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Inter-Parliamentary Union

It is a pleasure to speak in a debate when you are in the Chair, Mr. Bercow. I saw you striding across Westminster Hall a few moments ago and I wondered whether it would be our good fortune to have you chairing the debate. I am delighted that you are—[Laughter.] I would have said that to any other person present this afternoon, because we are a little thin on the ground. I thank my hon. Friend the Minister for her opening comments, which demonstrated her long-standing interest in the IPU, her commitment to it and the importance that she attaches to the work that we do. I very much appreciate those remarks. This is my first year as chair of the British group of the IPU and the first time, in that capacity, that I have reported in a Westminster Hall debate on our activities. I should like to place on the record my thanks and the thanks of the group for the work of my predecessor, my right hon. Friend the Member for Cynon Valley (Ann Clwyd), who not only served for three years as chair of the British group but served for five years on the IPU's committee on human rights and chaired it for three years. More recently, she has taken over as chair of the IPU's committee on middle east questions. It has to be said that that committee is not one of the IPU's greatest achievements thus far. It has been a little tardy in engaging in activities, but I am sure that, with my right hon. Friend as chair, it will become more involved in what is an extremely important situation and that the period of inactivity will come to an end. I am also pleased to report that another previous chair of the British group, my hon. Friend the Member for Erith and Thamesmead (John Austin), has recently been re-elected unopposed as chair of our geopolitical group, the 12-plus group. That reflects the great esteem in which he, too, is held by colleagues in the IPU for his contributions. I thank my right hon. Friend and my hon. Friend for their ongoing contribution. They are both great internationalists and make an enormous contribution through the IPU and in other ways. I am sure that the House recognises their efforts. I thank the members of the executive of the British group, the officers and all the Members of both Houses who have participated in our activities in the past 12 months. I also thank our general secretary and our secretariat. Ken Courtenay and his colleagues provide an excellent service. We greatly appreciate their expertise and good humour. We are very grateful for all that they do on our behalf. It goes without saying that we could not function without such an effective secretariat. Finally, I thank the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the Department for International Development. Without the work of Ministers, officials and staff in embassies and high commissions, we could not have such well-organised inward and outward delegations. We thank them for the very helpful briefings that we occasionally need at very short notice at IPU assemblies and for all the support that they give. We thank Ministers for agreeing to meet inward delegations. When the British group sends colleagues to other countries, we are invariably received with great hospitality, which involves meeting Ministers and senior political figures. It is very good that we can reciprocate when we receive inward delegations to the UK. I am very grateful to Ministers for all that they do in meeting visiting delegations. As this Minister said, she has been doing that again recently. As has been said, the IPU exists to promote dialogue between parliamentarians, the peaceful resolution of conflicts, and representative democracy—parliamentary democracy. It is worth saying in parentheses that a country does not have to be democratic to be a member of the IPU. I shall resist the temptation of naming names, but the criteria for becoming a member of the IPU are that a country is a sovereign state and has a functioning Parliament. Sadly, there are a fair number of sovereign states with Parliaments that can hardly be described as democratic, but engagement is the name of the game. The IPU, as an international organisation, is committed to promoting parliamentary democracy and human rights, and many of the activities, conferences and publications on which the IPU focuses are concerned with issues of parliamentary democracy. That probably explains why, although there are not, by any sensible definition, 150 democracies in the world, there are 150 countries that are members of the IPU. The need for dialogue and the promotion of democracy is as great now as it was 120 years ago when the IPU was established. There is a distinct difference between intergovernmental relations and relations between parliamentarians. Governments have their jobs to do, and Ministers, officials and ambassadors do them. Parliamentarians have a distinct job, but if we are to take a serious interest in the international community, as we must, our relations with parliamentarians from other countries become very important, so that we can learn from one another and share our views about tackling some of the important international issues of the day, but also share views about how parliamentary democracy can operate better. So, what has the British group been doing since our last debate just over a year ago in November 2007? There have been the usual two IPU assemblies: the annual assembly in Geneva and the major assembly elsewhere. As the Minister said, the major IPU assembly was held in Cape Town in April. As it took place so soon after the Zimbabwean elections, it was hardly surprising that both informal and formal discussion at the assembly focused heavily on the situation in Zimbabwe. The only additional comment that I shall make on that is that in many respects what happened in Cape Town illustrated the importance of parliamentarians and not just the IPU. At the opening of the assembly, the then South African President, President Mbeki, managed to give a lengthy speech without referring to Zimbabwe at all. However, Mrs. Mbete, the Speaker of South Africa's National Assembly, who, following protocol, was president of the IPU assembly because South Africa was the host country, was forthright in her comments on Zimbabwe. In her words, democracy had gone wrong and"““the world cannot simply look away””." It is to the credit of the Speaker of South Africa's National Assembly that she said that at the opening of the IPU assembly, and that she invited a small group of delegates to draft a presidential declaration. That it came out as, from all our perspectives, a good, strong declaration owes an enormous amount to the fact that Speaker Mbete had set it up, that the South African delegate on the committee was passionately behind a strong declaration and that there was support from other southern African countries, not least Botswana. It became clear to me, both at the IPU assembly and during a bilateral visit in the lead-up to that assembly with South African colleagues, that a very large number of South African parliamentarians, including a very large number of members of the African National Congress, for example, were appalled at the situation in Zimbabwe and were prepared to speak out about it. Those parliamentarians deserve enormous credit. Without Speaker Mbete's support, the resolution would not have been carried at the IPU assembly. If one is perfectly honest about the situation, it was the big assembly of the IPU in Cape Town following a few years of democracy in South Africa. Anyone who was going to speak against South Africa at that assembly would have to be pretty courageous—and foolish. None the less, the enormous prestige that South Africa had at that assembly was used to good purpose to challenge directly the situation in Zimbabwe, and all those South Africans involved deserve enormous credit for that, not least Speaker Mbete, who led that challenge. At IPU assemblies, as hon. Members might know, there is invariably a general debate on one topic, and this time it was on pushing back the frontiers of poverty. Those general debates tend to go on for three days, with between 190 and 200 speeches. Each country has about 15 minutes, and I shrewdly shared ours with the hon. Member for Ribble Valley (Mr. Evans), the Opposition vice-chair. Apart from his contribution, the others were often mind-numbingly boring—we have all been to international conferences at which everyone has to do a set-piece speech. I have been to World Trade Organisation meetings and heard such speeches, and it can get really quite tedious, but every country has to have its 15 minutes. I think that the work that took place outside the main plenary, however, was more important. We had a significant number of bilateral meetings, and some colleagues served on standing committees looking at issues such as national security, foreign aid, migrant workers and trafficking. Several colleagues in the group drafted papers for those standing committees and made significant contributions. At Cape Town we had 10 bilateral meetings, which I think was a useful way to spend our time. I mean no disrespect to the other speakers at the plenary, but I thought that those meetings were a better way of spending our time than listening to speeches as bland and general as mine was. We met with representatives with Iran, Russia, Thailand, China, Iraq, Serbia, South Korea, Kenya, Turkey and Pakistan—a varied collection, but all countries that wanted to engage with us and with which we wanted to engage. Without exception, all of those bilateral meetings were useful. We did not always agree, as might be self-evident, but they were useful meetings that at least promoted understanding and certainly a commitment to further dialogue. The assembly in Geneva in October also involved delegation colleagues taking part in standing committee discussions on a range of issues, including nuclear non-proliferation, climate change and freedom of expression. We had further bilateral meetings, including one with Russia, and we parliamentarians in the British group are keen to continue to have such discussions. There was an emergency item at the Geneva meeting on the global financial crisis. The downside was that I was again put on the drafting committee, and the bad news was that everyone was trying to blame everyone else. The United States, of course, is not a member of the IPU, so there were no representatives present to be blamed. You can imagine the kind of conversations that took place, but despite that, I think that a sane resolution was produced. It drew attention to the fact that, although the global financial crisis might have originated in the United States and other rich countries, we should be particularly concerned about poorer countries. They are bearing the brunt of the crisis in a way that does not correspond to their responsibility for it. Many countries are now suffering that cannot be accused in any way, shape or form of having any responsibility for the crisis, and they are mainly poorer countries, so the debate was significant. As the Minister has said, the British group engages in several bilateral exchanges each year, usually with between six and nine inward delegations and a similar number of outward delegations, and she has mentioned those that have taken place since we last debated the IPU in this Chamber. Sadly, there has been slightly less activity over the past 12 months on that area than we had planned, but frankly, that was because of short-notice cancellations, which are beyond our control. Each year we normally plan to do seven, eight or nine inward delegations and a similar number of outward delegations, but if other countries, for whatever reason, have to drop out at the last minute, that obviously reduces the number. This year the figure was more like six inward delegations and six outward delegations, so we are anxious to do more in the current year. We are also anxious to encourage more hon. and right hon. Members to apply to take part in IPU delegations. Some delegations are very popular, and some are less so—we are on air, so I will not name names—but I urge hon. Members to encourage their hon. Friends to apply, because as an organisation we want to be able to send good delegations that are diverse. I particularly encourage more women parliamentarians to apply as we really would like to see more women participate. When in South Africa I was interviewed by the local radio station, and the interviewer asked what I thought of the fact that only one member of our delegation to the assembly in Cape Town was a woman—my right hon. Friend the Member for Cynon Valley. I answered that I thought that it was shameful, which it was, and said that I would try to do something about it. The only thing we can do is to encourage more people to apply, especially our women colleagues, and I strongly urge us all to do so. In our delegations we try to get not only some kind of gender balance but a balance between new and more experienced Members. Clearly, we are looking for people to lead a delegation who have some experience of the topics or know the relevant country, but we also want to encourage people for whom the visit would be their first. That is a point I keep making to people—they should not think that they have to have done something like that previously to apply for an IPU delegation. We are always keen to encourage Members who have not joined us on delegations in the past to do so in future. A large number of all-party groups on countries are affiliated to the British group of the IPU. We provide financial support and assistance where possible and have done so in several cases in the past 12 months, in particular for the all-party groups on the Philippines, Finland, Palestine, Liechtenstein and Sudan. We send delegates to specialised conferences, as the Minister has said: in the past 12 months delegates have attended conferences, for example, on HIV/AIDS, human trafficking, the WTO and gender equality. Indeed, the IPU has taken a great interest internationally in gender equality. I would like to see it take a greater interest in wider issues of equality, and maybe that will happen soon, but gender equality is clearly extremely important. One of the good things that the IPU does is produce an annual ““women in politics”” map, and the latest shows that globally only 17.7 per cent. of MPs and 16.1 per cent. of Ministers are women. I am delighted that my hon. Friend the Minister is one of those and that she is with us today. However, those figures are not particularly good. Rwanda's Parliament heads the list, with women accounting for 48.8 per cent. of its MPs. The UK is joint 60th with Cambodia, with 19.5 per cent.—I think that we have 125 women MPs out of a total of 646, but I apologise if my maths is wrong. I say in passing that without certain action taken by a certain party before 1997 we would not even have that 19.5 per cent. The point is that more needs to be done on gender equality, and the IPU internationally, as well as member Parliaments, would do well to do more to promote it. I ought to say something briefly about funding. The IPU used to be funded by grant in aid from the Treasury, as was the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association, but for reasons that I will not go into we are now funded directly by the House of Commons and the House of Lords. As it happens, the agreed formula is that 70 per cent. of the funding should come from the Commons and 30 per cent. from the Lords. For reasons of equity, we therefore seek some kind of balance in our delegations and other activities—perhaps 70:30—between Members of the House of Commons and the House of Lords. As I say, that is only one guideline, but the funding mechanism means that we are directly funded—as it were, internally. We have had a successful year. We are always looking for ways to improve what we do, and we would gratefully accept the suggestions of other hon. Members. For example, in April we are organising a disabilities seminar for members of the 12-plus group, following the recent publication by the IPU of a handbook on disability equality. I said earlier that we were beginning to see an increased interest in wider areas of equality. That is an example, and I am delighted to see it. I expect that the 12-plus group seminar will generate some interest. We are always keen to look for new things to do and ideas on how to do things better. As always, suggestions would be greatly welcomed. We all know that many of today's important political issues are not susceptible to national solutions. Until recently, we used to rattle off the familiar list. We talked about climate change, terrorism and world poverty. We now have to add financial crises to the list. The planet on which we live is characterised by extensive interdependence between countries. If we are to deal with problems that affect us all, we need to co-operate. It is therefore important that parliamentarians, with their national responsibilities, should take the opportunity to share their ideas and experiences with those from other countries. The need for internationalism, for dialogue and for peaceful conflict resolution is as great today as it was 120 years ago when the IPU was established. I am grateful for the support that colleagues have given to the work of the British group.