Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Thursday 7th April 2022 Grand Committee

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I join others in thanking the noble Lord, Lord Polak, for securing this debate. One of my fellow Peers here today expressed some surprise at my presence, given the range of other topics on which I engage. Of course, if we had more Greens in the House, your Lordships would hear from me less—and I would be very happy with that.

But I have a particular interest in Iran, which dates back many years to when I looked academically at the place of feminist movements within Iran in the fall of the Shah—it was a major one, for those who are unaware of that—and the way in which they were viciously swept aside by what became the current theocratic regime. There are also, of course, my numerous encounters with this region as a journalist for 20-plus years, many of which were spent in international news. One of the reasons I always knew that I would leave journalism is that the same cyclical, depressing, disastrous and deadly stories came round again and again. Eventually, you reach the stage where that is very hard to take.

I also think the Green perspective on foreign and international affairs is a different one, which can be useful to this debate, and it lines up with what might be described as more mainstream perspectives. One of those is that we believe that everything is linked to everything else, which makes a five-minute speech very difficult. It is impossible to look at just one issue as a cog in a machine and say, “We’ve fixed that”, without acknowledging the entire context in which it is operating.

Before this debate I looked at some very interesting, detailed work from Chatham House, which is calling for a “JCPOA plus” process which

“must lengthen and strengthen the deal”.

Here I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Lamont, that this is not an “instead of” situation but an “in addition to” arrangement. Regional challenges must be managed through multilateral negotiating tracks. That means we have to think about the context of the wars in Yemen and Syria, building greater solidarity among the Gulf Cooperation Council countries, in the Israel-Palestine conflict and through the creation of meaningful confidence-building measures. We have to think about the place of the UK in all this rather differently to the way in which we traditionally have and perhaps still do—humbly, acknowledging our tremendously difficult history in the region and the continuing situation of issues such as UK arms sales to Saudi Arabia.

I also want to put this in the context of a feminist foreign policy. It may surprise this Committee—it certainly rather surprised me—that the last time I talked about feminist foreign policy in the House it was something of a hit on TikTok. That was not something I expected, but I think that is a sign of the world looking for different ways of looking at our international situation given where we are now. So what does that mean? It means a fundamental shift away from a total focus on hard security—nuclear and military weapons issues—to thinking about the environment, hunger and pandemic relief.

It is worth looking at the context of the region. The MENA region has 50 million undernourished people. The climate emergency and the crisis of water supply press particularly hard across this whole region. Two-thirds of its food is imported; we should think about what we know about the global food security situation now. SDG 2, zero hunger, looks further away by the day. Iran imports sunflower oil, wheat, corn, barley and soya beans from Russia and Ukraine—predominantly Russia. It has had much less rainfall, and yields are expected to be down by 30% this year. It is impossible to look just at nuclear without looking at all of this context.

The other side of a feminist foreign policy is that it is important to focus on women’s rights. That is particularly true in the context of Iran, given its hideous record in this area. We should note that women in Iran have in recent years been at the forefront of leading civil disobedience on a scale not seen since 1978-79, going back to where I started. It is really important to stress when we are talking about feminist foreign policy that that has sometimes been interpreted as the idea of us going in as saviours. Instead, let us think about the agency of women in Iran and the region and how they can be involved and engaged in this process. This is a matter of understanding security very broadly. If we look only at that single cog, without the total context, we are always at risk of doing more harm than good.