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Europe in the World (EUC Report)

My Lords, I had rather feared that we might miss the contribution from the independence party to this debate, so I thank the noble Lord, Lord Pearson of Rannoch, for coming in. One could have an interesting debate about which world is real and which is the virtual Daily Mail world in which the independence party prefers to live, but perhaps we will leave that for another day. I am sure that we will have the opportunity to debate such issues time and again. I, too, compliment the noble Lord, Lord Bowness, on the report and say how well he chaired the committee. I know from visits to Brussels that reports from this sub-committee, as the others, are taken very seriously not only in the European institutions but within other Governments. I am glad that my noble friend Lord Roper has succeeded him. I have had the pleasure of working with John Roper since long before either of us thought that we would make the red Benches. We were members of staff at Chatham House together 20 years ago, and we worked on international and European issues for a long time. If the constitutional treaty had gone through, we would now have a European Union Foreign Minister and the EU External Action Service would begetting under way. That would have caused some complications, but there would have been certain economies. I recall that the first draft of the EU security strategy, which I am sure the noble Lord, Lord Pearson, read with great care, included a paragraph pointing out that the 15 member Governments of the European Union employed 35,000 diplomats. EU27 must now employ something in the order of 40,000. That paragraph was struck out of the final draft because a number of memberstates, including France, objected to what they sawas implicit criticism of maintaining national representations even though they duplicated one another’s work. When I was in Beijing in November, I was grateful that the Irish ambassador invited me and one or two others to an evening at which we met the Commission representative and the ambassadors of half a dozen of the smaller member states. Every European Union member state has an embassy in Beijing, all of which are writing reports on political developments in China as well as promoting their separate trade interests. We had an extremely interesting discussion about whether they could justify their separate activities in political reporting and maintaining the specific Irish, Austrian, Slovenian or Danish political interest in relations with China. There is a great deal of duplication and, when the Comprehensive Spending Review hits the Foreign Office shortly and we have to cut the number of our embassies, the question will come up of how far it is practical and useful to combine further in third countries and to share with other European countries where we can. I am happy to say that the British Government have one of the best records in the European Union on this. I visited our embassy in Reykjavik, where the Germans have one side and we have the other, and we share security, transport and the conference room. I know that there are similar arrangements in east Africa and in central Asia, where the British have for extremely practical reasons gone in with the Germans, the Commission or other European countries. But in the states where we are not now represented, it would be helpful to have perhaps one British national in someone else’s representation; it would be better than having no representation at all. Out in the field, we co-operate relatively easily. When I was in Tblisi two years ago, the British ambassador kindly took me to a briefing by the EU special representative—not double-hatted—for the south Caucasus, at which representatives of all the EU states that have embassies in Tblisi, of which there are a small number, met the Commission representative and the special representative. That makes a great deal of sense. I only hope that they wrote a single, joint report afterwards, to save time and to ensure that they had relatively common views. Such practical ways forward are very much in Britain’s interest. The report talks about declining rivalries in Brussels. I welcome the evidence that the bureaucratic rivalries between the Commission and the Council are now in decline. I had a call three or four yearsago from a member of the External Relations Directorate-General of the Commission, who told me that papers were being written internally about the three Ps—in any competition between the growing Council secretariat and the European Commission, staff had to protect the powers and privileges of the Commission. There are still one or two echoes of that in the report, and I hope that the British Government do their best to criticise this when the Commission attempts to have extremely sharp elbows. The Council secretariat has grown remarkably and rapidly in the past 10 years. It has a military staff of over 200, and a foreign policy secretariat under Solana and others, and working together more closely, which includes much more extensive staff exchanges, is highly desirable. The Commission paper, for fairly obvious reasons, does not mention one of the problems that we have institutionally; namely, that there are too many commissioners, particularly those who deal with external relations. There are coy references to the Relex Group of commissioners. The relations between different commissioners concerned with different aspects of external relations are not always easy, but there are also national rivalries between national Governments and the European Union institutions, to which others have referred. How the European Union looks to its major partners is a real problem. I was invited to a joint conference and EU-Russia summit under the last Swedish presidency. I stood there watching the European Governments present their common view to the Russian Government. First we had Anna Lindh, the Swedish Foreign Minister, followed by Commissioner Patten and then Javier Solana. Standing behind them as they spoke, just to ensure that they were all there, were the 15 ambassadors to demonstrate that they were very much part of the same thing. I stood there thinking that, if I were a Russian, I would not take this seriously. I suspect that the Russians did not. The EU still does not have a common policy towards Russia, and desperately needs one. I am privileged to be leading a small group from this House to Russia next week, and I hope that we will hear from EU representations there that we are edging a little closer to a European Union common policy; we certainly need one. Practical co-operation on the ground, particularly in smaller states, is what we need next. I note the references in the report and in the paper to the experience of the Asian tsunami ina remote part of Indonesia and in southern Sri Lanka—areas in which one needed active and rapid responses and where representation from Britain and other EU states was thin. We certainly need less duplication of effort, and we need to ensure that small countries are better covered. Again, I should say in passing from my limited experience and observation, that the quality of Commission delegations in third countries is highly variable. Some are excellent, and some are not. There are tremendous advantages, which I hope the British Government are actively pursuing, in further staff exchanges not only from Whitehall but into Whitehall. It is very good to have more people from the Commission and from different countries working for some time in the Foreign Office. The British have an excellent record of being open to the nationals of other European Union states working in Whitehall—a record that is much better than the equivalent ones of our other European colleagues. I strongly hope that the British Government support the general double-hatting of EU special representatives. That is entirely desirable. I also hope that the Minister will be able to tell us that the British Government are now actively pursuing further progress in co-location. I shall make another couple of points about accountability and visibility before I conclude. Again, reading the report, it seems that it is practical and useful for the British Government to be more relaxed about the European Parliament’s external relations committee being able to move beyond the strict competencies of the first pillar and to discuss someof the broader principles of external action and common foreign policy—it does not make sense to keep it in one box, spending rather too much time on little issues—and to encourage it to launch a broader debate on the principles of European Union foreign policy. The closer co-operation among chairmen of national parliamentary foreign affairs committeesis highly desirable; I hope that Her Majesty’s Government strongly support that development. My biggest criticism of the Government comes from what is said in paragraphs 140 and 142 of the report, which refer to the inadequacies of, "““the presentation of the EU’s role in the world””." It says: "““The EU has substantial economic and political resources at its disposal, but its position on the world stage needs to be reinforced … This cannot be done unless the Member States in particular publicly acknowledge what the EU is doing””." Paragraph 142 says: "““The United Kingdom Government should give a political lead by publicly recognising what the EU is doing in the field of external relations and in giving due credit to the EU for its successes””." Far from being in the lead, the United Kingdom Government are a laggard on this. I hope that in a few months’ time, under a different Prime Minister, we will at last have a Government who are prepared to stand up to the Murdoch press and to admit what we have achieved in Britain’s interests through closer co-operation in foreign policy, defence policy and development policy in the European Union.