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UK Worldwide Interests

My Lords, listening to this debate brought back to me memories of when I was just starting out as a young academic nearly 40 years ago and decided that I would work on foreign policy-making in Britain. In the 1960s, as the noble Lord, Lord Wright, will remember, there were two government inquiries into the future of British interests abroad, which led to the merging of the Commonwealth Relations Office and the Colonial Office into the Foreign Office, leaving behind various orphans like the Commonwealth Development Corporation. The Duncan review in particular caused a great furore by describing Britain as,"““a major power of the second rank””." It was vigorously attacked by the Daily Mail, the Telegraph and others for suggesting that Britain was not a first-rank superpower. When my book was published in 1976, the Central Policy Review Staff was just setting out on another review. I have a vivid memory of being carpeted when trying to visit junior staff at the British Embassy in Paris by the then ambassador, Sir Nicholas Henderson, who grilled me aggressively about my book. Only afterwards did I realise that he was sharpening his teeth for the visit the following week by the woman whom the Daily Mail described as the ““dark-eyed evil genius”” of the CPRS review—better known to your Lordships, of course, as the noble Baroness, Lady Blackstone. The Berrill report’s recommendations included that there should be an overseas budget that pulled together the Foreign Office, development and Ministry of Defence budgets, as well as an external service recruited not as a diplomatic service, but from several departments across Whitehall engaged in external activities and feeding back into the whole of Whitehall. It made a number of arguments in recommending this: the need for wider language skills around Whitehall; the desirability of our representatives abroad being more deeply rooted in British government and society than some of our diplomats who spent two-thirds of their careers abroad were able to be; and the growing reluctance of both women and men with families to accept overseas postings when their children were small. Thirty years later these trends are far more evident than they were then. Foreign policy is conducted by much of Whitehall. Many people have mentioned this. I am struck by the complete transformation of the Home Office over the past 20 years from a department where there was an instinctive suspicion of foreigners coming into the building, to one that at last count had 70 people working full-time on international and European matters, most of whom speak two or three languages apart from English. The same is true of Defra, as has been pointed out, as well as those departments like the DTI and the Treasury which have always had large international activities. Foreign policy has not only spread across Whitehall, but has been increasingly concentrated in No. 10. I would underline what the noble and learned Lord, Lord Howe, was saying more tactfully, which is that, to some extent, the Foreign Office has been sidelined in British foreign and European policy by the extent to which policy is now concentrated with the Prime Minister and his advisers in No. 10. Alongside that, in the developed world, embassies are often bypassed by Ministers conducting direct relations—and of course by the Prime Minister, as Sir Christopher Meyer has so famously complained. There are many Britons abroad, and many more foreign citizens in Britain. We have a much greater degree of economic interdependence within the global economy, and, as many noble Lords have remarked, there has been a sharp and continuing increase in the number of states that are now members of the United Nations. I was reading the evidence given to the Foreign Affairs Committee in another place before this debate, and I noticed a complaint that we were not yet represented in Podgorica, the capital of Montenegro. We have only six representations in the former Yugoslavia so far. We used to manage with Belgrade alone. I am not quite sure how important Montenegro will be as an independent state immediately, but if it is going to be a member of the European Union in 15 years’ time, sure enough, we will need to be represented there. One recognises that as the number of independent states grows, we simply cover all of them. There has been one major change in our security context with the end of the Cold War. That is the disappearance of any direct threat to the United Kingdom from any other state and the replacement of that direct threat with threats that are much more indirect, through terrorism and state collapse in distant continents, and through the surges of asylum seekers that state collapse in Somalia—or, in previous years, the situation of the Kurds in Iraq—brings to this country. One has to remark that there has been only a partial adjustment to the transformation of our security context. My noble friend Lord Garden talked about the growth of defence diplomacy and the commitment to nation building, essentially a cross-departmental activity. However, as he also remarked, if you look at our procurement and our balance of forces you will see that we are still divided in exactly what we are trying to do with our defence commitment. I have started to read Sir Rupert Smith’s The Utility of Force, in which he says with very considerable power that the balance of British defence procurement and commitments simply does not meet the different sorts of threats and tasks that we now face. What should be the direction of change? First, we need a clearer sense of what our objectives are and what we think our role is, as the Duncan review said all those many years ago. If we intend to continue to punch above our weight, who do we think we are punching and what are we punching for? Are we primarily the junior partner of the United States or a partner in exerting growing European influence on the global order? That of course is the central problem for our military: whether we intend it to continue to be able to operate alongside the United States in major operations, or to shift its balance to the more likely new tasks. One may remark that of course the United States military has failed extremely badly to shift towards these new tasks of nation-building, police operation and defence diplomacy, in which the British Army has gained so many skills. Secondly, we clearly should be moving towards an overseas budget—a cross-departmental budget—in which one can talk about what is spent on defence against what is spent on development and on representation. We recognise that the Ministry of Defence will resist. It is easier to see how one might rationalise relations and representations between DfID and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in the developing world, as the French have done more carefully than we have. Thirdly, I also support the idea of an overseas service in which people would spend more of their careers in different departments, and less in just the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. That would encourage a closer integration of the FCO into Whitehall, with overseas missions drawn from across Whitehall. This is partly happening. I have been struck when visiting embassies across the European Union by how often one meets people from the Home Office or from Customs and Excise and so on; it is a development that we should be encouraging. Fourthly, we need a continued emphasis on public diplomacy—the British Council and the BBC, for example. I support strongly what the noble Lord, Lord Patten, has said about the shameful toadying to Rupert Murdoch on the question of the future of the BBC’s global operations. We should also continue to support those quasi-governmental agencies and non-governmental organisations that engage in what the Asians call second-track diplomacy—bilateral conferences and various other bodies of which the noble and learned Lord, Lord Howe, has spoken. Lastly, we should share resources abroad. It is highly unlikely that we are going to move towards common European embassies during our lifetimes. However, sharing consular services, reporting, counter-terrorism work, the provision of security and transport co-location are all highly desirable. Indeed they are already happening in a number of third-country missions. Last year I was in Reykjavik where the British and the Germans shared a building, a conference room and a transport pool, but otherwise operated separately; a useful saving of money without blurring too far that we are representing different states. The Government would do better to admit publicly what they are doing in this respect and in others. I am struck by the extent to which British forces are now engaged in a range of joint European peacekeeping activities in Aceh and Gaza, and shortly also perhaps in Transnistria, Moldova. There are other operations, such as the new agreement being negotiated between the African Union and European Union about which nothing is being reported to Parliament, almost as if the Government are ashamed of what is happening. That of course is part of the confusion over foreign-policy objectives, strategy role and presentation at home. The first essential is therefore a clearer definition of Britain’s international strategy and role. The second is a clearer co-ordination of policy-making and policy management between an over-powerful No. 10, an undervalued Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and its partners in the Ministry of Defence and DfID and the rest of Whitehall.