Mediation, Conflict Prevention and Peacebuilding

Lord Bates Excerpts

Thursday 29th October 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bates (Con)]

My Lords, it is always a privilege to follow my noble friend Lord Hastings. He is the last of those who could be accused of remaining silent in the face of injustice. He has been at the forefront of so many cases and I agree very much with what he said, including his words about Dave Beasley, with whom I had the privilege of working, when I was Minister of International Development, at the World Food Programme. He did immense work there.

I join others in thanking the noble Lord, Lord McConnell, for initiating this debate. No one in this place has done more over the years than him to advance the agenda of stopping wars and saving lives. We owe him a great debt of gratitude for the work that he does not only in this place but, as we heard in his introductory remarks, around the world. I place on record my interest as qualified mediator with the International Mediation Institute and I serve as an officer with the All-Party Group for Sudan and South Sudan.

Peace-seeking and peacemaking are never popular. In the short term, everyone wants to be a Churchill; no one wants to be a Chamberlain. Yet, in 1954, Winston Churchill became so deeply concerned about President Eisenhower’s refusal to talk to his Soviet counterpart amid rising tensions that he went to the White House to tell the President publicly that

“jaw to jaw is better than war”.

Eisenhower listened and agreed to hold talks which temporarily defused the tensions.

Often, we are unable to meet jaw to jaw on our own and we require an intermediary, a trusted mediator or a mediating institution to bridge the gap and facilitate the dialogue. When both sides are shouting, no one is listening. Mediation does not compel us to agree with our enemy, but it does require us to listen to them, and they to us, and for both sides to do so respectfully.

I recall being the most junior of bag-carriers to the Security Minister in the Northern Ireland Office in 1994, when messages were being received about a possible ceasefire. But the experiences of the terrorist atrocities, the lack of trust and a deep suspicion meant that we could not bridge that chasm on our own. It was not until President Clinton sent, as a gift, Senator George Mitchell as an envoy to Northern Ireland later that year that we had someone who would stand in the gap for us and form a bridge for mediation that led to the Good Friday agreement. There was nothing weak about negotiating that agreement—it was done with huge political and personal risks by all those involved—but it saved hundreds, if not thousands, of British lives.

It is so much easier to throw a brick or build a wall than it is to build a bridge, easier to raise a fist in vengeance than it is to extend a hand in forgiveness. That is easy for me to say—I have never lost family members in war or been a victim of violence. Erich Fromm, on the other hand, was a German Jew, one of the greatest psychoanalysts of the last century. He was living in Frankfurt when the Nazis came to power. He narrowly escaped the Holocaust, but members of his family did not. He had every reason to be filled with self-righteous hatred and judgmentalism. But instead, he wrote a small book, The Art of Loving, which I will quote some of here today:

“The lack of objectivity, as far as foreign nations are concerned, is notorious. From one day to another, another nation is made out to be utterly depraved and fiendish, while one’s own nation stands for everything that is good and noble. Every action of the enemy is judged by one standard—every action of oneself by another. Even good deeds by the enemy are considered a sign of particular devilishness, meant to deceive us and the world, while our bad deeds are necessary and justified by our noble goals which they serve … The faculty to think objectively is reason; the emotional attitude behind reason is that of humility”.


In a world where nine men have at their fingertips enough nuclear weapons to destroy all life on this planet many times over, our only hope is human reason. But Erich Fromm reminds us that reason is built on objectivity and humility. The capacity to reason is that we see things not as they are but as we are; where we sit determines where we stand. We do not see the whole picture, we may be wrong and our enemy may even have a point. Let me illustrate this: I follow Newcastle United Football Club.

[Noble Lords]

Oh!

[Lord Bates (Con)]

Thank you. As you can tell, I am an optimist. Even my blood group is B positive, and that helps. But when I am at St James’ Park, watching a game from the stands, the minute one of our players just trips over a shoelace in the opposition box, 50,000 fans rise as one to call for a penalty for such an obvious and devious foul. Yet when the opposing player is flattened by big Dan Burn in our box, the crowd rise as one to call it a clear dive that deserves nothing but a yellow card for simulation. But when I watch the game at home on TV, I see multiple different perspectives replayed endlessly in slow motion and from every angle. We have them assessed by a referee and a linesman, and independent commentators, and we see things differently, perhaps more objectively.

The point is that we live in a Westphalian world of sovereign independent states where each state is its own referee. We call events as we see them, but then so does everybody else. We believe we are right, but then so does everybody else. We believe our actions are just, but then so does everybody else. It is a system designed for chaos and conflict. Yet, with our incredible human ingenuity, we have designed mediating institutions to compensate for our human weakness, chiefly the United Nations to act as a bridge between sovereign states and within states to maintain order and over which they can seek to mediate their differences. When we uphold the United Nations, we are upholding international order. When we attack or undermine it, we are destroying the critical infrastructure on which the very future and hope of civilisation depend.

I believe it is no coincidence that today we are seeing armed conflicts at their highest levels since 1946, when at the same time great power rivalries are undermining the United Nations at every turn and cutting its budgets. In international relations, as in life, you get what you pay for. Global military spending last year was $3 trillion, 1,000 times the budget of the UN. The entire peacebuilding budget of the United Nations to respond to 65 active armed conflicts around the world is $124 million, less than the cost of a single modern fighter jet. We could mediate an entire peace process for less than the cost of a single cruise missile.

Moreover, we are blessed in this country with some of the most skilled and respected diplomats in the world. The convening power of London is second to none. We are a soft power superpower, but that superpower is hard power. We have also been the beneficiaries of patient mediation ourselves in Northern Ireland, and that imposes an obligation on us to repay it by mediating for others.

It is also in our own enlightened self-interest to do that. Around three-quarters of those arriving in small boats in this country are from areas of conflict abroad. We are more secure at home when there is peace abroad; we are more prosperous too. Peace is the greatest generator of prosperity humans have ever discovered, and war is the greatest cause of poverty. The Prime Minister and the Chancellor told us yesterday that they are seeking opportunities to invest for growth. My message to them is simple: invest in peace.