Queen's Speech

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Howell, on his appointment as Minster of State in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. He has a long personal and political record of commitment to international understanding and security and, while we might strongly diverge about aspects of policy, I am certain that he is decently and patriotically motivated. I wish him well in his new duties. We are now confronted by a national coalition Government, a condition that our British gift for understatement compels us to call "interesting". Nowhere is the contrivance more intriguing than in foreign, international development and defence policy. Time forbids detailed examination on this occasion, but some points irresistibly invite a little prying. To establish a general disposition, for instance, does the Minister retain the opinion that he expressed in this House just last November that the Liberal party’s policies are "boring and frankly incomprehensible", or has the elixir of coalition now made them fascinating and perhaps pellucid? More specifically, last week’s coalition agreement to, ""create new mechanisms to give British people a direct say in how an element of the aid budget is spent"," patently sustains the Conservative policy of distributing aid programmes, ""in proportion to how many votes they receive"." The Save the Children Fund describes that as development policy run like "The X Factor". Since it is the coalition’s approach, what is to be the size and qualification of the electorate? What will be the method and duration of the voting? Will the balloting be financed, perhaps, from the aid budget? Indeed, will the returning officer by any chance be Mr Simon Cowell? There are also concerns about the coalition’s commitment to introduce a new stabilisation and reconstruction force. The purposes of such a force in post-conflict conditions might appear worthy but development aid should not and must not be diverted to subsidising military operations. Security, development and humanitarian objectives must not be muddled. The proposal therefore begs the vital question: how would the force be financed—by new money, money from the MoD, or from DfID funds, as the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Jones, announced last January? We need to hear the essential detail and now would be a good time to give it. Similar questions arise about financing adaptation and mitigation efforts in poor countries to combat climate change: the Liberal party commitment to new additional money was clear, the Conservative Party was evasive, but no undertaking not to siphon off development assistance funds has come from this coalition. Can we therefore now have an undertaking that the coalition Government will not raid the DfID budget to fund climate change measures? May we also be assured by the Minister that FCO responsibilities will not be shuffled in a way which enables gaps in that ring-fencing around the DfID budget to be created? Since that budget must be sustained if Liberals and Tories are to fulfil their solemn promises of 0.7 per cent of GNI for development, will the Minister confirm now that the commitment will be enacted in legislation and not relegated to a parliamentary resolution? I am very proud of the Labour Government’s sustained commitment to development, particularly to efforts to foster security and justice for women and girls. In too many parts of the world it is more dangerous to be a woman than to be a soldier. That tragic reality is the reason why Gordon Brown gave me the cross-departmental role of special representative on violence against women. I hope the new Government will also now give priority to tackling all gender-based violence. That would, I believe, have the strength of consensus in this House. Time is short and I will have to leave Sudan, Congo, the Middle East and many other matters—including Afghanistan, where we all strongly support our forces and their mission—for future discussions in this House. I therefore move briefly to the coalition’s perspective on the European Union. Overall, it seems to have more smoke than an Icelandic volcano and more mirrors than Versailles. First, I strongly agree with the call to fix the sole seat of the European Parliament in Brussels. In 15 years as a Member of the European Parliament, I repeatedly voted to end the Parliament’s costly and time-consuming odysseys to Strasbourg. However, that city was specified as a city of the Parliament in the Maastricht treaty agreed by Prime Minister John Major. Changing that would require unanimous agreement. France will never vote for it; neither will Germany. The coalition Government know full well—as anyone else in Europe knows—that it is not a possible objective. Secondly, the referendum lock adopted by the coalition was described by Liberal Democrat leaders—when there were such people—as "nonsense, ludicrous and bizarre". When all the member states have agreed that there will be no treaty change in the foreseeable future, we should also now call it redundant. Thirdly, the coalition policy of introducing primary legislation to control any UK use of the European Council passerelle procedure, to which the Minister referred, is equally superfluous: apart from the veto, which would prevent the use of the passerelle, we have the 2008 Act which requires majorities in both Houses of this Parliament to permit UK support for a passerelle. In short, strict passerelle control already exists and everyone but the most obsessive of what Sir John Major would call "Euro illegitimates" recognises that. On all grounds, assessment of the coalition's "consensus" on the EU shows it to be a series of tokenistic gestures made by the leaders of the coalition to mollify Europhobes in the Tory Party. The election debate description of those people and their new group in the European Parliament by the Deputy Prime Minister enjoys justified fame. Before that, the new Energy Secretary, Mr Huhne, had called them "wackos and weirdos" and perceptively added: ""You can tell a lot about a party by the company it keeps"." Charity prevents me making the same observation about the company currently being kept by the Liberal Democrat Party. Ours is a world riven by economic and social division and menaced by crime, climate change, religious antagonisms, political hatreds and terrorising violence. It is a world overarmed with large and small weapons, rapaciously exploited, plagued by oppression in countless places and poisoned by distrust. That is why our foreign, development and defence policies must respond to these imperatives and must continue to focus on securing global equity, freedom and justice—the essential components of global stability and prosperity.