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Middle East and Afghanistan

My Lords, I join other speakers in congratulating the two maiden speakers, who will clearly become redoubtable Members of the Conservative Benches, this House and, indeed, Parliament as a whole. Both illustrate the well established truth that the range in backgrounds of Members of the House of Lords gives considerable value through the balance of expertise and understanding in Parliament as a whole. I shall underline some points in the report of the committee, chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Roper, of which I am a member. This is my swansong for my four-year cycle on that committee. I will then put some issues to my noble friend, of which I have given him notice, about the problems on the Iraq/Turkey border and how they interrelate to some of the problems of the internal evolution of democracy and human rights in Turkey. Some of us had the privilege of having discussions with the Turkish Prime Minister about that earlier this afternoon. I couple my thanks to the noble Lord, Lord Roper, with thanks to the clerk of Sub-Committee C, Kathryn Colvin, who is happily with us in the Chamber. The noble Lord, Lord Howell, may think that I will try to be helpful on sub-committees, but I have to stop there with regard to his thesis that there is something rotten in the state of Denmark when it comes to our committee structure and the remit of the EU Committee and its sub-committees. Of course it has never been the case, whether on Africa, the Middle East or anywhere else, that we are focusing only on what the issue has got to do with the EU. I can well imagine the speech that the noble Lord would make if we did not concentrate on the scrutiny of the EU as our main rationale. After all, we pride ourselves—do we not?—on having a comprehensive structure to scrutinise the EU. I would have thought that the noble Lord would think that that is absolutely essential—I refer to phrases such as ““Make sure they don't get away with anything””, and to rhetoric of that kind. I have been on two EU sub-committees. In committee it is often very salutary to say, ““Just a moment, we are not doing a report on the Russian economy or on the whole of Africa; we are doing a report on the role of the European Union””. For example, there is an important and growing role for the European Union in relation to development. The aim is that 10 African countries do not have 250 different pieces of advice about auditing or whatever. But it means that there has to be a bigger role for the EU on such external relations. There is a very long list that demonstrates the truth of that, whether it concerns energy policy, the environment or other such issues. I do not think that we need to shed too many crocodile tears over the EU being all over the place on policy matters such as the Middle East. I say ““crocodile tears”” because obviously—to vary my metaphor—charity begins at home. It is Britain, France and Germany that sometimes do not want the EU to act as a united front. I ask the noble Lord: where does that leave criticism? I do not ask him to respond to that this second but that is the nature of the balance that has to be struck. It would be retrogressive to advocate that the EU is simply going to be an exercise in intergovernmentalism. The noble Lord’s criticism would then be logically even more cogent. The EU in this context is a member of the quartet, but it has not been a very proactive member. We concluded with some agreement over Javier Solana’s remark that the EU sometimes needed to be two or three steps—I think I have this right—ahead of the United States. That is what the Arabs—if I can put them all in one compartment, which of course is a dangerous thing to do—would rather like. Noble Lords can read our remarks about the Mecca agreement in, I think, paragraph 180. We say that the agreements that the Arabs are struggling to put together—they were making some progress—rely on an interlocutor who is not so joined at the hip as are the United States and Israel. To follow on from that metaphor, I hope that my noble friend is recovering well from his hip operation; we look forward to him speaking from the Front Bench for many years to come. In the phase following Gaza and so on—