Westminster Foundation for Democracy: Funding

Philip Dunne Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd March 2022 Westminster Hall

[Richard Graham]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend, who was earlier discussing with me the importance of environmental democracy. I hope he will participate in the event that the WFD has organised, which I think is on the last day of March. It will gather colleagues from across the world to discuss the importance of environmental democracy. It is exactly the sort of long-term work he believes in, and that we are trying to deliver. I sense a future role for him in the WFD.

[Philip Dunne (Ludlow) (Con)]

My apologies for arriving after the commencement of the debate; I was still in a Select Committee. I put on record my appreciation for my hon. Friend for securing this debate and for the work that he does in chairing the Westminster Foundation for Democracy. It is not always the most glamorous task, but having been a director myself some 10 years or so ago, I know what incredibly important work it does. It helps to project on a cross-party basis from both Houses of Parliament the importance and the strength of encouraging democracy in some of the emerging democracies—particularly from former Soviet states.

I was in Kyiv with the WFD on my only visit to that, at present, benighted country. I tried to encourage the parties to recognise the importance of democracy and the role they can play in standing up to aggression. It is vital that WFD continues to do that work, not least during these dark days.

[Richard Graham]

I am very grateful for what my right hon. Friend has said. His own experience, both in Ukraine and more widely on the board of WFD, is extremely relevant. I pay warm tribute to Members of Parliament, the Government themselves and our non-political governors for their commitment and voluntary work over the few years that I have been chairing this organisation. It is to them that we owe what I hope is generally seen as a successful organisation, punching, as Douglas Hurd used to say, above our weight.

This is a good moment to come back to when we started, which was in 1992, after the fall of the Berlin Wall. It was a time when optimism was strong about the future of democracy. There was the election of Nelson Mandela in South Africa and the fall of dictators across eastern Europe. There was the exit of Suharto in Indonesia and Pinochet in Chile. These were heady times for those who believed in the values of democracy. The WFD was created to build those bridges between British political parties and our counterparts overseas, with other Parliaments and civil society, which is not to be underestimated in any of the countries where we run programmes—the role of civil society to help build more open societies and more prosperous countries.

In many ways, when the Foreign Secretary talks about a network of liberty, we can help deliver that, but we can do that only if we get the resources to enable us to deliver. Let me give one very tangible example, which I saw in action last week, in the Bangsamoro region of the southern Philippines, on the island of Mindanao, which I last spent a considerable amount of time in in 1986, when there was a rampant civil war between various Islamic groups, which we would now call fundamentalists or jihadists, as well as communists and the Philippines army. It was a region where everything was decided by the gun.

Today, in the Bangsamoro Parliament, which was set up over the last couple of years, and in the Bangsamoro Transition Authority, which is run by a former freedom fighter, I saw at first hand how the project that we are delivering—sponsored by the British embassy in Manila—can contribute to a series of programmes there, run by those who most strongly believe in democracy, to help deliver real peace and prosperity to that part of the Philippines. It is fragile, but I believe that an extension of it, which I hope will be formally announced fairly shortly, will continue to make a real difference. It is far away from the headlines of the media back here, but it is delivering very valuable progress.

To bring this speech to a conclusion, I hope that today’s debate leads not only to a reconsideration of our budget and a reaffirmation of support from the FCDO and from colleagues, but to a reimagination of what this country can do to support democracy across the world, at a time when democracy itself is under threat. That great challenge of our generation is up for grabs.