Yemen

Rosena Allin-Khan Excerpts

Tuesday 18th October 2016 Commons Chamber

[Keith Vaz]

I agree wholeheartedly with the hon. Lady. I commend her party and its Members for the way in which they have raised Yemen on so many occasions. I am grateful, and the House is very grateful, for that. She is right that we need to do much more. Organisations such as Save the Children, UNICEF, Islamic Relief, Médecins sans Frontières and the Red Cross are performing wonders on the ground, but they are struggling to get the funding needed for emergency programmes.

[Dr Rosena Allin-Khan (Tooting) (Lab)]

My right hon. Friend will be interested to know that I recently travelled to the World Bank with RESULTS UK to put forward the argument that the first 1,000 days of a child’s life are vital for their development. This means that even when the conflict ends, the effects will not stop. They will not cease. Millions of children will be left stunted with delayed cognitive development and may still die, despite the conflict ending. Does my right hon. Friend agree that we need to be doing more to find a peaceful solution?

[Keith Vaz]

I do, and I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention. I agree wholeheartedly.

When faced with a crisis of these proportions, one would have expected, as my hon. Friend has said, that the international community, led by the UK, would be urgently bringing the conflict to an end, and putting this at the very top of the agenda at the United Nations. Instead, when faced by this reality, the world has failed Yemen. We failed to stop the escalation of violence in March last year, and we failed to stop the fighting over the last 18 months. We have had two clear opportunities for a sustainable end to the fighting: a brief ceasefire for negotiations in April this year ended in failure; and the UN-sponsored round of talks in Kuwait ended in failure in August. Will the Minister confirm whether or not the UK Government were invited to these negotiations? Were we actually in the room?