Building Stability Overseas Strategy

Lord Bates Excerpts

Tuesday 30th October 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bates]

My Lords, it is a privilege to take part in this debate and follow the noble Earl, Lord Sandwich, with whose comments I am in total agreement—particularly his point about the importance of us drawing away and listening to a wider pool. There is a tendency within the foreign policy and defence community to have groupthink. The same people look at the same websites, read the same materials and journals, talk to the same people—and they all do it in a closed way, so it is not surprising that they often come to the wrong conclusion. There are some great examples. The noble Lord, Lord Patten, talked about opening the process up to civil society groups. There are great examples. The National Intelligence Council is one which our own stabilisation unit should look closely at; it draws on analytical resources in academic and civil society not only in the United States but also, crucially, from countries around the world that might take a different and contrary view to their own. It is regarded as all part of testing its own assumptions, which needs to be done much more.

I, too, pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord McConnell, for the excellent way in which he introduced this debate, and for the great timing of this debate. It comes in a significant week, with the co-chairmanship of the high-level panel taking place in this city. I congratulate the noble Lord himself for joining up his presentation, since not only did we have the debate on overseas aid last week but this debate this week—and as an avid reader of “Lords of the Blog”, I managed to catch the gist and thrust of his concerns this morning. Like the noble Lord, Lord Patten, I agree absolutely with every word he said and support very much the questions which he raised. All that I say will simply be in endorsing and emphasising that point.

I also welcome my noble friend Lord Ahmad to the Front Bench. It is the first time that I have spoken in a debate with him on the Front Bench. It is great to see him there, and I wish him well in his role.

I want to congratulate Her Majesty's Government on what they have done. In this whole area, which we do not talk about often enough in looking at the detail, they have joined up defence, development and diplomacy—something that most people will probably wonder why we did not do decades and decades ago. But it has been brought together now, and there is a coherent strategy. More importantly, the Building Security Overseas Strategy dovetails in with the new national security strategy. The National Security Council, the stabilisation unit and the Conflict Pool are there, working in a tripartite group. The fact that we get more cross-departmental and less silo operations makes the chances of us making catastrophic mistakes in our judgments or in our sight of conflicts around the world—and trying to prevent them—that much less likely to occur.

I could not put it better than my right honourable friend the Prime Minister when he said in introducing the national security strategy that,

“we must get better at treating the causes of instability, not just dealing with the consequences. When we fail to prevent conflict and have to resort to military intervention, the costs are always far higher”.—[Official Report, Commons, 19/10/10; col. 798.]

In many ways, that statement by the Prime Minister sets the tone that runs through all the strategies and agenda that we are talking about. We are talking about moving away from treating poverty, as it were; it is a symptom of conflict, violence and lawlessness. If we want to be in conflict prevention, we must get behind tackling conflict. When you have peaceful, stable societies, the rule of law and education can happen, rights can be respected and upheld, and trade and commerce can be built. So the entire focus on what we should be about is tackling conflict.

Here I come very much to a point about the millennium development goals that the noble Lord, Lord McConnell, made in his excellent introduction to this debate. There are eight goals, most of which we are familiar with; there are 21 targets and 60 indicators. In none of those eight, 21 or 60 is there any mention of the word “conflict”, or any aim to reduce it. People will say that it is implicit in all, but let us make it explicit that we want to reduce the number of conflicts that occur around the world. People will say that it is very difficult to define a conflict, but that is not true. The World Bank has a definition of a conflict; it defines it by a certain number of civilian deaths. So there is a model within the UN system. Why cannot we integrate it and work and target our resources on it?

In closing, I come briefly to the stabilisation unit and ask the Minister to comment when he comes to wind up—or perhaps, given that I am springing this on him, he may need to come back to this in writing for me, as well as for other noble Lords who have taken part in the debate. It would be good to see a detailed response to the excellent report, Evaluation of the Inter-Departmental Conflict Pool, by the Independent Commission for Aid Impact. It was a very thorough piece of analysis which contained some alarming points, particularly findings 2.2 and 2.6 on page 5. Finding 2.6 states:

“Decision-making is by consensus and tends to be slow and painstaking”.

However, conflicts are often fast moving and require decisions to be taken quickly. I would be grateful to my noble friend if he would respond to that point.

Given that we are talking about conflict prevention, investing in resources to prevent conflict and trying to get ahead of the curve rather than dealing with the consequences of conflict, I hope that my noble friend will say something about what Her Majesty’s Government are doing through the Conflict Pool and all these initiatives in areas such as Iran, which many of us see as being the next most likely area of conflict in which this country may be involved. It would be good to know what is being done to reduce tensions and the likelihood of conflict there.

I again thank my noble friend for giving these matters his consideration.