Afghanistan: Quarterly Statement

Lord Hannay of Chiswick Excerpts

Wednesday 14th May 2014 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Northover]

The noble Viscount talks about it being not over until the end of the year. As the DfID spokesman, I should say that it is not over then either, as we have been emphasising. He can be reassured that the Ministry of Defence is well aware of the need to ensure that those who are still there are well equipped. I see from the figures on redeployment of equipment quite a substantial amount still there. Around 63% of major equipment has been moved back and redeployed, but there is a quite substantial commitment still there. I hope that he will be reassured by that.

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick (CB)]

My Lords, could the Minister address a point not covered in her very welcome Statement, to which I think most Members of the House who have spoken have given strong support—that is, Afghanistan’s neighbours? The history of Afghanistan is full of involvement by its neighbours in destabilising that country and, alas, in the past, also of Afghanistan destabilising its neighbours. Is it not absolutely essential that some very solid undertakings are given, perhaps in some regional grouping, that Afghanistan’s neighbours will co-operate with us and others in maintaining stability in the country after NATO’s withdrawal, and that they will be committed to respecting the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Afghanistan and working for economic co-operation? It is all very well us pouring money in but, if the neighbours are fiddling about, as they have often done in the past, it will not avail very much.

[Baroness Northover]

The noble Lord speaks from a great deal of experience. As he will know, there has been tremendous engagement with the Government of Pakistan and there is a trilateral relationship between Pakistan, Afghanistan and the United Kingdom. Pakistan has made a number of commitments. It is very clear from what is being said by both Afghanistan and Pakistan that they recognise that their long-term prosperity and security depends on the stability in each other’s country. That is also true for India, China and Iran. Stability and prosperity in Afghanistan have a beneficial effect on all the countries around, and we will be engaging with all those countries in that hope.

Human Rights

Lord Hannay of Chiswick Excerpts

Thursday 21st November 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick (CB)]

My Lords, the debate we are having today on human rights violations and the Government’s response to them is of critical importance to our relations with a whole range of countries where those abuses have taken, or are taking, place. These are not simple judgments to make and the noble Lord, Lord Alton, who has done much to shine a spotlight of publicity on so many such countries, most particularly North Korea, deserves credit for insisting that we examine the dilemmas posed to our foreign policy.

It is easy enough to caricature the two extremes: a foreign policy based solely on realpolitik, aimed at securing the national interest as narrowly defined; and, on the other hand, what has been called an ethical foreign policy where human rights considerations override all others. However, it is also easy to dismiss either of those extremes. The real dilemmas are to be found in the foreign policy choices that lie between those two extremes, and they have to take account of the separate circumstances of individual countries. There is no single template for policy which can be applied worldwide.

This week the spotlight is very much on Sri Lanka, where the Commonwealth Heads of Government have been meeting, where massive abuses of human rights by both sides took place during the final phases of the civil war, and where the UN’s High Commissioner for Human Rights recently discerned a drift towards authoritarian rule, with pressure on an independent judiciary and free press. I trust that the Minister will give the House some idea of how the President of Sri Lanka responded to the Prime Minister’s representations. Will she also assure us that the Government will not slacken in their advocacy of an independent inquiry into the events at the end of the war? An inquiry is surely going to have to be international if it is to be truly independent. Will we also keep up the pressure on the need for reconciliation and genuinely even-handed treatment of all ethnic and religious groups in that country if the present very welcome peace there is to be consolidated and sustained?

In considering how Britain should respond to human rights abuses, I suggest that one mistake we need to avoid is looking at the issue principally, or even solely, in the context of our bilateral relationship with the country in question. However, Britain’s influence and leverage are unlikely to be decisive nowadays. All too often we have seen how easy it is for the country in question to punish us for our temerity and play us off against other countries which have been less assertive. We saw that over the Chinese reactions to the Prime Minister receiving the Dalai Lama, and the Russians are past masters at that game. A multilateral approach is not just a soft option and makes it more difficult for the country on the receiving end of the pressure or the sanctions to divide and rule. I give a few examples of where it has been very successful: the Commonwealth sporting boycott of apartheid South Africa; the wide-ranging international sanctions on the military regime in Burma; and the pressure the European Union is bringing to bear on Ukraine in the run-up to the Eastern Partnership summit later this month. This surely points to our making maximum use of the multilateral instruments and forums that exist for handling human rights. How effective are those instruments and what sort of shape are they in? As many other speakers have said, the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights must surely remain the cornerstone of our activity, whether multilateral or bilateral. However, it contains no enforcement machinery and the UN Human Rights Council, established in 2006, has yet to prove itself fully, although its universal periodic review of every member state’s human rights record is an instrument of real value. We need to do what we can to strengthen the hand of the admirable High Commissioner for Human Rights, Ms Pillay, who visited London recently. In that context, I hope that the Minister will say what response the Government gave to Ms Pillay’s plea for an increase in our voluntary contribution to her office’s work to help reverse the recent reduction in resources at her disposal.

Then there is the Council of Europe, the convention and the court of human rights, which is so often intemperately denounced for excessive interference in our affairs. Do those critics ever stop to consider the work the council’s machinery does in a whole range of countries whose human rights record is well short of perfection? Any action we might take which weakens that machinery would inevitably reduce its effectiveness.

I conclude with a simple thought. The 20th century saw probably the most widespread, dramatic and repugnant abuses of human rights in recorded history. The challenge to us is to ensure that in the 21st century the world turns away decisively from that appalling inheritance and that Britain plays a prominent part in bringing that about.

Young People: Democratic Participation

Lord Hannay of Chiswick Excerpts

Thursday 24th October 2013 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Northover]

Indeed, it has had a very positive effect in that regard. As I answered an earlier question, the link between what students will learn in their citizenship classes and their ability then to take that forward to register to vote and to vote is very important. I also note that within citizenship education students will be debating all sorts of political and social issues, and they will be encouraged to debate and make reasoned arguments and so on. I imagine that they are going to be very lively lessons.

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick (CB)]

My Lords, will the Minister and Secretary of State for Education accept my thanks for having acceded to the lobbying by a number of us to include the United Nations in the citizenship curriculum? Can she say whether the department and local authorities will welcome a non-governmental organisation like the United Nations Association, which promotes model UN debates up and down the country and can help the curriculum a good deal?

[Baroness Northover]

I thank the noble Lord and will pass on his tribute to my right honourable friend the Secretary of State. Indeed, looking at the curriculum, I was struck by how international it was. I am sure that the organisations that he referred to will be encouraged to play their part in trying to inform students; that would be extremely welcome. However, the curriculum reaches in all directions. Internationally, it deals with human rights and international law, and it also looks at the diverse national, regional, religious and ethnic identities within the United Kingdom. Therefore, it extends and it is deep.

Foreign Affairs: Global Role, Emerging Powers and New Markets

Lord Hannay of Chiswick Excerpts

Thursday 6th December 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick]

My Lords, I very much welcome today’s debate, and the initiative of the noble Lord, Lord Howell, in securing it, not just because it is the first occasion that the House has had to conduct a wide-ranging discussion of foreign policy issues since the debate on the Address in May but because it offers an opportunity for me to continue a dialogue with the noble Lord about some aspects of the Government’s external policies, which was cut short on that occasion through lack of time—even if his own position has changed, to my regret.

I have to say, and I hope that the noble Lord will forgive me, that I will remain completely baffled as to the significance of the phrase “network world”. In the interim, I have reflected a bit and am reminded of the character in the Molière play who said that he had some difficulty in distinguishing between poetry and prose, but who was assured that prose was what he had been talking all his life. I think that I have been doing networks all my life; it is not something that has been discovered in the past three or four years.

If the debate also reminds us of the lacuna that exists as a result of our not having a foreign affairs committee, or an international affairs committee, in this House, which could periodically report to the House on key issues, it will have served a genuinely useful purpose. Before addressing a few general issues, I just wish to say how deeply I regret the Government’s decision to abstain on the UN resolution giving the Palestinians a modestly enhanced status at the UN. It was the noble Lord, Lord Carrington, who in 1980 first persuaded the European Community, followed some years later by the United States, to back a two-state solution. I believe that we should have followed that logic in voting for the resolution, not have pursued some non-negotiable conditions to give ourselves a quasi-alibi for an abstention. It may have seemed ingenious, but it was certainly not principled.

The general criticism that I would make of the Government’s external policies are that they are a little too narrowly focused on the cultivation of bilateral relationships and are a little too mercantilist in their approach to trade policy. The Foreign Secretary’s actions to strengthen and extend our bilateral diplomatic network and, in particular, to build up our representation in the main emerging powers, is to be applauded. However the objective should not be exclusively to promote British exports and inward investment, but every bit as much to influence the policy decisions of countries whose increasing role in the major multilateral organisations will make them essential partners in shaping a rules-based set of solutions to the global challenges that we all face, whether in trade policy, climate change, development, nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation or in nurturing peace and security more generally. That second part of the narrative often seems to be missing.

Then there is the mantra du jour that we are in a “global race”. There is some sense in this as a means of galvanising the energies of business and of bringing home the fact that we live in a highly competitive world where we have fallen some way behind our main competitors, but it misses out totally the concept of international co-operation which is every bit as important a dimension of a world in which Britain, a middle-ranking power which needs partners and allies to achieve its objectives, can hope to thrive. There is a real risk that the aftershocks from the great financial and economic crisis of 2008 will undermine the gains made since the end of the Cold War in international co-operation, and that the major multilateral organisations such as the UN, the IMF, the WTO, the G20, NATO and the EU will lose political backing, be underresourced and decrease in relevance. If that were to happen, I believe Britain would be one of the main losers. So by all means let us pursue strong bilateral relationships but not at the expense of those multilateral, rules-based organisations in which we have hitherto invested so much effort with some considerable success.

Nothing is more difficult than achieving coherence in a Government’s external policies and in one important sector I believe the UK is currently falling far short of that. I do not imagine anyone will dispute that the higher education sector in this country is a world leader and that over recent years it has been a rapidly growing source of invisible exports of great benefit to our universities and to the country as a whole. Incidentally, it is also a hugely growing source of employment in many parts of this country where that is lacking. The potential for even greater benefit in both ways in the years ahead is there but the Government’s own immigration policies are putting all that at risk. Last week we had the Minister for Immigration at the Home Office, Mr Mark Harper, rejoicing at the latest immigration statistics, which showed a sharp drop in net migration, the lion’s share of which was attributable to a substantial reduction in the number of students coming here. These are not people coming to take jobs but people coming with ready cash to purchase services which our colleges and universities can provide, people who in future years, when their studies are completed, will often become a part of that worldwide network of bilateral contacts which the Government are trying so hard to build up. What on earth is going on? What are the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the Treasury doing about this truly aberrant state of affairs? I hope that the Minister, whose work in encouraging British exports, both visible and invisible, I very much admire and support will have something to say on this when he replies to the debate.

I have one final point. A debate on this subject would not be complete without a word on the European Union and the European dimension of Britain’s external policies, although we will have an opportunity to discuss that more fully before the Recess. If Britain’s influence in Brussels becomes marginal—even more so if we were to withdraw from the European Union—our influence worldwide in Washington, Beijing, Delhi, Brasilia and elsewhere would suffer too. We should have no illusions about that. Nor would our exports or our inward investment benefit—quite the contrary. It is, after all, not membership of the EU which can explain why our exports to China in recent years have developed so much less buoyantly than those of Germany. So we need to take a more imaginative, constructive approach to that European dimension than we have done recently, and to regard it as an essential and integral part of our external policies, not something that dare not speak its name.

EAC Report: Development Aid

Lord Hannay of Chiswick Excerpts

Monday 22nd October 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick]

My Lords, in this House we do not get many opportunities to debate the general case for development aid and the place of Britain’s aid programme within it—probably fewer than we should. So I very much welcome the chance to discuss the report on the economic impact and effectiveness of development aid produced by the Economic Affairs Committee and so ably introduced this evening by the noble Lord, Lord MacGregor, even if I disagree quite sharply with some of its recommendations—I am in rather greater sympathy with the Government’s response to them.

Development aid is a crucial part of Britain’s projection of soft power; it is a practical expression of our role in the world as a leading developed nation, able to help others less fortunately placed. Frankly, that is a moral obligation as well as a self-interested one. It is a not insignificant part of an overall effort, under the aegis of the United Nations, to make the world a more equitable and thus a more secure place. It matters and we need to get it right. Broadly speaking, I believe that the coalition Government have done precisely that, particularly by their decision to ring-fence the aid budget from spending cuts. They have taken a large amount of criticism for that decision, mainly from their own supporters, but it was a bold and laudable decision. They got it right.

The report recommends the dismantling of the UN’s 0.7% of GNI target for official development aid. What is the justification for that? Is the quantum excessive? Far from it, I would argue. Developing countries, particularly those whose populations make up what has been called by Professor Collier—who I was delighted to see gave evidence to the committee—the bottom billion of the world’s citizens, have needs in developing agriculture, education, health services, infrastructure and environmentally responsible policies far in excess of their own fiscal capacity, even when that capacity is put together with the sums that would be raised by the UN target, if only the donors actually provided them, which most of them do not. If our own aid budget is currently growing rapidly to meet that target, it is largely because, for many years, we shamefully fell far short of it while continuing, year after year, to sign up to it in any number of UN resolutions. Should that target be dropped? What signal would that send to the world’s poorest people? I suggest a disastrous one. We should not forget that by setting the target in terms of a percentage of the donor’s gross national income, the system already takes account—the noble Lord, Lord McConnell, made this point—of recession or stagnation in those economies.

The report is also rather critical of efforts to focus aid on fragile states. No one would dispute that mounting aid programmes in such countries is fraught with technical, security and political problems, but a situation in which aid to fragile states simply dries up, as was the case some years ago in a number of those countries, drives those states into a downward spiral, leading eventually to state failure, which puts huge costs on the international community to remedy. I believe that the previous Labour Government, who began a shift in our aid policy to give fragile states more prominence, were quite correct, as has been this Government’s decision to continue that effort. Above all, the development work in fragile states requires the most intensive co-operation between DfID and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. I very much support the call for that co-operation by my noble friend Lord Jay of Ewelme, and the progress in getting away from the unhealthy dichotomy between the two departments, which tended to be the order of the day under the previous Government. It must not be allowed to return.

Thirdly, I do not entirely agree with the criticism of the European Union aid budget, to which we make a substantial contribution, of not concentrating enough on poverty alleviation in the poorest countries. I note that the new Secretary of State for International Development took up that theme recently in one of her first public pronouncements. I rather regret that. The EU has a whole string of fragile states around its periphery, from the states of the former Soviet Union, through the Caucasus, to the Balkans and north Africa, which are not among the poorest countries in the world but which it is surely in our interest to see emerging as stable democracies and market economies and which need European help, including trade outlets and investment, to do so. We invariably support the EU’s neighbourhood policy when it comes before the EU Council and rightly so, so we should not be sniping at one of its inevitable consequences, which is a substantial aid budget for those fragile states on our periphery.

I have two more positive themes. First, nothing was heard in this report, or naturally enough in the Government’s response, about the desirability of our working closely with the principal emerging powers, such as China, India and Brazil, which are just beginning to become important players in the aid field. Often those countries have really valuable experience of programmes to lift their own populations out of poverty. Should we not be co-operating with them rather than regarding them as competitors? Perhaps the Minister could say something about that in her reply to the debate.

Secondly, there is the future of the United Nations’ millennium development goals after 2015. The Prime Minister is joint chair with the presidents of Indonesia and Liberia of the UN panel set up to prepare the post-2015 phase, which is a welcome tribute to the role that Britain is playing on development issues. Perhaps the Minister could say something about our approach to the MDGs post-2015. How can we get a better focus on the problems of that bottom billion? How can we refine the very broad-brush approach of the present MDGs? How can we ensure better monitoring of the recipients’ performance in using and in matching up to their own targets? She may also take on board that it might be really good if we had a full debate in the House, in government time, before too long on the post-2015 MDGs and the objectives that the Government are pursuing in respect of them.

International Development Policy

Lord Hannay of Chiswick Excerpts

Thursday 1st December 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick]

My Lords, I warmly congratulate my noble friend Lord Sandwich on obtaining this debate on international development policy. I sometimes feel that we devote too little time to foreign affairs and development as we apply ourselves to our primary task of scrutinising and improving the Government’s legislative proposals. I never felt that more strongly than yesterday, when the Foreign Secretary’s Statement on relations with Iran was not repeated in this House. I have no intention of diverting this debate on to that ground, other than to say that it was a lamentable decision. If we want to be regarded as a mere superfluous appendage to the other place, that is the surest way to go about it.

I should also like to congratulate my noble friend Lord Singh on his extremely graceful maiden speech. Ten years ago I chose to make my maiden speech in a debate on international development, so I cannot but congratulate him on his choice of subject matter.

The coalition Government’s decision to ring-fence our overseas aid from the spending cuts was a courageous one when it was first made and is all the more so now that they are sticking to it in the face of much discouraging economic news. Through all the cacophony of press criticism of that decision, I have yet to hear one respectable argument for making developing countries far poorer than we are suffer because of an economic crisis for which they have absolutely no responsibility. In any case, they are already suffering from the slowing of the global economy.

I am certainly not going to cheer the decision of two days ago to reduce the sums earmarked for aid in the latter part of the current spending period. However we are—and this I do welcome—sticking to our Gleneagles and UN commitments. That 0.7 per cent of our gross national income is going to be a good deal less than was earlier anticipated is, I fear, an ineluctable fact. I hope that the Minister replying to the debate will be able to say what we are doing to hold other developed countries to their Gleneagles and UN commitments, which some of them are missing by a very wide margin indeed. We should not spare their blushes, however much they would like us to do so. What plans do we have to use next year’s G8 and G20 meetings to get those commitments back on track?

I was encouraged to hear that the Secretary of State for International Development had recently been to China to discuss the scope for co-operation between us in helping developing countries. Can the Minister say something about the outcome of that visit? Did the Chinese respond positively? What sort of programmes and projects could we work on together? I hope, too, that we are working on similar trilateral co-operation with countries such as India and Brazil, which are just beginning to mount serious aid programmes. Some time back I suggested that co-operation over aid could be one of the best ways of thickening up our relations with those emerging powers. Are we doing that now in a systematic way? Brazil in particular has many links with African countries, both cultural and economic, and it has devised imaginative and effective programmes for bringing its own poorer citizens out of the abject conditions in which many of them lived, so it would surely be an ideal partner if we could agree to work together. Have we got anywhere down that road?

I return briefly to a question that I put to the Minister recently: namely, the plight of UNESCO following the lamentable US decision to withdraw all its support from that organisation when Palestine was admitted as a member. I hope that we have not concealed our disagreement with that deplorable move. Why on earth should developing countries around the world be punished for giving the Palestinians a status that is no different from that which we all, including the US Administration, believe is our right? That sort of behaviour is a throwback to the worse mistakes of the previous Administration. I know that it is mandated under US law, but that is an explanation not an excuse.

Be that as it may, I hope that when we come to consider our own future support for UNESCO we will take all that into account. I very much support the broad thrust of our policy of holding UN agencies to account for the quality and effectiveness of their development work, but no organisation can take a cut such as UNESCO has had to take overnight without a lot of disruption and some damage to its overall performance. Can the Minister say how we are planning to respond? With some sympathy, I hope.

I am sorry to disappoint my noble friend Lord Craigavon but I am not going to say anything about EU aid. Having taken the afternoon off from the festivities in the Moses Room and chosen to participate in your Lordships' debate on this aid programme, I thought that I might as well go the whole hog. Therefore, I will not refer to the EU’s programme but I will follow my noble friend by drawing attention to the 2015 deadline for achieving the millennium development goals—a deadline that is now well above the horizon.

A lot has been achieved and more certainly will be in the next three years, but it is already clear as daylight that we will fall short, and by a substantial margin. Moreover, too many of the successes have been concentrated in too few of the developing countries, so it is surely high time for us to clear our own minds about what we will aim to achieve after the 2015 deadline. I suggest that we will need a better focused, less broad-brush approach and that it should concentrate on what Professor Paul Collier has so eloquently called the “bottom billion”. I am sorry if the phrase offended my noble friend. Our decision to ring-fence our aid puts us surely in pole position to lead the search for an improved MDG mark 2. I hope that the Minister can tell us that we are already at work with that in mind. If so, can she give us some idea of where we think the main emphasis of those future programmes should be?

One other point I would like to raise is the question of failing or failed states. Last July DfID produced an excellent paper on this tricky subject which I could not fault, partly because it followed so closely the path set out in a number of preceding reports, not least that of the UN reform panel on which I had the honour to serve. Prevention is better than waiting for countries to go over a cliff and then trying to catch them in mid-air or, more often, picking up the pieces in the aftermath of the disaster. It not only costs less but saves many lives that would otherwise be lost.

Is this a proper task for development agencies or should they, as some critics suggest, concentrate exclusively on the alleviation of poverty? I suspect that this is in any case something of a false choice. The poverty of failing or failed states is in many cases dire. One of the characteristics of those states is that for purely political reasons their poverty cannot be alleviated by classic developmental policies. Are we just to let them stew? I would say not. Moreover, it is essential to demonstrate that the international community’s responsibility to protect—R2P, as it is called—is not just a recipe for military intervention but a call in the first instance for strengthened policies of prevention. Therefore, I argue that helping those states to avoid failure is very much a proper object of our development policy. I hope that the Minister will say something about how the department is following up and implementing that first-class paper of last July.

In conclusion, I very much welcome the recent decision by DfID to put more resources into the BBC’s World Service Trust. The fact that much of the World Service’s output has genuine developmental value is surely not in doubt and has been quantified. It is high time to recognise this potential as another facet of our development policy. It should have happened a good time ago, as some of us in this House urged last winter, but better late than never. Back-Benchers are supposed to get more pleasure out of criticism than praise, but I am truly pleased to speak so positively about the coalition Government’s development policies—more positively, I suspect, than some of their supporters in another place would have done. I hope that that will be some small encouragement to the Government to stick to the path they have chosen to follow.

International Development

Lord Hannay of Chiswick Excerpts

Monday 21st November 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Northover]

I realise that the noble Lord has a great interest in Malawi from his work in the Scottish Parliament. I will write to him so that he has the most up-to-date details on that. His question reflects the difficulty, which we all recognise, of working in some of the most complex countries around the world. It is extremely important that we balance the needs of the poorest people in these countries with the difficulty of working through some of their Governments.

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick]

My Lords, will the Minister confirm that, as the press reports, the Secretary of State for International Development has today, or recently, written warning the FAO and UNESCO for the last time that their aid from us may be at risk? Will she say whether the Secretary of State intends, in the light of the 20 per cent or more cut in UNESCO’s budget, for reasons that have nothing whatever to do with its efficiency, and for reasons that I imagine the Government do not sympathise with, to take that into account when considering that particular case?

Middle East Peace Process

Lord Hannay of Chiswick Excerpts

Wednesday 4th May 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick]

My Lords, I raise three questions, and I hope that the Minister can respond to them.

The first is whether this is the moment at which we should be trying to revive the peace process, or should we be—as the Israeli Government would wish us to—sitting back, waiting for the dust to settle, doing nothing hasty, and making no innovations? I am sad to have to say that I think that the second choice is disastrous. I hope we will explain to our Israeli friends that we think it is disastrous because the new regimes that are emerging in Arab countries will be more sensitive to public opinion and will be open to radicalisation, and if there is no process to engage with we can be quite sure what will happen. We will drift towards confrontation and perhaps even hostilities. I believe in everything that the Minister and her colleagues have said in recent weeks, and I hope that they share this view and will be active in trying to revive the process.

Secondly, how is the vacuum in the peace process best filled? I do not think we can hope that Israel or the Palestinians will fill it spontaneously. In those circumstances, I feel that it is important to argue with the United States that it, together with the quartet, should put some kind of outline down on the table and test the views of the parties to that outline. It need not be anything particularly ambitious. It could be within the parameters of the Clinton negotiations at the White House and the subsequent Taba negotiations, but we need some substance on the table, otherwise the thing will just go round in circles.

Thirdly, who should we, Britain, and our European allies be talking to? I believe we should be talking to everyone, and that includes Hamas. We must surely now make a distinction between talking to everyone and negotiating. That is the essence of diplomacy. We should not negotiate with anyone, including Hamas, who does not desist from violence and does not accept the Arab peace initiative, but we should talk to everyone because we will have something to say if an outline is put on the table, and preserving the old system of boycotting Hamas completely will be counterproductive.

I hope that we can hear a response from the Government on those three points. We are at an important moment, and I hope that we will turn it into an opportunity, not another entry in the long catalogue of missed opportunities.

European Union Bill

Lord Hannay of Chiswick Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd March 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick]

My Lords, the troubled history of Britain’s relations with the rest of Europe has been marked by numerous incidents of bad luck and bad judgment. It was bad judgment by both of the two main parties that we did not join the Coal and Steel Community and the European Economic Community at the outset of their existence in the 1950s; it was bad luck that we were vetoed twice by General de Gaulle in the 1960s; it was bad judgment that we tried unsuccessfully to renegotiate the terms of accession in 1974; it was bad judgment, too, that we did not join the exchange rate mechanism in the mid-1980s, when the then Chancellor of the Exchequer and the then Foreign Secretary, both now Members of this House, pressed that we should do so; and it was bad luck that when we did join in 1990, the whole system was beginning to suffer from the aftershocks of German reunification. The Bill we are debating today falls fair and square in the bad judgment category.

I shall not weary the House with a full-blown rehearsal of the arguments against the use of referendums as a regular part of our constitutional practice. We debated that extensively last October on the basis of an excellent report by the House’s Constitution Committee, which saw many negative aspects in referendums—many more than any positive ones—and I set out my views then. Suffice it to say that the problems of low turnout, of the impossibility of ensuring that voters address the question being asked and are not swayed by extraneous considerations or by their attitude to the Government of the day who are posing the question, are serious—perhaps fatal—defects which undermine any assertion that referendums represent a superior form of democracy to the working of representative parliamentary institutions.

It surely cannot be denied that their frequent use will seriously damage the legitimacy of the institution of Parliament, which has been built up so laboriously in this country over many centuries. Some of these defects can be palliated by devices such as adding a sunset clause to the present legislation, or by making the result of a referendum purely advisory, or by setting a voting threshold below which the matter would return to Parliament for decision—this last device, of course, being an amendment which the House supported in the context of the recent alternative vote referendum Bill. All these palliatives will, I trust, be given full and careful consideration as we scrutinise the Bill, but the fundamental negative consequences for our parliamentary system of the proposed extensive use of referendums contained in the Bill cannot simply be wished away.

The hard fact is that the Government faced a choice when they set out to give legislative effect to the coalition agreement of last May: that any significant change to the EU treaties should be subjected to approval by referendum. They could have brought forward a quite simple Bill ensuring that any future treaty amendments that transferred significant powers to Brussels would be so treated and would be the object of a referendum. Or they could, as the present Bill does, seek to invent new procedures, including referendums, to handle decisions taken by the European institutions under the powers conferred in the Lisbon treaty, which we, like every other member state, have ratified. I believe the Government made the wrong choice.

That, too, seems to be the thrust of this House’s Constitution Committee in its excellent recent report on the Bill, published on 17 March, when it stated:

“In our judgement, the resort to referendums contemplated in the European Union Bill is not confined to the category of fundamental constitutional issues on which a UK-wide referendum may be judged to be appropriate. Furthermore, many of the Bill’s provisions are inconsistent with the Government’s statement that referendums are most appropriately used in relation to fundamental constitutional issues”.

That is a damning judgment indeed.

In making their choice to go for a complex Bill, the Government have constructed a cat’s cradle of incredible complexity which, as cats’ cradles tend to do, is only too likely to catch and entangle the cat that created it in the first place. The main effect of the Bill if passed in its present form will be, I would guess—others have said this, too—to blight British decision-making in Brussels, even when the decision in question might be one which is strongly in Britain’s interests to see go ahead. After all, no Government are going to willingly risk defeat in a referendum as a result of mid-term unpopularity or in the approach to a general election. It is far more likely that we will find the Government of the day blocking a decision in Brussels, even when it would be in our national interests to pursue it.

There is also what I call the chicken and egg problem about this legislation. All the EU decisions which are designated to be caught by the Bill are only the ones that require unanimity in the Council. So unless and until Britain signifies its agreement to the measure in question, it does not exist in a legal form which can be put to the electorate for confirmation or rejection. Among other things, this implies that the Government as a whole will have to campaign for a yes vote in a referendum—I would be grateful if the Minister can confirm this—because they will already have backed the decision in Brussels. If they had not, there would not have been a decision and there would not be a referendum. Is that a correct reading of the situation?

If the referendum were to have a negative result, or if, for that matter, we were to block a decision simply in order to avoid the need for a referendum, we should of course have set up a simple position in Brussels under which the other 26 member states—which, by definition, would have agreed to it—could go ahead without us under the enhanced co-operation procedures of the Lisbon treaty. We would be left out of a measure which the Government and Parliament would have decided it was in our national interests to participate in. This would be an absurd situation. Is that what the Government have in mind?

In any case, the Bill is shot through with constitutional contradictions. None is more flagrant than the clear and deliberate attempt to go against one of the main precepts of our unwritten constitution, namely that no Parliament can tie the hands of its successor. That is exactly what the Bill sets out to do. This is made all the more blatant by the statement from the Government in the coalition agreement that they do not intend to agree to any significant transfer of powers to Brussels during the lifetime of this Parliament. The referendum provisions of the Bill will only be triggered in subsequent Parliaments, not this one. That really is making constitutional innovation on the wing. It is another powerful argument for a sunset clause.

As a number of noble Lords said, there is another of those contradictions in Clause 18, on the,

“Status of EU law dependent on continuing statutory basis”.

It is hard to understand what that provision is meant to signify or what, if any, effect its enactment would have. It is harder still if you read that in combination with Explanatory Notes 118 and 119, which state:

“This clause does not alter the existing relationship between EU law and UK domestic law; in particular, the principle of the primacy of EU law … The rights and obligations assumed by the UK on becoming a member of the EU remain intact”.

To use another feline metaphor, this clause really resembles the smile of the Cheshire Cat. The longer you look at it, the more it tends to disappear. Surely either the clause should be dropped or we should include in the Bill the Explanatory Note that I have cited.

I have no doubt—we have to some extent already been told this by the protagonists of the Bill—that it is designed to enable Britain to feel comfortable in its EU membership and the mere existence of this so-called referendum lock is meant to achieve that. Yet it certainly does not appear to be having that effect on the Government’s Eurosceptic supporters in another place nor on the prominently Eurosceptic press. Nor is it easy to see how a succession of referendums on relatively abstruse aspects of European law and practice could have that effect either, whether they were voted down or confirmed. If it is not going to appease Eurosceptics and will work against our interests in Brussels, what on earth useful purpose does it serve?

It is regrettable that, after a lengthy period of EU preoccupation with institutional issues, we British should now be heading back down that long, dark tunnel. I had hoped that with the Lisbon treaty in force we could focus on the substance of European policy-making, completing the single market, achieving economic and financial stability and growth, freer and fairer world trade, further enlargement and making a reality out of the common foreign and security policy. Instead, we appear to be seeking to deny the EU the flexibility built into the Lisbon treaty and the capacity to adapt to changing circumstances. Without that, no institution, either at the national or international level, can hope to prosper and flourish. The Government’s policy seems to be to lock the door and throw the key out of the window.

International Aid Reviews: Conclusions

Lord Hannay of Chiswick Excerpts

Tuesday 1st March 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Verma]

I thank my noble friend for her very warm words. I also pay tribute to UNICEF and many of the great NGOs that do incredible work often in very difficult circumstances. She raised some points about countries from which DfID money was withdrawn. We are going continuously to countries that will need our assistance. However, the infrastructure must be in place to be able to deliver it on the ground. If it is not, it is often difficult. I very much take on board what my noble friend has said and will take it back to the department for the Secretary of State.

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick]

My Lords, will the Minister accept a very warm welcome for the way in which the Government have withstood the slings and arrows of the tabloid press, who have asked them to cut our aid programme? How welcome it is that they are sustaining it, particularly given that, if you do a mathematical calculation, you will find that, because of the crisis, the 0.7 per cent of GNI will be worth less in 2013 than when it was pledged in 2005. These countries have already taken a hit. It is very good that the Government are standing up to that.

Does the noble Baroness recognise that seeking reforms to these multilateral organisations, which is entirely legitimate, depends crucially on getting allies in other countries who take the same view as us and press for the same reforms, otherwise it is just a concealed cutting operation? I hope she will be able to say that the Government put a lot of effort into that.

India, Brazil and China are now becoming aid donors. They are countries with a lot of working experience of how to lift people out of poverty. I hope that we will work closely with countries such as Brazil, India and China in future because we have both a lot to contribute and a lot of work to do with them.

[Baroness Verma]

I thank the noble Lord for all his comments. In fact there was very little that I could disagree with. As he is very well aware through his own experience, building good partnerships is very important. He is absolutely right; we will be working with China and Brazil and, hopefully not too far into the future, with India, too. We are having very constructive conversations with our other partners who provide donor aid. Many have shown a very keen interest in how we have gone through our review process and are looking very closely at what we have managed to do to ensure that their programmes are also going to be targeted and focused so that we all work toward the same end, which is getting people out of poverty.