International Development White Paper

Richard Foord Excerpts

Tuesday 21st November 2023 Commons Chamber

[Mr Mitchell]

The former Foreign Secretary unveiled Britain’s new women and girls strategy in Sierra Leone this year. It is a very good read—if I may add it to the hon. Member’s reading on international development. I was not an unalloyed fan of the merger, as he knows, but when I got back into the Government I saw that the Foreign Office had completely internalised the importance of putting girls and women right at the centre of everything we do in this area, and it is to be commended for that.

[Richard Foord (Tiverton and Honiton) (LD)]

The Minister is exactly right to say that little development happens in the absence of security. Speaking in 2014, before he joined the Government and during Israel’s Operation Protective Edge, he said that a ceasefire in Gaza should be made permanent before talks move on to addressing wider issues in the middle east peace process. Does he now agree that talks addressing the underlying grievances of the moderates would be part of a successful counter-insurgency campaign, part of bringing about greater security, and hence would foster international development in the middle east?

[Mr Mitchell]

The quote that the hon. Gentleman found from 2014 was made in very different circumstances, but he is right to say that development will almost always fail where there is no security. Indeed, as Sir Paul Collier memorably said, conflict is “development in reverse”. On the middle east and Gaza—that is not, of course, the subject of the statement, Mr Deputy Speaker—the sooner we can move to a political track in the region, at the United Nations and in the international Assemblies, and start working on what a future two-state solution would look like, with a state for both Israel and Palestine, the better.