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Queen's Speech

My Lords, I searched in vain in the gracious Speech for any mention of the fight against global poverty. It is right that the Speech should focus on the financial crisis and its effects on the citizens of our country and others, but it is right, too, to focus on those millions of people around the globe for whom $1 a day is wealth. In 2006, net global aid to the world’s most fragile states amounted to $16 billion. In that same year Wall Street paid out $24 billion in bonuses. To pick up a point made in the excellent maiden speech of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Bath and Wells, is that really the right way to divvy up the rich world’s wealth? I hope, and I am sure, that the Minister will give an assurance that the Government will give no lower priority over the next year to fighting global poverty than they have done so successfully in recent years. I shall focus on one aspect of poverty: fragile states and conflict. It is a vicious circle: fragility leads to conflict; conflict reinforces fragility. The innocent suffer—more than 5 million have died in the Democratic Republic of Congo in the past 10 years, almost all of whom were civilians. There are hundreds of thousands dead in Sudan, both in the north/south civil war and in Darfur. Somalia is in chaos and threatens our trade routes. Zimbabwe, incredibly, is getting worse day by day. I want to offer some practical suggestions for breaking out of this vicious circle. First, our diplomacy must focus on fragility and conflict throughout this cycle. The recent focus on international diplomatic activity in the DRC, including visits by the Foreign Secretary and the noble Lord, Lord Malloch-Brown, have been wholly welcome. But the seeds of today’s horrors have been evident for some time. They were certainly evident when I was in Goma and north Kivu a year ago. Might more active diplomacy earlier with President Kabila and President Kagame have prevented today’s crisis? As other noble Lords have said, this focus on diplomacy must involve all parts of the Whitehall machine: the Foreign Office, DfID and the Ministry of Defence working closely together with financial arrangements that encourage co-operation on the ground as well as in London. Other noble Lords have mentioned the need for a better resourced FCO. It will not surprise noble Lords to know that I share that view; it is not sensible to have no proper representation in countries, such as Liberia, that are making real efforts to recover from conflict and to whom we are rightly giving aid. Secondly, we should encourage and support regional groupings because their role is essential. The African Union has played an important role in Darfur, but the stronger it is, the better that role will be. SADC has tried, but failed, to intervene effectively over Zimbabwe. Ultimately, regional solutions will need to be found to regional problems. We should help the building up of regional organisations through encouragement, training and secondments. My suggestion is that we get the EU to put that at the heart of its diplomacy. We should also lead by example; my third suggestion is that we need to get the EU and NATO to work more effectively together to plan and carry out peacekeeping missions. Ten years on from the St Malo agreement, there is real scope for the UK and France to lead on this, as President Sarkozy is keen to bring France back to NATO’s integrated military structure if European security and defence arrangements are strengthened, which is very much in our interest as well as in that of the EU and NATO. The present stately dance in Brussels between the EU and NATO with the occasional nod, but not much contact and certainly no embrace, is now wholly outdated. Fifthly, and crucially, we need to strengthen the UN’s peacekeeping operations. The UN has more peacekeepers in operation around the globe now than ever before. The UN will remain indispensable for the future but, as the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, put it in an excellent recent book, the risk is that the UN will be both indispensable and ineffective, which is a desperate combination. UN peacekeeping therefore needs to be strengthened. Peacekeeping forces need clearer mandates. There needs to be quicker deployment, ideally with a rapid deployment force. Will that be easy? No, it will not, but the arrival of President Obama, with his commitment to multilateralism, and Secretary of State Clinton, with her experience and toughness, surely provides a real opportunity for progress. I suggest that it be at the centre of US/UK co-operation on foreign policy with an immediate focus on ending the conflict in the DRC and Darfur and on preventing a new civil war between north and south Sudan. Sixthly, I suggest that we should work to strengthen and put into practice the UN concept of responsibility to protect, which was adopted at the 2005 UN General Assembly. This seeks to redefine state sovereignty to include the duty of every state to protect its own populations from atrocities, including genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. Where they fail to do so, it puts the onus on the international community to step in. That doctrine needs to become accepted as customary international law and to be put into practice as the basis for international action to confront crises such as Darfur. Had it been more widely accepted, it would have strengthened the will and the hand of Zimbabwe’s neighbours in bringing pressure on Mugabe. Responsibility to protect is a Canadian concept. My suggestion is that we work with Canada to build it up over the next year so that when in 2010—just over a year’s time—Canada takes over as the head of the G8, the G13 or the G20, whichever it has by then become, Canada can declare the concept operational. Finally, we must all ensure that the aid that we give fragile states, in particular as they try to recover from conflict, is targeted at those who need it most, at building up capacity to provide basic services, is disbursed quickly, and that bilateral and multilateral aid agencies work with and through the many NGOs that know the situation on the ground at first hand and are doing a tremendous job, in often dangerous circumstances, to help the world's most vulnerable people. Those are seven practical proposals in seven minutes for action over the next year and longer, of course working on our own but, crucially, with our partners and allies which. If implemented, they could help to break the circle of fragility and conflict and save millions of lives.