Government Departments: Soft Power
Lord Soley Excerpts(13 years, 7 months ago)
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Lord Soley
I welcome this very timely debate, led by my noble friend Lady Taylor. I echo the words that we have just heard: this country has so much to offer and has done so much already. It is quite extraordinary to think of the influence of the United Kingdom throughout the years. You need think only of the English language, but there are many other aspects in which we have had influence. There has been some talk today of the importance of our culture and so on, but no mention of things like football and cricket. These sorts of things carry with them an immense image of Britain. Both the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Howe, mentioned the monarchy. It is quite true, I suspect, that this will not make the headlines tomorrow for the same reason as the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, gave—because the royal wedding will get the headlines. Some 10,000 journalists are here from other countries, and maybe one message is that some of the monarchies in the Middle East might like to take a lesson or two on constitutional monarchy, which could help them to some degree.
In my opening comments, I said that this debate was timely, because I have believed for some considerable time that there is a mood shift around the world against dictatorship. That mood has been growing for some considerable time; it has been led, as several noble Lords have said, by the intervention of hard power from time to time. With Iraq, or going right back to the Falklands, which the noble and learned Lord, Lord Howe, will well remember, the removal of dictators can at times precipitate a continuing change, which is profoundly important. But there is no doubt in my mind that one of the biggest changes at the moment, which is enabling the Arab spring and other events to take place, is the development of the internet. Perhaps we should remember at a time like this the contribution of Sir Tim Berners-Lee in developing the world wide web. These contributions that we have made are very wide and very deep.
I do not want to say anything about the BBC World Service other than that I agree with everything that has been said and it is the height of madness to cut it at the current time when people are holding up banners in some of the demonstrations in the Middle East saying, “Thank you BBC”. Attention was drawn to this by the e-mails from Peter Horrocks to many Members, but it was not the first time I had seen a banner like that in the middle of a demonstration. The BBC is immensely important to this.
I want to focus a little on what else we have to offer. When people think of the image of the United Kingdom around the world, apart from things like the English language, Shakespeare and football and so on, they will think of good governance and the rule of law—and they will think of a constitutional monarchy and freedom of speech. When all those people stand on the pavement outside the House, taking photographs of the demonstration, which so many of us are worried about, of the man who has been there for many years, that is as much about saying how the British are a free people as it is about saying, “My God, this is an environmental disgrace”. I would love to read their e-mails or letters to know which side of the argument is carried. It is a demonstration of the people’s views on the commitment in the United Kingdom to the rule of law. It is that issue that I want to come back to.
The Minister will know, as I have raised this on a previous occasion, about the development of a postgraduate school of law, which I have been working with at Zayed University in Abu Dhabi, with outreach into Palestine. That is the sort of thing that we need to do. I want to develop that theme, because it leads on to something else. The conversations that I had about a year ago led to conversations with a couple of other Arab ambassadors. One of them was the Tunisian ambassador, who is no longer with us. The new Tunisian ambassador, Hatem Atallah, came to see me on Tuesday and spent an hour with me here in the House, when we discussed in some depth what Tunisia needs. I have been very anxious throughout all my contacts—and I know that this applies to this and the last Government—not to tell countries what they need but to ask them what they need and how we can assist. That is very important.
Some of the things that the ambassador mentioned are very important. He told me that the Tunisian elections will take place on 26 July, and the Tunisians look forward to international observers on that from the EU and so on. He told me that the National Assembly will then have the duty to draw up a constitution. Then we got into the detail. He was saying that the Arab spring—I will call it that, although they were not his words—has led to enormous expectations about democracy, freedom, the rule of law and so on. Anybody in this House who has had any time in politics at all knows the danger of having raised expectations that you then cannot deliver on. The problem that we face, particularly in the Middle East at the moment, is: the expectations of democracy and so on are enormously high, but how can you deliver on them?
One thing that Mr Atallah and I talked about on Tuesday was what sort of questions you ask when you are setting up a new constitution. We talked about the importance of the Ministers being accountable so it is about what sort of questions they are asking them but, as he said, it is also about what questions they are asking the people standing in the elections. One thing that he wanted, perhaps more than anything else, was the opportunity for Tunisian people in relevant positions to come and stay here in the United Kingdom to work with various groups. This will warm the heart of the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, because we discussed in some depth how we could help them to develop a free and responsible media.
His view was that they did not need any help with journalist courses, as they have those. He said the problem was that, when somebody left one of those courses with their qualification, they had been taught all the right things but were then told what to write. In other words, they had no opportunity to learn how to report in a balanced, neutral and informative way. For example, the reporting of elections will be immensely important, but he wondered where the journalists would come from who could see an election taking place and know how to report what the various candidates were saying. He told me that it would be very useful if they could place journalists here in the UK to see elections taking place. It may be too late for next week, but he will be writing to me about that to indicate in a bit more detail what they want. I will endeavour to see that we do it. I hope that the Thomson Foundation, which both I and the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, have mentioned, might be able to help on that.
There is a range of areas here where we have to think rather differently. My noble friend Lady Taylor cast this debate in terms of the co-operation between government departments. I do not doubt that at all but we have to be more flexible in our thinking because it also needs to involve ways in which we can use all the other institutions that we take for granted—whether private, public or anything else—in order to try and place people for experience. If, as I suspect, they have the basic training right in many cases, as in the journalism example that I gave, we need to focus on how we can then help their journalists to learn beyond that.
Much the same applies to the rule of law issue. When I began to question the Zayed University in Abu Dhabi about what it offers, I was sent all the details of its law course but, not being a lawyer, I ran them past many experts here in this House who have been helpful to me. Yes, it is a good course but, interestingly, on the postgraduate side it virtually stopped. What happened was that any good student then went to Britain, the United States, Europe or elsewhere to get their postgraduate training. I told them, “If you're going to do that and are to be taken seriously in this world in future, you have to do human rights or humanitarian law and international law”. That is what we are now exploring. We are looking at doing it in an outreach operation with Palestine as well, in order to help them develop the mechanism of the state. That is working through universities but we already have here an organisation, based at York University, which helps British universities to connect with overseas ones. I am very encouraged by that and I work with it to try and make these contacts, so we really have to think much more adventurously.
I also think that we have to start looking ahead a bit. It was almost impossible to predict what happened in the Middle East. There are other areas where there is change but they are actually signalling it. I shall give the example of Cuba. If you want to read the speech of Raúl Castro, it will take you a lot longer than the 12 minutes that I have been given here. It is interesting, though, because he is clearly saying that Cuba wants to open its economy and its political system.
It is not just in Cuba or the Middle East. There is what I regard as a historical shift away from an idea that somehow or other some people are born to rule and can be in power for 40 years, towards the idea of democracy, freedom and the rule of law. We in the United Kingdom have to get away from the idea that we are somehow to blame for these things and that we are imposing our values on other people. Ideas about democracy and the rule of law are not just Western concepts; they have been around in many other forms. We can say with confidence that if you want a modern, progressive, stable and peaceful society, you need certain basic factors such as democracy, freedom of speech and the rule of law. We need to identify those areas where we can be most helpful and offer that help. I hope that in some way we can all lend our support to that.
Libya
Lord Soley Excerpts(13 years, 7 months ago)
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Lord Soley
My Lords, I want first to congratulate the Government and the Prime Minister because they acted rightly and effectively. It is important to put that on the record and have it known. I also take the view that, as always with these situations, military intervention is uncertain; you do not know what is going to follow. Both the Minister and other people have said that we must not put boots on the ground and that we must exit quickly and so on. The problem is that, once you start a military action, knowing how and when it will end is incredibly difficult. It also raises the issue of what we do in the post-conflict situation. The failure in respect of Iraq was not the issues around the United Nations but the absence of a workable post-conflict plan. Colin Powell had such a plan, but when he was replaced by Donald Rumsfeld it went out of the window and we paid a very high price for it.
The temptation in these situations is to compare one intervention with the previous intervention. Making comparisons with Iraq is not particularly helpful. What matters is looking at this intervention as part of a historical process. I have made the point on many previous occasions that it is not just the West that intervenes. I have discussed these arguments with my noble friend Lord Parekh in the past, but I remind the House that India thought that it was absolutely right to intervene and remove the East Pakistan Government and replace it with Bangladesh. What was happening in East Pakistan then was very similar to what is happening in Libya now. In other words, intervention is carried out by others. I have referred in the past to debates in this House in the 19th century on the ending of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, which cost us 12,000 military lives and released some 200,000 slaves. Those debates reflected many of the arguments now, particularly about international law. Intervention has a long history.
What fascinates me about this situation is that, with the collapse of the Cold War, the acceleration towards a wish for democracy, freedom and the rule of law has become clear. People in the Maghreb and the Middle East are not going on to the streets crying out for al-Qaeda or another dictator; they are going on to the streets crying out for democracy, the rule of law and human rights—they know what they want. The problem for them is delivering it, and our problem is helping them. Libya has had for 42 years a particularly brutal dictatorship. I sometimes think that we fail to get over the message that there is a very important difference between extreme and efficient dictators such as Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein, Adolf Hitler and others and those Governments, of Saudi Arabia, for example, who may be authoritarian but are capable of being moved. If we see the current events in the context of a historical process of people crying out for democracy and recognising that you cannot have a modern, stable state without democracy and human rights, we begin to understand them a bit better.
It is important to remember that, following the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003, Gaddafi feared the same would happen to him. That is why he came to the British Government and said that he had a weapons of mass destruction programme, that he was—as the noble Lord, Lord Alderdice, said—supporting terrorism and that he was going to stop. The previous Government got a lot of criticism for trying then to engage with him, but they were exactly right. If a dictatorship looks as though it is changing and breaking down, you need to help it happen, but when it fails, as it so dramatically did when Gaddafi turned his guns on his own citizens, you have to intervene.
The noble Lord, Lord Teverson, referred to the European Union. My frustration with the EU is along the lines of that of the noble Lord, Lord Robertson: it is an economic giant but a political and military pygmy. I do not have time to develop the argument, so I shall use, as always, a rather casual analogy. It is like a family being brutalised and beaten up, with the kids being killed, and the next door neighbours—Europe in this case—sitting down, calling a case conference and discussing whether they should stop the benefits of the guy who is doing it. You have to have a police force and you have to be able to intervene. If we had been able to remove Saddam Hussein in 1993 after the first Gulf War, there would not have been a second Gulf War. Nor would there have been 10 years of sanctions, which all brutal and efficient dictatorships manage to redirect on to their opposition within their own country. That is why sanction regimes can often be inefficient.
We should look at this as a process where our role is to encourage and promote, without being embarrassed about it, democracy, the rule of law and human rights. These are not just western concepts. Many societies throughout history and around the world have shown these attributes; they might not have used the same words or the same structures, but that is what they have done. There is bound to be a natural desire for freedom in people, and we need to stand up and speak for it.
Law has been mentioned often in this debate; it is a very strong issue. Lawyers have failed to grasp the problem, and continue to fail to grasp, that if we do not deal with brutal dictators and give ourselves a power to remove them, however difficult it might be to draw up that law, we enable them to continue—in whatever country, whatever culture and whatever society. It is not easy. I do not pretend for one moment that you can have a law up your sleeve which you can pull out and put into effect, because, at the end of the day, the political reality is that the world is not ready for it. The political aspect tells you that you cannot do it. But let us just imagine if, in late 1944 or early 1945, we had said, “Well, we’ve expelled the Nazis from all the countries they’ve invaded, but we’re going to let Hitler stay in power and we might apply a few sanctions”. We would have been laughed out of court. It would have been politically impossible and morally disgusting. Lawyers fail to face up to that, which is why I get so cross with them when they argue the moral case about removing brutal dictators. Yes, it is difficult, and, no, we do not have a way of doing it at the moment—I acknowledge that—but you cannot just duck the problem.
The key issue for us now is the post-conflict situation. We cannot say, as some have done, that we will simply withdraw. We may get pulled further in. If this battle continues, we may have to have boots on the ground. We have to face that reality. We will not walk away if, suddenly, Gaddafi gets even stronger and refugees start pouring out of the area and coming over to Europe.
I desperately hope that the rebels win, but, as has been indicated, we do not really know very much about them, so, by God, we need to put in an effort to help build the institutions of a state which begins to provide some stability, because 42 years of brutal dictatorship breaks down community relations at all levels. All forms of brutal dictatorships do that and we forget it at our peril. People are not often aware—indeed, I was shocked when I heard it—that, at the end of the Second World War, infighting among the French resistance cost more lives of French resistance fighters than were lost to the Nazis during the whole occupation.
Lord Gilbert
Before my noble friend sits down, would he not agree that everything that he has just been saying about lawyers was said by Edmund Burke?
Lord Soley
I shall have to go away and read Edmund Burke; I am not 100 per cent sure about that. I am not entirely against lawyers, although I have a long list of names of lawyers whom I would pay not to defend me.
Under evolving international law, we need to think a lot harder about the reality of politics. We need some way of facing up to the fact that leaving extreme dictators in power is not really a morally acceptable position.
Saudi Arabia: Human Rights
Lord Soley Excerpts(13 years, 7 months ago)
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Lord Howell of Guildford
Of course, as the noble Baroness recognises, there are attitudes that we do not like and seem to go against our values and views of how democracy should work. We do not miss any opportunity—in fact we take all opportunities—to put these matters frankly to the Saudi authorities and to other countries. One has to think in positive terms; the aim is to make progress by establishing trust, rather than by dismissing the efforts of certain countries and saying that they no longer qualify to operate or to make a sensible and responsible contribution to world affairs. The positive approach is the one that pays off in the end. While I recognise many of the worries that my noble friend articulates, I believe that the approach I am describing is the best one.
Lord Soley
In those discussions, how much emphasis has been placed on access to forms of justice in Saudi Arabia, and on the promotion of the rule of law?
Lord Howell of Guildford
I am sorry, but I did not hear the first part of the noble Lord’s question.
Lord Soley
In the discussions with Saudi Arabia to which the Minister referred, how much emphasis is put on access to justice for the people of that country and on promotion of the rule of law?
Lord Howell of Guildford
These are our values and these are the points that we put to the fore in our ongoing dialogue with the Saudi authorities. Because of certain relationships of trust and our close alliance, we are in a position to put those matters forward and get a hearing for them. I cannot measure precisely the amount of emphasis, but these issues are very much to the fore in all our dialogues.
Middle East: Rule of Law
Lord Soley Excerpts(13 years, 8 months ago)
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Lord Soley
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what action they are taking to promote and support the rule of law in the countries of the Middle East.
The Minister of State, Foreign and Commonwealth Office (Lord Howell of Guildford)
My Lords, in the Kuwaiti Parliament on 22 February last my right honourable friend David Cameron affirmed that we stand with the people and Governments of the Middle East,
“who are on the side of justice, of the rule of law and of freedom”.
As part of Britain’s long-term approach to, and friendship with, the region, and drawing on UK legal expertise, this Government undertake a range of activities to assist in promoting the rule of law. This includes training and mentoring to help build the skills and capacities of judges, justice ministries, lawyers and the police, and specialist support to develop policy and unlock legislative reform.
Lord Soley
I am sure that the Government and the House will agree that the lack of rule of law and democracy and human rights in the Middle East underpins so much of the instability and conflict in the area. I know that the Minister is aware of the proposal that I made to Zayed University in Abu Dhabi with outreach into Palestine to develop the rule of law in Palestine and Abu Dhabi. We have a very special position in the United Kingdom because of our expertise and history on the rule of law. Will the Minister continue to support the proposal that is now well developed for Palestine and Abu Dhabi to link up on the first postgraduate programme including human rights and international law in the Middle East?
Lord Howell of Guildford
My Lords, I am aware, as I think the noble Lord knows, of the project to set up the postgraduate school of law at Zayed University in Abu Dhabi combining Palestinian and Abu Dhabi endeavours. We welcome that as an excellent initiative and my honourable friend the Under-Secretary of State, Alistair Burt, has also indicated his welcome for it and suggested ways in which we in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office can assist with the project.
BBC and British Council
Lord Soley Excerpts(14 years, 1 month ago)
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Lord Howell of Guildford
As I have explained and as I think my noble friend understands, it is not going to be financed from the FCO budget but by the BBC. However, there are activities that fall clearly within the definition of overseas aid activities which can be financed from that source as well. So I do not think the problem my noble friend is concerned about actually arises any more, or will not arise two years ahead, when this new arrangement is put into place.
Lord Soley
On Tuesday the Government announced in the defence review that they wanted an enhanced soft power. On Wednesday we saw a dramatic cut for the BBC over the next six years, with the licence fee and the incorporation of the World Service into the BBC generally. What discussions have taken place between the Minister’s department, the Chancellor and the Secretary of State for Defence on how you enhance and protect soft power if you are also cutting the budget?
Lord Howell of Guildford
My Lords, we have a lot of discussions all the time with the other departments concerned, including the Treasury. The broader question of co-ordination of our soft power projection and our positioning in the world is, of course, a central part of the agenda of the National Security Council, where it is discussed frequently. The noble Lord is right to talk about our soft power as an overall effort involving all overseas departments. We have the co-ordination in place to do that and it is working extremely effectively.
Russia
Lord Soley Excerpts(14 years, 4 months ago)
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Lord Howell of Guildford
The noble Lord is absolutely right. We need to engage very carefully. The Russians have been through the great traumas of the 20th century and while there are always difficulties and tricky aspects in dealing with them, this is certainly not a relationship of lecturing or harassing, or any other thing like that. This is a relationship of mutual respect, understanding the differences that we have but not letting them overwhelm the important, positive developments of our relations with such a vastly important nation in a whole range of areas. As for the EU, we certainly want to see there a united momentum in engaging with Russia and moving forward positively as well.
Lord Soley
While regular meetings between senior political and business leaders would obviously be very welcome, will the Minister not forget the importance of the links between the Russian and British people? Perhaps some thought can be given to something the Russians have already helped on—a visit to Poolewe where the Arctic convoys assembled during the war to supply Russia, at great loss of British life. The possibility of developing that link could be examined so there is a better understanding of the relationship between Britain and Russia. It has already been developed in a very limited way by the museum at Gairloch just a few miles from Poolewe.
Lord Howell of Guildford
I agree with the noble Lord that that is a positive and interesting aspect and there have of course been others. I do not know whether your Lordships shared my view that there was something rather splendid about seeing a platoon of the Brigade of Guards marching through Red Square the other day in full dress. I liked that.