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Foreign and Commonwealth Office

My Lords, this debate could not be more timely. The Comprehensive Spending Review announced last year and the current and prospective year’s budgetary provisions have left the Foreign and Commonwealth Office squeezed and starved of resources. The consequences in the form of post closures and the slow haemorrhage of downgrading and thinning out the remaining posts are already visible. The premature departure at a time when they could have given more years of valuable service of many talented and highly professional diplomats is taking place daily. Important scholarship programmes, prominent among them the Marshall scholarships, have been top-sliced and, as a result, fewer such scholarships are now available than in recent years. I asked a Question about these false and damaging economies in the scholarship schemes last October and was then given a vaguely reassuring reply. I gather that the right honourable gentleman the Foreign Secretary today made a Written Ministerial Statement in another place which does not in fact take matters much further. Meanwhile, the facts belie the reassurance. There are fewer Marshall scholarships. We are waiting to hear whether the Government plan to restore these cuts in future. All these signs of stress and damage to what our rivals and adversaries have always acknowledged to be one of Britain's outstanding national assets—its world-class Diplomatic Service—are ones that we cannot afford to ignore. The noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, should be congratulated on bringing this matter to the Floor of the House. As a former member of the Diplomatic Service, I will try to avoid any special pleading and look rather at a number of general issues relating to the national interest. First, does Britain of the 21st century need a world-class Diplomatic Service or should we accept a process of relative decline and settle for something skimpier and less effective? The answer that we do need a world-class Diplomatic Service and that settling for second best would be damaging to our national interest is not just a response of knee-jerk jingoism; it is surely a matter of rational analysis. Everyone beats a path to the door of a superpower. Just look at the way that countries staff their embassies in Washington or Beijing. But when you are a middle-ranking power with world-wide interests to further and defend, as Britain does, you need sharp eyes and sharp elbows. Some 30 years ago, the Callaghan Government commissioned a report that concluded that Britain could no longer afford a Rolls Royce of a Diplomatic Service. The Government rejected that advice. It is sobering to think of where we might be if they had accepted it. I hope that the Minister will reject it again at the conclusion of this debate and will ensure that his rejection is not just a verbal reflex, but a reality in terms of resources and manpower. It really is important to look at Britain’s external policies in the round and to consider what is needed to manage them effectively, and not to look at them as a collection of disconnected stovepipes—some development aid here, some diplomacy there, and some military action when all else fails. This Government can take great credit for the massive and sustained increases in Britain’s overseas aid budget. We are at last in sight of the UN target of 0.7 per cent of gross national income to which successive Governments committed us and then did little or nothing to honour. But development aid cannot be a stand-alone policy. In many countries where civil strife or bad governance prevails, it is hard to deliver it at all; just look at Kenya today. In other countries which are successfully transiting towards developed status, aid will be of steadily diminishing significance. Look at India, for example. But we need active diplomacy in failed or failing states and we need it in rising powers. We should not be robbing diplomatic Peter while favouring development-aid Paul. We should be resourcing both as an integrated whole in our overseas policies. The same is even truer for our Armed Forces. If all that requires a bit more of the taxpayers’ money, government and opposition parties should be prepared to say so and defend that as being in the national interest. We will certainly not defend those overseas interests successfully by pretending that more and more can be done with less and less. It is sometimes suggested that in this era of rapid communication, of summit meetings and of increasingly specialised forms of multilateral diplomacy, we do not need diplomatic missions in the way we used to and that everything can be handled by experts from capitals and by political leaders themselves. In the real world, that is not the way things work. Ill-prepared meetings at political level seldom produce good results and often produce the opposite. Complex multilateral negotiations require a careful meshing of expertise from capitals, professional skills on the ground where the negotiation is taking place—in New York, Geneva, Brussels or wherever—and a world-wide diplomatic network lobbying for our objectives and warning where the obstacles to achieving them lie, and how best to get round them. Getting a good result from the post-Bali negotiations on climate change will require just that sort of multifaceted diplomacy; but we will not achieve it if we simply do not have diplomatic posts in some of the key places or if our posts are inadequately staffed. I remember a feeling of powerlessness and inadequate knowledge when successive crises occurred in three countries that were high on the Security Council’s agenda—Somalia, Rwanda and Haiti—in which Britain had no diplomatic representation at all. Later this year, assuming that the Lisbon treaty is ratified by all 27 member states, the European Union will establish its external action service, drawing on, among other resources, the serving diplomats of its member states. Personally, I regard that as a great opportunity for Britain, not as a threat or as an issue of low priority. As one of the member states with a Diplomatic Service of the highest reputation, we have an opportunity to ensure the professionalism of the new service and thus further our interests along with those of the European Union as a whole. Are we ensuring that we make a serious contribution in ideas, structures and human resources to the work that is getting under way in Brussels? Are we going to provide some of the best and brightest of our diplomats to work in the new service and not just unload those whom we value least—an old trick of any bureaucracy in circumstances such as these? Are we going to ensure that the development of that European Union dimension to our diplomacy is valued and rewarded, so that British diplomats regard a spell at a European Union mission as a step up the professional ladder, not a diversion or a distraction? I would welcome a response from the Minister on those points. My contribution to this welcome debate may have sounded a little bit critical. It is intended to be constructively so. We are dealing with an important national asset which will not retain its value if it is not properly resourced and led. The Diplomatic Service that I joined in 1959 has changed out of all recognition in the intervening half century. A series of rapid and fundamental transitions have taken place and the overall quality of the service has not declined. If anything, it has improved. That is surely a major national achievement of which we can be proud. But that process of unending transition and change will be successfully sustained only if we provide the necessary resources and political support. Let us just hope that today’s debate will have made some modest contribution to that.