I welcome the commitment in the Conservative manifesto to buy British, especially through public procurement. No one has been charged with that crime, but everything points to Turkish state responsibility. If one surveys the ruins of British and American policies in so much of the Middle East, it seems clear that second thoughts and new ideas are urgently needed, if only because of the unusual demography and deep discontent that exists there. Our history is deeply involved with theirs, going right back—as we should be celebrating again this year—to the Pilgrim Fathers, whatever the chequered stories that followed, as well as to the First and Second World Wars and the huge sacrifices made by the American people for the freedom of Europe. The late Lord Davidson founded Canning House in 1948 because he understood that the British Empire was coming to an end, and had the foresight to recognise that we had to find a new role in the world. Five hundred years ago, Henry Courtenay, the Earl of Devon, marked new year 1520 with a gift of oranges to his king and cousin, Henry VIII. As my noble friend Lord Gardiner rightly noted in his opening remarks, our brave men and women who defend this country and our nation as well as our national interests are a priceless asset. The good will expressed in those three countries exists throughout Latin America, from Mexico through central America and down to the tip of Patagonia. Can the Minister assure us that this will be followed up and that peacebuilding in the region will be part of this urgently needed review, to which we look forward in the coming months? Our immediate responsibility is to protect British citizens and maritime shipping in key areas such as the Gulf of Hormuz and the Emirate states, but one has to accept that in this modern world revenge attacks could take place anywhere. The north of the island continues to live under an unfair, unjust and unnecessary embargo; the south continues to be a magnet for Russian money and influence. They tried to burn the roof of the church by piling up the chairs, like a bonfire.”, “Every day we carry new corpses to the cemetery. I have spent 10 years looking at the reports by Gash and the Tamil university teachers, at the census and at all the coverage I could find. Most recently, on 19 December, she once again emphasised: “My Ministers will continue to invest in our gallant Armed Forces. I am sorry. The hospital was burnt. Will the Government be providing expertise or facilitating the adoption of an English legal framework for this region? Thousands of Iranians have long since seen through this theocratic terror state and have been publicly protesting against its leaders, while in Iraq more than 400 people have been killed while campaigning for a more open and democratic and less corrupt Government no longer manipulated by Iran. Later this year, when the Committee on Climate Change publishes its sixth carbon budget, the Government will be even further adrift from their legal commitment to net zero by 2050. Agriculture and food systems are extremely sensitive to climate change, as many noble Lords have indicated. The paper lists four principal elements of the trade Bill. The negotiation of our future trade relationship with the EU is of paramount importance, but it is also important to start negotiations with our other major trading partners. In the context of building capacity, I contest—and I declare my interests in this—that parliamentary strengthening and working with policy development in developing countries is relatively low-cost but can be extremely effective and should be encouraged. I will endeavour to follow up the reference he made to the breach of the Geneva convention and respond to him on that. I join my noble friend Lord Collins, the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham, the noble Lord, Lord Jay, and the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, in raising questions about the danger of DfID returning to the fold of the FCO. David Wallace-Wells’s book, The Uninhabitable Earth, should be required reading for every Member of this House as we move forward. hat zum zweiten Mal innerhalb von zwei Monaten das Parlament in London wiedereröffnet. They will not achieve any of these things unless we have hard, as well as soft, power. If the UK is going to have real moral authority and be able to use its soft power effectively to make the world a better place, it will have to start doing so in a way that is more open and transparent. It is worth noting that businesses based in Sri Lanka can market their products and services to 3.5 billion people on preferential terms. A serious and much respected elderly Israeli statesman once told me that at his age he had learned that it was a better use of his time to talk to his enemies than to his friends. It is in our hands; there are no other hands available. Namibia came to independence 12 years later. There are two options for that firm power: nuclear, or gas turbines with carbon capture and storage—we need both. I do not doubt the genuine aspirations, but I am concerned that a certain amount of watering down might occur. It signals a return to the bad old days of tied aid and aid scandals such as the Pergau dam, which will diminish our standing on the global stage. It is a worse Bill partly because of its effect on Northern Ireland and partly because of its reneging on previous discussions on equivalence of regulation and alignment with our European partners. Secondly, we would have discovered that the United States of America stays a good friend but that the relationship has changed from the old pattern of 70 years past, and that even before Trump appeared it was clear that our world views no longer coincided. I just want to go home with my children, but everything was destroyed, and we would be slaughtered.”. I hope that these Bills will give us the opportunity to rethink the ways in which we tackle six additional issues: waste, especially food waste; packaging; plastics; fly-tipping; recycling; and renewable energy projects. Bardarash is a symbol of the breakdown of global leadership. All those provide a route to getting to the £60 per-megawatt-hour level which we need for the technology. At the same time, I am not prepared for us to give anything up. Nutrition is the foundation of the health of every one of us. This is the really important question about his domestic environmental ambitions: will his proposed legislation give real teeth to its enforcer? I have been pleased to meet with Ministers to discuss the matter and I was heartened by the comment of the Minister about Her Majesty’s commitment to tackling this dreadful epidemic. There are some very good and not-so-good aspects of the gracious Speech to be noted this time—of course, it is the second in the past year. This should be paralleled by a national consensus that we need a complete moratorium on the needless cutting down of trees and hedges: no more chainsaw massacres, as alas we saw in Sheffield. Out of a total managed government expenditure of some £840 billion promoting our national interest in countries abroad, even with some ODA funding, we have a budget of just £1.1 billion. Downing Street has started setting out parameters, one of which is that, “the new strategy will seek to modernise defence”—. All local councils should give this considerable thought. You appear to have JavaScript disabled in your browser settings. It is a great friend of this country. According to the WHO, malnutrition is the number one cause of illness worldwide and contributes to the deaths of almost half of all under-fives. Perhaps the most influential vehicle for delivering British soft power is the BBC World Service—the frequency tuned to worldwide for the unvarnished truth in times of unrest and uncertainty. I wonder: is the Prime Minister up to the challenge of leadership on the climate emergency? I will not be alone in noting that the language of insulting other European Union countries, as if they were not listening or could not understand English, has now changed to the language of “our friends and partners” in Europe. Then, of course, there is the G7, in June, which will be hosted by President Trump at Camp David, in the full beam of the limelight created by the USA’s election year. In 2014 and 2015, the Turkish army stood by looking on while ISIS destroyed the frontier town of Kobane, which was saved only by American air support. Empires came and went, their hubris dribbling away into deserts of exiled misery, and powers and rulers never learned, even when they seduced their people into what turned out to be false securities. My most reverend friend the Archbishop of Canterbury—who was here earlier but sadly could not be here for the whole debate and was unable to speak—has had calls with the UN Secretary-General and the Vatican to explore ways to rebuild community relationships. Ever since the de facto partition of the island, however, there have been efforts to reunite it. We see some countries with effective family planning programmes, but all must be encouraged to have them. I finish with one interesting fact. I see huge opportunities for trade. The commitment that, once we leave the EU, we shall promote sanctions for human rights abuses worldwide and build on “existing Magnitsky-style measures” is somewhat puzzling to me. like other noble Lords, I wonder what will happen in reality. Does the Minister have any additional information to share with the House today, or details of what is going to be established? Their universal acceptance by UN states was a moment of immense national pride. Sadly, we are behind on almost all targets, and at the end of this year there is no new UK funding for nutrition. My other comment is on the reference to development, which is tagged on to the end of that sentence. If Britain is to spend large sums of money on girls’ education, vaccinations or climate change, let us not just tick the box, let us accelerate the impact of those interventions and look at them in the wider context of our vision for this world and Britain’s place in it. The cost of acting slowly is increasing. At the end of 2019, I made a request to the Chief Whip, my noble friend Lord Ashton of Hyde, that a major debate on defence and foreign policy should be held and he has kindly indicated that such a debate will take place. What better country to do that? He leads a minority government and is 40 shorts vote of winning anything in Parliament. My Lords, today’s world seems ever more precarious, with conflict and instability proliferating in so many places. The talks have the potential to change the world in the next generation. Economic output lags behind, trade is significantly embargoed and dependence on an increasingly erratic Turkey increases. Like my noble friend on the Front Bench, I live in Scotland and am very aware of the various dimensions of Scottish politics which impinge on our daily lives, but here we have a subject where the responsibilities seem to be shared. All arms of government on both sides were aware, however, with funding arrangements made available by this House. These were always going to be marathons, not sprints, and it is vital that we do not lose focus due to the idiosyncrasies of our political system, but ensure that the mantle is passed from Minister to Minister. Our Foreign and Commonwealth Office will continue to play a pivotal role in promoting and defending those national interests, and part of that is indeed achieved through soft power. What plans do the Government have to reverse that trend and to circumvent the paralysis of dispute settlement procedures if the US cannot be persuaded to relent? The Economist magazine recently named Uzbekistan country of the year in recognition of the many positive developments made in the country. Of course, this is not just about Christians being persecuted. In the same way, I am quite prepared to criticise my own party—the Tory party—in Somerset. The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Oxford eloquently expressed the potentially catastrophic environmental, economic and social effects of the current trajectory, so I welcomed the obviously heartfelt commitment of the Minister in his speech today and Her Majesty’s Government’s commitment to the UK achieving net zero carbon emissions by 2050. You cannot get decisions made because somebody is thinking, “Oh well, we will have to put this back or that back.” I hope that the conference in March will take place and that it will be more than a conference, and that Britain will come back to being the world leader that it was on this issue, and that the right sort of funding will be put in. All of this demands hard, as well as soft, power, and I am afraid that the Government are not investing in hard power. We were so much more fortunate than other areas in the country where six inches of rain fell in two days and where families had to leave their homes and farmland was waterlogged. That takes me back to the middle of the paragraph and the reference to the integrated review. When will they tell us how they intend to make the country more resilient to the inevitable impacts of climate change, including flooding, drought and high temperatures? This feels to me like a major strategic shift. This will doubtless assist our negotiating position with the EU. How will trials ever take place if we fail systematically to collect witness statements? The situation fulfils the criteria of genocide as recognised by the Nigerian National Assembly and must be so recognised, with the international community’s duty to respond accordingly. I am being told I can go on for two more minutes. I believe that we have to transcend political, ethnic, religious and other differences to compromise and co-operate so as to bring about the essential healing that is required in our fractious world today. First, carbon capture and storage is absolutely central to the net-zero scenario of the Committee on Climate Change, which envisages capturing around 176 megatonnes, or million tonnes, per year of carbon dioxide by 2050. These will all have to go eventually, but there is no excuse for still putting them in new houses or offices. Brexit has now become one of the greatest political issues in, and between, Britain and Ireland. These are disturbing statistics, but behind every statistic is a human horror story. This indicates a more internationally organised terrorist group bringing together Islamist militants to achieve their objectives in West Africa. However, we recognise that there are challenges, not least the paucity of the number of women at negotiating tables globally. My response is this: that this country’s contribution will be measured not only in the quantity but in the quality of our response, the quality of our imagination and innovation—from power generation to food production, to the harnessing of pension funds to support a new green economy—and the ability, the quality, of our leadership to provide tools that can be adapted and scaled up by others across the world. Sudan is in a region where its neighbours face civil or political unrest. During the election campaign the Prime Minister pledged the most profound review of Britain’s defence and security needs since the Cold War, and I welcome such an undertaking. That leaves completely untouched and so far without any real examination the question of how we will maintain our services—the bedrock of our economy. Many of the issues raised by Brexit and this Queen’s Speech will bear on that. 10 to ensure that we focus our combined international assets and efforts as effectively as possible in the national interest. My noble friend also called for a meeting between the all-party group and a DfID Minister to discuss the summit. A new report focuses on necessary action against human trafficking and migrant smuggling. Will the Government continue to focus on building programmes to support people with disabilities? This attitude of mind is transforming the future capability of our Armed Forces. DfID has a particularly good record on this—in partnership, interestingly enough, with Canada—and I hope that that will continue and grow. My Lords, I, too, congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Ritchie, on her excellent maiden speech. After 14 years Iraq is still rocked by the aftershocks of violent civil war. After we have left the European Union, this internal energy market with no longer be available to us, as we are leaving the single market. Many noble Lords cogently and eloquently expressed acute anxiety about the now visible consequences of climate change, and I would suggest that it was a dominant feature of the debate. There would be a cost implication of any adaptation necessary, which would fall to the Scottish Government to fund, but improvements in the EPC standards of those houses would seem to be an MoD responsibility to address weaknesses in its current Scottish housing stock if it is still on its books. It would be ironic if failure to secure EU trading terms in 2020 rendered Seville oranges a rare and costly gift once more. The Turkish invasion broke all the rules and our oldest ally failed to consult even EU and NATO members. I believe that the Government should provide dedicated, long-term, core, flexible funding for women’s rights organisations working at grass roots. Since the Syrian conflict, we have an operation in the Middle East, and considerable resource is going there. But we will be leaving the one institution that has helped provide so much political, social and economic stability on the island of Ireland. Can the Minister confirm that this will be considered and emphasised in the review? This must include a plan to end division and to bring down the physical and mental walls of division. We are certainly aware of this significant and lamentable deficiency. So I echo the noble Baroness, Lady Young of Old Scone, in saying to your Lordships that you also have to act. However, this will require vision, leadership, investment and greater co-ordination to capture some of the synergies between these different sectors, as well as dealing with the risks I talked about and a whole host of issues, including the difficulty of getting visas for foreign scientists and others coming in to this country, as mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Risby. Therefore, I do not quite share the apprehensions of some of your Lordships about the realignment between DfID and the Foreign Office. The 2010 and 2015 SDSRs were incoherent cost-cutting exercises with little regard to strategy or strategic thought. I was pleased to hear my noble friend the Minister confirm today that the UK will not only honour the NATO commitment to spend at least 2% of GDP on defence but will increase that budget by at least 0.5% above inflation every year of the new Parliament. I have had first-hand experience of that. As we have already heard from my noble friend Lord Patten, in particular, and the noble Baroness, Lady Young of Old Scone, there was something of a bidding war on tree planting during the election campaign, and planting the right species in the right place is of course very important. The development of soft rather than hard power can rebut it. There is an opportunity here which is not always good in connection with our present problems over Iran. Women particularly can be such powerful agents for change in their societies. A number of noble Lords have referred to the fact that we shall be debating our third effort at an environment Bill. What about the internal work, which we have been discussing for many years, not much of which seems to have been settled? To start with the best bits, it is obviously good to see the end of the Brexit deadlock in clear sight. Then we can take President Macron’s radical consultation and conversation which followed the yellow vest protests last year. I will quickly advise the Government against two other things. I very much hope that we can, but my goodness, it is a delicate operation. The Secretary-General gave a very good, precise order of priorities as soon as this crisis blew up. Last year saw the 40th anniversary of CEDAW—the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women—known as the international bill of rights for women. Achievement of that target would make a critical contribution to the bold ambition, laid out in last year’s Lancet commission report, to eliminate malaria entirely by 2050. Here is the full text of the Queen's Speech delivered to the Houses of Parliament today: My Lords and Members of the House of Commons. The Government gained an extra 300,000 votes in the 2019 general election but thereby an 80-seat majority.
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