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UK Worldwide Interests

My Lords, all of us know that one of the consequences of the increase in public debt, the fall in the growth rate and the rather lame performance in productivity, to which the Chancellor owned up at the beginning of this week, more or less—I think probably less rather than more—is that over the rest of this Parliament we will see rising taxes and a squeeze on public spending. It makes a mock of our intelligence to suggest other than that. What does that presage? One thing that it clearly presages is another assault on the budgets of the Foreign Office, the British Council and the BBC World Service. It is a curiosity of public life in this country that we review so frequently and underfund so equally regularly the things that we do best and the institutions which are most admired around the world. There is another review in train on our public diplomacy. I am sure that the noble Lord responsible for it will conduct it extremely well, but I ask myself: what is wrong with our public diplomacy? The institutions of private and public diplomacy in this country are widely admired around the world. Where we are unpopular—for example, in parts of the Islamic world—it is not because of failings in our public diplomacy, but because of the policies that we have pursued. It is rather easier to change the policies than the institutions of public diplomacy. The Prime Minister, whose chutzpah we should, I suppose, rather admire, offers us the vision of a Gladstonian foreign policy for this country. It is a tad vainglorious to propose a Gladstonian foreign policy without the Gladstonian resources to follow it through. As my noble and learned friend said at the beginning of the debate, we cannot cut much of a dash in the world if we do not adequately resource the Foreign Office, the British Council and the BBC World Service. It is difficult to retain the enthusiasm for our national values if we assault, once again, the budget of the BBC World Service. I will say in passing that it is a rum old world in which Mr Rupert Murdoch suggests that the Prime Minister probably prefers Fox News to the BBC. My second point is an institutional one, which has already been touched on rather delicately. Perhaps I bring to our discussion too much of the bruiser habits of another place, but we all know that the Treasury hates the Foreign Office, and has done so for as long as I can remember. The Treasury thinks that the Foreign Office is a waste of space. The mindset, if I may follow the noble Baroness, is that all ambassadors wear red socks and that their principal function is exchanging gossip at the glitzy cocktail parties to which the noble Baroness referred. I suspect that the present Chancellor’s personal prejudices reinforce the institutional prejudices of the department that he leads. In addition, the Prime Minister, whose profound belief in his own diplomatic skills is not perhaps always borne out by what happens—one considers, in passing, the present discussion about the EU rebate—has brought into No. 10 a great deal of policy-making from the Foreign Office. The noble Lord who has just spoken touched on some consequences of that. Despite the abilities of the officials concerned, the results have not been conspicuously successful. What has happened as a result is that the Foreign Office has been pushed into a rather defensive posture. It seeks to justify itself not by what it does best, which is to define and pursue our national interest in both political and commercial terms, but by turning itself into a sort of glorified management consultancy. Almost every ambassador and senior official with whom I have spoken in recent years has grumbled about being drowned in questionnaires and choked in management guff. That is not good management of a great public service. Frankly, a lot of it is charlatanry, as Peter Drucker would have said; and charlatanry at the behest of the Treasury. The last point that I want to make will sound a little counter-intuitive. Yet in spite of the death and destruction from Haiti and Colombia, via West Africa and Sudan, to Iraq and Afghanistan, we have actually become better in the past few years at avoiding conflict. The number of conflicts has fallen dramatically, while the number of casualties as a result of conflicts has also fallen dramatically. When I was Minister for Overseas Development, I sometimes used to worry that our ability to deliver humanitarian assistance, often necessary because of political failure, was greater than our ability to prevent the political failure in the first place. But there has been remarkable progress in the past few years. We have done a lot better through proactive diplomacy in preventing conflicts. I have seen a great deal of that myself, in my previous job, for example, in the Balkans, where this country played a formidable role. It is equally the case in West Africa. It makes no sense whatever to cut back on the resources that are required to conduct that proactive diplomacy—the resources that are required to ensure rather greater peace and stability around the world. We can do better, but we need the resources to do the job. I have one further point—my noble and learned friend touched on it at the outset in discussing the origin of a phrase that we all use. It has been a feature of our debates about Britain’s role in the world in the past 40 or 50 years to discuss how we can ensure that the rest of the world sees us as a great country even though we are no longer a great power. We often talk about how we can be seen to ““punch above our weight”” to borrow that expression again. I do not want to be seen to be borrowing from my noble and learned friend’s previous use of sporting metaphors but it is very difficult to punch, let alone above your weight, if you do not have boxing gloves. I much very hope, for what it is worth, that the Prime Minister and the Chancellor will bear that in mind in the months and years ahead.