Global Challenges

Baroness Williams of Crosby Excerpts

Thursday 2nd July 2015 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Williams of Crosby (LD)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure for me to follow the remarks of my noble friend Lord Ashdown, who has given us an extraordinarily challenging picture of the world in which we live and which, alas, is opening before us. I begin by underlining something that was said by the noble Lord, Lord Jay of Ewelme, who of course knows the Foreign Office very well. He said, and he was absolutely right, that the failure of the British Government to go to Minsk was an abdication of responsibility, which was central. We should remember that we signed the Budapest memorandum, which made the United Kingdom one of the guarantors of the independence of Ukraine. It was a crucial commitment. For us then not even to appear at a critical meeting about the future of Ukraine, which is still deeply unresolved, was frankly an abdication of our responsibility. That is not the right way to deal with a troubled and increasingly perilous world.

The noble Lord, Lord Jay of Ewelme, might have gone on to point to another dangerous abdication. It is that, sadly, the United Kingdom has now clearly abdicated any responsibility for the huge range of refugees who are now flooding Europe and the world more generally. Even being willing to take one part of the 400,000 refugees the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees is trying to settle would have been an indication of a moral duty that we share with our fellow Europeans, and from which we cannot abdicate. I found that extremely sad. The United Kingdom has a responsibility, as a past great power and a present still very significant power, to show a willingness to recognise that we cannot just walk away and leave refugees rotting in their camps all over the Middle East in countries such as Lebanon and Jordan, which are far poorer than we are, and to which we then refuse to give any example of some share in the responsibility for running this difficult world.

I want to talk briefly about two specific things, both squarely within our range of responsibility. The first is that we have made a very impressive start on getting a serious agreement out of the Paris environmental conference which is due to start at the end of November this year. It may well be our last chance to avoid steady deterioration to a situation where we once again abdicate from literally saving our own world. Between 1880 and now, there has already been just under a 1% increase in global temperatures. That is half way to the 2% that most of the world’s greatest scientists—including our own, such as the noble Lord, Lord Stern, and others—have indicated clearly is the point at which the world cannot easily survive. We are half way there already, and 1% more will take us into the 2% level where, I repeat, many of our own and the world’s greatest scientists are clear that the world’s future becomes counted in very short terms indeed.

Therefore, can the Government say, first, whether they will keep entirely to the commitments they made when my excellent colleague Mr Ed Davey was Secretary of State for the Environment, to ensure that we retain that energetic effort to cut carbon emissions and resolve that we will take dramatic steps to lower emissions in this century? Will they say that they are still committed to that ambitious and inspiring plan? Secondly, will they also say what they suggest should happen in respect of sanctions against those countries—there are several of them—that simply refuse to be bound by any international commitment to addressing climate change? Sanctions can be very effective, and without them we can say in advance that the environment faces a steady deterioration. The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Worcester was absolutely right in pointing out that it is the poorest in the world who are the first and most serious victims.

I will quickly add one other thing before I sit down. It is also crucial that we face up to the huge onward rush of migrants. The noble Lord, Lord King, with his usual extraordinary insight and common sense, pointed out how serious this is. We need to come up with something very close to a Marshall plan—a huge effort to build up the economic standards of those living in poorer countries. For example, our scientists might simply look at the extraordinary solar potential of the Sahara and ask whether there is not some possibility of addressing the problems of the people of the Sahara flooding out of the area because, currently, it spells death. That could of course be a major step forward for the climate if we only had the imagination and the wisdom to try to do it.