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UK Worldwide Interests

My Lords, I believe that I am not required to declare an interest as a former head of the Diplomatic Service, but I would nevertheless like to declare my continuing admiration for what I still believe is the best—if seriously under-resourced—Diplomatic Service in the world. I think that I have quoted before in this House a remarkable tribute paid to the British Diplomatic Service by a former French foreign minister, Monsieur Couve de Murville who described our Diplomatic Service as the second best in the world. I am grateful to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Howe of Aberavon, for initiating this important debate. Having accompanied him, on at least three occasions, for the FCO’s annual public expenditure ““scrap””—if I can call it that—with the Treasury, I have some experience of the difficulties which Foreign and Commonwealth Secretaries regularly face in trying to limit the damage imposed on the Diplomatic Service by persistent Treasury pressure on an FCO budget which, even including the sums allocated to the British Council and the BBC World Service, is less than one-third of 1 per cent of overall government spending; one of the smallest budgets in Whitehall. I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Patten of Barnes, whose maiden speech we much look forward to hearing today, will allow me to quote the following from his book Not Quite the Diplomat. He writes:"““Foreign ministers are not very interested in budgets, which is one reason why they get pushed around so much by finance ministers who see foreign ministry resources as an easy target for cost-cutting””." Since there have been several references to the differences between the FCO and DfID, I would like to pay a tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Patten, for having taken the initiative when he was Minister for Overseas Development and I was Permanent Secretary of the Foreign Office to join his policy meetings whenever I could. He made a significant difference to the relationship between our two departments. I was grateful for the assurance given to the House by the noble Lord, Lord Triesman, on 2 November that it is still the policy of Her Majesty’s Government to pursue a global foreign policy. The Foreign and Commonwealth Secretary’s statement of 15 December 2004 no doubt represents the outcome of some painful and agonising decisions on how to meet the continuing demands of such a policy within the inadequate resources allocated to the Diplomatic Service. Many of us will have personal reasons to lament the closure or downgrading of particular posts, but there are two aspects to post closures which I should like to draw to your Lordships’ attention. The first is that diplomacy is largely about making, retaining and passing on personal contacts—what an American book once called:"““Making friends and influencing people””," a process in which the reduced programme of sponsored visits plays an important part. Once a post is closed, that process of contact-making is severely curtailed until—as often happens—it is later decided, at considerable and unnecessary cost, that the post should after all be reopened. In this uncertain world, a post which appears unimportant today may turn out to be crucial for British interests tomorrow. The second point relates to our experience during the Falklands War. Although the diplomatic skills of our Ambassador to Washington and our Permanent Representative to the United Nations were rightly praised at the time, too little attention has been paid to the massive and persistent efforts by our diplomatic posts around the world, and in particular with the non-permanent members of the Security Council that year, such as Panama and Togo, to support our case. I do not propose today to rehearse my familiar criticisms of the Iraq War, but there is one lesson which I hope has been learnt from the many mistakes which have been made over the invasion of Iraq—and that is that wars cannot be waged solely by the military. I have no way of knowing whether Sir Christopher Meyer is right in saying that the Foreign and Commonwealth Office was regularly bypassed in contacts between 10 Downing Street and Washington over the invasion of Iraq. But the extent to which the Pentagon excluded the skills and professional advice of American diplomacy and foreign policy over Iraq was largely responsible for the lack of adequate planning for the aftermath. Defence and foreign policy go hand in hand, and it would be a serious tragedy if inadequate resources for the Diplomatic Service were to lead to underperformance by the Foreign Office side of that partnership, both in offering experienced and professional advice to Ministers, and in having the right people in the right posts and, incidentally, speaking the right language, to promote British political, strategic, economic and commercial interests, quite apart from the consular capacity to help British subjects in trouble. I have much sympathy for my former colleagues—I suppose that I am their former colleague—who had to make these painful recommendations to their Ministers. I do not intend to question the Minister about particular post closures beyond asking him, as the Minister for Africa, whether sufficient thought was given to the implications of closing three sovereign posts in that continent on the eve of the Prime Minister’s much vaunted Year of Africa. I hope that the Minister will carry back to his colleagues in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the Treasury a message from this House—that if we are to continue to conduct a global foreign policy there must be adequate resources to do the job.