Libya
Rory Stewart Excerpts(13 years, 3 months ago)
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The Prime Minister
Far be it from me to join the hon. Gentleman in attacking the last Government. To be fair, I think it was right to have a new relationship with Libya when we could persuade it to get rid of its weapons of mass destruction, discontinue its nuclear programme and try to take a different path. I have my criticisms of the last Government, as I think they were then too gullible and went too far in that direction. Specifically, when we had the O’Donnell report into Megrahi it found that the last Government were trying to facilitate his release, but I do not criticise the general intent of wanting a new relationship. What really changed was the treatment by Gaddafi of his own people. That was the moment for the world to act, and I am proud of the fact that the world did so.
Rory Stewart (Penrith and The Border) (Con)
The most impressive aspect of this intervention is the Libyan pride in what Libyans see as a Libyan event. Will the Prime Minister reassure the House that he will do all he can to restrain the irresistible desire of the international community to micro-manage and over-intervene? We should remember that in this kind of intervention, less is more.
The Prime Minister
I know that my hon. Friend speaks with considerable knowledge, not least because rather against my will, he spent two days last week in Tripoli. He has seen for himself that the Libyans are managing the transition quite effectively, but what he says about trying to make sure that we understand our role as backing a Libyan plan rather than substituting our judgment for theirs is the right way ahead.
Afghanistan
Rory Stewart Excerpts(13 years, 5 months ago)
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The Prime Minister
Obviously it is hugely important that we secure those who work in our embassy. I had the great good fortune of meeting many people who work in the Kabul embassy, which is now one of our biggest embassies. They have to make huge compromises to work in such a difficult location, and their security needs to be absolutely at the top of our agenda.
Rory Stewart (Penrith and The Border) (Con)
It takes wisdom to set a date for withdrawal, but it takes enormous courage to stick to that date. Will the Prime Minister reassure us that no amount of guilt at lost lives, over-optimistic promises from generals or fear of lack of progress will ever shake his resolve that Britain will be entirely out of combat operations by the end of 2014 at the very latest?
The Prime Minister
I can give my hon. Friend that assurance because it is important to give people a sense of an end time to these combat operations. As he said, it is always difficult to change the lay-down of British armed forces. I think that the early decision I made to focus on central Helmand and to get out of Sangin has been hugely important in ensuring that we have the right concentration of forces on the ground to do the job that we need to do. It is always difficult to come out of somewhere, but it is an important measure to make us more effective. That does not mean that lives have been lost in vain, however, and the Americans continue to do excellent work in Sangin. Nevertheless, we have to make hard-headed and difficult decisions for the long-term good of our armed forces and country.
House of Lords Reform
Rory Stewart Excerpts(13 years, 5 months ago)
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Gavin Shuker
The hon. Gentleman anticipates the point that I was just about to make. Some people in this country view proportional representation as a more legitimate system of representation, although I and many Members of this House would disagree, so there must be safeguards to prevent the second Chamber taking on the mantle of that legitimacy. In my view, a wholly elected upper House would be the best way to manage that change. Specifically, what would be of most benefit would be to ensure that there was no constituency link between Members of that Chamber and the places they sought to represent.
Rory Stewart (Penrith and The Border) (Con)
I am perplexed by the hon. Gentleman’s suggestion that we should confer legitimacy on the upper House and then prevent it taking on the mantle of that legitimacy.
Gavin Shuker
The hon. Gentleman and I obviously have different opinions on the definition of that legitimacy. There is a type of legitimacy that is very important—the legitimacy of being able to look people in the eye, having stood for election, and hold the mandate of being elected. Equally, there is an issue of accountability. If the hon. Member for Wellingborough (Mr Bone) were here, I am sure he would stand up and say that the most accountability and legitimacy he would have would be with Mrs Bone, because he has a particular one-to-one relationship. [Interruption.] Obviously, I should not speak about him when he is not here. I hold a level of legitimacy and authority with the constituents I represent—100,000 or so—and believe that that would be an unfair level of legitimacy, accountability and authority to bestow on the other place in its new and revised form. I think that that indirect accountability is probably the best way to achieve the balance between having an elected House and not threatening the rights and responsibility of Members in this House to represent their constituents. I think that a party list system would probably be the best way to achieve that. There are many arguments for and against it, and I look forward to the Joint Committee looking at that in more detail.
I want to discuss one other area in relation to which I feel that a 100% elected system would be best: the selection of bishops in the House of Lords. I am a Christian. I am quite overt about that and very proud of my Christian faith. I want to see more Christians and people from other faiths coming into Parliament, but I find it very difficult to defend a system under which we choose a certain group over-represented or to always have a seat in that Chamber. I buy into the liberal idea that there is a round table around which we all get to come together and make our voices heard, and, although I do not feel that that position is always held in this Chamber or in the other place, I believe that that second Chamber could be a place where people go with their own representational legitimacy to make their case, and to make it well, without relying on the fact that they are there simply because of who they are in their own organisations or through right of birth.
The proper way to get more people of faith into our institutions is to encourage more people of faith to stand and make their case for election.
Rory Stewart (Penrith and The Border) (Con)
Why are we discussing constitutional matters in this way? Is this how we should talk about our constitution? Is this how we think such matters should be discussed? Have we forgotten what a constitution is? Do we really think that something which constitutes the rules of the game, and which is supposed to protect our citizens against us, is something that we can somehow arrange in darkened rooms on the basis of 22 words out of 20,000 and three-line-whip through on a rainy afternoon? If we are here for the purpose of democracy, let us deal with the issue in a democratic way.
All of us in this House believe that there is a crisis of accountability and democracy. Let us make not only the outcome democratic; let us make the process democratic too. Let us have the confidence to open it up. Let us accept that constitutional issues are not like other laws, and that we cannot push through constitutional change in the same way that we change the treatment of wild animals in circuses. There is a reason for that.
Constitutions have traditionally emerged either from revolutionary fervour or slow historical evolution, yet we now behave as though they can simply be downloaded from the internet and, with a single press of the “replace all” key, be adjusted to any nation. We are going around the world doing that to other people, and now we are going to do it to ourselves. We are sending out British consultants to lecture Kenyans on governance and Egyptians on democracy, and we are writing constitutions for Iraq and holding elections for Afghanistan, and we are about to do it for ourselves with the same lack of success, because we lack the same thing. In all these cases, we fail because we fail to engage with the nation—with its imagination and desires. Instead, we treat this as a technical exercise. All the issues that have been raised today—who should be in that other House, what that House should do, how its Members should be selected, why it should be changed—are important not just because they are technical details, but because they matter for our country. They matter for our citizens, and the citizens should be allowed to speak about them.
The question of who is to be in the other place is not about what we in this House think should be the balance between elected politicians and the people down the other end of the corridor; it is about what the people think. Do they agree with the shadow Minister that our debates are of a far higher quality and that our expertise can be ranged against that of the other place; or if they were to spend some time in both this House and the other place might they think that teachers, policemen, professors and scientists have something to contribute that matters to them—that is valuable and that they appreciate?
What are we trying to create? Who are these senators with their 15-year terms? What will people make of these monsters of pride, with all the disadvantages and all the unaccountability—they will never stand for election again—sitting on their red Benches, swathed in their ermine robes, without the expertise of others, and able to claim a mandate from the people that conveys power without responsibility? Why are we doing this? We are doing it because the public is angry with us. Under the cloak of democracy and legitimacy, we are switching things around. It is as though our constituents had asked us to repair a leak in the school roof, and we have said, “Don’t worry, we’ve repaired a leak in the church.”
Please let us put our democratic principles into the process. Let us have a free vote at least. Ideally, two thirds of this House should vote for a constitutional change. The Labour party gave us a free vote, and I say to the shadow Ministers that they should stick to it. We should have a free vote on constitutional issues.
Finally, let us accept that if no crisis demands it, and if the public is indifferent and the other side is uninterested, then this reform is uncalled for. We should not let unfocused measures detached from urgent needs or our nation drive us towards a decision that will undermine trust, which is the only foundation of our legitimacy.
United Nations Security Council Resolution 1973
Rory Stewart Excerpts(13 years, 9 months ago)
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Rory Stewart (Penrith and The Border) (Con)
This is not something that began in Libya, and it will not end in Libya. It came out of a regional situation. It is a response primarily to Egypt and Tunisia. We should be celebrating, but with immense caution, what both the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition have supported because of that broader regional context. We are talking about not one country and one month, but a series of countries and 30 years. We have to keep our eyes on that, or we will find ourselves in a very dangerous and difficult situation.
The situation in Libya and the no-fly zone are driven, of course, as everybody in the House has said, by our humanitarian obligation to the Libyan people. It is driven by our concerns for national security and, probably most of all—this is not something that we should minimise—by the kind of message that we are trying to pass to people in Egypt or Tunisia. If we had stood back at this moment and done nothing—if we had allowed Gaddafi simply to hammer Benghazi—people in Egypt, Tunisia and Syria would have concluded that we were on the side of oil-rich regimes against their people. We would have no progressive narrative with which we could engage with that region over the next three decades.
Stephen Lloyd (Eastbourne) (LD)
On that point, does my hon. Friend agree that it is incredibly significant that both the Arab League and countries in the area such as Qatar support the engagement and the UN resolution?
Rory Stewart
I agree very strongly. That is immensely significant, but the meaning of that needs to be clear. The limits that the Prime Minister has set are so important to all of us exactly because of that point. The reason we need the Arab League and the UN on side, the reason we need a limited resolution, and the reason all the comments from around the House warning that the situation should not become another Iraq are so important is that we are talking about 30 years, not just the next few months.
Respectfully, I disagree with the right hon. and learned Member for North East Fife (Sir Menzies Campbell); the most important thing for us now is to be careful with our language and rhetoric, and careful about the kinds of expectations that we raise. I would respectfully say that phrases such as “This is necessary,” or even “This is legitimate,” are dangerous. All the things that the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition have done to hedge us in, limit us, and say, “This isn’t going to be an occupation” are fantastic, but they are only the beginning.
Katy Clark (North Ayrshire and Arran) (Lab)
Does the hon. Gentleman agree that one of the risks is that it might be said on the Arab street that we would not be interested if it were not for the oil in Libya?
Rory Stewart
That is a very important danger. The fact that Libya is not just an Arab country, but a country with oil, has to be borne in mind. The kind of legitimacy that we may have had in Kosovo will be more difficult to come by in Libya for that reason.
The biggest dangers—the dangers that we take away from Afghanistan—are threefold. The Prime Minister will have to stick hard to his commitment, because it is easy for us to say today, “So far and no further,” but all the lessons of Afghanistan are that if we dip our toes in, we are very soon up to our neck. That is because of the structure of that kind of rhetoric, and the ways in which we develop four kinds of fear, two kinds of moral obligation, and an entire institutional pressure behind reinvestment. That is why the former Secretary of State for Defence, the right hon. Member for Coventry North East (Mr Ainsworth), is correct to sound his cautions.
What are the four fears? We can hear them already. First, people are saying, “We have to be terrified of Gaddafi. He is an existential threat to global security.” That is the fear of the rogue state. The second fear is the fear of the failed state. Gaddafi is making that argument himself: “If I collapse, al-Qaeda will come roaring into Libya.” The third fear that people are beginning to express is a fear of neighbours. They are already beginning to say, “If this collapses, refugees will pour across the borders into other countries.” The fourth fear is fear for ourselves: fear for our credibility, and fear that we might look ridiculous if, in response to our imprecations or threats, Gaddafi remains. We have seen the same fears in Vietnam, where people talked about the domino theory. We have seen the same fears in Iraq when people talked about weapons of mass destruction. We have seen the same fears in Afghanistan, where people worried that, if Afghanistan were to topple, Pakistan would topple and mad mullahs would get their hands on nuclear weapons.
Those are all the same fears, and the same sense of moral obligation. We do not need to be able to name two cities in Libya to be able to talk about two kinds of moral obligation: our moral obligation to the Libyan people, and our moral obligation because we sold arms to the Libyans in the past. This is very dangerous, and we must get away from that kind of language and into the kind of language that is humble, that accepts our limits, and allows us to accept that we have a moral obligation to the Libyan people but that it is a limited one because we have a moral obligation to many other people in the world, particularly to our own people in this country.
Of course we have a national security interest in Libya, but we have such an interest in 40 or 50 countries around the world, and we must match our resources to our priorities. The real lesson from all these conflicts is not, as we imagine, that we must act. The real lesson is not just our failure, but our failure to acknowledge our failure, and our desire to dig ever deeper. It is our inability to acknowledge that, in the middle east, many people will put a very sinister interpretation on our actions. It is also our failure to acknowledge that “ought” implies “can”. We do not have a moral obligation to do what we cannot do. We have to consider our resources rather than our desires.
What does that mean? This is easy for someone on the Back Bench to say, and much more difficult for a Prime Minister or other leader to say. How do we set a passionately moderate rhetoric? How do we speak to people to support something that is important? How do we acknowledge the moral obligation and the national security questions, but set the limits so that we do not get in too deep? I suggest that we need to state this in the most realistic, limited terms. First, we need to say that our objective is primarily humanitarian: it is to decrease the likelihood of massacre, ethnic cleansing and civil war, and to increase the likelihood of a peaceful political settlement. Secondly, we will try, in so far as it is within our power to do so, to contain and manage any threat from Libya. Finally, we will deliver development and humanitarian assistance. In the end, however, the real message that we are passing on through limited rhetoric is not to the people of Britain but to the people of the middle east over the next 30 years.
Japan and the Middle East
Rory Stewart Excerpts(13 years, 9 months ago)
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The Prime Minister
I do not believe that the Government are being inconsistent. We have said throughout this that the response of Governments to aspirations for greater freedom and democracy—what we call the building blocks of democracy—should be reform and not repression. That applies right across the region. What is special about Libya right now is that, as I have said, there is an uprising of people against a brutal dictator who is brutalising the people. In the international community, we should be asking ourselves, “What can we do?” We do not have a perfect answer, because there are red lines that we are not prepared to cross, but in my view that is not an argument for doing nothing.
Rory Stewart (Penrith and The Border) (Con)
While welcoming the consensus on both sides of the House that we need a coalition and cannot freelance this, may I ask the Prime Minister what steps are being taken to bring Brazil, India, South Africa and other new members of the Security Council on side with the no-fly zone?
The Prime Minister
My hon. Friend asks an extremely good question. Those discussions are actually ongoing, and the UN Security Council is meeting as we speak. I think that those who have been sceptical about needing to take further action will be struck by what the Arab League and the Gulf Co-operation Council have said, and by what the Libyan opposition themselves have said. If we were having this argument and the Arab League was saying, “No, stay out, don’t help”, that would be a different situation, but that is not the case. I hope that the Brazilians and others will look at what the Arab League is saying and say, “Actually, this is a different situation and we need to give our support.”
Libya and the Middle East
Rory Stewart Excerpts(13 years, 9 months ago)
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The Prime Minister
That question was the definition of flaky. I went to Egypt, an important country whose democratic transition we should be encouraging. I also made a speech in the Kuwaiti Parliament about democracy. Yes, links with middle eastern countries are important. One of the reasons for going was that country after country had said to us that they were ignored, downplayed and downgraded by the previous Government. Making sure that we are building those relationships is important, and the hon. Gentleman’s judgment on this one is wrong.
Rory Stewart (Penrith and The Border) (Con)
Libya is a wake-up call that Afghanistan is not the only country that matters in the world. It shows that we have not had a balanced, moderate foreign policy. Does the Prime Minister agree that this is a reason to accelerate the draw-down of resources from Afghanistan, so that we can meet the many crises in the world, of which Libya is one, that will confront us over the next decade?
The Prime Minister
I do not think this is an either/or. I know that my hon. Friend has considerable experience in Afghanistan, but I think that the draw-down should take place. We have set an end date, but between now and then it should be done with our NATO and international security assistance force partners to make sure that we are doing on the ground what we need to do, so that that country can have some chance of controlling its own affairs and its own destiny and providing its own security. But our aim in Afghanistan is no more than that the Afghans themselves should be able to secure that country, so that it does not require the presence of foreign troops. It is as simple as that.
Big Society
Rory Stewart Excerpts(13 years, 9 months ago)
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Rory Stewart (Penrith and The Border) (Con)
I honour the hon. Member for Dagenham and Rainham (Jon Cruddas) for giving a good defence of many of the good elements of the big society, and a good warning on some of its dangers. Much of the debate, however, reminds me of sitting in a room with a group of philosophers looking at some bird and explaining why the bird cannot fly. Again and again, I come to these debates and hear people say, “The big society cannot work, because people do not want to take responsibility”—I take the point from the hon. Member for Newport West (Paul Flynn) about people not wanting to save a child from a pond—or they say, “It cannot work, because they do not have the resources or expertise”, or they say, “It ought not to work, because if these communities were trusted, they would do the wrong thing.” So there are three kinds of argument: communities do not want to do this stuff; they cannot do this stuff, because of cuts; and they ought not to do this stuff, because they will do something irresponsible. For example, in debates on planning, we hear again and again that communities left to their own devices would build a concrete jungle or act as nimbys and block all development.
There are many good points here. The Opposition are making many good points. The big society is not a replacement for everything; it is not a silver bullet or a panacea. We need a state. I will list three of the many things for which a state is very important. First, we need a state where there are issues of expertise. For example, brain surgery is best left to the state, not a community. Secondly, where massive resources and big strategic decisions are required, such as in the building of highways or high-speed rail networks, things are best left to the state, not individual communities. Finally—this is where I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Dagenham and Rainham—the state is important when it comes to the protection of the vulnerable. Our democracy is based not just on majority representation, but on the protection of minority rights, and for that a state is very important.
Nevertheless, despite the fact that some communities might not want to do these things, despite the fact that some cannot do these things, and despite the fact that some might make the wrong decisions, big society is a wonderful thing. To those philosophers who say that this bird cannot fly, I say that it does fly. They should come to Cumbria or go in fact to any constituency. As was pointed out in an intervention, we can all see again and again exactly what big society is about. It is not about the state; it is not even about the voluntary sector, although it does a wonderful job; and it is not about individuals or businesses. It is about communities and community action.
Why does it work? Why, if someone comes to Cumbria, can they see in Crosby Ravensworth a better affordable housing project built by a community than would have been built by the county council on its own? Why, if someone comes to Kirkby Stephen, can they see a really smart neighbourhood plan—not one pushing for a concrete jungle or a nimby objection to any development, but one sensitive to the vulnerable and imaginative in how it does its development? And why, if someone comes to Appleby, can they see wonderful renewable energy projects? It is because those projects are different from those done by the state in exactly the three ways I mentioned—in the degree of knowledge, in scale and in their relationship to the risk to the vulnerable.
These are projects in which communities have a competitive advantage over the state because local knowledge matters in those projects. It is very important to live in a place in order to produce a really good plan for that place. The people who live there know about the place and care about it. They come up with creative solutions, street by street, on where to place a school, on how much housing to allow and on who will live in the affordable houses and where they will be located.
It also really matters that people care about these projects. Communities want their children to have a house in a way that a distant expert does not. Finally, although it is difficult to quantify, I think that all of us—as politicians, as opposed to civil servants—understand the will and the desire in communities to make things work in a way that a distant expert might not.
This debate should be familiar to the Opposition. There is a very distinguished tradition on the left of believing in people, of not being pessimistic about them, and of not being over-optimistic about technocratic, centralised expertise. There is a tradition of understanding that there is of course a place for the state, but that there is also a place for the community, and that that does not just involve mowing the lawns. A patronising idea is sometimes expressed that communities can be trusted to do only small, limited things.
In Cumbria, we bang on about what we have done with broadband because it is an example of communities, not the state, delivering a highly technical, highly challenging engineering project for a fraction of the cost and in a fraction of the time that the state would have taken. That has happened because the parish can ask people to do things in a way that the state cannot. The parish can ask communities to take out loans to pay for some of their own broadband, it can ask farmers to waive their way leave in order to get the fibre optic cable to the houses, and it can ask the church to put the transmitter on its roof. In that way, the price can be reduced fivefold. And this is just the beginning.
There should be a resonance between both sides of the House over our scepticism of expertise, and over our understanding that there are forms of knowledge, not theoretical knowledge, but “knowledge of how”—“capacity knowledge”, forms of caring, of will and of desire that are not a replacement for the state but that, in the right place and the right circumstances, can achieve miracles.
All the points that hon. Members will make in this debate are true. They will be worried that a project might not be sustainable, or that it has not been the subject of sufficient research or strategic planning. They might also worry about whether it would fit into a global planning framework. All those objections are important and valid. Nevertheless, to return to the bird that I mentioned earlier, some people will stare at it and try to analyse it anatomically, wondering how it will ever get off the ground. I say to them: “Come to Cumbria and see the bird fly.”
Paul Flynn (Newport West) (Lab)
In listening to the hon. Member for Penrith and The Border (Rory Stewart), I had great difficulty in finding any connection between what he was saying and the subject of the debate. He cited three splendid initiatives, but presumably they all took place under the last Labour Government.
Rory Stewart
They are three examples from the big society vanguard project in the Eden district of Cumbria, initiated by this Government, and the hon. Gentleman is very welcome to come and see them.
Paul Flynn
I am glad to have heard that explanation. I was also relieved to hear from the hon. Gentleman that we are not going to have volunteers doing brain surgery.
We should all beware of Prime Ministers bearing three-word gimmick policies. I have served in this House under six Prime Ministers, and I remember “the cones hotline”, “the third way” and “back to basics”. Now, we have “the big society”. I think that the big society has most in common with the cones hotline. These were all pet subjects of various Prime Ministers who were willing to distort their own priorities to find money to plough into them over and above their general policies. There will be a degree of cynicism, when the cuts are taking place in all directions, if money is available to employ volunteers—
Liz Kendall (Leicester West) (Lab)
I am grateful to the hon. Member for Dover (Charlie Elphicke) and the Backbench Business Committee for securing this debate. The issue that we are discussing goes to the heart of what I believe politics is about: how to secure a just and fair society, where everyone has the freedom, power and opportunity to fulfil their potential and thrive. There has and always will be a strong strand within the Labour movement that believes that self-help and community action are the foundations of a good society and the route to a good life. During the industrial revolution and earlier, ordinary working people came together to form co-operatives, mutuals and friendly societies. Those organisations were owned and run by their members for the benefit of one another, and were established to protect working people from the consequences not of an overbearing state, but of unfettered markets that treated people as mere commodities to be bought and sold for financial gain. Generations of working people learned to help and develop themselves by taking roles in those organisations. They learned how to read and write by running a trade union branch or got health insurance from friendly societies in case they had an accident at work.
The modern Labour party was born out of those organisations and we then went on to create the welfare state, so that the security, opportunities and other benefits provided by those organisations were made available to all. The values of community, self-help and mutual aid remain strong in the Labour party, as our record of the past 13 years shows. Government-funded programmes such as the new deal for communities have helped to transform the most deprived areas in my constituency, such as Braunstone, by empowering local residents and community groups. Labour councils have opened up local services to the voluntary sector. In Leicester, organisations such as Streetvibe now provide fantastic youth services, which young people themselves help to shape and run. In Rowley Fields, in my constituency, residents who campaigned to save the Manor House community centre are now running and developing community services that better meet local people’s needs.
Some of the biggest changes that Labour made were in the NHS. We created foundation trusts and backed pioneering new social enterprises, such as Central Surrey Health, so that local staff, patients and the public can now own and run their local health services. However, we did not just harness the skills of voluntary and community groups to transform public services; we empowered those groups to help change markets, too. For example, we increased support for credit unions and updated their legislation, so that more people on low incomes can now save and get access to affordable loans denied to them by the commercial market.
Those are just a few examples of Labour’s good society in action. They show, first, that the state and civil society are not mutually exclusive, but inextricably linked; an enabling state is vital to supporting civil society, and vice versa. Secondly, they show that securing the good society is as much about changing the economy and markets as it is about reforming the state. The Government’s big society fails to acknowledge either of those crucial points, which is why it will fail to empower individuals and communities to take control over their own lives.
Let us consider the Government’s proposals to encourage more volunteering, which is an important and laudable goal. The real issue is not that people cannot or do not want to volunteer because of work or family constraints; it is that securing the good society requires more than kindness and charity alone. Giving people real power and real control depends on far deeper and more powerful principles and values: solidarity and reciprocity; taking common action to achieve common goals; and knowing that your fellow man will share the burdens as well as benefits that life inevitably brings.
The Government say that the big society is about not only encouraging volunteering, but opening up public services so that the voluntary sector can play a bigger role, but some of their plans are likely to achieve the opposite. The Prime Minister says that the new Work programme will make up to £700 million available to the third sector, but organisations are to be paid only after they have got people into work and kept them there for some time, which will mean that many small and medium-sized charities cannot get involved because they simply do not have the resources necessary to put in this money up front.
I have long championed the idea of giving people more choice and a greater say over their public services. As the former director of the Maternity Alliance charity, I have always thought that different providers have an important role to play in public services, but that must be done within a properly managed system so that the benefits of choice are felt by all, with genuine accountability to users and the public. That is not this Government’s approach. They want to drive a full market and full competition approach through the whole public sector, regardless of any evidence about whether competition works in particular fields and without the vital checks, balances and accountability that Labour had in place. That is not the way to improve the quality of our public services or to give users and communities greater control.
Rory Stewart
The hon. Lady has spoken very eloquently about the barriers to volunteerism in relation to resources, and about solidarity, but what about regulation? In my experience, the main barrier that people tend to complain about is that they are prevented by regulation from doing what they want to do, so a lot of this is about clearing regulation out of the way, not about giving people resources.
Liz Kendall
I think that is an important point, but it is not the issue that people in my constituency raise with me about volunteering—it is about whether they have the time and the resources to do it because they have family, caring and work commitments. That might be the hon. Gentleman’s experience, but it is not mine.
Whatever the Government’s plans for reforming public services, the more immediate and pressing issue is the speed and severity of their public spending cuts. There is no getting away from that. Two weeks ago, in my constituency, I met a whole group of charities, which told me that the cuts threaten their very existence. I am talking about brilliant organisations such as Lighthouse Learning, which has played a huge role in reducing the large number of young people not in education, employment or training in Leicester. The Government say they have recognised this problem and provided transitional funding, but groups in my constituency tell me that the funding is available only to charities that are “undergoing change”—for example, merging with others—and not to fund existing work, salaries or rent. If the Government support the voluntary sector so much, why do they refuse to provide transitional funding to continue that work? Unless other funding is found, the very voluntary and community groups that they claim to want to support will have no choice but to close. I do not doubt for a second that Government Members support the voluntary sector and want it to play a bigger role, but their economic policy threatens the existence of many voluntary and community groups because their public spending cuts go too deep and too fast.
NATO Summit
Rory Stewart Excerpts(14 years, 1 month ago)
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The Prime Minister
There was a very lively exchange at the NATO leaders’ dinner on this issue. I am a pragmatist, and it just seems to me that, given that there is an EU mission to train the police in Afghanistan and a massive NATO mission to train the army and the police there, the fact that NATO and the EU cannot talk to each other on these issues because they do not have permission to do so, apart from in Bosnia, is simply crazy. One of the reasons for this problem is the fact that the issue of Cyprus is used by both sides in the debate, and the EU-NATO relationship is used as a proxy for that. I am sure that everyone in this House wants to see a settlement of the Cyprus dispute, but we should not allow that to bung up relations between the EU and NATO. An outbreak of pragmatism is required and, because this was discussed at the dinner, we all instructed our NATO ambassadors to go back and try to do better, so that we can try to unfreeze that conflict.
Rory Stewart (Penrith and The Border) (Con)
I congratulate the Prime Minister on setting such a firm deadline for the ceasing of combat operations but, given the problems that we had in Basra in 2006, how will we use the next three years to ensure that we pin down the United States and British military to facilitate the transition?
The Prime Minister
I pay tribute to my hon. Friend, who knows a huge amount about that country—I do not want to give an advert for his book, because I am sure that it has sold well enough already. The point is that by setting the deadline early, we are giving a clear signal to our friends and allies in NATO about the role that Britain has played—we should remember that we have played a very big role and taken a very large number of casualties—and about our intentions. The key to a successful transition is focusing on training the Afghan army and police, as well as the governance that I have spoken about, and being clear about our intentions. We cannot make it up with only six months to go; we need to say now what Britain’s commitment is and what it will be in the future.
Strategic Defence and Security Review
Rory Stewart Excerpts(14 years, 2 months ago)
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Mr Speaker
Order. These are hugely important matters, and I should like to accommodate some more colleagues, but greater brevity is now vital.
Rory Stewart (Penrith and The Border) (Con)
One of the fundamental problems of the last eight to 10 years has been the split between foreign policy and defence. Will the Prime Minister please tell us what steps are being taken to ensure that not just the National Security Council, but the Joint Intelligence Committee and the Foreign Office, really drive us to have the right resources and the right priorities?
The Prime Minister
I am going to sound a bit like a stuck record on the National Security Council, but it really has struck me over the last few months that when it comes to issues such as how we respond to the Pakistan floods, what we do to help Haiti, how we go through the defence review and what is the future of our development programme, the fact that the Foreign Secretary, the Secretary of State for International Development, the Business Secretary and the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs are all sitting around the table discussing the issues means that decisions are not being made in silos. Much of what the Ministry of Defence does has a huge impact on our foreign policy. Our fleet of frigates is hugely influential in building relationships the world over. I think that the fact that we are all working together much more positively than has been the case in the past solves the problem to which my hon. Friend has alluded.