COP26

Tom Tugendhat Excerpts

Wednesday 10th March 2021 Commons Chamber

[Tom Tugendhat (Tonbridge and Malling) (Con)]

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker—and let’s push those eight minutes, shall we?

It is a great pleasure to be in the Chamber today talking about COP26, because it really is the absolute key event this year.  We are going to get through covid, and we are already well along in the right direction due to the brilliance of various people in Government, in science and in the NHS, and many, many thousands of volunteers around the UK. That will free us and the world to focus on the real existential threat that we face, which is, of course, climate change.

I am delighted to follow my friend the hon. Member for Bristol North West (Darren Jones), under whose chairmanship the BEIS Committee has begun to expose some of the questions that we need to answer in the coming months. I am also delighted that we are working together on that, because one of the things I have discovered since taking the Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee is how little of our international reach is exercised by the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office. I thought that the largest and most seminal conference absorbing our diplomatic network and shaping our diplomatic output for this year would be run by the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, but it is not: it is run by the Cabinet Office, and run very ably by my right hon. Friend the COP26 President; I am delighted that he is supported so well by the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office. It was a bit of a surprise to me, but then again, I suppose I should not be surprised, because our Europe policy is also run by the Cabinet Office, and not even in this House, so perhaps I should expect our Americas policy and our Africa policy to be run by the Cabinet Office. Eventually, perhaps only our Scottish policy will be run by the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, but that would be a great shame. Maybe that can bring us back to talking about the importance of focusing on the joined-up policy that we need to see.

While the Select Committees have come together and have been working together, it is also worth pointing out how well the Government have begun to work together. When the French started their process, it resulted in the Paris COP21 that everybody remembers. That was not only a success at the time, but with the election of President Biden, it has become a renewed success as Paris has just been signed up to again by the United States. It took them two years, hundreds of diplomats and a former Prime Minister to bring all that together. That work was really, really tough. What my right hon. Friend has picked up on is that he started later with fewer staff and in the middle of the covid pandemic, and that makes it really difficult. However, I can report from, if he will excuse me, spies in other camps that the pace at which he is producing results is already very well received. I am delighted to say that in conversations I have had with representatives from other countries—I am not going to name them, but they are people who have spoken to him in recent days and weeks—they have reported that he is certainly well on the way to delivering a result.

Of course, this is not just down to my right hon. Friend; it is also down to our partners around the world. Many people have heard me in this House condemning communism, but I have to tell the House that I have actually been working very closely with a communist in order to try to achieve some of the results that we are all trying to share. He is my opposite number and colleague in the Italian Parliament—Piero Fassino, the former communist mayor of Turin, who now chairs its foreign affairs committee, because this conference is of course being organised jointly with our Italian partners. We have all welcomed my right hon. Friend’s co-operation with them.

In the run-up to our going to that wonderful city of Glasgow—my favourite city in the north—later this year, I very much hope that we will get a chance to see some of the progress along the way. My friend, the hon. Member for Bristol North West, has set out many of the targets that we should be looking to, and I hope that he will be as co-operative in reporting back to this House and to Parliament generally to make sure that we can help to guide the process. This will be one of those moments when we can define the future—we can change policies not just in this country but around the world to make these aims possible. We need to be talking actively not just about carbon offshoring and carbon pricing but about how we transform the very nature of the societies in which we are working. The hon. Gentleman spoke about Antarctica and, indeed, other areas being made uninhabitable. We need this to be a policy that is not just led by the Cabinet Office but touches on every single aspect of Britain’s foreign policy.

Whatever happens with the aid budget—I know that many of us hope that 0.7% will be rather more respected than do others—what we decide to do in aid, in diplomacy and in how we structure our trade policy will have a direct consequence on whatever my right hon. Friend agrees with partners around the world. That is why I very much hope that his role, as he sees it, will not just be about a conference—not just about an event, a day and a moment—and not even just about a deal, although it is a hugely important deal. Actually, this will be about a change of structure, a new understanding and a new partnership that engages all of us and—yes—the Biden Administration, who have already demonstrated such interest, as well as our partners in the European Union, our partners in the Commonwealth and, indeed, those countries with whom we have often found it harder to work. If we do not get this right, we will feel the pain—it is true—but we will also see an increased salination of the rice fields of eastern China, an increased desertification of the many parts of the world that are already struggling, and an erosion of the ability of many communities to sustain.

This year, the World Food Programme was rightly awarded the Nobel peace prize— a well-earned prize. I was fortunate enough to speak to its director general, Governor David Beasley, who is an amazing individual and a great friend of our country. He pointed out what I think is well worth remembering: if we think that the migration crisis that we saw in 2015 out of Syria was something serious, just imagine the crisis that would be caused if my right hon. Friend the COP26 President and his friends and partners around the world were to fail in Glasgow. I hope he knows that he will have the support of the whole House, and he will certainly have the support of the Committees, as we try to help him to shape and achieve the results that we all need.