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Foreign Policy

My Lords, I join in thanking my noble friend, not just for making possible and launching this debate but for the shrewd and elegant way in which he covered the ground. It was extraordinarily skilful. I am tempted to follow the noble Lord, Lord McNally, because his worries about a future meeting—perhaps in the quite near future—between Chancellor Merkel, President Sarkozy and my right honourable friend who is now the leader of the Opposition are bizarre. Those happen to be two people with whom I know that my right honourable friend has close and happy dealings a great deal of the time, so the noble Lord can rest assured that his nightmare will not take place, but I shall not pre-empt what my noble friend Lord Howell may say when he winds up. I want to deal with just one aspect, which is the instrument of foreign policy; namely, the Foreign Office and mainly the Foreign Office at home. I have a personal interest. It is just over 56 years since, my bowler hat in hand, I tiptoed into the Foreign Office for the first time as a humble Third Secretary. Most of my working life—not all of it, but most of it—has in some way or other been concerned with the Foreign Office. I am proud of that association and I know that the Foreign Service today is full of men and women of integrity and high talent. I believe that it continues to provide an attractive and valuable career. That is all the more reason why we should notice and take account of what I believe is a malaise becoming increasingly apparent in its working. I base that not on statistics or surveys but on a steady accumulation of anecdotal evidence from friends, acquaintances and strangers, varied in content but almost unanimous in its thrust. That thrust is that the Foreign Office in London—which is what I am mainly talking about—is ceasing to be a storehouse of knowledge providing valued advice to Ministers and is increasingly an office of management, management of a steadily shrinking overseas service. It is management applying at the request of the Treasury the latest techniques of modern administration: targets, frameworks, mission statements, public service agreements, departmental strategic objectives, and so forth. I am not qualified to rubbish those techniques and I am certain that they have their place, but method should be the servant, not the master of policy. I have been doing some research for a book. In the 19th century, the Foreign Office was essentially a management office, a tiny one. In that century, policy was for many years gripped by two amazing Foreign Secretaries, Lord Palmerston and Lord Salisbury, who liked to pretend aristocratic ignorance of detail but in fact worked hard and long, treating their officials as clerks and their senior officials as super-clerks—that was a phrase of the time. Lord Salisbury passed on and the officials became powerful national figures: Crowe, Arthur Nicholson and later Vansittart were well-known names. Perhaps that went too far, but I worry now that the Foreign Office in London may be reverting, despite the talent deployed there, to an age of super-clerks, rather than policy advisors who have time to think and to bring weight to bear through their advice to Ministers. This is all in the name of financial discipline and economy and, of course, money is important—money is tight and money will probably get tighter. I am not sure that we set about allocating it in the right way. When I was Foreign Secretary, I tried to get our overseas efforts looked at as one—I refer to defence, Foreign Office, aid, British Council, overseas services of the BBC. We made some painful progress, but certainly not enough. The present distribution of resources in our overseas effort weighs heavily against the Foreign Office in an age when diplomacy is more widespread and, I believe, more important than ever. Of course, the balance needs to shift—it needs to take account of changes in the world. Much— perhaps most—EU business is now done either in Brussels or between national departments, and that is right. It is natural, though, to me, strange, that Her Majesty’s ambassador in Kabul, Her Majesty’s ambassador in Beijing and the high commissioner in Delhi, now have bigger staffs and carry more weight than our ambassadors in Rome and Berlin; I do not complain at all about those necessary shifts. We should be aware, however, that shifts and balances are one thing, but the squeeze on the service is undeniable. The House of Commons Select Committee, in what I thought was a very moderate report, talked about the serious risk of overstretch—a net reduction of 400 staff planned over the next five years. It is sad to me and to others—perhaps to most noble Lords present—to see the closure of posts, many of which we have known, and to see our representation, in Latin America and Africa in particular, slip. I am not sure that the choices here are always wise. I shall give a very small example—life is composed of small examples. If I were a Treasury official crouched over my computer, looking at the facts and figures, I might well decide it was not necessary to have a high commissioner in Swaziland, as has been decided. That Treasury official would not, however, know that the relationship between the King of Swaziland and the British high commissioner was traditionally very close and important—that relationship cannot be reproduced by the high commissioner in Pretoria, or by an aid official in Swaziland. That brings me to a point, which has already been touched upon, about our aid programme. It is very good news that the Government have been able to increase that programme substantially. My worry is not about the size of the programme but about the growing feeling that the efforts of DfID bear less and less relation to the foreign policy of this country. It seems to be a different exercise with different priorities. I believe that we need to look at the working of the 2002 Act. There is nothing wrong with specifying the reduction of poverty as the basis and the focus of the aid programme. I will not now go into the question of ministerial responsibility, because that is a controversy in its own right, but I point out that it is perfectly possible to have a separate Cabinet Minister for aid without having a separate department increasingly diverging, in my view, from the foreign policy of this country. I do not believe that the 2002 Act was designed as a decree of divorce between our aid programme and our foreign policy. I think that that needs to be scrutinised. My main concern—this is a narrow point, but, I believe, an important one—is that the Foreign Office in London has been hollowed out. I believe that it should, once again, consist of and produce a reserve of knowledge that can put advice from overseas posts in a strategic context, hold its own in arguments with the Prime Minister and with No. 10. This, again, is a matter that we could debate separately. The Prime Minister is absolutely entitled to feel sure that the foreign policy that he and his colleagues have worked out is being consistently and efficiently applied. In return, however, the Foreign Office should be equipped to remind the Prime Minister, from time to time, that the world is not exactly as he or she wishes it to be and to put certain restraints on the natural and proper enthusiasms, or, as Keynes said, ““animal spirits””, that you find coming out of No. 10. Not all the knowledge needs to be home-grown. One of my regrets as Foreign Secretary is that I did not, in the rush of events, give enough time and attention to the huge body of information and insight from outside Whitehall, outside the foreign service, in the think-tanks, in the universities and so on. This has increased in recent years and I am not convinced so far that the Foreign Office, and the Secretary of State in particular, borrow sufficiently from it. Diplomacy used to be quite narrow in scope. It used to be about frontiers, colonies and dynasties. Now it is about almost everything under the sun, including the sun, climate change, trade and finance, and energy security—almost every human activity now requires, in a globalised world, intercourse between nation states, which cling to their authority. Not all of this should be done by the Foreign Office, of course not, but the Foreign Office should be, as far as Britain is concerned, the co-ordinator, the guide and the shepherd. I think it is very important, in this baffling world, that it should keep and, where necessary, repair and restore its tradition of excellence.