Foreign Affairs

Lord Purvis of Tweed Excerpts

Tuesday 5th March 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Purvis of Tweed (LD)]

My Lords, this debate has presented a fascinating combination of the global challenges—outlined so eloquently by my noble friend Lord Alderdice—that we now face mid-decade but which will be with us for many years, in fact decades, to come and how the UK Government have approached them over recent years. In summary, the former are immense, and the latter has been faltering in too many areas. Regrettably, there have been too many times in recent years, especially in development policy, when the UK has not been a dependable, reliable and predictable partner. All these factors are absolutely necessary if we are to have the international reputation and recognition that the noble Baroness, Lady Prashar, and my noble friend Lord Bruce have indicated are in our interest.

I start with two areas that have been raised in the debate that need an immediate, far greater international response to humanitarian need. Last year at this time, I was in Khartoum. I met separately General Burhan and General Hemedti to support what turned out to be a failed process to prevent conflict between the Sudan armed forces and the Rapid Support Forces. As the noble Lord, Lord Ahmad, knows, I have continued to support Sudanese civilians through their Takadum initiative, but have watched with ongoing horror the suffering of the people since last April: 8 million Sudanese driven from their homes, likely 15,000 dead and 18 million people whom the World Food Programme describes as being in acute hunger. What was the global community’s response? A paltry 3.5% of the $2.7 billion requested by OCHA has been raised. Trafficking in humans is now on the increase. My heart sank last week when I learned in a meeting that, in 2024, a slave market has been reported in Omdurman, outside Khartoum.

My noble friends Lady Suttie and Lord Bruce, and the noble Lord, Lord Boateng, mentioned the Wagner Group. I called for its proscription 11 times over 12 months and commend the Government for proscribing it, but I would be grateful if the Foreign Secretary could give an assessment of the impact that has had on the Wagner Group’s capability.

Sudan is the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, but it is the least reported and has had the worst global response. Gaza has understandably dominated much of this debate this evening, and I visited the Gaza border two weekends ago through the UK-based Jewish charity, Yachad. I also visited Ramallah, Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. As my noble friend Lady Janke said, of the reported 30,000 Palestinians killed, it is estimated that 70% are women and children. We know in all conflicts that women and children are disproportionately impacted.

I know that the Foreign Secretary is a student of political biography. In 1979, in the first speech by his predecessor Lord Carrington as Foreign Secretary in the Thatcher Government—the last time we had a Foreign Secretary in this House—he discussed the Middle East and said that

“the Palestinian problem lies at the very heart of the issue. The objective here must be full and genuine autonomy for these areas as a step towards determining their final status. Nothing would do more to help these negotiations, to build trust in the area, and to win the consent of the Palestinians than for Israel to cease the expansion of its settlements in the occupied territories”.—[Official Report, 22/5/1979; col. 240.]

That was the year of Security Council Resolution 446, which sought to prohibit illegal settlements. That year, they numbered not more than 15,000; 45 years on and the resolution not being adhered to, that figure is now 750,000.

We already know that settler violence in the West Bank in 2023 was the worst on record, so I welcome warmly the Government’s designation of the two settlers under the global human rights sanctions regime. I visited the part-UK-funded school and medical centre in the West Bank destroyed by one of the settlers now sanctioned by the UK. They acted with impunity, with material and economic support from government entities and Ministers, and these Benches call for the designation under the human rights regime of Ministers Smotrich and Ben-Gvir as facilitators of the violence.

When I met the IDF spokesman, I asked for an estimate of how much they had depleted the capability of Hamas after four months of fighting. He told me that of the 30,000 estimated Hamas fighters, the IDF had killed 10,000. A remark was made at the meeting that 2024 will be a year of war. It is now obvious that there will be no sustainable military solution, and to secure neighbour security for Israelis and Palestinians we needed the bilateral ceasefire in November when these Benches argued for it, with a hostage release programme and the commencement of a political track including the recognition of the state of Palestine.

We have also heard about the ongoing Ukraine conflict and the ongoing suffering of the people of Ukraine. One constant across all sides of the Chamber is that we cannot afford for the Putin regime to prevail. However, as my noble friend Lady Suttie, said, the war inflicted on Ukraine has many fronts. The week of the full invasion, it was clear from messages that I received—when I visited Baghdad and Beirut and came back to the Chamber with reflections—that efforts in Ukraine must be matched with diplomatic and development efforts in the wider region, especially in the Horn of Africa, which is reliant on food supplies, to ensure that we did not present apparent and real double standards.

Unfortunately, we are seen by many around the world not to be reliable, and we have raised the concerns about double standards. We have welcomed and sheltered Ukrainians fleeing disaster but closed off routes for those from Sudan, Yemenis, Iranians and Rohingya. Indeed, the Foreign Secretary confirmed to me on 16 January that funding had been diverted from supporting the Rohingya to pay for the Ukrainian resettlement. The welcome UK aid for Ukraine scheme has been offset by cuts to famine support in the Horn of Africa, meaning our response to famine there was far lower than that to a lesser famine in 2018. These actions are significant because Putin’s objective is to undermine the rules-based international order to highlight its double standards and hypocrisy and instead present a multipolar one, even though we know that it is deeply threatening to neighbouring states. China seems aligned with that broad approach.

The noble Lord, Lord Ahmad, referred, rightly, to trade and development. But the UK has little credibility when we challenge developing economies, asking them to pivot from China when they know that the UK has by far the largest trade deficit in goods with China of any nation on earth, at around £50 billion. That deficit means that we are dependent on China in key sectors, while government policy has made it much harder to trade with Europe, with a cost of £100,000 per typical business in extra trade friction, bureaucracy and form-filling.

As my noble friend Lord Wallace said, reconnecting with Europe on trade—but also on security and intelligence—is now of geostrategic importance. It is an irony of Putin’s horrors against Ukraine that Europe is more united and less divided. This will potentially be a supremely important contingency should a second Trump Administration happen in America.

I declare that I co-chair the Trade Out of Poverty All-Party Group. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Ahmad, when he says that trade and the Commonwealth offer significant opportunities; but not a single FTA with a Commonwealth country signed by the UK under this Government has included a Commonwealth chapter, allowed by the WTO, to pursue and promote intra-Commonwealth trade. I hope that before he leaves office, whenever that is, the Foreign Secretary will change tack and speak to the business department to ensure that that is corrected.

While we have become a less reliable partner, we have also become a less dependable one. At the UN last year, the Development Minister, Andrew Mitchell, said that the UK needed to regain and rebuild trust in the development area. But how can we do this when the Government do not even acknowledge that we have lost it? As my noble friend Lord Oates has indicated, we need to have dependable relationships too. The average tenure of an Africa Minister over the last eight years has been nine months. I was speaking to a diplomat during one of the many reshuffles and he said that the Foreign Office was currently finding out whether the new Minister for Africa had ever been to Africa.

With regard to what dominated the recent AU summit —the eastern lakes, the DRC and Rwanda—we know that there are very many potential conflict areas. Therefore, Rwanda is not only in our domestic legislation but potentially of foreign relations interest. On the Rwanda Bill, we talk about global human rights and the global rules-based order, but the Human Rights Council’s top headline on UN News two weeks ago, when we were debating the Rwanda Bill in Committee in this House, was that the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights was decrying the UK’s breaching of the rule of law and fearful of how other autocracies would feel that it would now be easier for them to do so.

Regrettably, I feel that the Foreign Secretary’s legacy will be his name on that Rwanda treaty; it is his signature. It is a terrible agreement, which, alongside its profound moral faults, simply will not work.

I return to why the UK needs to be a predictable partner in development investment. These Benches would adhere again—we would never have left it—to the 0.7% target in the 2015 legislation, which I had the great privilege to pilot through, with cross-party support. We are committed to its immediate restoration, and we want to see UK development expertise again recognised in an independent development department.

I return to the immediate: 2024 is already a terribly bloody year for civilians. I close with just two comments on a recent visit that I made. Rachel Goldberg, mother of Hersh, a hostage held by Hamas, told me of her empathy with Gazan mothers who have lost their children or are unsure where their children currently are. She told me, “There is no competition of pain and tears; there is just a lot of pain and tears”. The son of parents killed in a peace kibbutz told me how all his mother’s work and warnings had been overlooked in recent years. He said, “I can forgive the past. I can even forgive the present and those who commit the crimes, but I won’t forgive the failure to change the future”.

As we face the first anniversary in a number of weeks’ time of the present conflict in Sudan, I hope the Foreign Secretary will take time to focus on the Sudan crisis. In Gaza, the US and UK must now change policy and call formally for an immediate bilateral ceasefire. If we are to have a process after the day after, we need a day before. If we are to fight for the rules-based international order, there must be order, and we must adhere to the rules.