Autocrats, Kleptocrats and Populists

Viscount Eccles Excerpts

Thursday 3rd February 2022 Grand Committee

[Viscount Eccles (Con)]

In following the noble Lord, I very much agree with him that we should refer ourselves back to the creation of the United Nations, the World Bank, the IMF and the other institutions. Indeed, the Motion refers to co-ordination, which is a very important point.

I move on to sub-Saharan Africa, where there is a quarter of the world’s poorest countries. It seems a very good example of the struggles to arrive at a proper understanding of the norms and values of democracy. It has been said, and I think it is right, that the best thing about democracy is that it enables you to change your Government without violence. In sub-Saharan Africa, that is by no means universally the case. Another thing that one could say is that some countries that have been mentioned today, including our own, have arrived at an understanding of the norms and values of democracy and are now being accused of backsliding—what you might call the Capitol syndrome. But many other countries have never got there. It is important that we think differently about the countries that have never got to the point where they had regimes that respected the norms and values of democracy.

When one thinks about sub-Saharan Africa, one is looking for something positive—that is to say, what are we going to do about it? Do we have any responsibility to do anything? If so, what will we do? Of course, that takes one back to the international organisations. In reading about the World Bank’s operations in sub-Saharan Africa, I get the impression that it is rather tired. It is not the World Bank I remember from 20 or 30 years ago.

The positives we need to find are headed by economic development. We know that if you want to have a reasonable regime, it is important to be able to collect some taxes and to have some public expenditure. If your economy simply does not support that approach, you are not very far along the road to having an acceptable regime. In thinking about acceptable regimes, it is risky to assume that the default position is our understanding of democracy. All the evidence shows that this is not the case and that there may be many other ways in which people will continue to think about their politics and their regime that do not conform to our understanding of the norms and values of democracy. We have to approach all this rather cautiously.

I want to cite two examples in sub-Saharan Africa: Burundi and Cameroon. They were both brought under German colonial control in 1884. At the end of the First World War, they were both taken away from Germany and, by a co-ordinated effort of the League of Nations, one became Belgian and one a mixture of French and English. We now have virtually no relationship with Burundi, but we have a sanctions regime. It seems to me that to apply a sanctions regime to Burundi, which is similar to that we might apply to Russia, does not make any sense. I think the British Government have forgotten Burundi. On Cameroon, I have just one last sentence: there is conflict there, again created to quite a large extent by the League of Nations decision after the First World War and by independence and what happened in 1971. I think our Government’s reaction is that Cameroon is too complicated for us to have an opinion about what should be done there. After Brexit, we now need some opinions about what needs to be done in sub-Saharan Africa.

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

My Lords, the speaking time for Back-Benchers is five minutes. If we go over that, we will cut into the time that the Minister has to respond, so can we please keep an eye on the clock?