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Foreign Policy

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Marlesford, for the tone with which he opened this debate. I agree with a good deal of his speech, particularly the emphasis on the new challenges we face. I want to talk about the challenges that are posed for British foreign policy. We are, after all, in a transformed world in which the likelihood of major war between states is now very low. We face new challenges: global economic co-operation and the creation of a more sustainable, but still open, global economy; the enormous threat of climate change and the need for global co-operation and changes in domestic policy throughout the world to cope with that; the related threat of population growth, with another 300 million to 400 million people in Africa in the next 20 years and a similar number in southern Asia, with all the problems that that brings in terms of unemployed youth and the temptations of radical ideologies, whether secular or religious, that unemployed young men fall prey to; state failure and state collapse; and migration on a large scale, which will hit the richer countries of the world. We know that we need much stronger regional and global governance but we are stuck with a world system in which nearly 200 state entities cling to their sovereignty and indeed a popular narrative in Britain which clings to our sovereignty as well while suggesting that others should co-operate more. There are some real challenges, therefore, for British foreign policy. Our foreign policy posture looks back—indeed, it is in many ways nostalgic. We talk about Britain as a world power, punching above our weight. We emphasise our ““independent”” deterrent. We wish to invest in aircraft carriers. The whole narrative of British foreign policy is, as Tim Garton-Ash has written, a footnote to Churchill. He defined Churchill’s view of British foreign policy as an unambiguous commitment to the United States and an ambiguous commitment to Europe. I find on the Conservative Party website something that Churchill himself could have said to define the Conservative approach to British foreign policy today: "““Britain enjoys a unique position—it is the place where America, Europe and the Commonwealth meet. Our outlook and responsibilities have always been global””." That is good, old-fashioned nostalgic stuff. Tony Blair’s rhetoric was pretty similar and if one looks for the foreign policy of a post-Blair Labour Government, the most appropriate thing is to quote the title of a New Statesman article: "““Notes on a post-Blair foreign policy””." That is perhaps about as far as they have got. We have some real challenges therefore for British foreign policy: what we can afford, with whom we work and what we put first. The Conservatives so far fail on all of these. David Cameron suggests that the problems of the economy are domestic and that it is all therefore the Government’s fault. We know that it is far more complicated and global than that. William Hague suggests that we are threatened by the concept of a European Army, disregarding everything that Michael Portillo as Secretary of State for Defence did to promote European defence co-operation. It disregards even more, as I discovered last night, what Sir Alec Douglas-Home said 38 years ago when he was Foreign Secretary. When proposing British membership of the European Union, he said that Britain should find and pursue effectively practical joint defence policies in Europe. The Daily Mail did not like that so the Conservatives and Labour have now gone back on it. Conservatives, as we know, have been colonised by right-wing think-tanks in Washington and now face the danger that, as the Obama Administration talk about a transatlantic relationship between the United States and the major European governments collectively, the Conservatives will be committed to an exclusive relationship with Washington when Washington will want a broader relationship with Europe. Britain cannot have a coherent foreign policy unless it has a coherent European policy. My party will be giving this message very strongly as we approach the European elections and as we pick up the inconsistencies of a Conservative Party which finds it extremely difficult to cope with the whole European dimension. If we want to co-operate on climate change, economic recovery, migration or terrorism we have to start with the regional dimension before we go on to the global. With regard to the Government, we are led to believe that Gordon Brown has now succeeded in going to Washington before President Sarkozy and Chancellor Merkel but of course after the Japanese Prime Minister. We will hear more about the wonderful special relationship in which we accept 15,000 American troops in Britain under agreements shaped in the early 1950s, many of which have never been debated in Parliament. I came across an interesting quote some months ago in Kissinger’s memoirs in which he said how refreshing it was to meet Edward Heath as British Prime Minister, someone who saw the US relationship with Britain in terms of interests and not in terms of sentiment. I wish we could have a Prime Minister and a Foreign Secretary now who would see the same. I regret that the British Government have not responded to President Sarkozy’s initiative for closer, franker British co-operation in foreign policy and defence or to invest in a positive relationship with the German Government. I regret that our Middle East policy follows the American perceptions far too closely, although we must hope that shifts in Washington’s policy will in turn lead to a shift in London. The Liberal Democrat response to all of this is that we should cut our coat according to our cloth. We should co-operate with our neighbours at least as closely as with Washington. We should pursue a transatlantic relationship based on interests and not on illusions or sentiment. We note how enormously overstretched we are in defence and that we have to have a radical review of what we can afford in defence terms. That may pose large questions about future defence commitments and it certainly requires us, as my much regretted friend and colleague Tim Garden used to argue, to go further down the road of co-operation with our French partners and with others across the channel. We need a strong push for nuclear disarmament built around the review of the non-proliferation treaty next year and we must be prepared to think through what that means for the renewal of our own nuclear deterrent, an enormous cost hanging over future defence procurement which we have to start paying heavily from 2011 to 2012 onwards. Lastly, we have to explain to our public the world in which we live, and that is the biggest foreign policy challenge that British political leaders now face. For too long, Governments, both Conservative and Labour, have been frightened of the Daily Mail and the Murdoch and the Rothermere press. For too long, they have gone on pulling out the old nostalgic ideas without trying to educate our public in the world in which we now live. Britain is not a global power with global interests distinct from our European neighbours. Let us just look at how much more the Germans export to China, Brazil and Russia than we do; let us just look at how much more German investment there is in Latin America. If Britain is a global power, the noble Viscount, Lord Montgomery of Alamein, may wish to say, it would help if we paid a little more attention to Latin America, for example. So we need to explain to our public what is possible, what we can afford, where perhaps we need to be a little more modest, certainly where we need to co-operate a great deal more actively with our European neighbours; and design a foreign policy which addresses the challenges of 2009 to 2020, not of 1945 to 1960.