Middle East Debate
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Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne
Main Page: Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne (Conservative - Life peer)Department Debates - View all Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne's debates with the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office
(8 years, 9 months ago)
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Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne (LD)
My Lords, developing relationships in the Middle East, as the noble Lord, Lord Grade, knows only too well, depends almost 100% on building relationships. I serve as trade envoy for Iraq, and in that context perhaps I may thank the Minister, the noble Lord, Lord Maude of Horsham, who is on the Government Front Bench for this debate, for his tremendous work in supporting all of us in the trade envoy network. I have benefited dramatically from his support and hard work and from the way in which he has built up the network. Indeed, three noble Lords who are speaking in this short debate focusing on the Middle East can bear evidence to what I say. We know that it is all to do with personal relationships.
Perhaps I may draw your Lordships’ attention most particularly to a comment made by my kinsman, the noble Lord, Lord Luce, when he declared in his debate a week ago that the BBC World Service and the British Council are outstanding in communicating our values to the world. It is our values that we communicate when we discuss and collaborate with colleagues and friends all over the Middle East, and it is those values that they commend and benefit from; they are what they want. Nowhere better can we look than at the British Council to see how that can be done. I pay tremendous tribute to the retiring director-general of the British Council, Sir Martin Davidson, who did a magnificent job. His successor, Ciarán Devane, has just taken over.
I am very glad that the Foreign Office has managed to retain the budget of the British Council, but I tell the Minister, as he knows well, that this is not nearly enough. The British Council has a unique outreach in teaching English and Arabic, and in understanding. It is fighting extremism in a very soft and gentle way. It is one of the big architects of peace, not just in the Middle East. Somehow, it has been devastatingly underfunded in recent years. It works not just in the Middle East but here in London. At the recent Syria conference I even found some Bromley schools representing the British Council and communicating with Syrian refugees in Lebanon. That is the British Council’s strength globally.