Westminster Foundation for Democracy: Funding

Maria Miller Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd March 2022 Westminster Hall

[Mrs Maria Miller (Basingstoke) (Con)]

It is a great pleasure to work under your chairmanship, Dr Huq.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Gloucester (Richard Graham) on securing the debate and on his incredible work as the chair of the Westminster Foundation for Democracy. I draw attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests: I, too, am a governor of the WFD. There can be few dates when it would be more appropriate to discuss the importance of supporting democracy around the world, following the incredibly moving standing ovation for the Ukrainian ambassador at Prime Minister’s questions today.

My hon. Friend set out why we should never be complacent about the role of democracy in our world and about the importance of continually making the case for it. He is absolutely right about the fragility that we should be concerned about at all times. I suggest to him that this is an appropriate time to remind ourselves that no man is an island. Geographically, that is always a difficult concept for people from the United Kingdom, but we are not an island: in a world of globalised interests, everybody is our neighbour, and we should never forget that. The more that we can invest in ensuring that those neighbours are stable and have the values that we have, the safer we all are.

My hon. Friend pointed out that the WFD was established directly after the fall of the Berlin wall to strengthen democracies and, by doing so, to strengthen Parliaments and countries as well. WFD funding is from many different sources. I am a relatively new governor and am still trying to get my mind around all these things, but the core funding, rightly, is from the UK Government. To be diplomatic, planning for the next financial year has been challenging because of the lack of a clear indication of the likely level of the grant for the spending review period.

Having myself been a Minister through a spending review, I can only stare in admiration at this Minister, given the amount of work that she must be doing or have done on this. I do not underestimate the complexities. It is absolutely right that Ministers consider carefully how overseas development assistance is allocated—we would expect nothing less—but this debate is to draw attention to the fact that delay, of necessity, causes uncertainty. That uncertainty and the impact it can have on organisations such as the WFD is what we want to remind the Minister about today, particularly given the WFD’s pivotal role in helping deliver the strategic priority for the Government of strengthening democracies around the world.

Financial uncertainty is affecting our ability to operate at a level that we would expect, given the real and transparent need to strengthen democracies at this time. I hope the Minister can provide clarity today. She knows the WFD through her own work and through my noble Friend Lord Ahmad’s visit to Bosnia and Herzegovina, where he learned about the WFD’s western-Balkans programme. Indeed, the Prime Minister, in his former role as Foreign Secretary, announced the Commonwealth Partnership for Democracy programme and launched the WFD Kosovo programme in Pristina.

The Minister for Europe and North America, my right hon. Friend the Member for Braintree (James Cleverly), also learned a great deal about the work of the WFD in supporting women’s political participation and representation, in preparation for his recent visit to Kuwait. It is so often women who are disproportionately affected when democracies are threatened. I could give many other examples, but time is short. Suffice it to say that we need to see that the UK Government are doing all they can to ensure that, through the WFD and organisations like it, Government strategy for a global Britain and the ambition to strengthen democracy around the world can be brought into reality. I pay tribute to the staff of the WFD who, despite all the uncertainty, have continued their extraordinary work in an unstinting way.