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Debate on the Address

My Lords, there is little in the Queen’s Speech on foreign policy. We are promised legislation to approve the EU reform treaty, but there is no promise to persuade the British people that the treaty is necessary, let alone that European Union membership is in Britain’s national interests. We have some welcome words about the millennium development goals, to which we on these Benches will continue to give our strong support and on which my noble friend Lady Northover will speak later. There are sentences on Iraq and Iran—major and continuing British commitments, neither of which is very easy at the moment—and there is a reference to, "““international concerns over Iran’s nuclear intentions””." There is a promise to, "““maintain Britain’s strong commitment to reaching a lasting peace settlement between Israel and the Palestinians””." My noble friend Lady Williams of Crosby will speak on that. There is also a reference to Afghanistan, but I am surprised that there is no mention of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation. I wondered whether that was a sign of Britain’s hesitation about its future, although we heard a little from the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor, in her opening speech about the problems that NATO now faces in Afghanistan. One hears very often that the future of NATO is at stake in Afghanistan. Those unconnected sentences betray an underlying incoherence. Britain has no foreign policy at the moment in terms of a clear view of our place in the world and our preferred international role. Tony Blair, like John Major before him, slid back from his initial promise to place Britain at the heart of Europe to a position in which Britain followed Washington’s lead wherever it took us. The Government have failed to provide the British people with a new narrative about national identity and about our relations with our neighbours, our friends and our responsibilities, even about the threats that we face. Two or three years ago, Tim Garton Ash wrote that British foreign policy over the past 40 years had been footnotes to Churchill—that we are still stuck in the assumptions of the 1950s. In summing up, the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor, said: "““It is in this country’s interests to remain an active and leading participant on the world stage””." Anthony Eden could have said the same, as could Harold Macmillan; indeed, they both often did. Gordon Brown, in his British Council speech three years ago, said interestingly that confusion over our national identity lay behind our hesitation over our role in the European Union. However, there has been no effort since then to address this confusion. Instead, there has been a sad silence from Ministers. Indeed, I congratulate the noble Baroness on managing to avoid mentioning the European Union once in her opening speech, if I heard her correctly, although there were several references to Britain standing together with the United States. The divide between nationalism and internationalism is one of the underlying issues in democratic politics. The Liberals are instinctive internationalists. We believe that co-operation with our neighbours and the promotion of open societies, open markets and, so far as possible, open frontiers are the best way in which to build a peaceful and equitable international order. The Conservatives are instinctive nationalists. They believe in British sovereignty and British status, although I sometimes wonder whether it is now English sovereignty and England’s status. The Conservatives are therefore naturally suspicious of Europe and, as the noble Lord, Lord Howell, has suggested, they are now also suspicious of the United States. I think about the position in which Enoch Powell ended up, and I wonder whether the Conservative Party is drifting in the same direction. Labour is historically an internationalist party, coming, like the Liberals, out of Britain’s progressive tradition. The Government have an excellent record on world development and on commitment to action on climate change, although on climate change they are having trouble meeting the commitment that they have given to the European Union. But Labour’s backsliding on co-operation with our neighbours has been an immense failure, giving rise to press and popular suspicions about France and Germany and to the glamorous illusion of world status that successive British Prime Ministers come to feel as they walk along the White House red carpet arm in arm with the President of the United States. Our previous Prime Minister’s image of the United Kingdom as a bridge between the United States and Europe, in which Britain interpreted our incoherent European allies’ wishes to the United States and interpreted to our non-understanding continental partners what the United States wanted, was a wonderful illusion. Tony Blair never stopped to ask why that did not appeal to Paris and Berlin. This week, as President Sarkozy is welcomed in Washington with even more warmth than Chancellor Merkel, the idea that Britain somehow had a special relationship between Europe and the United States is exposed as empty. With the new Prime Minister as with the old: we read that Rupert Murdoch was at Chequers the day after Gordon Brown decided not to call an autumn election. Irwin Stelzer, Rupert Murdoch’s effective representative in Britain, is in and out of No. 10 and the Treasury. There is active competition between Labour and the Conservatives for Rupert Murdoch’s Anglo-Saxon blessing. If you sup with the owner of Fox News and the Weekly Standard—the bible of American neo-conservatism—you endanger your principles as a progressive. We know what the Murdoch agenda for international order is—antagonism to the United Nations and to international institutions, scepticism about climate change, insistence on America’s special mission and the belief that it is the duty of America’s allies to follow its lead. I hope that we all accept in this House that there are almost no international issues on which the United Kingdom benefits from acting alone. All the major challenges that we now face beyond our borders require close co-operation—first with our neighbours, then with other democratic Governments and then through global institutions and all those whom we can persuade to work with us. Britain cannot stand alone on the challenges of global warming, which is now the greatest threat to Britain’s long-term security, as it is to others. It cannot stand alone on the non-state threats of transnational terrorist movements and cross-border crime, and on our fragile world economy—although, as a semi-detached member of European financial and economic co-operation, Britain will often find that the Chancellor of the Exchequer sits outside meetings of EU Ministers discussing financial questions, or as the euro, the dollar and the renminbi are negotiated. Again, Britain cannot stand alone on population growth and on the pressures for migration. Any coherent British foreign policy must start with co-operation with our neighbours. Of course, the European Union is not ideally designed for all Britain’s specific interests. Other members have other priorities and national inhibitions. But nor is it ideally designed to fit the exact priorities of any other member state. Negotiation and compromise are the essence of multilateral co-operation. No state can expect to win every point in every game. Enlargement from a European Union of 15 to 27 necessitates some institutional changes. That is the justification for the reform treaty that we will discuss in this House later this Session. However, the British press and British politicians—including far too often Labour Ministers, as well as our previous and current Prime Ministers—portray European diplomacy as a battle between Britain and the rest, in which we stand alone embattled against the Continent, brave and honest Englishmen in danger of being outwitted by the devious French and the wicked Germans. That is a powerful myth, which feeds into the Churchillian image of the Anglo-Saxons, as in 1940-41, alone but resolute in the face of the threat from across the Channel. Next Sunday, on Remembrance Day, we shall celebrate and symbolise that powerful British recollection, which we have not yet managed to move beyond. But it is now a myth. France and Germany have long ceased to be the motor of European integration in close partnership. Both Governments would prefer very clearly a closer partnership with a constructive British Government, if our Government were capable of responding. The German Government cast a dissenting vote in the Council of Ministers far more often than the British Government. Those who campaigned against the constitutional treaty in France argued that the Anglo-Saxons had taken over the European Union. Indeed, with four Nordic members, economic liberals in government in Portugal and the Netherlands, and eight new members from central and eastern Europe, the balance of approaches in the European Union is now far closer to our own than to the protectionism of the old French left. The underlying reality is that Britain shares interests and assumptions across most international issues more closely with our partners within the EU than with the current Administration in Washington, than with the Commonwealth, which the noble Lord, Lord Howell, prefers to cultivate while his party protests actively about Zimbabwe, or than with other groupings across the world. I must say to the noble Lord, Lord Howell, that as African members of the Commonwealth resist our good governance agenda, with real problems about corruption in the use of aid, I would hesitate strongly in transferring more of our aid budget to the Commonwealth multilateral framework rather than working with our partners in the European Union. On energy and climate change, on the Middle East, on Israel/Palestine and Iran, on Russia and on world poverty and development, our interests go most closely with our European neighbours. For example, the European Union collectively provides more than half of world development assistance. But there is a wide gap between the realities of British co-operation and the nationalist rhetoric that Ministers prefer to adopt. On border control, for example, the long-term co-operation between UK customs officers and their opposite numbers was hardly mentioned in discussions on the UK Borders Bill. The opt-out from Schengen is paraded by Ministers without mentioning the unreported opt-ins to benefit as far as possible from arrangements that our police know are essential to combating crime and illegal immigration. I was provided by the Ministry of Justice, after a great deal of effort, with a list of our 53 opt-ins on immigration. I wonder how many more there are in police and judicial co-operation that are not reported to this House. On foreign policy and defence, who would remember now that the European security and defence policy was launched by Tony Blair at the Pörtschach informal summit in 1998 and jointly provided by Tony Blair and President Chirac at St Malo? Once the Daily Mail dubbed it the ““European army””, Ministers took fright. The Daily Mail of course thinks that this is yet another Franco-German plot to force British soldiers into what it calls a ““militaristic”” Europe—wearing jackboots, of course, as part of their uniform. Since then, Ministers have done their best to pretend that this has little to do with us. Yet, underneath it all, we are deep in the middle of it still. The head of Mr Solana’s foreign policy secretariat is a British official on secondment from the Foreign Office. The head of the European Defence Agency is a British official on secondment from the Ministry of Defence. Throughout last year, the head of the EU military staff was a lieutenant-general seconded from the British Army. You do not read that in the Daily Mail and Ministers do not tell us about it either. The other week, in Brussels, negotiations on the European External Action Service began. Clear British interests are at stake. The Foreign Office budget is being cut and the number of missions that we have in overseas countries is going down. We have just discovered that Burkino Faso has been elected to the UN Security Council and we do not have a mission in Burkino Faso to look after our interests as a permanent member of world status of the UN. In reality, we share posts abroad with a number of other European countries—more than most others. We share most often with the Germans and even occasionally with the European Commission, but you do not read that unless you get to page 200 of the FCO annual report, in the appendices. As discussions start in Brussels on the future shape and structure of the European External Action Service, I am told that the British are sitting silent on the edge of the debate for fear of word seeping out to our Eurosceptic press. That goes against Britain’s national interests, for fear of upsetting the illusions of the domestic conventional wisdom. Ministerial rhetoric is all about red lines and resistance, even when some red lines cut across Britain’s long-term interests. In contrast, there is no whisper of a red line in our relations with Washington, under either Democrat or Republican Administrations. On the Middle East peace process, neglected for the past six years, Tony Blair hoped that acquiescence in Iraq would win American commitment to Middle East peace negotiations, but it is only now, in the final 15 months of the Bush Administration, that the Americans at last appear to be almost serious about getting negotiations under way in Annapolis. We have to hope that the Annapolis conference will take the process forward, but Her Majesty’s Government on their own have no influence over it. Iraq has, of course, been the greatest disaster not only for British foreign policy over the past 10 years, but also for the stability of the Middle East. But American policies in Lebanon, towards Syria and above all towards Iran have not been entirely rational. America’s refusal to negotiate with Iran in 2003-04 and the clamour in Washington for enforced regime change do not inspire confidence. Are there any red lines for Her Majesty’s Government in this? Have we warned about bombing Iran? Have we condemned what appears to have been American connivance in the unexplained Israeli air raid on Syria this summer? On climate change, what have we said? When was the last major speech by a British Prime Minister in Washington, laying down the line to an American audience on the urgency of that global issue? On missile defence, on which our Government have accepted all American requests and on which the US Administration are now negotiating over our heads with the Russians about the terms and conditions of future deployment, what are the Government telling Parliament? A Written Statement slipped out on 25 July, just as we rose for the summer. It referred to the need to protect the West against ““rogue states””, accepting American concepts and American language to justify British acquiescence in an American project. Some months ago, the Financial Times said of Conservative foreign policy that it was odd to find a British political party dedicated to following the national interests of another country. I sometimes think that that could also be said of new Labour’s foreign policy. It is, after all, what Rupert Murdoch would wish. A progressive foreign policy must start with greater honesty in explaining to the British people Britain’s underlying international interests and capabilities and how best to pursue those interests in co-operation with like-minded partners within the capabilities, capacities and finance that we are prepared to devote. Later in the debate, my noble friend Lord Lee of Trafford will talk in more detail about the capabilities of the Armed Forces and how better to match commitments to the limitations of what any British Government are prepared to spend. I want to end with a question for the new Labour Government as they attempt to straddle the divide of nationalism and internationalism between the illusions of the Anglo-Saxon special relationship and the necessities of European co-operation. It is now 15 months to the arrival of a new American president in Washington, with a new team that will set out to launch its own vision of foreign policy and call on its European allies and partners to fall in line behind it. We now know that this will be before the next general election, so it will be on this Government’s watch. What will new Labour’s response be and how will it work over the next 12 months to prepare for it? Will Mr Brown jostle to be the first European head of government to visit the new president in Washington, as Tony Blair did with President George W Bush, or will new Labour now work to promote a concerted and coherent European response on the many issues on which we share common interests in order to build a more balanced Atlantic partnership for the next decade?