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Conflict Prevention

Thank you, Mr. Martlew. I shall try to give a short answer and then return to my central focus. My right hon. and learned Friend the Member for North-East Fife (Sir Menzies Campbell) has been asked by our party leader to conduct a review. I will not pre-empt his announcement. But the party has already made it clear—my right hon. and learned Friend made it clear when he was leader, and I spoke in the debate at our party conference that addressed this issue—that we are not in favour of a like-for-like replacement for Trident. Therefore we do not take the same view as the Government, which announced their position some years ago, long before they needed to, or the Conservative party. The detail of the review will be announced by our party in due course. My hon. Friend the Member for Montgomeryshire (Lembit Öpik) has joined us. Many colleagues, including him and my hon. Friends the Members for Edinburgh, West (John Barrett) and for Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk (Mr. Moore), have persistently asked oral and written questions of the FCO and DFID on issues to do with conflict prevention. I pay tribute to their interest and to the fact that we have been able today to pull together all that interest in what I think is the first formal debate on conflict prevention for many years. I have one other objection that I put up front straight away. We have annual debates in the House on each of the services. I hope that we will now have an annual debate on conflict prevention. [Hon. Members: ““Hear, hear.””] I hope that the Minister reflects on that and commits to it today or asks his colleagues to commit to doing so before the general election. The House would benefit from that and it would be good if the country knew that we took this matter so seriously that debating these things was not an accident of a ballot but something to which we returned regularly. I want to make two short comments, setting the scene, because a goodly number of hon. Members are present and I do not want to take their time or prevent strong voices from being heard about why this matter is so important and where we need to go next. When the Parliamentarians Network for Conflict Prevention and Human Security was launched, under the auspices of the EastWest Institute, it produced a simple, persuasive fact sheet with a table showing the number of wars that ended in negotiated settlement, rather than military victory, in the 1990s and since 2000. It will not surprise you, Mr. Martlew, to know that many more wars ended in negotiated settlement than in military victory: 42 in the 90s, compared with 23 by military victory. In this decade so far, at the time this fact sheet was produced, 17 conflicts were ended by negotiated settlement and four by military victory. However, the reality is that 50 per cent. of peace agreements do not hold, often because the peace has been imposed from the top rather than being built up from the bottom. One of the great successes of recent years has been in Kenya, where it was clear that a bottom-up peace process following the difficulties managed to lock in the peace that had been arrived at with such difficulty. Africa as a whole has learned the lesson of needing to do that. Success in Ghana and its ability to have a peaceful transition to different Governments has been due to its much more developed grass-roots network of engagement in such exercises. The financial figures are the most telling. The direct average cost of one conflict is $64 billion. When that figure was published, there were 70 ongoing or potential conflicts worldwide, and that sum translated into $17.5 trillion in cumulative, direct costs. For every dollar spent on conflict prevention, states spend some $2,000 on weapons and military budgets. That is a central and telling fact.