Westminster Foundation for Democracy: Funding Debate
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Christine Jardine
Main Page: Christine Jardine (Liberal Democrat - Edinburgh West)Department Debates - View all Christine Jardine's debates with the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office
Westminster Foundation for Democracy: Funding
Christine Jardine Excerpts(2 years, 8 months ago)
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Christine Jardine (Edinburgh West) (LD)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairpersonship, Dr Huq.
I declare that I am also a governor of the Westminster Foundation for Democracy. I first became involved with the WFD on one of the programmes I visited in Kenya, which was encouraging, supporting and advising women to get involved in the political process there. I was taken aback by the similarity between the issues they faced and those we face here, and by how useful what we experienced was to them. Today, in common with so many other people, I am taken by the timing of this move, which simply reinforces the need to rethink the cuts to the budget.
We have all mentioned that this is the 30th anniversary of the Westminster Foundation for Democracy. It was set up, almost to the day, in 1992, to support and encourage the nascent democracies of eastern Europe—those peoples who had just thrown off the yoke of the Soviet empire and were experiencing for the first time the freedoms that we took for granted. Now, 30 years later, those very democracies, which have flourished, are under threat once more from a Russian autocrat. Those very freedoms, which they cherish, are under threat.
I am from the generation that remembers the cold war. I remember feeling fear as a teenager at every faux pas by an American President and every rumbling of discontent from Moscow. I felt the sheer elation and celebration that went with the crumbling of the Berlin wall and the awakening of democracy in Europe: the end of the cold war and of the Soviet empire.
I am now standing here, 30 years later, considering the future of the organisation set up to protect those democracies, which has gone on to do so much—not just in eastern Europe, but throughout the world, including in Africa and in Myanmar. It has been protecting those democracies. The foundation was working in Kyiv this week until the invasion. If ever there were a moment for the Foreign Office to stop and rethink its funding of this wonderful organisation, it is surely today, when the very thing it was set up to defend is yet again under threat.