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Foreign Policy

My Lords, I join the noble Baroness, Lady Hooper, in her commendation of the Council of Europe. The more I see of our involvement in the European Union and what it forces us to do, the more I admire the Council of Europe, which operates entirely on a voluntary basis, with no powers of compulsion. It is a most excellent organisation, to which we should pay more attention. I join everyone else in thanking the noble Lord, Lord Howell, for giving us this debate and a good opening speech—an admirable tour d’horizon, which will certainly repay my study in the future, as will the speech of the noble Baroness, Lady Symons, which was very much to the point. The image that comes to my mind in looking at the present international situation is that of a leaky boat containing a number of unruly amateur sailors. Some are dying of thirst, while others are drinking a good deal more than is good for them. Most seem more interested in quarrelling than in mending leaks and manning the oars together. One officer is aboard in the form of the United Nations, but he finds himself under the unhelpful influence of an overweight, heavily armed bully and tends to be ignored by us, although we were seriously involved in the founding and the early working of the United Nations—it is sometimes forgotten that its first meeting was in Church House and that its first Secretary-General was Lord Gladwyn, a member of the Liberal Party in your Lordships’ House. I find myself more and more distressed when we ignore the United Nations, as we have done in our attempts to bolster America. America is in denial over the leak problem and its main effort is to get everyone over to the starboard side of the boat to try to harpoon a great white shark that it wrongly believes to be the main threat. Clearly, we need to bring a sense of order and rationality to bear on the international situation. I would like to bring to your Lordships’ attention a series of reports by the World Bank, the Worldwide Governance Indicators. They capture six key dimensions of governance: accountability, political stability, government effectiveness, regulatory quality, rule of law, and control of corruption. The datafor these measurements are robust, reliable and consistent—as we should expect of the World Bank, which has many faults but is not short of professional accountants. Remarkably, and to our comfort, the Worldwide Governance Indicators demonstrate that good governance promotes prosperity and that bad governance brings poverty. The arrow of causality is pointing in the direction of good governance. This is very good news in a world where bad news appears to be the norm. If we wish for international development, we must promote good governance wherever wefind it. Prosperity and human rights go hand in hand. How can this be done? The first and most obvious need is for the UK to set a good example in matters such as peacemaking and corruption. Sadly, this is often far from the case, which should encourage usto redouble our efforts to hold the Governmentto account, particularly in the area of corruption. Sometimes I feel that we do not look enough at the history of areas where we are joining in to try and help. A greater knowledge of history and of our history in Afghanistan, Iraq and the Balkans would have led us to take a rather more prudent path than we have. The second tool that we need to bring to bear is to encourage the UN to measure and publicise the performance and behaviour of all Governments. It is rightly said that, if you do not measure it, you cannot manage it. We must measure government records, especially our own, particularly in the field of human rights, and the results must be widely available. The indicators need to be within the reach of any intelligent citizen, and power must be accountable to the citizens it serves. Knowledge is power. Let us help the United Nations to make knowledge of government behaviour easily available through the annual publication of an index of human rights, as proposed by my party. To that knowledge we should add the knowledge of history. In that way we would help to restore order to the boat, so that all can work together to mend the leaks, to bend to the oars and thus bring ourselves to safety.