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Council of Europe (UK Chairmanship)

This is an important and timely debate, and it is absolutely right that we have an opportunity to discuss in the House the UK's forthcoming chairmanship of the Council of Europe. However, it is a shame that the most pro-European member of the Cabinet is not here to open the debate as was planned until late this morning. There are now 47 members of the Council, and the period of chairmanship is six months, so this opportunity does not come around often. According to my rudimentary mathematics, the next time the UK will be in the chair will around 2035. The last time the UK was in the chair was in the early 1990s when the Conservative party was falling out about another European institution—the European Union. I sense a bit of déjà vu, and I trust that this afternoon's debate will be less heated and divided than the debate earlier this week. Our membership of the Council of Europe has been supported by successive Governments of different political colours and persuasions for the last six decades. It is worth reflecting on the history of the institution, which was shaped by the aftermath of the second world war and the defeat of fascism, and later by the collapse of communism. When Winston Churchill made his speech at the 1949 gathering in Strasbourg, he talked of an"““ancient city still scarred by the wounds of war””." The horror of that global conflict, and the destruction and loss of life throughout Europe, led to the growing realisation that avoiding future wars had to be a priority. That realisation brought together some of the leading statesmen of post-war Europe, with much of the earliest thinking coming from Winston Churchill. Other Conservative politicians played a role, particularly former Home Secretary David Maxwell Fyfe, who was instrumental in drawing up the European convention on human rights, which Clement Attlee's Labour Government ratified in 1950. A cross-party consensus held then and over the following decades, and I hope that it will do so today.