City-to-city Diplomacy

Lord Anderson of Swansea Excerpts

Wednesday 26th March 2014 Grand Committee

[Lord Anderson of Swansea (Lab)]

My Lords, the noble Earl raises a challenge not only to the UK Government but to the devolved Administrations with their responsibilities for local authorities. He has been a persuasive advocate of the concept of city-to-city diplomacy and greater public participation, which I have witnessed not only in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe but also in the All-Party Group on Croatia, culminating in the launch of the new city diplomacy project with Zadar and Dundee on 4 February.

The noble Earl tried to distinguish his concept from that of town twinning. I think that he would agree that his concept needs to be sharpened a little. In some way it stems from the concept of twinning, which began, as he said, after the Second World War and which is now, alas, on the ebb. There are a number of reasons for this: there is the austerity—it was perhaps the first cutback made by local authorities; people are travelling more; some have sought to politicise it—Cuba, the West Bank; and there is the amount of councillors going to exotic locations at council tax payers’ expense. However, city-to-city diplomacy clearly builds on the concept of town twinning.

I hope that the noble Earl will say that we need to learn the lessons of what has been good and bad in the existing town twinning system. We should also learn the lessons of what we did immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall, where we sought to buttress local democracy and active citizenry in the countries that were formerly part of either the Soviet Union or the Soviet empire by sending senior local government officers there, be it chief executives, deputy chief executives and so on, or be it in leisure. We should consider what was done well and what lessons we learnt from that.

The noble Earl is well aware, of course, that work in this field is being done by the European Union—Europe for Citizens. This is supported by the Government, rather surprisingly, because it not only deals with commemoration but promotes the concept of Europe itself. Clearly it needs co-ordination with the European Union. The European Union has the money and the Council of Europe perhaps has the resources and the wider membership. Given the precedent of, for example, the partnerships for democracy with Morocco and the Palestinian Authority, there needs to be close co-operation between the narrower European Union and the wider 47-member Council of Europe.

There is a new wave of localism in Europe, which we need to encourage. We need to exchange best practice to learn from the initial Dundee-Zadar precedent. This is clearly good for individual countries, good for local democracy and good for international co-operation. Again, I commend the noble Earl.