Britain in the World

Barry Gardiner Excerpts

Monday 1st June 2015 Commons Chamber

[Barry Gardiner (Brent North) (Lab)]

The hon. and gallant Member for Plymouth, Moor View (Johnny Mercer) spoke with great passion, great eloquence and great courage, and he has clearly come here with a mission to support mental health and our veterans. I was privileged to listen to him and I look forward to seeing him achieve his mission in this Parliament, as he achieved his mission on the battlefield.

Exactly one week before Her Majesty opened this Parliament with the Gracious Address, President Obama gave a speech not in London but in New London, Connecticut, to the United States Coast Guard Academy. He said:

“I am here today to say that climate change constitutes a serious threat to global security, an immediate risk to our national security. And make no mistake, it will impact how our military defends our country. So we need to act and we need to act now.”

He said that climate change posed risks to national security, resulting in humanitarian crises and

“potentially increasing refugee flows and exacerbating conflicts over basic resources like food and water.”

Last summer, I was critical in this House of the Government’s decision not to provide financial support to the Italian Government’s coastguard operation to rescue refugees from Libya. I recall the Minister’s response to me then, which was that such rescue operations acted as a “pull factor” and were only increasing the number of attempts at migration. I thought that an obscene argument then, and in the intervening months we have seen that it was not only obscene but wrong. The number of attempts has increased. On Saturday, the Italian coastguard announced that more than 4,000 migrants had been rescued off Libya’s coast on Friday.

My purpose is not to berate the Government for their lack of compassion; I want to look more deeply into why those migrants are coming in the first place. The Libyan civil war was part of a much wider pattern of regional upheavals that we called the Arab spring, which began in Egypt in 2010 with the uprisings in Tahrir Square. However, if we track those disturbances back, we come inexorably to the 2010 drought in Russia’s wheat belt. It was the longest and most severe drought in Russia in more than 50 years. Russia lost 25% of its crops, leading it to impose an export ban on wheat that it had traditionally exported to Egypt. The food crisis in Egypt was the precursor to the Arab spring; the situation was the same in Tunisia and the rest of the Arab world.

On 9 September 2010, when the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation warned that Syria’s drought was affecting food security and had pushed two million to three million people into “extreme poverty”, few people took any notice. In fact, Syria had suffered four successive years of drought, causing the longest and deepest crop failure since records began in 1900. The losses from these repeated droughts were particularly significant for the population in the north-eastern part of the country. Experts warned at that time that the true figure of those living in “extreme poverty” was even higher than the official estimate of two million to three million people. What is astonishing in military terms is that in September 2010 nobody predicted that such a tinderbox might give rise to civil unrest and the civil war that began only six months later.

The International Institute for Strategic Studies is clear about the impact of resource shortages. In 2011, it published a report claiming that climate change

“will increase the risks of resource shortages, mass migration, and civil conflict”,

and the Ministry of Defence has said that climate change will shift the tipping point at which conflict occurs.

It has been a feature of recent debate to talk of the need for the UK, as a member of NATO, to meet the target of 2% of GDP on military spending. Our military do a superb job, but at the moment it is a job carried out within the limits of a very limited political vision. As politicians, we have to understand that the greatest threats to our security are no longer conventional military ones; nor do they come from fundamentalist terrorists. We cannot “nuke” a famine; we cannot send battleships to stop the destruction of a rain forest, but we can spend money on clean technology transfer that enables countries to bring their people out of poverty without polluting their future, and we can invest in adaptation measures that will protect communities from the effects of climate change that are already putting societies under stress.

Next month, at a UN conference in Addis Ababa, we must begin to align the global financial system with the real economy and the needs of the world’s poor. Then, we will have taken a major step towards achieving real security for our nation and for the people of the world.