Lord Barber of Chittlehampton
Main Page: Lord Barber of Chittlehampton (Labour - Life peer)
Lord Barber of Chittlehampton (Lab) (Maiden Speech)
My Lords, I would like to thank the noble Baroness, Lady Featherstone, for introducing this important debate, and all the preceding speakers, many of whose speeches were absolutely brilliant. I particularly congratulate my noble friend on her wonderful maiden speech. She is a very hard act to follow.
Last week I showed AI a picture of this Chamber. Its response: “A room with some people in it”. There was nothing about the magnificent Pugin interior, nothing about the historic controversies that that have echoed through this Chamber and nothing about the numerous Members on all sides from whom I have learned so much over the years. All of which makes this, for me, an infinitely more daunting and more humbling moment than AI will ever understand.
I take this opportunity to thank my supporters, my noble friends Lady Chapman and Lady Hunter, for their wisdom and support. Everyone, including the Lord Speaker in the last month of his distinguished term of office, my noble friends Lady Smith of Basildon and Lord Kennedy of Southwark, Garter King of Arms, Black Rod, the Clerk of the Parliaments, the doorkeepers, the clerks and the librarians, has been so welcoming and generous, and I am profoundly grateful to all of them.
This is also a rare opportunity to pay tribute to successive Education Ministers, who have given me exceptional opportunities to contribute to our school system over 20 or 30 years: the noble Lords, Lord Baker and Lord Gove, the noble Baronesses, Lady Shephard and Lady Morris, and my noble friend Lord Blunkett, among others. I salute their vision, their courage and their combined impact on our schools. The day we published our White Paper Excellence in Schools in July 1997, my noble friend Lord Blunkett taught me a powerful lesson. He said, “A White Paper, however well written, Michael, is worthless unless it visibly changes the lives of children for the better”. The follow-through after the headlines has to be rigorous.
It was that lesson that I took with me to No. 10 in 2001 when the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, invited me to set up the original Prime Minister’s delivery unit. Its task was to ensure follow-through across the public services, and the acid test for every proposal was what measurable difference it would make, and how soon. It turned out to be a global innovation.
As a patriot, I realise that these are challenging times. This is a dangerous world and we do need to be strong. Even as the son of loving parents who were committed Quakers and pacifists, I strongly support the case for strengthening our hard power by urgently building the capacity of our Armed Forces and security services.
I favour with equal strength enhancing Britain’s capacity to influence the world through soft power, as we have heard about this afternoon. It is the combination of hard and soft power that makes Britain unique. It is our superpower. It is our military and nuclear capability as well as our creative industries, world-leading universities, the BBC World Service, the British Council, Harry Potter and the Premier League. One telling fact is that 59 current world leaders were educated at UK universities—just short of 66 in the US and more than twice the number in France. That counts. On soft power, no other country can match us.
Building our hard power will help us deter and resist the obvious current threats. Building our soft power will help us resolve and prevent conflict in the first place. We need both, but how? When a conflict is in the headlines, we act, but what happens when it drops out of the headlines? At those moments, we cannot afford to abandon weak or failing states. We should help them and work with them to build capacity to deliver the stability, security and basic services that people crave.
For example, in 2009, the Taliban came dangerously close to Islamabad. Through that dark time, Britain and Pakistan collaborated on military and intelligence issues. That was hard power. Meanwhile, David Miliband, the then Foreign Secretary, asked me to help Pakistan rebuild its basic public services. Over the next decade, one visit turned into 50. Successive Prime Ministers—Brown, Cameron and May—actively supported this work. That was soft power. I do not claim that Pakistan solved all its problems—far from it—but its education and health systems improved, its poverty alleviation through the pandemic was exemplary and, crucially, it is a safer, more resilient country today than it was in 2009.
In late 2023, the noble Lord, Lord Cameron, asked me whether we might do something similar in Palestine. Since 2024, with the active support of successive Foreign Secretaries Cameron, Lammy and Cooper, I have been Britain’s—unpaid, I hasten to add—envoy on Palestinian governance. Working with the excellent Palestinian Prime Minister, Mohammad Mustafa, we are taking the first, very small steps towards a Palestinian state with the rule of law.
If I learned anything from my time in No. 10, it was never to lose focus on delivery, whatever the distractions. I should add at this point that I have also always been a strong and active supporter of the State of Israel and the British Jewish community, especially during my time as a councillor in Hackney. A capable Palestinian state with the rule of law is in everyone’s interests. That work has only just begun.
Climbing the mountain ahead looks daunting. The exercise of soft power is never a soft option. We, the British, know how to build trusting relationships, and we can be determined and skilful. Bill Bryson says that, when the British are asked how they are, they say that they “mustn’t grumble”. Even so, as we heard from my noble friend, at our best, we are good at optimism too. Anyone can do easy things; this is the time to embrace difficult things and to unleash our unique capacity to combine hard and soft power—the solutions are to be found there. Hard power or soft power? Both. Palestine or Israel? Both. Clear-eyed realism or incurable optimism? Both. The road to hell is paved with false dichotomies.