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UK Worldwide Interests

My Lords, it has been a real pleasure to listen to this debate this afternoon. We are all extremely grateful to my noble and learned friend Lord Howe for introducing the subject and speaking from his vast and almost unique experience in these fields. I was also delighted to hear the maiden speech of my noble friend Lord Patten of Barnes. What particularly pleased me more than I am normally pleased by his excellent delivery and style of speaking was his candour about the Treasury, whose expensive ignorance in cutting budgets time and again leads to even more expensive consequences as we have all learnt to our cost. At the risk of striking a slightly discordant note, there has emerged from the comments of your Lordships over the past two and a half hours a clear message for the Government which I hope the Minister will take back to his colleagues. It is worrying to hear the noble Baroness, Lady Symons, who was a central Minister in the Foreign Office and a really excellent Minister as well, saying that diplomaticinitiatives and diplomatic budgets are being under-resourced and squeezed. Moreover, she was not the only person to say it—a lot of people said it in the debate. It is worrying to hear my noble and learned friend Lord Howe, with all his experience, pointing to the minuscule resources assigned to the Foreign and Commonwealth and the minuscule resources available for diplomacy and its associated skills compared with the tens of billions spent on defence projects such as the Eurofighter. There are no doubt similar projects to come, some of which have dubious value in protecting the lives of our citizens in the streets of London. Indeed they appear to have no connection with that vital task at all. In the debate there has also been a cautious challenge, which I welcome as it I believe it is very healthy, to that almost unchallengeable shibboleth that spending more money on aid is a good thing because it leads to more development. We are of course beginning to learn that aid does not necessarily equal development and therefore, as my noble friend Lord Eccles rightly said, maybe a couple of pounds on aid might be better spent in another way. I am not trying to claim that everything that is done by our great diplomats is essential. I was reminded when I heard the comments of my noble friend Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville about Khartoum of the reply which was sent to demands from our post in Ulaanbaatar at the time of the Profumo scandal, who wanted every salacious detail sent out in telegrams and received the rather curt reply from London, ““We think you have all you need””. My noble and learned friend Lord Howe mentioned the UK International Priorities document issued by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office two years ago. This document had eight strategic priorities which I re-read last night. Although I was in a generous mood I could not see that more than two of them had achieved the slightest visible progress in the past two years. I then went on to the specific aims in each section, of which there are 62. Again I counted them up and again in a thoroughly generous spirit I found that 17 of the 62 can, with a bit of friendly interpretation, said to have been achieved; of 13 one really could not say anything because they were so general; and 30 of the specific aims have ended since then in complete and utter failure. The latter category includes: zero progress, indeed reversal, on strengthening the European Union; zero progress on UN reform; a move backwards on ending poppy cultivation in Afghanistan; not much progress on halting Iran’s nuclear ambitions, all of which issues are mentioned in the strategy report; little progress on the New Partnership for Africa’s Development, which, with the Zimbabwe fiasco, has gone backwards; zero progress on agreeing and ratifying an EU constitutional treaty, which, I am afraid, has come to an end; and little progress on reforming and liberalising the EU economies, successful negotiations in the WTO, on which we keep our fingers crossed, strengthening NATO, maintaining energy security or a host of other negatives. Frankly, it has not been a very good record. Failure in all those areas, capped by the alienation in the EU budget debate of most of our friends in central Europe, who used to be our number one supporters—the more I see this saga, the more appalling a development it seems—are costing the British people dearly. A weak Britain in the world leads to weak social cohesion at home, for which we will also pay dearly. Worse still, those failures mean that we are squandering golden opportunities to strengthen Britain’s reach and influence worldwide. At a time when we should be building up that vital soft-power impact on the world—and, incidentally, when regrettably but realistically American soft-power influence has almost totally collapsed in the world—and when we should be drawing on our immense experience and on the domination of the information revolution by the English language, we seem instead intent on running down our diplomatic capacities and capabilities and sliding, as my noble friend Lord Garel-Jones said very graphically, into the second division or league. Who do we call to account for all those undoubtedly damaging setbacks? Is it just the Treasury, which has received a battering from all noble Lords during this debate? Of course it is not just the Treasury. The real answer is that our very hard-working officials, often working in extremely dangerous conditions, and our diplomats and civil servants generally, have been undermined and let down at many points by bad political leadership and wrong-headed or weak foreign policy formulation. If asked to specify, I would give three examples. First, Ministers have been preaching, and remain wedded to, the wrong vision about Britain’s status, place in the world and potential. We are not just one small to medium-sized European state, caught between trying to please America and trying to be at the heart of Europe. We are a central part of a network of relationships that goes far beyond the European region and is much more than a subordinate partner of the United States. That is one difficulty under which our officials have been labouring. Secondly, because our European policy is feeble and reactive, as demonstrated by the hopeless presidency of the past few months, we have a wrong view of our place in the EU, which has led to neglecting our true friends and allies in this transformed world. Thirdly, if we need, as we do, to establish a friendly but influential dialogue with the USA and have real influence over American policy, we would do far better to work with our real allies around the world, including our fellow Commonwealth members, as the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Craig of Radley, reminded us. That group includes most of the dynamic, knowledge-intensive economies on Earth, such as India, Australasia, Singapore, Malaysia, and so on. What are we doing to build up links in that new situation? As we have heard in this debate, we are closing embassies, relocating posts, reducing reach, de-layering and de-prioritising, as my noble friend reminds us, squeezing the Foreign and Commonwealth Office budget—after 2006, in real terms it falls—neglecting our friends outside Europe and weakening Britain’s soft power on every side. I hope that no one would question the dedication of our diplomatic staff around the world, both UK-based and local, who work often in conditions of great danger. No one should question the excellent work of the BBC World Service, which should be supported, and the British Council in spreading and promoting the British word and values. But behind all those endeavours should lie ““a certain idea””, if I may quote General de Gaulle: a certain idea of Britain and its potential in a highly interdependent world. That idea, I regret to say, seems absent from present ruling circles. It should be restored, and with it will come an uplifted morale and pride and new vigour in our diplomatic ranks and in our projection of British policy and influence.