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UK Worldwide Interests

My Lords, I join other noble Lords in thanking and congratulating the noble and learned Lord, Lord Howe of Aberavon, on introducing this important debate. I also welcome the maiden speech by my noble friend Lord Patten. We are facing questions about whether Britain wants and needs a global diplomacy and whether we can afford it. The answer to both those questions is yes. By any yardstick, the United Kingdom is one of the four or five most important industrial nations in the world. We have interests. I hope without undue self-congratulation or being holier than thou, we can say that Britain represents certain values as well. We take seriously our position as the oldest parliamentary democracy in the world. Can we afford a global diplomacy? As the noble Lord, Lord Wright of Richmond, pointed out, the cost of the British Diplomatic Service is about £850 million per annum—that is out of a total government expenditure of £521 billion. We are talking about 0.16 per cent of total government expenditure. Suffice it to say that last year alone two government departments overspent by more than that amount. No doubt the Treasury feels—I dare say that it is right—that it should go through an expenditure round with the Foreign Office, but the sums involved barely register on the radar screen. I propose to concentrate on Latin America. I have the honour of being president of Canning House, a position in which I succeeded my noble friend Lady Hooper. Latin America has 21 countries, a population of 560 million, and a gross domestic product of $2.26 trillion. It is a continent where Spanish is the most widely spoken language. As noble Lords will be aware, Spanish is the most widely spoken language after English in what we used to call the free world. It is the most widely spoken language in the United States of America. Brazil, which does not speak Spanish, exercises an enormous cultural influence. One has only to look at the debates going on about the Doha round to see the importance of Brazil. They like us; we have a good history down there. It was George Canning who first dispatched British troops to fight alongside Bolivar in the wars of independence. It was through the City of London that most of the infrastructure that now exists in Latin America was financed and built. Names such as Cochrane, O’Higgins and Brigadier Wright are still commonly talked of in Latin America. How are we doing down there? Well, we have closed four embassies: Paraguay; Nicaragua; El Salvador; and Honduras. No doubt the Treasury even today is congratulating itself on a saving of no less than £1 million. As the noble Lord, Lord Wright, and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Howe of Aberavon, have pointed out, the Latin American department at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office has been reduced by something like 40 per cent in the past two years. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Howe, referred to Robert Culshaw, an outstanding Foreign Office official who retired early. The whole department has been reduced in rank. The Heads of Mission Gift Scheme, to which the noble Baroness referred, has been cancelled. I just mentioned that we have closed our embassy in Paraguay, where there is one very good example of the Heads of Mission Gift Scheme. When we had an embassy there, out-of-use fire engines from the United Kingdom were brought to Asunción, and there is now a fire station called the Grand Britannia fire station. While we may not have an embassy, at least there is a fire station with our name on it. When a tragic fire took place in Asunción recently, that fire station played a sterling role. We are sliding almost unnoticed into the second division. I bow to no one in my desire and wish to see the European Union flourish but I can predict that, at the present rate, in 15 or 20 years’ time we shall find ourselves with one embassy in Mexico, one in Brazil and in all the other 20 republics we shall no doubt be represented by the European Union. I do not think that that is good enough. I think that it is now possible to talk, without sounding faintly ludicrous, about the next Conservative government. Wisely, the new leader of the Conservative Party has set up a series of policy groups to look at policy in all areas. That is precisely what my noble friend Lady Thatcher did in the late 1970s; indeed, the noble Lord, Lord Patten, was instrumental in many of those committees. I very much hope that they will look seriously at the way in which the Foreign Office is being funded. Just as in the 1970s the opposition made a commitment to increase in real terms the defence expenditure by the incoming Conservative government over the first term of office, I hope that the policy committees will come to the conclusion that Britain is still a nation: that our interests and values need to be upheld throughout the world. If the Government decide to take that on board, they will enjoy the support of the Conservative opposition, as the Leader of the Opposition said yesterday. If they do not, I hope that the next Conservative government will go into the election with a commitment over their first term in office to increase expenditure on our foreign service in real terms by between 3 and 5 per cent.