G8 Summit

Lord Bishop of Bath and Wells Excerpts

Thursday 13th June 2013 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of Bath and Wells]

My Lords, I am most grateful for the opportunity to participate in this debate and to speak in the gap, not least because, due to my impending retirement and relinquishment of my See, this is the last opportunity that I will have to address your Lordships’ House. I express my thanks to the House for its unfailing courtesy and generosity to me during my brief years of service here.

I, too, thank the noble Lord, Lord Trimble, for his introduction to this debate. Fermanagh is very special to me. It was the home of my late and much loved father-in-law.

The Prime Minister indicated on 6 June that the G8 summit would be an important opportunity for him to discuss Syria with the other world leaders. While most of the attention at the G8 will rightly focus on the priorities set out by the Prime Minister and largely debated here today, it is nevertheless customary for the first day of the G8 to be spent on pressing international issues.

There is probably no more pressing concern than the crisis in Syria, which the Foreign Secretary has described as representing,

“the worst crisis affecting world affairs at the moment”,

and the biggest humanitarian crisis today. Few would disagree, and it is clear that for the G8 to meet without due attention to this matter would be unacceptable.

I welcome the remarks made by Justine Greening in the other place in respect of the United Kingdom Government’s commitment to both the short and long-term need for humanitarian aid. Further, with the United Nations appeal for £3.2 billion to deal with the humanitarian emergency, the G8 provides us with an opportunity for encouragement of greater participation in respect of that need. It is clear that we cannot stand by and do nothing.

I declare an interest as the chair of Conciliation Resources. There are competing narratives on Syria, not least in the provision of arms, and there is a real difference of opinion in this House, as evidenced elsewhere. However, the absence of a political settlement in Syria places particular strains on the resilience of neighbouring countries, particularly Lebanon. Every effort needs to be made by the G8 leaders to contain the conflict, and key to this is meeting the humanitarian needs of Syria’s refugees, which are already pushing to breaking point the current UN refugee protection system.

The G8 provides a rare opportunity to offer hope in an otherwise bleak landscape. It provides an opportunity for G8 members to resolve the differences that have emerged since the announcement on 7 May of a joint effort by the US Secretary of State, John Kerry, and the Russian Foreign Minister, Sergey Lavrov, to convene a peace conference to advance a political solution. I hope that the Minister can give this House some assurance that at the G8 the United Kingdom Government will give a real impetus to pursue this rigorously. As the former NATO Secretary-General Jaap Scheffer said, all parties, including the Assad regime and Iran, should be among those present on this occasion.

The G8 summit provides an opportunity to move beyond the paralysis and defeatism that has all too often marred international debates about Syria. I believe that the brutality and bitterness of the Syrian conflict, which mirrors all too many such conflicts in recent times, place before us a deep series of questions. What does it mean to be a human being? How do we value and place significance on every human life? I very much hope that the G8 will get behind the peace initiative. I hope too that we might at some point have a debate in this House on the issue and nature of the significance of human dignity and what it means to be human. Meanwhile, we express the hope that the leaders of the G8 will, as we implore them to, resist the bellicose rhetoric with its threat of regional spillover, and ratchet down the violence to bring an end to this ghastly conflict, with all its dehumanising realities.