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Debate on the Address

My Lords, some would indeed argue that we have been too good in keeping our doors so determinedly wide open for immigrants from the new entrant accession-state EU members, while most of our neighbours throughout the EU kept their doors prudently ajar and managed the situation much more carefully and intelligently. Now, of course, the British policy has gone into reverse and we are trying too late to close the door for the newcomers Romania and Bulgaria; but the errors have been made. The truth is that the international scene has metamorphosed into an amazing new network of states, and it is time for new platforms and coalitions. The idea of the EU as a bloc with a single foreign policy, whether intended to confront America or for any other purpose, is—to put it in the jargon—““yesterday””. Power has shifted from the bloc-builders, indeed from the whole Atlantic world, in two overarching ways: it has dispersed to billions of desktop computers via the worldwide web, a teeming and often dangerously empowered micro-world; and, of course, it has shifted to Asia’s millions and the unstoppable Asian enterprise, soaring economies and high technology which is flowing not west to east, but east to west. The architects of the Lisbon treaty—to which we will have to give a lot of time—are taking the European Union in the wrong direction. They are trying to establish the legal and constitutional structure of a kind of western empire that belongs to history while the real need is not for another jammed-together regional bloc but for far more flexibility and a trelliswork of links and relationships between different nations. That is why the integrationist flavour of the latest treaty is so hopelessly inappropriate. It is trying to sew together a constitutional garment for the EU of the past. The EU of the future, which I hope will certainly include Turkey and maybe other countries, will look quite different and require different systems of governance. Let there be no scintilla of doubt: this latest treaty is patently and obviously a document that embodies the old constitutional concept. We know from the candour of President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing and the like that it was designed to be largely unintelligible, which is a far cry from the hopes of those at Laaken four years ago. They wanted a new treaty that would bring the EU closer to the people. I am afraid that it is more likely that it will be closer to the lawyers. Its DNA is identical to that of the rejected treaty. It is that treaty’s proven child. As the European Scrutiny Committee in the other place put it a few days ago: "““Taken as a whole, the Reform Treaty produces a general framework which is substantially equivalent to the Constitutional Treaty””." In the words of the Economist magazine, which is no lackey of any party, this is, "““Sneaking a constitution through on the sly””." The case for a referendum on such a transfer of Parliament’s powers to others and such a contracting out of our foreign policy is absolutely unanswerable, just as it was with the previous treaty. We shall certainly be tabling an amendment to that effect when the treaty Bill comes before us. Adding a personal addendum, I am only sorry that your Lordships’ European Union Committee does not quite see it this way, although my hope is that another committee of your Lordships’ House will examine and advise on the treaty’s constitutional implications in detail, comparing it with the previous, now defunct, one. The task of clarifying our external interests and role in the face of a long list of new challenges should be pursued in quite different directions from the ones I am talking about. We are confronted by foreign policy priorities of the utmost urgency which just cannot wait for cumbersome and all-too-often fruitless attempts at manoeuvring for common positions in the European Union. I shall take some of the issues that the noble Baroness has already raised. We have the still crumbling position in the Middle East, the persisting Iraq civil war—let us hope that there are signs of improvement, as she suggested—and the glaring dangers, to which we can never shut our eyes, of our withdrawal and the so-called overwatch strategies. I hope they will go right, but they seem full of risks. Then there is the continuing Israeli-Palestine stalemate. There are some hopes for the forthcoming Annapolis conference, which Condoleezza Rice has engineered, but there are also enormous difficulties and it will be first of a long series of conferences. There is the still rising Iranian nuclear threat, which is still unchecked, and all the proxy wars, terrorist campaigns and irregular warfare which leave our Armed Forces under ever more pressure to re-equip and adjust to new patterns and techniques requiring new types of defence technology. I echo the tribute paid by the noble Baroness to the young men and women who have fallen in the two campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan and to the bereaved. Each death is a terrible personal and family tragedy. My noble friend Lord Astor will develop in greater detail how we see the military problems, which are considerable, and how they should be resolved. Furthermore, I sometimes wonder whether in the world-wide scramble for oil, gas and minerals and the looming threats to our energy security are properly appreciated on the Government Benches. I will say more on them in a moment, if I have time. And what about the water and food shortages and the rising tensions they generate? There is the paralysing dilemma, which seems to have passed by some government policy makers, between the rapid global growth out of poverty—which actually means consuming and needing a lot more cheap energy—and the longer term environmental and climatic health of the planet, which calls for much less energy consumption, certainly less from fossil fuels, and much more expensive energy. That is a dilemma that we cannot just brush by and hope for the best in the best of all possible worlds. We have booming transnational crime; we have the drug trade roaring ahead more vigorously than even. The noble Baroness mentioned Afghanistan’s heroin. The poppy crop is bigger than ever, alas, and therefore the heroin supply is stronger. We have epidemics and pandemics. We have imploding nations such as poor Zimbabwe, and now—the noble Baroness also mentioned it—Pakistan. Pakistan is a nuclear power, so whoever governs it will have nuclear capability. It is a seed bed of terror all over the world and it is a feeder for the Taliban next door in Afghanistan. Any instability there must be a source of immense and acute danger to us directly here in this country. Of course we want to see democratic elections and for these things to be encouraged and supported, I hope, through the Commonwealth, about which I shall say a word in a moment. We also, incidentally, face new cyber-war dangers which could paralyse our society overnight and induce total civil collapse—this is not fantasy—as it did in Estonia only the other day. There is not much sign of that kind of vision of the future in the gracious Speech. These are the sorts of priorities which we should be concentrating on. I personally feel especially concerned that our foreign policy and our energy supply threats seem to be left unconnected and, as it were, dangled and hanging in the air. We have a run-down nuclear industry—half its plants are down—and it will take at least a decade to resuscitate that now thanks to the Government’s dithering, even if the new Energy Bill and Planning Reform Bill in the gracious Speech go through at high speed, which they will not. We have oil approaching $100 a barrel; a misplaced attempt to involve ourselves in the EU’s precarious, forlorn and Russia-dependent energy systems; the wrongly taxed North Sea oil running down; inadequate gas storage; a tiny dependence on biofuels—and the wrong expensive sort of biofuels; unreliable and oversubsidised wind farms; and with a string of targets, mentioned again in the gracious Speech for CO2 emission reductions and renewable energy sources, both EU-based and our own, but no serious strategy to achieve them. The EU’s favourite idea for developing carbon capture and storage remains completely uncommercial and untested: it is just talk. The huge prospective Chinese and Indian coal-burn, if not curbed, will completely overwhelm and render useless all our elaborate western efforts to limit carbon—however many Bills we pass imposing legally binding frameworks to cut carbon, as mentioned in the gracious Speech. How do we become more realistic about these things and meet these challenges more effectively? The sober answer is that there are no glib answers or magic bullets. To cope with this new world, we have at hand one network which could prove invaluable; that is, the Commonwealth. The Commonwealth is lucky to get one brief mention in the gracious Speech—except, of course, when we are referring to Her Majesty as Head of the Commonwealth—but here is a system of relationships which embraces all our friends, of which Her Majesty is the highly popular head figure; which connects across continents; which is multifaith; which contains six of the fastest growing and cutting-edge economies in the world; which brings together on equal and not patronising terms the smaller and poorer and the richer and bigger nations; and which ties us into a system of broadly common values, or at least aspiration towards them. As I mentioned, it could well be relevant—but not, alas, mentioned by the Government—in dealing with the Pakistan danger. I wonder whether the Commonwealth might not be a much better channel for our development aid than some aspects of the much criticised European Union aid programme. I certainly wonder whether giving certain forms of aid to China and India still makes the slightest sense when India is pouring out a million science graduates a year, as the noble Baroness, Lady Corston, reminded us yesterday in her excellent speech, and China is doing much the same. The Government should apply their minds to the changing situation there. As the Daily Telegraph—not everybody's favourite paper—remarked the other day, the Commonwealth could be, "““a powerful agent of political and economic change””." Other countries think that we are quite mad not to be making far more use of the Commonwealth, yet no mention does it get in the Government's vision or strategic views on foreign policy. Of course, it needs reinvigorating from its present diminished and neglected role. It needs confidence; it needs a more vigorous external agenda; it needs connecting with sympathetic powers such as Japan; and, above all, it needs resources. It is absurd and grotesquely unbalanced that our net subscription to the European Union is well over 100 times greater than our support for the Commonwealth. The balance needs correcting. The Commonwealth is today and tomorrow’s neglected colossus. Far from being a nostalgic club of the past, it is the global network of tomorrow, which we ignore at our peril. At the forthcoming Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in a few weeks’ time in Kampala, I hope that the Government show some understanding of that. I am very glad to learn that his Royal Highness Prince Charles is attending it with his parents. Perhaps he sees the future a bit more clearly than do Ministers. The next big challenge—or big idea, as I think people say nowadays—is how, in a totally interdependent world, we build the right partnerships and links to handle all the external influences which are shaping our lives, our work, our economic health and our safety here at home at this moment. I believe that we have the wrong partners and are drifting along under the wrong influences and that it is high time for this country to review and alter those alliances and work more closely with our true friends, who may or may not be our geographical regional neighbours. Some are, some are not. In India, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Japan, the oil-rich Gulf states, the recovering South Africa, as well as Scandinavia and the brave little Baltic states and other parts of the new Central Europe, we have a lot of friends. They are all asking, ““Where are the British? Why have their horizons become so narrow, regionalised and inward looking? We are waiting to grasp hands with them again, but where are they?””. Those countries are the network and the powerhouses of the future. Our Asian friends, together with China, are the areas to which the centre of the world economic gravity is fast shifting. They are the capital-rich countries that will supply and finance the development of the whole globe. They are where the action will be and where the British, with their long history of adventure and their vast global reach, should also be. I see no comprehension of that in the gracious Speech, for all the frenzied talk of spin and narrative. This is a lost Government with a lost agenda. Some of their Ministers seem disaffected, while others, such as our own delightful additions to the Government, the noble Lords, Lord Malloch-Brown and Lord Jones, or Digby Jones—is he here now?—are, as we so often hear from the noble Lord, Lord Jones, determined to stay outside the new Labour tent. I do not believe them. I do not blame them either, although I am not sure that I can find them room in our tent, so they may just have to stay out in the open and live the open life. I hope that they do not get too wet. The Administration, of which they and others are semi-detached members, is living on borrowed time. In my view, it has already borrowed too much of it. The moment has come for payback—the moment when this whole raddled Government should stop their borrowing and start repaying for their misrule and their mistakes. Ministers can do that best, both for the rest of us and to restore their own work-life balance, which seems to be important to them, by removing themselves and all their works and letting a new generation and a new Government take over.