My Lords, HIV/AIDS may have gone off the front pages here in Britain, rightly or wrongly, but what is beyond doubt is that it remains a serious scourge in many countries overseas. How do our overseas assistance programmes, current and future, measure up to that specific and very serious challenge?
My Lords, when I first put down this Motion, it was really to draw the contrast between the amount of attention we are able to give to media issues in the House of Lords compared with the House of Commons. I do not think we have come out well out of that, but you only have to look at the Order Paper…
I begin by congratulating the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, on introducing this debate with great erudition and wisdom. I will concentrate on some very important issues. The recent Israel-Palestine war and the American takeover of Venezuela have raised all kinds of issues about the relevance and limitati…
My Lords, I have been a journalist for 60 years, leaving aside a rather lively period in which I served with the late Baroness Thatcher. But apart from that, I have been a journalist, and in that time I have also chaired two regional newspaper groups.
Of course, the BBC has made mistakes; we have h…
I ask that the noble Baroness should support the gold standard of the BBC in its reports, and in its general reporting duty.
As I am sure the noble Lord is aware and welcomes, alongside South Africa, the UK is leading the campaign to raise investment for the Global Fund’s next three-year funding cycle. I assure him that we will, as he does, continue to champion global health and certainly remain committed to UK support fo…
I am not sure which financial spokespeople the noble Lord is speaking about. On behalf of the Government, I can say that the decision to reduce our ODA spend was taken in order to invest more in defence. That is a decision I support; it was the right decision to take at that particular point in time…
My Lords, to the noble Lord’s question, your Lordships will have to wait until summer, when we will set out our strategy. The Deputy Prime Minister is absolutely keen, in her role as Secretary of State for MHCLG, to ensure that we have strong electoral reforms ready for the next election.
Our first priority, as I have made very clear, is to get food to the people who are starving. The noble Lord is right that that is not being helped by the inability of journalists to report accurately what is happening in Gaza. I do not know the precise reasons the Israeli Government have for not pe…