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Conflict Prevention

There are certainly lessons to be learned. My hon. Friend knows much more than I do about Northern Ireland from his family links and so on, although I have often been there. The peace there did not happen just because Governments in Dublin and London decided that there should be peace. It did not even happen just because the political parties realised the folly of what they were doing. It happened because the communities, led by women in large measure and young people, decided that peace was necessary. The lessons for conflict prevention around the world are that if the grass roots of communities, often women and often in rural areas, are supported in taking initiatives, they can build the structure for peace. Afghanistan is a good example. I was privileged to chair a conference in this very room at the time of the summit over the road on Afghanistan a couple of weeks ago, and it is absolutely clear that all the international policy and all the troops in the world will not provide a lasting legacy of peace in Afghanistan. The same applies to countries such as Iraq, which are made up of different communities with different traditions in one country with boundaries that were drawn artificially some time ago. There must also be a bottom-up process. The cross-party Select Committee on Foreign Affairs welcomes steps that the Government have taken—the single conflict prevention pool of funding, the creation of the stabilisation aid fund, the clear alignment between the Foreign and Commonwealth Office's new public service agreement target on reducing the impact of conflict and the departmental strategic objective 6 on preventing and resolving conflict and developing indicators that make such things clearer. I am pleased that, since President Obama's arrival at the White House, the United States has understood the importance of such matters. Just the other day in January, the Chief of the General Staff made a welcome contribution down the road at the International Institute for Strategic Studies when he made clear the importance, from the military's perspective, of conflict prevention in this country. I acknowledge and pay tribute not just to the people who support us in the all-party group, but to the groups in this country and elsewhere who lobby, inform, engage and educate on these issues and who are an important part of the debate and the political process. They include International Alert, Peace Direct, Responding to Conflict, Saferworld, the Global Partnership for the Prevention of Armed Conflict and organisations that work to ensure that the next generation understands these matters better than the last. A few weeks ago in the Macmillan Room, we were privileged to have an organisation called Leap Confronting Conflict, which talked to us about its work with young people. The reality is that if we educate the next generation of young people to understand that conflict can be prevented from home and in schools and communities, it is far more likely that politicians, diplomats and civil servants will be able to prevent conflict in the years ahead. To return to my questions to the Minister, if the Government accept the spending-to-save argument, why have they reduced funding for the prevention of conflict and for peacekeeping? Can we afford not to increase the money spent on reducing conflict, given that the long-term costs of conflict are so high? I hope that the Minister will tell us what is happening to the total of conflict funds year by year and inform us accurately what Government plans should be and what proportion of the budget will be spent on peacekeeping in the future. I hope that the Government will tell us how much they want to spend—and are spending—on what are called long-term or upstream preventive measures, as opposed to military interventions. I know the commitment of the Secretary of State for International Development, and everybody agrees that conflict often prevents proper development. Is there likely to be any additional support from the Department for International Development or other Departments towards the Government's conflict prevention activities? Do the Government seek to assess the relative costs of direct military intervention in a specific country, so that they can assess what the costs of alternative strategies would be? If we contemplate intervention in the future—whether in a place such as Sierra Leone, where we were invited in by many people, or somewhere such as Kosovo, which was clearly controversial both in international law and at home—is there a mechanism to assess the benefits and cost of direct intervention against the cost of preventive and peacekeeping measures in advance? Do the Government look clearly at the benefit of investing in local people—this is the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Montgomeryshire—so that local communities can build the peace, as opposed to bringing in outside agencies? Given the comments of the Chief of the General Staff in January, it would be valuable to know whether the Government think that they have adequate mechanisms in place to measure the effectiveness of our efforts, both unilaterally as the UK and as part of NATO and the European Union, in preventing violent conflict. I do not expect the Minister to elaborate in detail on all of those points, but it would be helpful to understand whether the Government see most of this work as multilateral, as opposed to work that they do on their own. In many ways, we are perceived as taking the lead on such matters. It would be helpful to know what the Government see as a gold standard whereby we can be seen to take the lead not only in those countries where we have a particular interest, but in other countries round the world. Can the Government say with confidence that international mechanisms are in place so that, in this decade just beginning, the assessment is that there is lesser risk of armed conflict globally than ever before? I will end with a set of issues. As someone who takes a particular interest for my party in matters of energy and climate change, I am clear that the conflicts of the future are likely to be driven by competition and struggles for resources. Threats caused by the climate crisis are likely to increase rather than reduce the risk of conflict. People will struggle over water, for example, and that heightens the chance of conflict—recently, there was a fear in Bangladesh that its water supplies were likely to be cut off by a dam-building project by India upstream. Last night, I was with our noble Friend Lord Ashdown who was speaking about the fear of conflict driven by shortages of food in some parts of the world. The reality is that energy, water, food and the other ravages of climate change are likely to be the drivers of conflict, particularly in the less-developed and poorer parts of the world. At the end of the debate, it would be helpful to hear not only that the Minister understands those issues from the point of view of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, but that the Government have a coherent strategy. For example, all the information that comes to the Minister's colleagues in the Department of Energy and Climate Change about the risks to, and instability of, global energy supplies could be factored into Government policy, European Union policy and our activities in the United Nations. My last plea is this: I am a supporter of the United Nations; it has done a fantastic job, but sometimes it does not have the effective ability to intervene where it needs to do so. I return to Sri Lanka—the world was standing by and the UN was powerless to intervene. The right to protect, which has now been accepted in international law, cannot necessarily be invoked when countries need it. When countries are likely to go into that sort of conflict and when they put up barriers and do not allow anybody in, it almost invariably ends up with genocide and a terrible legacy that is a hugely expensive and costly problem to solve for generations to come. I do not pretend that the world will necessarily be safer in the next 10 years than it has been in any other decade during our lives. The number of conflicts in the world have certainly gone down, but many ongoing conflicts recur and they are not necessarily solved just because peace has come once. I hope that the Government understand that investment by them and by other Governments in effective, bottom-up conflict prevention, regional support systems in the world's continents and the understanding that that must be central to the agenda of the UN, the European Union, other regional organisations and individual Governments is the best way to ensure that the decades ahead have fewer conflicts and far less money spent on defence, armaments and arms exports and that the agenda can be turned to give the world a better chance of a more peaceful future.