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The Rt. Hon. Baroness Symons of Vernham DeanEastern Province Chamber of Commerce and Industry |
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Your Excellency and distinguished guests, thank you for inviting me to this discussion today. I welcome the chance to speak to you and I look forward to hearing your views afterwards. It is too long since a British Trade Minister visited the Eastern Province. I know it is the scene and source of so many Saudi-British business partnerships. It is a dynamic, productive and progressive place and the home of world-beating operations such as Saudi Aramco, SABIC, Jubail Industrial City and King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals. It is also known for its agriculture and the world's largest oasis at Al Ahsa. In Jubail you have created, in just 25 years, a high tech industrial city and world-class petrochemical complex. Together with Yanbu, this now attracts 30% of all foreign investment into the Kingdom. I have read with interest and admiration your plans to build on this success with a further 14 major projects worth 35 billion Saudi Riyals. I am sure this expansion will be equally successful in attracting both domestic and foreign investment. I am keen that British companies play a full part in that process. We encourage Saudi businessmen to visit and invest in the UK by giving them five-year multiple entry visas. It would be nice if British businessmen were offered the same generous terms. Saudi Arabia is by far the UK's largest trading and investment partner in the Middle East. My Ministry's business plan for Saudi Arabia highlights 14 key sectors including: power, water, oil and gas. These are areas where we believe British expertise and capability can match your demands and requirements. We have a full programme of commercial initiatives lined up for the coming year. I want to mention a couple which are particularly relevant to the Eastern Province:
These demonstrate how committed we are to developing partnerships between Britain and the Eastern Province. Your Chamber has been important to this effort. Mike Hurley at our Trade Office in Al Khobar is standing by to provide further information. One of my ministerial responsibilities is investment. British companies invest heavily overseas. Our investment in Saudi Arabia is considerable: it is in the region of 3.5 billion US dollars. But collectively the GCC attracts less than one percent of the world's Foreign Direct Investment. The blunt truth is that Foreign Direct Investment is a seller's market. Funds have to be competed for and won. Investors want a competitive return and a clear, reliable and fair legal framework. The Kingdom – including institutions here in the Eastern Province – should be congratulated for the efforts being made in this direction. We hope that the momentum of liberalisation and reform will increase so that the Kingdom can compete even more effectively in the international investment market. British experts and investors are keen to be a part of this. And we British have a good record. We invest more overseas that any other country in the world, except the US. I had a very useful and positive meeting with Minister Faqih in Riyadh yesterday. We discussed areas of mutual interest and concern. We discussed Saudi accession to the WTO. As Trade Minister of the world's the world's fifth largest exporter of goods and services, and second largest exporter of services, I am a committed advocate of free and fair trade. I believe accession to the WTO is in the interests of Saudi Arabia and the whole international trading community. But it is Saudi accession to the WTO that I feel is so important. Accession will underpin your economic reform programmes. It will assure access to other markets and help attract foreign investment. These are key requirements for a mixed and diverse economy. When I visited Jeddah last summer your colleagues from the Jeddah Chamber told me the WTO debate needed to be widened and their concerns discussed and debated. Our Embassy hopes to arrange seminars in the next couple of months at the Chambers here in Jedda, and in Riyadh, to widen this debate. There are difficult issues for the Kingdom in the accession process. All accession negotiations are detailed and lengthy. But I believe the rewards, ultimately, will be worth the effort. As a hugely important economy, not only in the region but worldwide, Saudi should take its rightful place in the family of WTO nations. External threats and difficulties can unfortunately overshadow economic and business opportunities. We understand the problem of Iraq must loom particularly large for you here. I know how unsettling it must be for you. But the threat that Saddam Hussein poses is global. That is why the international community must tackle it with deliberate and unified determination. It is why the United Nations have acted with such determination and sense of purpose, and why we believe it is so important to uphold the authority of the UN – as we did unanimously on the passage of UNSCR 1441. We all want passionately to avoid military conflict. This is a message my Prime Minister has repeated over and over again. But nobody could be comfortable with the previous or current situation. For years the Iraqi regime has flouted the authority of the UN. For more than 4 years it had been able to develop weapons of mass destruction with no international check whatsoever. Reducing the threat from weapons of mass destruction is now the UK's highest foreign policy priority. The threat was brought home graphically to us last week with the arrest of a group who had been developing ricin in a house in North London. We have to take seriously the risk that weapons of mass destruction, or techniques for their development, can be passed from irresponsible governments to murderous terrorists. The last few weeks have been ones of solid diplomatic achievement. The UK has played a significant part. We, our Prime Minister, have pursued the UN route, clarifying objectives and building up unanimous Security Council support for Resolution 1441. The UN Weapons Inspection programme, itself the product of British diplomacy in the shape of Resolution 1284, is now testing Iraqi co-operation and the effectiveness of the new inspection regime. The 27th of January is the date set for the weapons inspectors' first substantive report. War is not inevitable. Not then, nor later. But it does remain a real possibility. Without the possibility of it, without the credible threat of force, we would not stand any chance of implementing Security Council Resolutions. Over next few weeks, possibly months, we will be working for highest possible degree of international consensus. This is an uncertain period for everybody. But we hope the world community will stick to its united resolve and bring this issue to a peaceful conclusion. But the he key decisions rest with Saddam Hussein. Conflict is not inevitable. We are sometimes criticised for applying double standards to Iraq and Palestine. No Western leader has tried harder to generate progress towards a just solution on Palestine than Tony Blair. He will not give up. In his speech to the Labour Party conference in the autumn he said peace must be achieved with two states side by side as envisaged in Security Council Resolution 242. You will have read about the conference on Palestinian reform, which Tony Blair held in London last week, despite Israeli obstruction. The uncertainty over Iraq is compounded by another from Al Qaeda and the broader threat of terrorism. September 11th and subsequent terrorist atrocities - in Bali, Moscow and Mombasa - have cast a long shadow over everything we do. I was with the Prime Minister on that dreadful day – 11 September 2001. His response was that there is no necessary conflict between the West and the Islamic world. We must be vigilant against the terrorist threat but we must also maintain our openness and tolerance. It is easy to be drawn into labelling and false characterisations. This has already caused enormous damage. This is one of the reasons why we continue to encourage Saudi students to visit the UK. So we can learn from one another. Education and training are important to your reform agenda. The UK wants to be at the forefront of encouraging and supporting this agenda. Before I left London to come to Saudi Arabia the Prime Minister stressed to me how much he wanted to make these points as clearly as possible and as strongly as I can. We value our relationship with Saudi Arabia greatly – in all its aspects. And we look forward to building on the sound foundation of mutual respect and growing friendship between us. I will stop there. I hope we can have a good discussion of the issues on which I have touched briefly, and any other issues you would like to raise. |
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Other speeches by The Rt. Hon. Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean
(the following are available from the archive) |
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