Queen’s Speech

Lord Teverson Excerpts

Thursday 17th May 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Teverson]

My Lords, I have the great privilege of being the chair of the House’s European sub-committee on external affairs, on which I have been helped many times by the Chairman of Committees, who is in the Speaker’s place and whom I thank for his assistance over the past few years. Today I will go through some of the issues that the committee has felt strongly about and has reported on, and will ask the Government a number of questions on them.

South Sudan and Somalia are both in the Horn of Africa, which is one of the areas that we looked at and about which we have concerns. I will deal with the Horn of Africa first. We very much welcome the fact that our Government, together with the European Union, are bringing together a much more overarching strategy for the region—one that is not just based on naval forces against piracy but encompasses security sector reform, with personnel based in Uganda but for the benefit of Somali troops, as part of a much broader Horn of Africa strategy.

In particular we noted that in the past two weeks there was an incident where EU forces in the Indian Ocean, as part of Operation Atalanta, attacked onshore pirate facilities in Somalia. I am sure that I speak on behalf of my committee when I say that we welcome that bolder-than-usual step forward towards making sure that we stem the problem at the source rather than trying to solve it in the vast expanse of the Indian Ocean. It is a major step forward.

We were very iffy—if I may put it that way—about the civil arming of merchant ships, which is being introduced with government approval. There, perhaps, the committee will have to eat its words. If it is done with sufficient training and is successful, it will be another step forward that we will welcome.

A Question was asked earlier in the day in the House on South Sudan. It is a key issue. Matters have got worse. We thought that perhaps they could not get worse but they have. The committee is very aware that the problem is not just with the Sudanese Government; the South Sudanese Government, too, have been reckless in this area by cutting off oil revenues to the north and by their occupation, however provoked, of Sudanese oilfields for a temporary period—as well as all the other issues in South Sudan.

We wish South Sudan every success in its independence, but at the moment the situation is going the wrong way. We know that both the European Union and our Government are very concerned to make sure that the matter is resolved peacefully. Again we ask them to bring China constructively into the conversations, because China is the main market for both countries’ output of commodities, so that we can somehow resolve the issue without all-out war between the two nations. It is a very difficult topic, but if it goes wrong it will threaten much broader regional instability that will spread into Uganda and other parts of that area of Africa.

Another area that our committee is involved in is not directly European but covers the UK-French defence treaties that were agreed at the end of 2010. It is probably not known by the House generally that my committee, together with the Defence Committee of the other place, meets the Senate and the National Assembly every six months to track the progress of the treaties and to give a parliamentary overview on whether they are fulfilling their objectives. The overview was demanded more by the French Administration than by us, but was very much supported by the MoD as something that would help us in our negotiations. Of course, the Libyan war was an example of bringing together our forces. Instead of practice through exercises, there was close co-operation between our two armed forces during that time.

We are very keen that those defence treaties should continue to be successful. There has been much progress with them over the past year: they have been deepened. But I would be interested in the Government’s view on how the change in aircraft specification for our own aircraft carriers away from cats and traps will affect that interoperability and whether it will in any way sour the potential defence relationship. Has there been any initial indication from the new French president in the Elysée Palace as to whether he is equally dedicated to this very noble cause of two great European powers making sure that together they are able to exercise their military influence in times of budgetary difficulty?

I would like to bring up an area of personal interest as chair of the All-Party Group for Guinea-Bissau, which is a small ex-Portuguese colony in west Africa. It has been an independent state since the 1970s. It has all sorts of issues. I was due to go out as an election monitor for the second round of presidential elections last month. Unfortunately, those did not happen because of a military coup. My APPG was part of the monitoring of the first round of presidential elections. The tragedy was that that election was carried out perfectly—as well as any election in this country—yet the military did not approve of the likely result and intervened. I want publicly to thank the Foreign Office and the ambassador in that part of Africa, who is based in Senegal, who helped that election monitoring to work and be successful. I can do no more than endorse European and British sanctions now on Guinea-Bissau and on those individuals in the military until that situation is resolved.

I was going to talk about the European military situation and the NATO summit in Chicago coming up, but I do not have time. However, it is imperative that the EU and NATO work together for Europe's defence now that America is cutting its own budgets and looking towards the Pacific theatre. We have huge resources in Europe and we should use them better, which means that they should not cost us any more money to be effective.