Global Challenges

Lord King of Bridgwater Excerpts

Thursday 2nd July 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord King of Bridgwater (Con)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Ashdown, on the vigorous and most interesting way he delivered his speech, in the luxury facility of 15 minutes, about which I feel extremely jealous. I shall therefore restrict myself to very few remarks.

The first is on questions of activism and what we can actually do, in the kinetic way in which the noble Lord, Lord Ashdown, described it. I look on what happened in Afghanistan and recall the phrase that almost wilful ignorance of local realities led to the West’s failures in Afghanistan. We have been there for 14 years now, and I see that the new Chief of the General Staff, General Carter, said very recently that the most important lesson that he learned was, before you get involved in these problems it is very important to have a good understanding of what the problem is and then limit your ambition accordingly. Those words could have been well taken into account many years ago.

Following on from that was what I regard as the disastrous invasion of Iraq, which unlocked the Sunni/Shia conflagration that we have now, running from Mali to Mumbai. Unlike the turbulence that the noble Lord, Lord Ashdown, referred to—some of which, such as that of the Lehman Brothers, was capable of early solution—I do not see any early resolution of the conflagration of that sectarian struggle.

Against that background, I do not have time to discuss the need for sensitivity and intelligence in the approach to Russia at the present time in Ukraine and Georgia, where EU or NATO activity could easily provoke a very difficult situation, which is the last thing that we can afford at the present time. I regard what is happening in north Africa, the Middle East and beyond as just the beginning of what could be an absolutely catastrophic situation. I do not know whether noble Lords noticed an announcement in the paper only yesterday that Jordan has stopped food coupons for half a million refugees currently outside their camps. Nobody has any idea how those people will be fed.

The World Food Organisation says that the World Food Programme is running out of funds. The figures for displaced people in Syria are absolutely enormous. I have just checked the population of Yemen: it was 8 million in 1980; it is now 26 million. It imports 90% of its food, it has a shortage of water and a war going on right across its territory. The implications of what that might lead to are quite terrifying. As the noble Lord, Lord Evans, knows very well indeed, social media and the communications that can develop from them underpin the speed of things happening in this area.

I want to make one fundamental point. The noble Lord, Lord Ashdown, gave us four global challenges. He left out one: population. That is an issue that we do not talk about but which is devastating. Why did they demonstrate in Tahrir Square? It is because they did not have any jobs. The outcome of that is that there are even fewer jobs now. If you look at the explosion in population and at Tunisia, the man who committed this outrage was quite well educated, but he did not have a proper job. Some 3,000 of his chums have gone through Libya, training for Syria and other places, and there is a lack of jobs right across the globe. Saudi Arabia has a population of 24 million at the moment; it is forecast to be 48 million in 20 years’ time. That is not exclusive to them; it is all round the region. Part of the jihad I believe is built on the frustration of lack of jobs.

I pulled out an article that David Attenborough wrote in 2001 in the New Statesman. He wrote:

“The population of the world is now growing by nearly 80 million a year. One and a half million a week. A quarter of a million a day”.

He wrote that that is going to have to stop: it is a finite planet and it will stop at some point, and that,

“that can only happen in one of two ways. It can happen sooner, by fewer human births—in a word, by contraception”,

and family planning.

“The alternative is an increased death rate—the way that all other creatures must suffer, through famine or disease or predation. That, translated into human terms, means famine or disease or war—over oil or water or food or minerals or grazing rights or just living space”.

It is a terribly difficult subject to tackle. The absolute priority for the world now, looking at the longer term, is that our own aid programme and the United Nations efforts into family planning and contraception have to be a central ingredient in any approach that we take to tackling both the long-term and appallingly difficult short-term problems that we face.