Global Britain: Human Rights and Climate Change

Rachael Maskell Excerpts

Tuesday 7th September 2021 Westminster Hall

[Rachael Maskell (York Central) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is a pleasure to serve with you in the chair, Mr Betts, and I also thank the hon. Member for Arfon (Hywel Williams) for highlighting the urgent need for Government leadership, not least at a time when we see the G7 intersecting with COP26. In my city of York—the only human rights city in the UK—we weave human rights together with climate rights; we believe that together they deliver a just agenda.

The events in Afghanistan this summer have ricocheted through the Government, demanding that the Government seriously question their priorities. The UK Government have spent around £37 billion on a war that has resulted in a shattered country, now on the edge of a humanitarian crisis due to crop failure caused by climate failure—or should I say human failure. The country is now so fragile that we fear that to talk about human rights seems understated, since the right of humans just to exist there is the only thing we can focus on. The UK has spent the equivalent of just 10% of the war’s cost on development aid in Afghanistan. If the balance between development and defence had been reversed, if we had chosen to use our soft power to support the region rather than destroy it, if we had spent our time building bridges not conflict and instead of provocation chosen reconciliation, what a difference we could have made. If we had traded in ethics and ethical goods, not arms and aggression, what lasting good we could have done alongside others.

The term global Britain, in itself, imposes a colonial superiority from a nation that has over the centuries used its influence to extract wealth, resources and even people for its own economic advantage. When we examine our shameful history, we soon realise our part in driving global destitution, climate degradation and international instability. Our export portfolio hardly causes us to lift our heads from this shame; trade has been at the expense of rights and the climate—not in aid of it. It has been transactional, not relational and transformational. Arms sold to nations such as Saudi Arabia—which protect neither human rights nor the climate—are one such example that shows that trade, rights and climate are interwoven.

We should harness a different approach—one that seeks to advance equality and reparation, and economic and climate diplomacy—and lead a new dialogue on peacemaking and trade justice. We should collaborate with others, not exert power over them. Hardwiring simple principles will demand a different emphasis on our trading priorities, but will leave a more stable and equal planet. A carbon border adjustment mechanism or a border tax would ensure that we minimised carbon use through trade, instead of offshoring climate destruction activity, while keeping our country clean. It would ensure that we took responsibility for substandard practices in making all the products we purchase. Fundamentally, it would shift us from a consumerist approach to a collaborative one that advances values and enhances the people and planet we interact with.

In a post-Afghanistan world, the UK must never again return to its hard imperial roots, but instead must find its soft power as one of many collaborators, not as global Britain but as Britain humbly repaying the debt we owe this planet and all who inhabit it.