Queen’s Speech

Lord Williams of Baglan Excerpts

Monday 23rd May 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Williams of Baglan (CB)]

My Lords, the gracious Speech makes the bold statement that Her Majesty’s Government will continue to play a leading role addressing major international security and humanitarian challenges. However, there has not always been strong evidence of that in the debate this afternoon, preoccupied, as it has been, by the forthcoming referendum on Europe—the result of which, I would argue, will have an enormous influence on the role that this country will be able to play in addressing conflict resolution in the coming years.

The gracious Speech refers to Ukraine. Of course, we are not a member of the Normandy group that brings together France and Germany, Russia and Ukraine itself. It also mentions Syria. There is no mention of Iraq, of Israel/Palestine, of the United Nations, where we are still a permanent member of the Security Council, or of the pending search for a new Secretary-General. The Normandy group was formed precisely on the 70th anniversary of D-day, 6 June 2014, yet, by an historical irony, we are not part of that group. Seventy years on, we no longer seem to be at the heart of European security issues, as we were as recently as the 1990s in the Contact Group on the Former Yugoslavia. Not to be involved in the most important diplomatic group on Ukraine seems to me a ball that was dropped in the Foreign Office, if ever one was.

I turn now to the Middle East and welcome what the gracious Speech says about ISIS and a lasting political settlement to the Syrian tragedy, now in its sixth year. I welcome, too, the note of caution and implicit welcome for a political settlement in Syria, which, by definition, would somehow have to include all sides. However, other parts of the Middle East are not mentioned—for example, Iraq, where the promised political advances have not materialised some 13 years after the US/UK invasion left the country broken and divided. The recent storming of the green zone in Baghdad by protesters led by the Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr brought to the surface a long-standing dilemma—namely, that the system which has governed the country since 2003 is in dire need of radical reform. However, the ruling political class has set its stance against that and is highly resistant to genuine change.

There is much in the gracious Speech about the need for the fight against Daesh, but that fight cannot be prosecuted solely by military means. That should be stunningly obvious. It needs political recourse, and that is singularly absent in our policy with regard to Iraq—a policy which, I have to say in defence of the Government, is not limited to the UK Government; it is one held by the Government of the US and our other allies.

I want to focus now on Israel and Palestine, and perhaps to state the obvious—that there is no longer a peace process. We seem to be indifferent to that. There have been no serious negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority for more than two years. What was called the Middle East peace process and the quartet are now fictions—entities hollowed out. Yet we know that this is a situation that in the long run is unsustainable. In Israel the right wing gets stronger—especially the national religious groupings—and on the Palestinian side there is a continued division between the Palestinian Authority and Hamas. The Palestinian Authority is led by Mahmoud Abbas, or Abu Mazen, now 80 years of age, and it is difficult to foresee Israel dealing with a more moderate Palestinian interlocutor. The landscape of Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking bears no resemblance to that of a decade ago, in which I was privileged to play some role in both a national and UN capacity. Little, if nothing, has been done to alter the conditions that precipitated unrest and violence in the past—the continuous growth of settlements and the heavy presence of the Israeli army in much of the West Bank. I would welcome the Minister’s reflections on this and on why it is not seemingly a greater priority in the Government’s foreign policy. Is that simply because it is too hard?

I welcome the initiatives that the Minister spoke to with regard to sexual and gender discrimination. I strongly endorse them. However, they cannot on their own substitute for the real hard grind of diplomacy needed to tackle deeply entrenched conflicts that we ignore at our peril.