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British Association For Central and Eastern Europe

asked Her Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the work of the British Association for Central and Eastern Europe. The noble Lord said: My Lords, my task in this short but important debate is to celebrate the achievements of the British Association for Central and Eastern Europe. I have always called it BACEE, although some have called it other things. I declare an interest as chairman of BACEE for the past 10 years. Others have an equally strong interest. The noble Baroness, Lady Rawlings, who is on the opposition Front Bench, has been on the governing body for a number of years—I cannot quite remember how long, but she will no doubt tell us. The noble Lord, Lord Roper, was chairman of our organisation in the 1980s—it had a slightly different name at the time, but I shall come on to that. I welcome the noble Lord, Lord Dykes, to our debate, and we all want to hear what the Minister says when he winds up. I shall start with the bad news, although I shall not continue in this vein because we are here to praise BACEE and not to—I was going to say ““bury it””—complain about our fate, because we have complained about it quite a lot already. Sadly, BACEE, which has been widely acknowledged by successive Foreign Secretaries as a notably successful FCO non-departmental public body—that is an appalling mouthful, but I think that we all know what we mean by it—has had to close. This is the direct result of the FCO’s decision in August 2005 under a previous Foreign Secretary—I do not blame the present incumbents—to withdraw the grant in aid. I and my colleagues on the governing body have made it clear that we regard this decision as short-sighted and prejudicial to British interests in the area. It was not a wise decision, but an economy made by the Foreign Office under pressure from the Treasury, and it will come to regret it in the future. BACEE has had a proud history. Under its then title of the British East-West Centre, when the noble Lord, Lord Roper, was its chair, it kept channels open to the countries of the eastern bloc, as it was then, by organising conferences and seminars, to which some of us went. It was very important that we reached out to a number of independent people in those countries. We were an independent organisation, which was very important because it meant that we acted as a valuable counterweight to the propaganda of communist-front organisations. Then, after the collapse of Soviet rule in eastern and central Europe in 1989 and 1990, we did valuable work in promoting the values of civil society and helped prepare those newly independent countries for membership of the European Union through seminars, round tables and conferences targeted specifically at the political, judicial, civil service and media leaderships. Since 1991, there have been more than 5,500 participants in BACEE programmes, including more than 60 current and former Ministers from the area as well as four Heads of Government and 10 Foreign Ministers. That is a pretty impressive list. Then, just to show that we were moving on again, as the EU moved towards enlargement, we did not rest on our laurels but, with the active encouragement of the then Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, turned our focus to neighbouring countries outside the EU. We continued our work in the west Balkans, which is a vital area for Europe, and expanded our activities to include Ukraine, Moldova, Belarus and Turkey. Our programmes have been centred traditionally on well prepared conferences, seminars and study visits, but the key note of our work throughout the period has been the building-up of an extraordinary network of contacts, which with the help of our embassies in the region we developed and proved extraordinarily useful to our foreign policy. I mention as an example the New Serbia Forum, which BACEE organised in the late 1990s to prepare for a democratic, post-Milosevic Yugoslavia. It was supported not only by the British but also by the Hungarian and Swiss Governments, and proved to be one of BACEE’s greatest successes. It is perhaps significant that many of the participants in the New Serbia Forum continue to play a role today in ensuring the survival of the democratic system in Serbia, which is vital to the whole European Union. Central and eastern Europe remains an area of key importance to the United Kingdom. Almost half the member states of the European Union, including a key heavyweight in Poland, come from the region. EU decisions on key issues, including trade, the environment, organised crime and terrorism, and energy, will require their support, to say nothing of relations with Russia. It is vital that the Foreign Office continues to focus its attention on this area and does not think that, just because those countries are in the EU, we need not worry about them any more. BACEE’s governing body will want to be certain that the FO continues its work and continues to be interested in the area. I hope that the Minister will satisfy us in that regard. BACEE has made its own contribution to keeping our values alive and retaining interest in the area by setting up in conjunction with the School of Slavonic and East European Studies a series of public lectures or conferences, which one hopes will be held for a long time to come. Our first public lecture will be held in the autumn. The Foreign Office has assured us that it will be in the Locarno or ““another fine room”” there—it is apparently a technical term. I hope that the present Foreign Secretary will be our first lecturer—he certainly ought to be—and I think that he would do a very good job. I conclude, because we are allowed only 10 minutes and there are other speakers. On behalf of the governing body, which has included parliamentarians of all parties—I mention from the present governing body not only the noble Baroness, Lady Rawlings, but David Curry MP and Gisela Stuart MP—I would like to thank parliamentarians of all parties and representatives of the media, the judiciary, business and universities who have helped us in our work. We could not have carried it out without the support of all those people who have given their activities entirely free. I thank successive chairmen of BACEE—I think that the noble Lord, Lord Roper, will say a few words about them. I thank also our staff, who have had the difficult task of closing down an organisation successfully, and particularly our director, Nicholas Jarrold. I mention also his predecessor, Sir John Birch. Last but not least, I thank the governing body which worked so hard to make the work of BACEE a success.