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UK Worldwide Interests

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow my noble friend Lord Selsdon. It is one of his distinctions that he always speaks in your Lordships’ House with great fluency and punctuality, as he did today, but equally without ever having the benefit of a note. Amnesiacs like myself can envy but not emulate him. My noble and learned friend, Lord Howe of Aberavon, was, as he said, for over a decade successively Chancellor of the Exchequer and Foreign Secretary, the ideal hinterland for the debate which he has initiated, and with such breadth as to encourage a plethora of other speakers, not least and notably, my noble friend Lord Patten of Barnes, whose hinterland has a similar kaleidoscopic quality. In a debate like this, if you bat 17th, everything that could be said has been said at least once much earlier in the debate, so I shall necessarily be more idiosyncratic. If I have a text at all, it is the opening words of my own first passport which, as I recall started:"““We, Ernest Bevin, His Britannic Majesty’s Principal Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, requests and requires in the name of His Majesty . . . ””." Many in your Lordships’ House will be familiar with the story told in James and Jan Morris’s great imperial trilogy, of the outpost in Sudan which heliographed to Khartoum:"““Outpost surrounded by lions and tigers. Please advise””." To which Khartoum, with the classic British concentration on the essential, replied:"““There are no tigers in Africa””," prompting the outpost to reply:"““Delete tigers””." Yet we all know that lions and tigers roam the world, and it is not in the British character to ask others to control their behaviour on our behalf. Our island topography has never made for insularity of conduct or mien. Before the days of empire, the Muscovy Company was founded in 1555, the Turkey Company in 1581, the Venice Company in 1583—the latter two merging in 1592 to become the Levant Company—the East India Company in 1600, and the Virginia Company in 1609. It was an Elizabethan and Jacobean version of globalisation. Sir Thomas Gresham, of Gresham’s law and probably the richest commoner in England, was inter alia the Crown’s financial agent in Antwerp. One of the companies I mentioned ran its finances from the City of London but ran its global trading operations from the Low Countries. To fast-forward within the Low Countries, as one is obliged to do in these soundbite times, I was in business in Brussels at the time Heath government—of which my noble and learned friend Lord Howe was a distinguished member—was negotiating our EEC entry. Being in business, I was on the road throughout Europe during the week, but back in Brussels at the weekend where, socially, I was constantly struck that the international staffs of multinational companies headquartering regionally in Brussels were largely composed, perhaps for linguistic reasons, of men and women from the smaller European countries, but that the British outnumbered all others put together from the larger European countries. We have an international aptitude and, despite perfidious Albion, we are strangely trusted. Dean Acheson’s quip that we had lost an empire but failed to find a role has perhaps been overtaken. In the words of Tennyson’s Ulysses:"““We are not now that strength which in old days      Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are””." The new role is not a formal one, as perhaps befits a nation shaped before global warming by centuries of mist. Informally, we have become special constables to the world. The United Nations always seeks a British contribution to any new peacekeeping venture. It does this not only because of our military competence, but also because of our capacity to rub along and to work with others. I appreciate that the Prime Minister’s taking up of the Messianic inheritance of the Gladstonian Liberals a century and a quarter ago acknowledged the Tennysonian disclaimer I quoted. There is a continuity of attitude about the problem. Gladstone’s rationalisation of the military occupation of Egypt in 1881 and taking arms against the Dervishes of the Sudan thereafter was akin to part of Her Majesty’s Government’s explanations of why we are in Iraq. Nor do I in any way denigrate the present Chancellor of the Exchequer’s expansion of British international aid, especially to Africa, on which my noble and learned friend Lord Howe made comparative comment. Yet, in the long history which has given us our particular international centrality, and which was characterised by the recent debate my noble friend Lord Freeman initiated on the Commonwealth, it was both the public and the private sector which worked in integrated tandem, sometimes trade following the flag, sometimes vice versa. One cannot help remarking, at this moment when domestically the West Lothian question is still unanswered but internationally the Achesonian one seems on the way to resolution, that the Treasury is diminishing in proportionate terms the resources, both military and civilian, to sustain the new mission that the Prime Minister has bestowed on those who carry the freight and responsibility to deliver it. I began with Khartoum, and will end between Afghanistan and Iraq. Some in your Lordships’ House will recall Colonel Bailey’s book Mission to Tashkent. Bailey, Britain’s principal agent on the Northwest Frontier in 1914, became, because of his mastery of Muslim dialects and of disguise, was, in the aftermath of the 1918 war, the senior staff officer from the Indian Government attached to the White Russians in central Asia. Bailey, who died peacefully in his own bed in Norfolk in the 1960s, achieved his professional apogee by attaching himself to the Bolshevik NKVD murder squad, whose only duty was to hunt down and destroy the notorious British spy, Colonel Bailey. There can be no substitute through technology for such individuals as Colonel Bailey. Individuals will always be individuals, but they are persons rather than machines, and often in distant places. Their spirits require refreshment and material encouragement from Her Majesty’s Government for their services’ services. We at home whom they also serve through the 21st century equivalent of that magical instruction, ““We, Ernest Bevin . . . ”” which I quoted earlier, owe them the sense that what they do is both important and valuable to us, and need to insist to our rulers that we at least recognise that this reassurance does not, and should not, come cheap.