Refugees: Mass Displacement

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Thursday 6th January 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Alton, for securing this debate and so powerfully introducing it by setting out the human reality of displacement, particularly for children. We have already had a very rich and informed, if distressing, debate.

I particularly commend the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Hayward. I regret the fact that I cannot boycott Coca-Cola myself, because I never drink the vile stuff, although I have once or twice used it as a cleaning fluid. Its impact on grime certainly raises questions about its impact on the people who ingest it—but I promise him that I will not use it in the next two months.



Some 16 years ago, in 2005, the world’s nations collectively signed up to a responsibility to protect the world’s people from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. There are three pillars in that: each state should protect its own people, other states should provide international assistance and capacity building to ensure that other states can protect, and there should be a timely and decisive collective response when states fail.

As this debate and the UNHCR have made clear, war crimes and genocide are having a big impact on the displacement of people. If we are looking at the root causes of mass displacement, as the noble Lord, Lord Alton, set us to do, there is a patently obvious missing pillar in that responsibility to protect agreement. You might call it a Hippocratic pillar: do not create and continue the conditions that allow genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity to flourish. We really need to think about the world that we have created and been such a powerful force in. One in 95 people in the world is displaced. We should look at that figure with horror.

So I want to be practical. I have three suggestions for the Minister that might live up to the UK’s Hippocratic responsibility not to do harm. First, end our arms sales; stop pumping out arms into a world already awash with them. We are the second largest arms exporter in the world. Between 2011 and 2020, the majority of UK defence exports—60%—went to the Middle East. That is a cause of the great issue that we are discussing now.

Secondly, we need to stop buying goods from around the world. We have already talked quite a bit about goods from Xinjiang, where a people subject to genocide are also subject to forced labour, producing IT goods and medical supplies that we consume and use. But of course it is much broader than that. In south-east Asia, palm oil is a major driver of deforestation, environmental destruction and the consequent impact on states and their ability to protect their people.

Thirdly, and most obviously and importantly, we need to rein in our companies, particularly miners but also bankers, consultants and lawyers, who profit from corruption in the global south that causes the breakdown of countries. We are the problem here; we are causing many of these problems.

If noble Lords do not want to accept the moral argument for change, I put to them the self-interest argument: the wealth that we have extracted cannot protect us in this unstable and unequal world, where so many people are forced to be on the move.