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United Nations

My Lords, in a short debate like this, we are forced to be telegraphic and focus on the key points. We all recognise that the UN system—and it is very much a system whose specialisations are increasingly important—is necessary but imperfect. It would be wonderful if we could redesign it from the outset, but we cannot. We therefore have to work as well as we can within this deeply imperfect system. With 192 members of the General Assembly and specialised agencies, it clearly is deeply imperfect. It includes some small, corrupt and, sadly, incompetent states. I only discovered that Palau existed when I read about its existence in the UN voting list. We have, therefore, to work on an expanded agenda of global governance with instruments which are deeply inadequate. This includes the whole new security agenda, for which we need global governance. It includes population growth—population has more than doubled since the UN was formed. That means migration, it means social collapse and it means internal conflict. The whole climate change agenda is desperately central, as are the communications revolution and all the implications of that and the scientific and technical revolution, which has all sorts of implications, including those for the disarmament agenda. There is also the question of culture and civilisation. I note that President Obama spoke at an Alliance of Civilisations conference only the other week. What, therefore, are the principles with which we have to deal? First, we have to cling to the idea of inclusive global organisations, not exclusive global organisations. The whole concept of an alliance of democracies, instead of a global organisation, is something that we should reject. I was rather worried the other week when I read the Henry Jackson Society’s list of principles and saw that an alliance of democracies was one of the things that it still wished to promote. The Bush Administration were exclusive. Happily, the Obama Administration are now re-engaging. The obstacles to the reform of the UN Security Council remain high, so we have to work as far as we can with ad hoc bodies. Perhaps the G20 is an ad hoc body which will work for a bit; at least we have to try it. We have to re-engage with China, India, South Africa and others, and I note that, at the moment, China, India and South Africa all have more troops engaged in UN or African Union peacekeeping than the United Kingdom does. So we really need to co-opt them to work with us as far as we can. We have to recognise that popular nationalism and commitment to sovereignty have grown, even as the demand for global government has grown. There is a deep mistrust of elites, of bureaucrats, of distant conferences on complex topics, and of people like the noble Lords, Lord Hannay and Lord Malloch-Brown, deciding things far away from anywhere the Daily Mail journalists could fully understand or keep up with. What is the UK’s role in this? First of all, we have to work with our neighbours in the EU, as well as the Commonwealth. If we cannot co-operate with our neighbours, we certainly cannot co-operate with others around the world. Secondly, we need political leadership for popular education to explain to our publics why sovereignty does not work anymore. I simply end by saying to my colleagues on the Conservative benches as well as to the Government: we all need to explain to our publics how desperately we need stronger global and regional co-operation.