International Court of Justice ruling recognised Western Sahara’s right to self-determination. In 1991, the United Nations promised a referendum for the people in Western Sahara to decide whether they wished to be an independent country or whether they preferred to become part of Morocco. That referendum—as the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, pointed out—has never taken place.

Further, in its World Report 2020, Human Rights Watch stated:

“Moroccan authorities systematically prevent gatherings in the Western Sahara supporting Sahrawi self-determination, obstruct the work of some local human rights nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), including by blocking their legal registration”.


Could the Minister tell the House what discussions Her Majesty’s Government have had with Morocco regarding safeguarding the capacity of NGOs to work effectively in the Western Sahara?

The Court of Justice of the EU has ruled that Moroccan territorial jurisdiction does not extend to the territory of Western Sahara or to the territorial sea adjacent to Western Sahara. The consequence of that ruling seems to be that Defra could not lawfully grant fishing quotas to British fishing vessels in waters off Western Sahara. What consideration have Her Majesty’s Government given to this ruling? Will there be robust guarantees that all trade to and from Western Sahara is taking place only with the full consent of the people of the Western Sahara? The Minister will understand that the natural resources of Western Sahara are important in this respect. He will be aware that some 15% to 20% of Moroccan exports can be traced back to Western Sahara.

In the current EU-Morocco fisheries agreement, registered vessels, including some from the UK, are allowed to fish extensively off the coast of Western Sahara. For these access rights, I understand that the Moroccan Government receive a €30 million contribution over a four-year period. This is in clear violation of a 2002 UN opinion on the matter, which stated that any such activities must benefit the people of Western Sahara. Could the Minister tell the House what benefit the people of Western Sahara receive from these access rights?

The European Court of Justice, in a judgment of 21 December 2016, determined that the 2012 agreement between the EU and Morocco concerning reciprocal liberalisation measures on agricultural products and fishery products provided no legal basis for including Western Sahara within its territorial scope. This decision was confirmed by the UK High Court in April 2019, yet the UK Government are now seeking to roll over the EU-Morocco association agreement into UK legislation.

I hope the Minister will agree that the UK Government should now enforce the judgment of the High Court so that no goods should be imported into the UK from the Western Sahara under the presumption that they are from Morocco. Only once the people of Western Sahara have expressed their right to self-determination will the UK be able to trade legally in goods produced in the Western Sahara. The UK Government should now use that High Court judgment as a basis to support the UN supervised process of self-determination. I hope the Minister will agree.

[Lord Patten (Con)]

My Lords, I admired the stoicism of the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, as he sat waiting for his eagerly awaited speech in your Lordships’ Chamber for such a long period, while what I can describe only as a lot of wet fish filibustering went on during the preceding proceedings. Then, lo and behold, the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, gets up and gives us another barrel of wet fish off the coast of Morocco.

All that said, while congratulating the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, on his interesting speech, I have decided to make myself his Official Opposition, as noble Lords can see in this crowded Chamber tonight. That is, I regret this regret Motion very much indeed, first, because of its lack of procedural timeliness and, secondly, in case perceived messages coming from your Lordships’ House during this debate harm Anglo-Moroccan relations and the perception of other countries on the north African-Mediterranean littoral which are vital to our security, such as Algeria and Tunisia.

On my first point, Labour did not, I think, at any stage in either place try to force a proper debate or find a way to get the issue raised during the objection period for this excellent UK-Morocco association agreement, which ended on 11 February. The simple facts on the ground are that the agreement, under our procedures, is now deemed to be ratified. The debate on the regret Motion is therefore no more than a bit of interesting virtue signalling and has absolutely no effect on what has happened with this excellent agreement. We must recognise the facts on the ground: the Moroccan Government are in charge of the Western Sahara and have been since the hopelessly failed decolonisation by the Spanish of the area in decades past. What a muddle the Spanish made of that whole process.

It is not just this House that wishes to have a trade association with Morocco; the EU—our neighbours and friends—has also canonised, recognised and re-recognised the reality on the ground in its recent agreements with Morocco. This is despite the fact that the Spanish—I should not have got myself going on the Spanish—still occupy two areas. I am not quite certain what they are properly described as. Enclaves? Exclaves? They are Spanish city states on the north African coast, on Moroccan territory, which Morocco wants back—and quite rightly too. They are called Ceuta and Melilla. The last of those two enclaves/exclaves/city states on the north African shore still has a statue of Generalissimo Franco standing. There is not one of those in Spain, but it certainly signifies the Spanish attitude and pinpoints the strangeness of their attitude to British Gibraltar in comparison.

Morocco says that the disputed territory belongs to it. I have had no connection at all on this with either the Moroccan Government or any special interest groups. The Polisario problem, which is real and which I do not dispute, will take decades, if not generations, to sort out. In the meantime, I do not wish to see our growing bilateral trade with Morocco suffer. It is fast approaching £3 billion a year in visibles, which is a very substantial amount of money, while in invisibles—I work in the City, although I have no interest to declare in this debate—we have excellent and growing links between the bourse in Casablanca, which is growing fast in north African terms, and the London Stock Exchange, which I wish to see flourish. I do not wish to put anything in the way of this growth. I am sure the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, does not really wish to either.

Secondly, I regard Morocco and its neighbours, Algeria and Tunisia, to be not just important economic partners but also very important strategic partners in defeating terrorism along the north African littoral. Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia are, in their different ways, bastions against terrorism, whatever criticisms people wish to throw against their Governments. They should be much valued for that.

Sanctions and Anti-Money Laundering Bill [HL]

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3rd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 24th January 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Pannick (CB)]

My Lords, I add my thanks to the Minister and the Bill team for what the Minister accurately described as the collaborative co-engagement on the Bill. It has been quite remarkable and exceptional, and I am very grateful to him. My only regret is that, personally, I prefer a good argument—it may be my professional training—but I realise we are not here for my personal gratification. I very much look forward—perhaps the Minister may communicate this to his colleagues on the Front Bench—to the same collaborative engagement, co-operation and desire to accommodate concerns when we consider any other Bill that may come before this House in the weeks ahead.

[Lord Patten (Con)]

My Lords, your Lordships may need reminding that, before this excellent Bill was introduced, between April and June last year, some 30,000 people and companies were asked for their views. Just 34 responded with any views in writing. Since its introduction, however, the Bill has received the line-by-line scrutiny expected of your Lordships’ House in Committee. Even I had a go, once or twice.

No one could fairly say that it has not been scrutinised thoroughly before it journeys to another place. There certainly have been some tussles but, below the surface, it has received broad all-party support. This is welcome from the Opposition Benches and Cross Benches, of course—just as some of us, a few years back, in opposition, spoke in equally strong support of the eventual Bribery Act 2010, when ably introduced to Parliament by the then Justice Secretary Jack Straw, whose contribution certainly should not be forgotten. I believe the Bribery Act is still the toughest anti-corruption legislation anywhere in the world, raising the bar far above the earlier US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Similarly, if passed by another place and then passed by us again, the Sanctions and Anti-Money Laundering Bill will become its absolute twin, as it were, giving us again another globally tough measure to match the Bribery Act, and marching in step with it.

We must remember that bribery, sanctions breaking and money laundering are very often in practice very closely intertwined. One key test of the legislation before your Lordships’ House is its ability to go beyond the big or top players, right down through the supply chains of corruption via intermediaries, and then down through them to minor actors and mere runners—indeed, that cascade of responsibility referred to so aptly by the noble Baroness, Lady Bowles of Berkhamsted. How right she was. The Bill as amended by your Lordships does just that, as globally we work against terrorism and in favour of maintaining and strengthening the integrity of our financial system, as we have since 1989, when the UK as a key player was one of the G7, which first set up the Financial Action Task Force.

[Lord Collins of Highbury]

My Lords, I add my thanks to everyone involved in the Bill. I start by thanking my own team, my noble friend Lord Lennie and my noble and learned friend Lord Davidson. These people do not often get thanked publicly, but I thank also the team in the Labour opposition office, including Catherine Johnson, who did a particularly good job in helping me to be well prepared for my numerous meetings with the Minister.

I also thank the Lib Dem Benches, particularly the noble Baronesses, Lady Northover, Lady Kramer and Lady Bowles. We, again, had numerous meetings. One thing that the Minister omitted to mention—he mentioned all the time that we spent in Committee, in the Chamber, scrutinising the Bill—was that we spent substantial time in meetings outside the Chamber. In fact, the Minister got quite anxious at one point when I turned up to meetings with the noble Lord, Lord Faulks. I am sure he felt that I was in the wrong meeting at the time. We had very good cross-party and cross-Bench support, and I add my thanks to the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge. We now have a better Bill. It is not necessarily a good Bill in all respects, but it is a much better one than what was originally delivered.

I also pay tribute and thanks to the Bill team, particularly Louise Williams, Adam Morley and Jennifer Budniak, and of course the lawyers. I think I had the most pleasure dealing with the lawyers, and I hope Luke Barfoot and Michael Atkins enjoyed those exchanges as well. They did a terrific job; they are great public servants and, again, they deserve our thanks and gratitude. Obviously, as the noble Baroness, Lady Northover, said, their work will continue.

One thing that surprised me was that at one of the lengthy meetings I had with the Minister, the BBC fly-on-the-wall cameras were there. I hope to God it is better than the programme it did on the House of Lords. I certainly hope I come across much better than some noble Lords did, but let us wait and see—I do not know when it will come out.

My final thanks, of course, go to the Minister. He said at the beginning of this Bill, “I am in listening mode” and I know we joked about that, but honestly, he has listened and his responses prove how much he listened. I am very grateful to him for dealing with us so well on this Bill.

Sanctions and Anti-Money Laundering Bill [HL]

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Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 21st November 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon]

My Lords, I thank the noble and learned Lord for moving his amendment. I know that he has spoken before about the powers that are being given to Ministers in this respect. The amendment seeks to remove the ability of the Government to make designations by description which cover groups of people. It would mean that we could designate individual persons only when we knew their names.

Picking up a point made by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer—I hear what he said—I assure the Committee that we will always seek to designate by name wherever possible. We anticipate that the power to designate by description will be rarely used, for reasons that I will set out shortly. But, as I hope to explain to the Committee, it remains a useful tool for the imposition of sanctions. The noble Lord, Lord Lennie, commented just now that some exceptions might apply. That is exactly the kind of exception for which we want to ensure these powers will allow us to apply sanctions.

It is important that this proposal is seen in its proper context. Sectoral sanctions—those aimed at groups or sectors rather than individuals—remain a vital foreign policy and national security tool. The ability to designate by description also enables us to refer to lists of designated persons produced by others, such as the United Nations. To have a single list to look at will reduce the administrative burden upon business. It will also enable us to target particular entities within a given sector: for example, state-owned banks operating in a particular market. Finally, it will enable us to target groups of persons, such as members of a terrorist group—for example, the Hezbollah military wing.

In some cases—they may be few but there will be exceptions—we will not be able to identify all members of a group by name. But it remains important that those members are subjected to sanctions, to prevent them using their funds and assets to commit terrorist crimes. We are also cognisant of the difficulties that this might cause to banks; the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, raised this issue. We accept that a designation by description will be harder for them to implement, but I hope that I can offer a few reasons why this power should be retained despite the difficulties that have been highlighted.

First, as I have said, we will always seek to designate by name where we can and this power will be used very rarely. Secondly, when we use this power we will provide as much information as possible to assist institutions, such as banks and other businesses, to carry out their obligations under the sanctions. Thirdly, it may sometimes be necessary to impose these types of sanctions to cover groups of persons where, as I have said, not all the names of members are not known. Fourthly, banks and businesses carry out their own customer assessments and are well placed to carry out their obligations under sanctions. They also have their own compliance procedures, which enable them to identify persons subject to sanctions and can be used to assist them to identify members of a group. For example, if we designate a group of persons acting in a geographical area, the compliance systems can then be used to pick up economic activity in that area and trigger a deeper investigation into the relevant account holders.

If this amendment were to be accepted, we would be unable to impose these kinds of measures in the cases that I have illustrated. This provision needs to remain to ensure that sanctions can be used as an effective tool for not just foreign policy but, importantly, national security. Noble Lords have alluded to the difficulties, which I fully acknowledge, but I hope that I have offered some degree of reassurance in the context of how they might be overcome.

The noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, also mentioned the phrase “connected to” and designation by description in primary legislation. The issue remains that the connections and descriptions can be context-specific. For example, what is applied under counterterrorism sanctions may not be applied under Russian sanctions, hence the proposal to include these definitions as regulations. That said, he also referred again to the reports by the two committees. As I alluded to earlier, we are reflecting on the specific points that they have raised, including the one that the noble and learned Lord raised in the context of this debate. I will return to those points and reflect—

[Lord Patten (Con)]

I apologise for not having entered into the debate at an earlier stage but I have been reflecting on what the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, said about the importance of legislation being specific. I also reflect on the fact that, working in the financial services as I do, I often see names but we are never quite sure who is behind the names. It may therefore be necessary to have a secondary back-up power to address the groups of unspecified people who one thinks are behind those whose names are specified. Much in the spirit of the noble and learned Lord, I suggest to my noble friend that he may wish to reflect on whether there is some way of specifying in the Bill that these are reserved powers, to be used under particular circumstances. That might well reassure those who feel that they are too overarching.

Middle East

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Tuesday 23rd February 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Patten (Con)]

The lightning conductor and fulcrum of Middle Eastern misunderstanding since the late 1940s has been the state of Israel with its polyglot and talented population. Understanding the Middle East today, almost 70 years on, must begin at home in the United Kingdom, which has a particular historical role as the colonial power in Palestine during the run-up to the creation of Israel in 1948. We have not managed so far, despite best efforts, to be at all successful in eradicating anti-Semitism at home in the United Kingdom and thus cannot be sure of our standing in getting greater understanding of Israel, which feels under deadly threat just as some Palestinians feel the same.

Only this month we had, as my noble friend Lord Grade said in his notable speech, seen a particularly nasty outbreak of anti-Semitism among the members of one particular political club in Oxford, its co-chairman resigning as he thought some of its members had “poisonous” attitudes made intolerant statements and had,

“some kind of problem with Jews”.

That 70 years on these attitudes prevail in what should be a bastion of liberalism and tolerance is completely shameful, so robust action must be taken where and when reason is missing. I thus congratulate very warmly the Government on their stand against local authorities who now wish to boycott Israeli goods as their own little contribution to Middle Eastern understanding—nowhere else, just Israeli goods. I want my local authority to deal with flood prevention and potholes rather than developing its own foreign policy in direct contravention of the rules of the World Trade Organization with the sole aim of undermining and delegitimising one state and one state only in the Middle East—the state of Israel.

I say all that not as a Jew but as a Roman Catholic. There are a lot of my lot in Jerusalem and I want them to stay there. I am extremely grateful to the Government of Israel for protecting them and for making it possible for Roman Catholics and other Christians to be in Jerusalem and not to be cleansed and cleared out, as they have been in so many other parts of the Middle East.

Eritrea and Ethiopia

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Tuesday 27th January 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Patten (Con)]

My Lords, migration from Ethiopia and Eritrea to western Europe can be understood only in relation to where those leaving go to. Take Ethiopia. Following my noble friend’s excellent speech and the point he made on Ethiopia, we must recognise, however, that that country is now host to more than 600,000 immigrants—the highest number of refugees taken in by any African country. The Government of Ethiopia should be highly commended for accepting and managing so many with such scant resources—and not attacked.

The first question is where these refugees come from. A minority come to Ethiopia from sub-Saharan Africa—from countries even poorer than Ethiopia. Far more come from countries nearer at hand. A lot of Somalis, many more from the Sudan and more from Eritrea itself, of course, flood into Ethiopia. Then there is the huge number—more than 160,000—of recent returnee refugees: Ethiopians returning to Addis Ababa from Saudi Arabia since the amnesty there granted by the late King Abdullah ended. They, too, are often destitute when they arrive.

Where do all these people go to if they try to get away from Ethiopia? The answer is that not all, by any means, go to Europe—that is a contemporary urban and media myth. Quite a lot travel south to South Africa. Ethiopia and its Eritrean refugees generate by far the largest number of migrants out of the Horn of Africa to the Yemen and through Djibouti. Certainly, some travel the western route, aiming north for countries such as Libya and thence to attempt those perilous sea crossings to reach the warm waters of southern Europe, before travelling further north. Far from all of them, however, come, or seek to come, to Europe.

Vital work needs to be done to try to anchor people where they are in Ethiopia or Eritrea—to develop there a stable, trustworthy civil society within which sustainable local livelihoods can emerge. This does not need grand plans, geopolitical initiatives or great gestures, let alone a bunch of selfie-taking celebs jetting in and then, just as quickly, jetting out as soon as possible. Rather, it needs some money and lots of slogging, grinding hard work.

Many are trying to do it. For example, there are three outfits in Ethiopia that I know doing just this, in the shape of CAFOD, the UK-based Catholic Agency for Overseas Development, and two sister—or brother—organisations of theirs from the Caritas network: SCIAF and Trócaire. They are all working to promote sustainable livelihoods and then to anchor the otherwise wannabe migrants, whether they are refugees in transit from the countries I have described or younger native-born Ethiopians seeking the somewhat illusory betterment that they think they might get abroad through migration.

As it happens, my own daughter, Mary-Claire, is not long back from a visit to Tigray in northern Ethiopia, with CAFOD, for whom she works, happily just in time for this debate. She has told me what it is like on the Eritrean border, marked by just a line of straw across the asphalt track between the two countries. The programmes run by these three bodies have to date reached more than 65,000 people, more than 60% of whom are women and girls, which is much to the good.

What do these programmes do? They provide training and support on business development and entrepreneurship skills to poor female and male farmers—former pastoralists—as well as to the urban self-employed, predominantly women and girls. They also help organise farmers into co-operatives and support groups and get the young training in business, finance, numeracy and literacy, and lots more.

None of this is easy; nor is it easy at the moment for our own Government to deal with much of the raucous criticism of our taxpayer-funded overseas aid budget. I suspect but do not know that much of it, directly or indirectly, goes on trying to help people in the end to stay put and not to migrate—to be where all of us would want to be, at home if at all possible. I say to my noble friend the Minister on the Front Bench that figures are perhaps available. If figures to this end are available, they might persuade more of our fellow citizens that the overseas aid budget is well spent on trying to anchor the otherwise migrant-inclined.

Queen’s Speech

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Tuesday 10th June 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Patten (Con)]

My Lords, sometimes the socially and economically desirable clash head on with the environmentally undesirable. Today’s debate links business and the environment, explicitly and implicitly, whose activities are intertwined with and crystallised by the effects of housebuilding or, for that matter, road and rail building. This is because such construction activity is, by definition, indelible; it is pretty irreversible in most cases. By comparison, some changes in the natural world as opposed to the built world are reversible—happily, as we now see, for example, in the population explosion of the otter, once thought 50 years ago in the United Kingdom to be heading straight for extinction. Once built, however, changes to urban and rural land are permanent. I can think of very few examples in which the clock has been turned back to some silvan or rural idyll, outside of the airfields of East Anglia where the nissen huts have vanished and the concrete airstrips have reverted to the ploughland of pre-World War II times.

One of the ways that more housing, more building, will be made more acceptable—this is a great political challenge for the age—and less prone to protest and thus delay, is if those concerned with the social need for more roofs over heads and the economic need for more growth contributed to by the building industry pause to reflect that these rightful ends make indelible marks on the landscape of our country—“No turning back”, to borrow a phrase. It is critical, therefore, that the irreversible is well designed, well landscaped and well lit in the interests of those who are to live there and of those who live nearby and perhaps have a new housing estate in their view. It should also, for example, inform the mind of a passing motorist, whose rapid glance produces a “Dearie me, look at those brick boxes—that blot on the landscape over there” reaction.

The reverse should be the case in order to promote a new consensus that new housing is needed just as much on some greenfield sites as on some brownfield sites. Good design is not a matter for limp-wristed aesthetes but a matter for political concern. It is practical politics, as we are going to find in the run-up to the next election. It is a vacuous cop-out by those who—like me, I have to admit—wish to see brownfield built on first, and greenfield sites only when necessary, to say that everything will be solved if only all new housing is on brownfield sites. We see this most tellingly when we look at the new building that surrounds us in the capital, which is going so slowly, in an area where brownfield or renewal and rebuilding are the only options. That is the case for London itself, but certainly not for the rest of the country.

Land is owned by central government—noble Lords will know the old refrain—and by the NHS and local government that is at least brownish-tinged and could be built on. There is a mass of sites that must be called brownfield in other forms of ownership. However, I have absolutely no idea, as there is an information blackout, of exactly how much brownfield land there is in this country. The debate on “brownfield building” would be so much better informed and so much more realistic if we had, à la William the Conqueror, a Domesday Book of brownfield land. I do not know whether that exists in some ministerial cupboard or other, but if the Minister responding to the debate—my noble friend Lord Freud—has any idea of the amount of such land, and whether there is a definitive map of it, might he kindly let your Lordships know? It would better inform our debates and, unless we have it, nimbyish arguments about there being no need to build on greenfield sites because there is so much brownfield land will continue to dominate the debate. That said, because of such arguments and the need to build more houses—which I of course recognise—I strongly support proposals in the new Infrastructure Bill contained in the gracious Speech to end the unfortunate delays caused by local authorities blocking progress on projects already granted planning permission.

However, the argument about building seems to be a competitive bidding war now between the major political parties. My own has made a pledge to have so many more houses built as soon as possible. The noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, in her feisty speech, gave a clear commitment to see that 200,000 houses a year will be built by 2020 if there were a Liberal Government—

[Noble Lords]

Liberal?

[Lord Patten]

A Labour Government. That was a deliberate mistake—you never know how these coalitions will be formed. As for their possible coalition partner, the noble Lord, Lord Stoneham of Droxford, did not give quite such a ringing endorsement of his leader’s new pledge yesterday that 300,000 houses would be built per year. What fun it will be in Liberal party meetings when they discuss the implications of, “Vote Liberal, vote concrete”. I am sure that shortly after that has sunk in, we will see our fun-filled Nigel Farage produce a pledge of probably 500,000 a year. We are all in this together.

The noble Lord, Lord Macdonald of Tradeston, who is not in the Chamber at the moment, called for a new consensus on getting more people into higher forms of apprenticeship. I agree with him entirely. Equally, I think that we all have to speak honestly and outwardly about the effects that new building can have and about our determination to have new-build houses and flats of a high quality. I am afraid to say that sometimes the quality is very poor. It is legendary in my area of the south-west. In a housing estate that has just sprung up quite close to me, one of the new house owners put a three-pin plug into a socket and nothing happened. She asked the builder, who came round to the freshly built and quite expensive house and said, “We seem to have forgotten to put any wires up to the socket” into which the plug went.

I also think that builders themselves sometimes pay scant attention, and local authorities even less, to high-quality design. It tends to be the rolling out, in this housing bonanza that we have, of four or five different sorts of houses, which they stick a porch on the front of—if it is in a half-timbered area, the porch is half-timbered; if it is in a stone area, it is built in stone; and if it is in a plaster area, it is covered in plastering—but we get the same low-quality, very often cramped housing across the land. I remember someone in the building industry telling me some years ago, “One of the best ways, son, to sell a house is to make quite sure that in your show house you take all the doors off inside so it looks much bigger”. The dimensions, we have to say, are rather limited.

None of us in the political world, including my noble friends in government, can get away from the fact that we need to use our bully pulpit to promote among the building industry and others involved the need to build the sorts of houses that improve the landscape and do not diminish landscape quality. The newly built can be landscape enhancing, not destroying, as it all too often is, whether it is on a brownfield or greenfield site.

In his introductory speech, my noble friend Lord Livingston of Parkhead, when referring to the role of government in job creation, said quite rightly that it is not the state’s task to create new jobs; it is the state’s task to provide the framework and the environment in which more jobs are created. I urge my noble friends and noble Lords in all the other political parties represented here to be absolutely clear that one of the critical ways of persuading people to accept new housing is if it is well built, environmentally responsible and nothing more than that.

Gibraltar

Lord Patten Excerpts

Monday 10th March 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Patten (Con)]

My Lords, I am deeply saddened that in Spain, just as in Argentina, prime ministers and presidents alike in deep economic and, therefore, political, trouble seek by diversionary tactics to raise with their electorates alleged threats by foreigners. Indeed, over this weekend, a very senior European foreign affairs figure, with no interest in either the United Kingdom or Spain, told me that it is possible to correlate exactly Spain’s recently renewed activities against Gibraltar with the emergence of the corruption scandals in the Spanish Government not long ago—the two correlate.

Therefore, just as the President of Argentina routinely issues daft and pathetic threats against the Falklands, so in recent years the Prime Minister of Spain has authorised deliberate incursions into Gibraltarian waters, as outlined by the noble and learned Baroness in her commanding speech and the figures that she gave, while political amnesia leads him to forget the ambiguity that Spain actually has two much contested exclaves of its own just across the Straits of Gibraltar on the north African coast at Ceuta and Melilla, surrounded by Morocco. Spain carries out these incursions—these interruptions into the lawful behaviour of people on Gibraltar—in a concerted campaign against the United Kingdom, one of its allies and a fellow NATO member. Indeed, in Spain people are today making bits of kit that go into the Eurofighter and are sent to Lancashire to be assembled there. That is an extraordinary reflection on Spain. I ask my noble friend the Minister: please, what kind of ally is Spain?

Only last week, on Wednesday 5 March, as the noble and learned Baroness has already referred to, in the Foreign Affairs Committee in another place I heard the First Minister of Gibraltar outline what he terms Spain’s “bullying tactics”, ranging from all those lengthy border delays to the breaking and entry into a British diplomatic bag at the frontier on one occasion—in the old days a gunboat would have been sent to deal with that kind of thing—to much more shocking incursions into territorial waters. The worst was on 18 February 2014 by a Spanish state vessel which sailed into British Gibraltar waters and disrupted an important Royal Navy exercise involving some of our special forces personnel from the Royal Navy Submarine Parachute Assistance Group—a disgraceful act. This must stop. I would like to ask my noble friend the Minister: on that occasion was the Spanish ambassador immediately summoned to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and, if not, why not?

By comparison, over the past 15 years, Royal Naval vessels have entered into, or passed through, the waters claimed by Spain around its two north African exclaves, to which I have already referred, on precisely two occasions. The first was by invitation back in 1999, when HMS “Herald” paid a port visit to the Spanish exclave of Melilla in north Africa just across the Straits of Gibraltar. The second was when, in August 2013, HMS “Montrose” exercised its lawful right of passage through the Straits of Gibraltar off Ceuta en route to the eastern Mediterranean. The score of incursions is several thousand to one, as far as I can see from the figures that the noble and learned Baroness gave. This is no beating about the diplomatic bush from me. It seems to me that in this respect we behave impeccably whereas the Spanish behave disgracefully.

Why does the United Kingdom not raise the Gibraltar issue at the next NATO council, for I think these Spanish claims and incursions are the only current examples of belligerence by one NATO member against another in the whole list of 28 member nations, setting aside the long-running saga that followed the Turkish invasion of Cyprus?

Gibraltar’s population wished by an overwhelming majority in the last referendum in 2002 to maintain the status quo. That population of 30,000 is approximately 10 times the size of the population of the Falklands, who feel exactly the same. Therefore, I welcome the apparent strong support of Her Majesty’s Government for the status quo. I just wish that Spain and the Argentine would—I borrow a phrase—grow up and get over it all soon and that their leaders would pay proper and effective attention to their own economies and the appalling unemployment, with the social unrest that follows, that both countries are experiencing, rather than trying to disrupt endlessly the life of a friendly neighbour. What a shocking accusation I am about to make: that is very un-European behaviour.

Burma

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Wednesday 5th June 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Patten]

My Lords, Burma is at grave risk of joining the list of permanent world trouble spots as a failing state. On present trends, it is sinking fast into a terrible cesspit of racial violence and ethnic cleansing, as the noble Lord, Lord Alton, has just portrayed so graphically; he knows much more about it than I do. I believe that Burma desperately needs three things. First, it needs enlightened and outspoken healing democratic leadership; secondly, it needs a miraculous outbreak—I believe in miracles—of religious understanding and human decency between Buddhist, Muslim and Christian alike; and, thirdly, its people need to recognise that unless they bring about stability, they will fail to hoist themselves out of poverty through economic development, something that is achievable within a generation.

On the first point, with hindsight it seems much easier in Burma, as elsewhere, to foment change out of a repressive regime than to embed the further necessary changes thereafter. Remember the soundbite delights of the so-called Arab spring a couple of years back. Tell that to the Copts in Egypt or the Christians in Iraq or Iran alike. Where are the outright and immediate appeals to human decency from the heroines and heroes of recent political change in Burma? They are sadly but understandably muted so far.

Secondly, there is no evidence at all of an outbreak of religious understanding in the face of Burmese, Burman and Buddhist persecution of Muslims and Christians, increasingly led—surprisingly, as they are religious—by some gung-ho Saffron Revolutionary Monks, such as the Venerable Wirathu, who said after last week’s burnings and killings, which spread on 29 and 30 May to the north-eastern town of Lashio, to which the noble Lord, Lord Alton, has already referred:

“The Rohingya there burned down their own houses so that they could live easily in the refugee camps”.

He then went on to say that the burnings and killings by Buddhist mobs in Meiktila was “forgivable”. The story is similar for the poor Baptists and others in Kachin, who look as though they will face the fate of the Kurds in ever more repressive Turkey, as we have seen in recent days in that country. To an outsider like me, it looks as if the lessons of these recent changes in Burma simply express that it is best not to be a minority of any kind at all. The world community and the Minister need to show a lead in this.

Thirdly, one can only hope that economic change can ride to the rescue as the majority of hard-working, decent Burmese of all religions realise that this increasing endemic violence will prevent their experiencing the rapid advances out of poverty that an Indonesia or a Thailand managed so quickly in a couple of decades. The Burmese could grow their economy by four or five times over the next 25 years with all the inward investment that is needed to build a new deep-water port at Dawei or roads into Thailand. It is a country that I read may soon experience the delights of having a Coca-Cola bottling plant, but it will be among pitiful poverty, with hardly an ATM in sight and hardly any mobile phones or the other things that increasingly power democracy through the messages that they send.

Maybe, in the end, the realisation that they can lift themselves out of poverty will produce that national miracle where there is, as yet, neither much uplifting political leadership or an outbreak of human decency among majority and minority groups. It could well be the engine of social cohesion and national salvation for Burma—something I never thought I would say of economic growth.

Religion in the United Kingdom

Lord Patten Excerpts

Thursday 22nd November 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Patten]

My Lords, I thank almighty God, or whichever deity your Lordships happen to choose this afternoon, that we do not have some Minister for spiritual affairs, because religion is, rightly, not a matter for the Executive or Parliament, despite the presence of all those right reverend Prelates and most reverend Primates in your Lordships’ House. The leading spin-maester of the previous new Labour Administration once said that they “didn’t do God”. Whatever my noble friend may say in her wind-up, I hope that her words will not include a pledge to set up some Minister of religion.

However, I hope that our assessment will, first, recognise that Governments can benefit much from the spiritual guidance and advice of religious groups and, secondly, give a clear recognition of the role that decent spiritual values play in our society, although I claim no monopoly in this on behalf of organised religions. One of my dearest friends who I admire most is at the same time highly clear-sighted on spiritual values and matters of right and wrong, while being what could only be described as a high-church atheist in his total disbelief of the eternal or any deity. I also trust that my noble friend’s speech will not strike a utilitarian note towards religious groups along the lines of just how useful their cash and skills are, at a time of organising the delivery of voluntary work in these moments of austerity. Then there is the assessment of the role of religions in the big society, of which, alas, we have heard not much these days.

In reality, religious groups have already for a long time involved themselves in the work of the helpful and hopeful small society of communities that surround synagogue, church or mosque. Essentially, in relation to religion’s role in the UK, the Government should ensure three things. First, they should ensure that sincerely and often long-held religious beliefs, when they do not happen to fit in with the political social policy priorities or fashions of the day, are not marginalised or, at worst, sneered on by those in power as being backward or out of touch with progress—that much abused word—but, rather, treated with reasonable respect. Secondly, the Government should reflect the concern of our indigenous faith groups for those persecuted abroad—from minority Islamic groups under attack in a Turkey, a Syria or an Iran to Christians of all hues, from Chaldean Catholics to those right-on evangelicals among the half million who have experienced total religious cleansing in post-conflict Iraq. Thirdly, the Government should bend over backwards on the home front to protect the freedoms of religious groups in the United Kingdom, however small or strange they might appear to our governing class.

For example, contrast my, “If it’s all right by His Holiness the Pope, then it’s certainly all right by me”, brand of Catholicism is many a liturgical mile away from that of the tiny Plymouth Brethren. However, we should be very cautious before we interfere with religious freedoms. They are now under attack on public benefit grounds in the United Kingdom. If such freedoms fall on this, other religious groups may well follow. We had all better watch out.

Christians in the Middle East

Lord Patten Excerpts

Friday 9th December 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Patten]

My Lords, I am a bit gloomier than the most reverend Primate about things to come in the Middle East, which will be reflected in the three points that I have to make.

First, I stress my belief that we are facing religious cleansing in parts of the Middle East and may be entering what might be thought of as an Arab winter for Christians, Jews and other minority groups alike on a scale that we have not hitherto seen. We have heard about what is going on in Iraq, and I reflect that if some of the movements that are already happening were addressed not at faith groups but at ethnic groups, or those of this or that personal preference, the whole bang-shooting match of outrage in the United Nations—with Secretary of State Clinton flying in to try to deal with the issue—would have been released. Yet we do not seem to see that with religious freedoms. Secondly, in our religious comfort zone in the West we have to recognise that we have much to learn from those who are threatened in the Middle East. Thirdly, we must persuade our rulers to treat religious freedoms as being just as basic as other, much vaunted human rights. Religious freedoms belong in the premier league of human rights; in that context, I entirely agree with what the right reverend prelate the Bishop of Exeter has just said.

On my first point, to exemplify the Arab winter, it seems clear that all non-Islamic faith groups in the Middle East are in it together. It means facing up openly to the fact that some Islamic groups, however many good and moderate adherents there may be, are self-professed militants against Christians and Jews alike. We evidence this in their own words and actions. One sad manifestation of this in the western world today is not just to brush this issue under the carpet but to feel that it is not possible or polite even to talk about it in decent society. Yet the fate of Christians in the Middle East is indivisible from the fate of Jews there, for example, and indeed from other minority Muslim groups such as the Alevi adherents of Shia Islam who are so discriminated against, even in Turkey today with its increasingly authoritarian Government.

There can be no walking on the other side of the faith road in the Middle East in the face of a self-declared agenda by some of religious cleansing in some parts of the region. We must not do that any more than we can, even in the Palace of Westminster, ignore the manifestly Newspeak anti-Zionism, which concentrates as a surrogate on the Jew as a nation—I borrow from the noble Lord, Lord Sacks, on this—rather than on the Jew as a person, as it was in the old-style and now wholly non-PC anti-Semitism. At least in the Middle East, people are honest about it; we should be honest about it here.

However threatening this may be perceived to be in this country it is nothing like the threats facing the last Jews in Baghdad, nor the last few Jews in Iran. But then, it cannot be very nice for the last remaining 13,000 of my co-religionists left in Iran either. The pace of religious cleansing is gathering. Only this week, the organisation Minority Rights Group International introduced figures to show that while in 2003 there were between 800,000 and 1 million Christians of different brands and classifications in Iraq, the few years since have seen the numbers leach away to fewer than half a million. In his own words, not my suppositions, we heard it again earlier this week when Archbishop Sako, the leader of the highly threatened Chaldean Catholics in Kirkuk and the surrounding regions, despairingly said:

“It is a haemorrhage. Iraq could be emptied of Christians”.

They are caught in the middle of a terrible three-way squeeze between the majority Shiites, the Sunnis and the Kurds.

Secondly, we have very much to learn from those threatened in the Middle East in their reaction to secular unease. We must not fall foul of any patronising assumptions that we can give help from some position of spiritual strength in the West for, in much of the Middle East, religious leaderships have taken a hold on secular government in exact reverse step with the tendency in the West that sees many secularist leaderships encouraging the view that the state rather should take on the role of faith groups, by back-filling a void that they see as having been left vacant by faith groups—leaving the arbitration of moral matters to others. This is a view held by many, not necessarily always by me; none the less, those leading the threatened churches in, say, Egypt sometimes have an approach that is different from this spiritual/secular balance.

Take the leader of the majority Coptic Orthodox Church, his Holiness Pope Shenouda III. If he remains not an actual hermit while holding his high office, he is at least a part-time monk in his lifestyle, returning for some days each week to his monastery from the cares of running his church and dealing with state authorities, there to meditate and think. Meditating and thinking are not luxuries in this matter. This gives him strength at home which he will need for his people, as will be needed for the far fewer Coptic Catholics—only about 150,000 now remain in Egypt—in the face of a clear Islamist movement.

It seems certain that the Muslim Brotherhood, via its Freedom and Justice party, and the even tougher Salafis via their al-Nour party, will form a majority in the Egyptian Government after the general election results are fully declared. We have very much to learn from the deeply meditative Christianity of the Middle East, which gives them such clarity. Sadly, I think it highly likely that Pope Shenouda will one day wish that he was back in what will, bizarrely, seem a golden age of religious tolerance under the very unsatisfactory Mubarak regime, compared with things to come in his country in the next few years.

This will be rather like the views of the remaining Christians of contemporary Syria—I think they are about 5 per cent of the population as a whole—who were subject to a proper public opinion survey in the summer of this year. Much to my surprise, the survey revealed that they feared the success of the apparent Arab spring-like anti-Assad regime demonstrators, paradoxically, much more than they feared their present rulers, however dreadful and unpalatable they are, bizarre though that seems to us, for those rulers have at least allowed some freedoms to the Syrian Orthodox—the Syro-Malabar Catholics and others—in albeit registered churches in that country.

Thirdly and lastly I hope that, here in the UK, our secular rulers as a coalition—I see my coalition partners present—will clearly restate that it regards religious freedom as being as important as any other human right, then act when it can in difficult areas of diplomatic intervention. I would exemplify this by a worked example from Turkey, whose law on foundations of 2008 may have produced the occasional high-profile permission for a mass to be held at a Catholic shrine once a year, or kick-started back into life some Greek Orthodox seminary on an island, but it certainly has not spread religious freedoms across that country.

Slightly to my surprise, I was approached out of the blue about this, via a letter, by a bunch of Anglicans on the Anatolian peninsula. They wrote about the issues facing them, where they find it difficult or impossible to worship in churches or church-like meeting places on that peninsula. It is not allowed by the local state rulers. I asked a series of Written Questions about this, starting in my characteristically fair-minded way by asking the Government what the rights of Turks were in this country to worship. Could they worship in an unfettered and untrammelled way? Back came the helpful answer: yes, Turks can worship any which way they want in this country. I then put down some Questions about whether my right honourable and honourable friends in the Government would help these Anglicans by intervening with the Turkish Government, to try and see whether they could get a bit more freedom.

I did this in the traditional way by tabling Questions for Written Answer from the middle of 2010 until about the middle of 2011. Then, exhausted, I gave up because I got an Answer that there was nothing that Her Majesty's Government would do—this is quite specific; you see it on the record in Hansard—to help those who minister to the considerable number of Anglican residents and holidaymakers in the Anatolian peninsula, who want to keep their heads below the religious parapet. Incidentally, they are residents who vote. At the moment, they are forced to rotate worship among different houses, rather like Christians in the old days. Would the Government do anything to help them? The answer was no; they would not approach the Turkish Government to ask, “Please can you ease up a bit? Please can they just worship in this hall and then go on quietly to worship in some other place?”.

Then, however—and I end on this point—a bombshell. My Anglican correspondent, a clergyman in orders who spends half the year helping this necessarily furtive community, said that the German Roman Catholic community had suffered the same problems but then a much more muscular German Government had intervened directly with the Turks to promote a full-on, properly recognised German RC priest to worship and to celebrate in at least semi-public places. Maybe having a German Pope has put a bit of vigour into German diplomats.

I was struck, by the way, a few weekends ago in the car park of our West Country church by seeing a silver people carrier with one of those animal-loving advertisements across the back window with the strapline, “I love my German shepherd”. I looked down at the illustration but rather than an Alsatian I saw instead His Holiness Pope Benedict represented in its place.

I hope that our Government can act with similar vigour to that of the Germans to help the Anglican community on the Anatolian peninsula, for I fear that conditions may get worse for non-Muslim faith groups in Turkey. Dialogue, whether secular or spiritual, is of course vital, but so is action. The simple act of toleration of these little injustices to this or that religious community in any part of supposedly civilised Turkey will only encourage the religious cleansing that is gathering pace in other parts of the region as a whole.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Patten]

I thank the noble Baroness for giving way. She has just mentioned Saudi Arabia, and the lack of reciprocity between our practices and theirs. The same is the case with Turkey, which was mentioned earlier in the speech of the noble Baroness. Does she feel that we could or should do more to encourage the Foreign and Commonwealth Office to use the argument of reciprocity as a starting point and not brush it under the carpet?

[Baroness Cox]

I am grateful to the noble Lord for highlighting the point that I was intending to make, and for making it absolutely explicit. I thank him.

I ask the Minister whether religious freedom features as a priority in discussions on human rights with other countries and whether in cases of gross violations, consideration might be given to the use of appropriate pressure with regard to religious freedoms. My last question is what consideration is given to the provision of aid to victims of oppression and persecution, such as the desperately needed humanitarian aid for Christians under attack in Iraq.

In conclusion, religious freedom is one of the most fundamental freedoms enshrined in the universal declaration of human rights, to which the UK is a signatory. The threats to this freedom are growing in ways highlighted by today’s debate, which is why we owe a debt of gratitude to the most reverend Primate for initiating it. I sincerely hope that the Minister’s reply will demonstrate the Government’s deep commitment to the protection and promotion of religious freedom to bring reassurance to Christians and members of other faiths who are currently suffering persecution and oppression, and to assure faith communities that we are taking their situation seriously. We who enjoy our freedoms must surely use those freedoms to speak and to act for those who are denied theirs.