Sri Lanka

Jo Swinson Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd April 2019 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hunt]

Those are the kind of wise words that I would expect from my right hon. Friend, with whom I was privileged to work; he spent many years in the FCO. He is right to say that if we are going to prevent this kind of horrific massacre from happening in future, it is really a combination of the hard and the soft. The hard side, of course, is making sure that the security is there and that the security services are able to do their job to track down perpetrators and potential perpetrators. The soft side is what he and the shadow Foreign Secretary so movingly talked about, which is the message of reconciliation, because trying to set faith against faith is one of the oldest tricks in the book in human history. It is a great measure of human progress that in the last 100 years, we have massively increased across the world the amount of religious tolerance, but I am afraid that these events show that we can never be complacent.

[Jo Swinson (East Dunbartonshire) (LD)]

I thank the Foreign Secretary for his words, his statement and for all that his Department is doing, and I thank the shadow Foreign Secretary for her moving words. This was a heartbreaking attack on Sri Lanka, Christians and peace-loving people everywhere, and we stand with Sri Lanka. Does the Foreign Secretary agree that we face a real threat from those who seek to divide us and to drive our world towards conflict, where far right nationalism and pseudo-religious extremism feed off each other in a dependent, destructive cycle? We need to stand up and challenge that hate and the best way to do that is to stand together with love.

[Mr Hunt]

I agree. That is the fundamental challenge. When we are trying to answer the important question of how we prevent this kind of thing from happening, the most important first step is to properly understand the motives of the people who try to perpetrate these attacks. We do not know that at this stage, but it seems clear that one was a religious motive to try and set faith against faith, and one was a cultural motive to try and target western tourists who are visiting Sri Lanka. We have to be alive to both of those, but the shadow Foreign Secretary was absolutely right in saying that one of the things that we can do to support Sri Lanka is—obviously subject to travel advice, which is very carefully kept under review—to continue to visit a country that depends on tourism to show our support and to show that we are not going to be put off by this kind of terrorism.