Britain frets over a lost duck and a punctured wheelchair in Zimbabwe

Below is Lord Stunell’s full contribution, which also touches on refugees

I start by declaring what is not a formal interest but, until March this year, I was a governor of the Westminster Foundation for Democracy, which is largely funded by the FCO and DfID, and some of my remarks bear on its funding and work.

I welcome this debate and the opportunity to participate in it. I thank my noble friend Lord Loomba for it, and go further and thank him sincerely for the work he has invested in the Loomba Foundation over the years, first in India and then throughout the world.

It is largely down to him that International Widows’ Day was declared by the UN General Assembly in 2010; the work of his foundation led to that. He called for today’s debate, and we have heard some passionate, heartfelt and well-informed contributions.

Even those of us who have had concern for development for many years have perhaps missed the significant and often terrifying hardships faced by widows throughout the world, particularly in conflict zones but, as the noble Baroness, Lady Flather, reminded us, also in places where custom and bad social practice—I had intended to use the word “culture”, but she has taught me something already—horrifically magnify the impact of widowhood on the individual, as well as on their children and the society in which they live.

My renewed thanks to my noble friend and his foundation, which published its report to coincide with International Widows’ Day, which did not work too well in the United Kingdom this year, because it was 23 June, when other events were taking place.

We have already heard some of the appalling statistics, with the important qualification in the House of Lords briefing that all the figures in the report are almost certainly serious underestimates of the actual problem. Shocking as those figures are, and wake-up call as they undoubtedly give us, they are letting us off a little lightly: the real situation is even worse than the Loomba Foundation’s report sets out.

I first worked on a refugee resettlement programme more than 50 years ago, in 1959. It was World Refugee Year, something lost in the midst of history, but at the time in western Europe there were 1 million refugees still living in camps following the end of the Second World War, mostly huts and ex-barracks in Germany.

They largely consisted of German diaspora who had been expelled from countries in eastern Europe as the Soviet army advanced, where people had no intention whatever of provoking a future German Government to rescue them. World Refugee Year was a start to tackle that backlog of refugees in western Europe. It took more than five years to finish the task of rehousing and resettlement, and people’s circumstances could be complex.

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