Monica Harding MP: speeches

Speeches

• 8 Sept 2026 · Conflict in Sudan · Hansard source

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  It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Dr Allin-Khan. I thank the hon. Member for Gillingham and Rainham (Naushabah Khan) for raising the subject, which we should be talking about much more, and welcome the Minister to her place. I declare my interest as vice-chair of the APPG for Sudan and South Sudan, and I refer to a trip undertaken with Action Against Hunger to the Chad-Sudan border to witness the impact of the conflict. I can rehearse the lines I have said over and over again during my time in the House to a range of Ministers: the world has failed Sudan, and the UK must do much more to bring about an end to the conflict and to the largest humanitarian crisis in the world today. In June, with the leader of my party, my right hon. Friend the Member for Kingston and Surbiton (Ed Davey), I wrote to the former Prime Minister urging him to use his last hours in office to act to end the escalating crisis in El Obeid, which is at real risk of levels of violence against civilians similar to the El Fasher massacre in 2025. I did not receive a response. Over the summer, El Obeid has seen thousands of people arriving in search of shelter. Foreign Ministers, including here in the UK, have made welcome statements calling for de-escalation and for the warring parties to uphold international humanitarian law, but the situation there continues to worsen. It is emblematic of the situation in Sudan today. In May, colleagues and I visited Chad’s border with Sudan. We found a humanitarian response operating under extraordinary pressure. The town of Adré, which once had a population of 40,000, now hosts an estimated 240,000 people. Chad now hosts more than 1.5 million refugees, the majority of them from Sudan. Chad is one of the poorest countries in the world and is sharing scarce water, land and services with a vast refugee population. But as the humanitarian actors we met on our trip told us continually, the needs far outweigh the resources they have to respond.

• 8 Sept 2026 · Conflict in Sudan · Hansard source

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  Absolutely. China, Russia and so many other countries are involved in the crisis. I welcome yesterday’s statement by the UK on behalf of the coalition for atrocity prevention and justice in Sudan, which called for a stop to the continued illegal flow of weapons, but when will the UK call out the countries doing it? I have pressed and pressed successive Ministers and Foreign Secretaries, and they continually refuse to call out the UAE in particular for its widely reported bloody role in the conflict. When will they do so, and when will they take consequential action for their hand in it? Will arms licences to the named countries be reviewed and halted in the light of the reports? With the current arms embargo on the Darfur region up for renewal at the end of this week, will the UK push for a Sudan-wide arms embargo, something that even the USA is now calling for? Will the Government use the UK’s role as UN Security Council penholder on Sudan to advance efforts to secure a ceasefire? The current road map is unrealistic; how will the Government propose a realistic de-escalation? What about the sanctions on those at the heart of the conflict? Will the Government widen the scope of their sanctions regime to ensure that those driving the conflict face further restrictions? In Chad, I met women so traumatised by what they had experienced that their eyes were dead. Some could not speak. Those who did told us harrowing tales of rape and murder on their way across Sudan to Chad. One lady had witnessed nine male members of her family being murdered. One lady had just arrived at the border into the care of the UN with two children, aged five and seven. She had taken five months to get there, by herself, from El Fasher. Those roads are dangerous. How will the Government work to secure the safety of civilians? What about accountability? In the absence of reprisals, belligerents and their state backers are acting with impunity. Belligerents are using rape, starvation as a weapon of war, arbitrary detention, torture and retaliation against civilian populations. International NGOs are being silenced with the threat of their access being removed if they speak out, and the UNHCR does not even have the money to spend time with victims of unbelievable violence and diagnose what has occurred. We cannot seek accountability if we cannot fund the capacity to establish it, so will the Government review their financial commitment to Sudan and encourage other nations also to fill the void? Will the Government commit to seeking to extend the mandate of the fact-finding mission? What conversations are being had about a peacekeeping force in Sudan, perhaps with the African Union, if only to state that the world is waking up to this conflict and that the belligerents are no longer able to act with impunity, thumbing their nose at international humanitarian law and the values of humanity itself? The UK has a unique role to play in this conflict. I have just hotfooted it from the Foreign Secretary’s statement on Palestine, which I welcome. I applaud his assertion that “It is also the case that if we fail to stand up for the values that this country has long held and fought for, we lose credibility and influence in the world.” He talked about “a Britain that upholds its values at home and around the world, a Britain that fights against oppression and suffering wherever they occur, and a Britain that stands up for what is right.” Does that apply to Sudan too? Will the Government use every lever at their disposal to up the urgency and convince the international community to act to stop the bloodshed? For every child trapped in this terrible conflict, terrified right now, for every mother trying to protect her son, for every civilian caught up in the violence, for the humanitarian worker facing unbelievable risks, and for humanity’s sake, do more.

• 8 Sept 2026 · Conflict in Sudan · Hansard source

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  The right hon. Member is absolutely right. The overall funding to Chad for the humanitarian response had fallen to 27%. That meant that in the refugee camps we visited, food was being rationed—it may have been every other week or every other month that they were missing food parcels—and the refugees were extremely worried about what would happen. We Liberal Democrats welcomed the Government’s announcement of £146 million of new funds for frontline aid workers to support Sudan, but the Government’s aid cuts have diminished our ability to respond to humanitarian crises and honour our international commitments. I remind the Minister that the 0.7% aid budget was a commitment that the House legislated for, and that we continue to wait for a timetable to return to 0.7%. Meanwhile, the atrocities continue. I recently met representatives of the independent UN fact-finding mission for Sudan. Their latest report was just released and makes for tough reading, concluding that external support is sustaining and expanding the military capabilities of the SAF and RSF, particularly their drone capability; that transnational networks are supplying the RSF with “weapons, logistics, training and foreign personnel”; and that the SAF is using foreign-supplied drones that harm civilians.

• 1 Sept 2026 · Climate Change: National Security · Hansard source

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  May I put on record that the Liberal Democrats’ concern and thoughts are with the people of Nepal and Tibet as this tragedy unfolds? I urge the Government to stay the distance with them. The UK’s spend on international aid and development aids our national security not only in climate change but in keeping extremism, pandemics and illegal immigration from our shores, but the Government have slashed aid brutally, and the true impact of the cuts was finally realised only in the final hours before summer recess. The cuts are deep and worrying. Will this Administration reverse them? Will the Secretary of State set out a timeline for when UK aid will return to 0.7% of GNI—a commitment that the House legislated for?

• 7 Jul 2026 · UK Aid Policy: Global Funding Trends · Hansard source

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  The hon. Member is 100% right, and I will come to that slightly later in my speech. We hear a lot from the Government about migration. Each 1% increase in food insecurity in a population compels 1.9% more people to migrate. They are escaping war, too. The largest single group of unaccompanied minors in small boats has been from Sudan, the world’s greatest humanitarian disaster, in the midst of a brutal civil war. But this is just the tip. The wider Sahel is a tinderbox. Millions are expected to fall into crisis or, worse, into hunger in this lean season, as armed violence escalates across the region. Thousands of schools are closed due to insecurity, health systems are buckling under the weight of need, and still we cut. Do the Government understand the reality of these cuts at this inflection point, when the world is on fire? Do we not need some honesty with the public on where ODA is actually spent? In 2025, £2.4 billion was spent on in-donor refugee costs, in comparison with £1.3 billion spent on humanitarian assistance. Lifesaving ODA is being spent on propping up a broken asylum system, with less and less spent on the causes that brought those people here in the first place. We can assume that the cuts came first and the strategy second, given that the cuts announced in February 2025 seemed to take everyone, including the then Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs, the right hon. Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy), by surprise. Since then, the approach has often seemed confused and incoherent. The IDC has asked for clarity on the Government’s theory of change to reach their shared objective of poverty alleviation. Of course, upheaval like this can create opportunity and wake us up from our stupor to make the case for aid outside of our own echo chamber, and to re-imagine our aid and development spend. But tearing down the system before the plan is in place is never a good idea. The answer for many things that have failed to be funded is that they will be “mainstreamed”, which is a euphemism for “disappeared”. British aid and development worked. Millions of children vaccinated and educated; safe births; clean water and sanitation; lives saved—all achieved by well under 1% of this country’s GNI, and it gave the UK influence and leverage on the world stage, a seat at the table in global fora and friends in trade and diplomacy. Why not celebrate that? Instead, the Minister for Development suggested: “The days of viewing the UK Government as a global charity are over”. Does the Minister before us today really believe that, or does he hope, like us, that with a change in leadership and a new Prime Minister, a focus on the long term will come back, with a realisation that doing the work now will make Britain safer and more powerful down the line? Does he not agree that framing the debate to pitch defence against development is wrong, and that, as the right hon. Member for Oxford East (Anneliese Dodds) said when she resigned as Development Minister, “it will be impossible to raise the substantial resources needed” to fully fund our defence capability “just through tactical cuts to public spending”? And so it is: there is another hole—a £4.7 billion hole—in the defence budget, despite the aid cuts that were supposedly meant to fill it. Is it not right that the new Prime Minister must lay out the urgency of the debate on funding our defence and our development spend, and the benefits that it can bring to Britain? Great damage has been done by our retreat from aid to the reputation of our country and our shrinking influence. While we retreat, others whose values may not match ours are making a play for Africa. With rapid population growth and an emerging labour force, Africa will become one of the world’s biggest markets, and the Government should place themselves in the best position to take advantage of that. The Government have a chance now, with a new leader in place, to take the long-term strategic view, repair the damage, return to the world stage and remember their moral responsibility and the strategic benefit to Britain. It is not too late, but it is nearly.