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Conflict Prevention

Thank you, Mr Turner, for calling me to speak. Through you, I want to thank Mr Speaker for giving us this opportunity to debate the Government's policy on conflict prevention. I also welcome the Under-Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, the hon. Member for North West Norfolk (Mr Bellingham), to his place on the Front Bench today. In the briefing that the House of Commons Library prepared for this debate, there is one particular article that summarises why I wanted us to have this debate, and my view is shared by the colleagues from other parties with whom I have the privilege of co-chairing the all-party group on conflict issues. I welcome the hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) to the debate. Our third co-conspirator, the hon. Member for South West Devon (Mr Streeter), cannot be with us this morning and sends his apologies. This debate is very much a cross-party initiative, rather than a personal one. The particular article in the Library briefing that I want to start this debate by referring to is a BBC Online article from 11 April this year, headlined, ““Aid spending should target conflict, World Bank urges””. It states:"““Poverty rates are 20% higher in countries hit by violence, so aid should target violence, the Bank says. The World Bank is recommending a major difference in the way aid is spent. A quarter of the world's population live in states affected by conflict. In a report released on Monday, the World Bank says that there should be far more focus on building stable government, and on justice and police, than on health and education. The report says if there is not a major refocusing of aid in this direction, then other targets on poverty, health and education will not be reached. There is far more spent on alleviating the effects of conflict than preventing it from breaking out, and conflicts tend to be repeated. Ninety percent of recent civil wars occurred in countries that had already had a civil war in the last 30 years. The report found that cycles of violence were hard to stop, for example in South Africa and Central America. In Guatemala, twice as many people are dying now at the hands of criminals than died in the civil war in the 1980s. Poverty rates are 20 percentage points higher in countries affected by violence, but up to now, the World Bank found, there had been too little focus on ending corruption or reforming state institutions and justice systems. For instance, reform of justice was not one of the Millennium Development Goals...The report's author Sarah Cliffe says this is the greatest development challenge facing the world. ““It's much easier for countries to get help with their militaries than it is with their police forces or justice systems, and much easier for them to get help with growth, health or education than it is with employment,”” she says. ““Our analysis would indicate that that should change.””””" That is where I begin today and I am very grateful that, since the last election, the Government have made it clear that they give a great priority to conflict prevention. I am also very grateful to the Foreign Secretary who, when I have raised this specific issue with him on two occasions since the general election, has also made that clear, both generally—as a matter of strategy—and in relation to the initiative that he took recently to extend our diplomatic presence around the world. He said that those diplomatic missions would see conflict prevention as a key part of their work. So this is not a debate that has been called in order to rap the Government over the knuckles, but to encourage the trend in government, which began under the previous Government, to place a greater priority on conflict prevention for us as a country and for all the relevant partners in Government that work together on these issues. That means not only the Foreign and Commonwealth Office but the Department for International Development and the Ministry of Defence. A few years ago, at the prompting of people from outside this House to whom I now pay tribute, the all-party group on conflict issues was formed. I hope that it has already been effective, if only in a modest way, in bringing issues to the attention of the House and in opening up debates. Indeed, in Westminster Hall we have had debates on the legacy of Northern Ireland, and debates between representatives of Russia and Georgia. Recently, we have had two sessions involving young people from Israel and Palestine talking about their vision for the future. The themes of those debates and sessions are recurrent. It is all too easy to respond militarily when something goes wrong and then to try to pick up the pieces. It is much more intelligent and much cheaper to intervene to prevent a country, community or part of the world from falling to pieces in the first place. About a fortnight ago, my hon. Friend the Member for Cheltenham (Martin Horwood) and I were part of a delegation that visited Israel and the west bank. If ever anyone wanted an example of a legacy of desperate failure to prevent conflict, they only have to go to those places. Whatever the good work that we, DFID and the FCO do to try to reconstruct community and civil society in the west bank or in Gaza, it is—bluntly—a much taller order than it would have been if there had not been the years of conflict in the first place.