Queen’s Speech

Lord Judd Excerpts

Wednesday 11th June 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Judd (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a great privilege to follow the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Eames. He has served his people of Northern Ireland with commitment, distinction and courage over many years, and what he said tonight is no exception. We all need to listen carefully.

Like others, I welcome the Minister’s reference to the summit taking place in London today, and I very much endorse the gladness of my own noble friend Lady Morgan about it. In the long run, our leadership on this issue will depend on the effectiveness with which we handle these issues internally in our own lives and in the areas of the world for which we are responsible. We cannot separate the rhetoric from the performance. Our credibility stands on our own performance, and that applies equally when the Government speak so powerfully—as they have today and as they do repeatedly, with our present Foreign Secretary—about the importance of human rights.

I take second place to nobody in stressing the importance of human rights but, again, the world looks at us and makes a distinction between the rhetoric and the reality. That is why we have to be absolutely committed in all we do—whatever the provocations, however severe or acute they are—to the application of human rights in our affairs and in the affairs for which we are responsible. This is not a burden, as those who drew up the universal declaration in the aftermath of the Second World War understood. Human rights are the cornerstone—the foundation—of security and peace in the world. It is not an oversimplification to say that where there is an absence of human rights, there will always be a danger of alienation, extremism, terror and the rest. Where a very widely operational atmosphere of human rights is applied and fulfilled, there will be very little room for the extremists to recruit.

We live in the midst of a paradox, which this debate has underlined very strongly. On the one hand, we live in a time when the reality of global interdependence has never been more evident. It is true in economic affairs; it is true in trade affairs; it is certainly true in the issues of global warming and climate change; it is true in health; it is true of almost every major issue with which government is confronted. It is difficult to think of any of the issues facing our children and grandchildren that will be resolved within the context of the nation state alone. All will require international co-operation.

Yet we see this new unpleasant reality of political alienation. We cannot bury this and pretend it does not exist. It is there. It is not simply those who vote for less pleasant, extreme parties; it is the very large number of people who do not vote at all and who could become their prey. For that reason, we must recognise that, in the age of globalisation, people feel threatened and insignificant and that they have no strategic influence on their lives. We must understand that if we are to build peace and security, it is essential to recognise the importance of identity, not to deny it—and that involves cultural identity, not just political identity—and then to have the courage and imagination of leadership to enable people to see that in the confidence of their identity they must move forward to co-operation. We must all move forward to co-operation because of what I said in my opening remarks: all the issues that face us necessitate effective international co-operative approaches.

That must also be true in our institutions, certainly as we talk of the reform of the European Union. We have to go back to first principles and recognise that there was a very real debate at the beginning about the virtues of confederalism and federalism. Perhaps what we have learnt in history is that there is a great deal to be said for the confederal approach, whereby you build within the institutions of the European Union the shared commitment and the co-operation necessary to deliver effective policies—not to impose authoritatively and administratively a whole range of policies without those having been debated among the countries and therefore becoming seen as real issues among the people of the individual countries.

It is also perhaps true that we should look at the issues of federation in the context of our own society. I will make only this point about the Scottish issue. I am a half-Scot so I am very much exposed to the debates within my own family. I am very proud of my Scottish blood. If we get a no vote in the referendum, let us not be fooled into thinking that the issue will go away. It will not go away. I do not want to be dispiriting but there is always a danger of that debate turning nasty. In that context, we have to start talking much more imaginatively about different structures for the United Kingdom. We should have done it long ago. I think that we will have a strong future as the United Kingdom if we have a federal United Kingdom in the long run because that is the logic of everything we are trying to do by fiddling here and there—more economic powers for Scotland here, more powers for Wales there. The logic is to get on with building a strong federation in which each part of our United Kingdom can co-operate freely in the common interest.