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Conflict Prevention

I congratulate the hon. Member for North Southwark and Bermondsey (Simon Hughes) on securing this debate, and welcome the ““tripartisan”” approach that he took in his opening remarks. My party supports the idea of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the Department for International Development, the Ministry of Defence and other Government Departments working closely together to plan conflict prevention activity in the national interests of the United Kingdom. However, we need to go further and institutionalise such practice by creating a national security council at which common strategies can be agreed to which all Departments are firmly signed up. However, it is difficult to define where conflict prevention starts and ends. It is inherently difficult to measure, partly because we are dealing, in most cases, with policies that aim at change over the long term—going beyond any one budgetary or electoral cycle—and partly because we can never be confident about what would have happened had we not taken particular action in another part of the world. It is important to remind ourselves that if conflict prevention is to be effective, it has to rely on other aspects of the Foreign Office's work being of high quality. Public diplomacy is one obvious example. Work through public diplomacy, including the work of the BBC World Service and the British Council, seems to be essential if we are to make contact not just with Governments and bureaucracies, but with wider civil societies. Moreover, we should not neglect that old mainstay of the FCO, the nurturing of diplomatic relationships over many years. I know that the Minister has recently returned from a visit to Yemen. There is agreement across the House that any successful work to prevent the conflict in that country from getting worse will depend on not what this country does but the extent to which effective action within the region, particularly by the Gulf Co-operation Council countries, can be co-ordinated. If we are to persuade our old friends in the Gulf that that should be a priority and that they should work with us to stabilise the situation in Yemen, we need to be able to act on the basis of friendships that have been nurtured over many years. We cannot expect to snap our fingers and see an instant response. I could use the same argument in respect of other parts of the world. Just to avoid any misunderstanding, I have recently been to Tokyo as a guest of the Japanese Government, and it became very clear to me that Japan's influence in many of the Asian countries where there is conflict, and its ability to exercise economic influence and to be a major provider of development assistance is something to which we should have great regard in our diplomatic policy, but that means we must spend time, energy and effort on nurturing and improving our relationship with Japan. I want to put three points to the Minister, to which I hope he will find time to respond. First, for effective conflict prevention we often have to work through international organisations. It is also clear from what the Foreign Office itself has published in its annual reports that those international organisations do not always deliver in the way that we might hope. For example, the United Nations is obviously a key institution, but the Foreign Office annual report for 2007-08 stated that too often UN peacekeeping missions are not adequately planned. The report cited the United Nations-African Union Mission in Darfur as an example of that. Do the Government think that there has been some improvement in the UN's performance in that regard or do they think that we still have difficulties there? Secondly, in addressing some of the challenges of conflict prevention around the world, have the Government considered trying to make greater use of the Commonwealth as an institution? The Commonwealth has an advantage in that it has a very diverse membership across continents and that its countries, while all committed to ideas of democracy, of human rights and of the rule of law, have many different ethnicities and religious traditions. As such, it seems to me that it has a part to play.