My Lords, the people of these islands have made an extraordinary contribution to the world, much of which we can be immensely proud of. However, with the contraction of the British Empire, two world wars, the emergence of the Commonwealth and our renegotiated relations with mainland Europe post Brexit, we have to continue to adapt to the changing world around us, not least as we negotiate new trade deals—a theme which I know a number of speakers will pick up on during today’s debate.
Long gone are the days when we could boast that Britannia ruled the waves or when the UK was famous for being the home of the Industrial Revolution and known as the workshop of the world, but as some things have declined, others have emerged. Today, we are renowned as a major financial centre, a provider of some of the best tertiary education in the world, the home of some of the most exciting and innovative developments in science, medicine and technology, not least in the fields of computing and artificial intelligence, and a country which has been at the forefront of international development and human rights. All this is happening in a world with massive population growth, where international trade and travel have grown hugely, where environmental concerns and climate change are rising—rightly—up the agenda, and where the ever-present threat of war, not least nuclear war, continues.
We face many challenges as well as many opportunities. China continues to grow rapidly and, as the Integrated Review Refresh 2023 report says:
“The CCP is increasingly explicit in its aim to shape a China-centric international order more favourable to its authoritarian system”.
North Korea now has nuclear weapons and is conducting regular tests. As President Putin’s war against Ukraine continues, China and Iran are strengthening their links with Russia in what many consider a worrying alliance, not least for those of us in the West. Taiwan continues to be under threat by China and could easily become the focus of international conflict.
Meanwhile, population growth across the world continues apace and is unsustainable. The recent Covid-19 pandemic was also a wake-up call. The virus spread rapidly and no country was able to prevent it infecting its population. It gave us a real-time lesson that, whatever our racial and ethnic background, we are all part of one human race. The pandemic revealed our mutual dependence and we learned a lot about the vulnerability of some of our supply chains.
In every age, a major role of government is the defence of the realm, particularly in turbulent times. I was therefore interested to read the Integrated Review Refresh 2023. Having no expertise in defence, I am content to leave that area of foreign policy to those Members of your Lordships’ House who are experts. I look forward to their contribution in this debate. However, I note that the review is proposing that expenditure on defence should increase from 2% of GDP to 2.5% over time and as fiscal and economic circumstances allow. The reason I raise this is that His Majesty’s Government have made a conscious decision to reduce spending on overseas development assistance from 0.7% to 0.5%. In other words, this is a deliberate policy shift away from assisting foreign countries to develop to increasing our military capability instead.
My Lords, I thank the right reverend Prelate for giving us the opportunity for this debate and for his thoughtful opening remarks. I agree with large parts of what he said, and I am sure we can all endorse the wish that we should work to make this a more peaceful world.
This is a timely debate because it comes on the back of the Government’s Integrated Review Refresh on foreign policy, one of the rare intellectually coherent documents to come out of government. I pay tribute to the role of my friend Professor John Bew, foreign policy adviser now to three Prime Ministers, in writing it. I was a little involved in writing the 2021 original review, so I welcome the fact that this 2023 refresh maintains some fundamental elements of that review’s approach, particularly the emphasis on systemic competition as a key feature of today’s international system, and the clarity that
“traditional multilateral approaches and defending the post-Cold War ‘rules-based international system’ are no longer sufficient on their own”.
Too much of our post-Cold War diplomacy seemed to put too much emphasis on process rather than substance, a belief that the unique mission of the UK was to preserve the processes of international interaction —in which we, as a P5 member, have a privileged position—rather than to consider whether the outcomes of that system actually suited this country’s interests.
This new realism is welcome, and I hope it will be coupled in future with a more clear-sighted view of international institutions and how they work—to see them not so much as producers of global norms or as global NGOs but more, for the time being at least, as what they are: arenas for conflict between the great powers. We saw during the pandemic how the WHO became extremely influenced—perhaps captured—for a time by Chinese perspectives, and I look for these lessons to be learned in our attitude to the pandemic treaty currently being drafted in Geneva.
My Lords, it is a privilege to follow the noble Lord, Lord Frost. I admit that I had not expected to use such words, nor did I expect to agree with so much of what he said. However, I do not agree with all of it; I may come to some of that in due course. I join the noble Lord in congratulating the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans and thanking him for securing this debate. This is a precious opportunity to debate these really important issues. I regularly ask the Government to find more time in the Chamber to debate these issues in a longer debate, but other things are going on.
I was particularly grateful to the right reverend Prelate for opening by reminding us of some of what makes us proud to be British—the constituent elements of our soft power. I am very pleased that he made such a powerful case for our priority for peacebuilding and conflict resolution, which I have not very successfully applied much of my time in politics to trying to achieve. I agree completely that our soft power was built up through long-term strategic patience and application. Peacebuilding requires that, but we seem dramatically short of it. We are not alone in the world in doing this; how the Afghan war ended was the result of a lack of strategic patience.
In preparing for this debate about the UK’s foreign policy, I find myself somewhat hamstrung by the question, “Which foreign policy?” Noble Lords will be familiar with President Nixon’s madman theory of foreign policy. It was drawn ultimately from Machiavelli, who suggested that in statecraft it can be
“a very wise thing to simulate madness”,
to disrupt the calculations of strategic adversaries. Speaking as an observer rather than a participant, it appears that the Conservative Government have in recent years taken this doctrine to the novel extent of applying it inwards, ensuring that our diplomatic positions are sometimes incomprehensible not only to outsiders but even to ourselves. We saw the current Prime Minister’s predecessor assert that the “jury is out” as to whether France can be described as an ally of the United Kingdom, and her successor, only months later, hail the “special bond” that exists between the two countries.
My Lords, I, too, thank the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans for securing this debate and for opening it so very effectively.
We are indeed in dangerous and rapidly changing times. The war in Ukraine is a reminder that, even in Europe, conflict is not far away. Global powers are vying with each other, as was ever the case. But overarching all that is the existential threat of climate change. So where is the United Kingdom in all this?
We have the Integrated Review Refresh, which certainly needed to be “refreshed”. As was said at the time, the first one had an EU-shaped hole in it. It promoted “global Britain”, as if our country could alone compete on equal terms with the three major power blocs: the US, China and the EU bloc, with their far greater GDP. That review claimed to be “once in a generation”. Two years later, it turns out that it needed to be refreshed.
To remind noble Lords of the first review, it claimed that we were renowned in development, but DfID had just been crushed and the aid budget cut. It claimed that we could “shape the international order”, but then came the abandoning of Afghanistan and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It said that we were a science and technology superpower, yet we had taken ourselves out of Horizon—we had a strong legacy, but we were damaging our future position. It confidently claimed that the UK could tilt to the Indo-Pacific. It stated:
“What Global Britain means in practice is best defined by actions rather than words.”
Global Britain was well and truly shown up in the withdrawal from Afghanistan; we could neither persuade our US allies, or even expect to be consulted by them, nor stay if they withdrew. What a terrible situation we collectively left in Afghanistan—starvation, the collapse of public health, as shown on the BBC last night, and the denial of all rights to women and girls. I note what the noble Lord, Lord Frost, said about our influence or otherwise now in Washington.
My Lords, I join the noble Baroness, Lady Northover, and others in thanking the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans for securing this important debate. This year is the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and of the convention on the crime of genocide, and today is World Press Freedom Day. It makes this debate particularly timely.
As the noble Baroness predicted, I shall concentrate my remarks on China, including Hong Kong, but I shall also make reference to North Korea and Iran. I refer to my non-financial interests in the register as well as to the sanctions which have been placed on me and other parliamentarians by those regimes.
As the noble Lord, Lord Frost, reminded us, a week ago the Foreign Secretary delivered a speech at the City of London Corporation. It was trailed in advance as his major China policy address. Given the scale and breadth of the challenges posed by the Chinese Communist Party regime—not, I emphasise, by the people of China, but by the regime currently led by Xi Jinping—I could see no coherent strategy. That is exactly the criticism levelled in two House of Lords Select Committee reports. The tone suggested that rekindling friendship with Beijing in pursuit of something resembling the “golden era” trade and investment opportunities was now a government priority. The Foreign Secretary argued that isolating China would be counterproductive, but I know of nobody—including our own Select Committees—who has suggested that the UK disengage from China. The question surely is not whether to talk to China but how, about what, with what objectives and on whose terms we should engage.
By way of example, I invite the Minister to tell us what the Foreign Secretary will be talking about with the Vice-President of China, Han Zheng, during his coronation visit to London over the next few days. Will he be raising the trashing by Han Zheng of the 1984 Sino-British declaration or his role in the imprisonment of 1,400 political prisoners in Hong Kong, specifically the imprisonment of British citizen, Jimmy Lai—referred to by the right reverend Prelate—and other breaches of Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights relating to media freedom in Hong Kong? Will the Foreign Secretary raising this week’s announced decision—a breach of the Sino-British joint declaration—to reduce the direct election of district councillors in Hong Kong to just 20%, in a further emasculation of Hong Kong’s freedoms?
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The Lord Bishop of Leeds
My Lords, I do not wish to detract from the power of the questions that the noble Lord, Lord Alton, has put to the Minister. I promise I will not add more questions to them; I will come at the debate from a different direction. There are two ways of addressing this Motion: first, the role of the UK as seen through our eyes in the UK, who can easily assume that ours is the only way of seeing; secondly, our role as seen through the eyes of “the world” doing the looking in. I am not being pedantic, but why do we in the UK find it so difficult to look at ourselves through the lens of those who might see the world differently?
In his excellent Chatham House speech on 27 April, the Minister for International Development, Andrew Mitchell, addressed the future of international development. Among the very good, welcome and perceptive observations in his speech, one line is understated and easy to miss: the admission that the UK Government’s cut in aid from 0.7% to 0.5% of national income has “dented the UK’s reputation”, as well as being “painful for our partners”. Dented? Only the partners who suffered the consequences of that decision can really tell us what they think our role in the world is now and how it is experienced. Painful reality is more persuasive than optimistic rhetoric.
The question that underlies this debate is this: do we in the UK listen to ourselves and the language of mere aspiration, or can we look through the eyes of those who experience us? I ask this simply because there is often a great gulf between our perception of ourselves and that held by others. In fact, the constant repetition of the language of “world leading” and “world beating” in just about any government statement indicates a basic insecurity about which psychologists could probably say a great deal. I would be happy with just “functional”, in some respects.
I raise this question simply because Andrew Mitchell’s speech admitted a glimpse of light into what has been a depressingly dim discourse in the last decade or so. He offers a language that sounds grown-up. In his stress at the outset of his argument on partnership, progress and prosperity, he returns us to something that sounds both sensible and realistic. Global Britain, whatever that was supposed to mean, seems to have subsided and partnership is back—thank goodness. Gone is the hubris that the UK is still a world-beating power that can function alone in a world of shifting economic and military power blocs. We can argue for ever about the rightness or wrongness of Brexit, but I contend that the corruption of our language with regard to the wider world was damaging in ways we rarely take time to understand.
My Lords, I start by declaring my interest as the Prime Minister’s trade envoy to Uganda, Rwanda and the DRC, a role that I very much enjoy and which rather neatly brings together my three main political interests: the UK’s SMEs, exports and building better relations with Africa—being African-born, please forgive me if I am a little biased.
I believe that building stronger diplomatic and trade links post Brexit with Africa should be Britain’s first priority to secure our nation’s prosperity and economic future. Our approach to Africa has been outdated for some time. We need to re-invent our role in Africa. Brexit offers us a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reshape our global posture, to shift our focus away from Europe and back to Africa, to rebuild our ties with it and re-establish a stronger presence in the booming economies in Africa.
Africa accounts for 17% of the world’s population. That population will double in 30 years. With Africa now having a global GDP of 3%, you can imagine the prospect of the potential our country has with Africa by 2050. This shows the huge room for growth for UK companies.
Africa’s culture is every culture. Some 70% of the people in Africa work on farms. With a land mass of 30 million square kilometres, which is larger than America, China, India and Europe put together, you can see the fertile land they have. Despite that, as the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans, mentioned, some 22 million Africans starve from hunger on a daily basis.
Africa contains 30% of the world’s minerals. The DRC, for which I am a trade envoy, has $30 trillion-worth of minerals; cobalt and lithium, 80% of which are in the DRC, goes to China. Eight out of nine Chinese companies are now in the middle of business in the DRC. We will need cobalt and lithium for defence, car batteries and mobile phones in the future. It is important that we develop a good relationship with that country.
My Lords, it is a privilege to speak in a debate on international relations. It is not an area I normally speak on, and I certainly do not have the expertise of other noble Lords contributing today, but it is something I feel strongly about.
It gives me absolutely no pleasure to say that recent years have witnessed some significant deterioration in our traditional strengths on the world stage, our international reputation and, sadly, our international competitiveness. We have taken a major hit to our GDP from leaving the EU. We have lost our position as the key bridge between the US and the EU. There are to be no US-UK trade negotiations during the present Biden presidency. In my view, we have put at risk our attractiveness to international students and all the benefits of that leadership position. About 10% of world leaders, for example, went to a British university. As others have said, we have also diminished our long reputation for compassion, generosity and thought leadership in international development. We have virtually eviscerated the globally trusted international BBC and British Council operations, a key source of our soft power. It is really not a good and certainly not a balanced score card.
At the same time, our world has become much less safe, with much greater levels of volatility. Russia’s brutal full-scale war against Ukraine has resulted in multiple crises for the whole of Europe and may yet lead to the unthinkable use of tactical nuclear weapons or worse. The Covid threat is not yet over—dangerous new variants may yet develop—and new pandemics may emerge and confront us with devastating speed and effect. As my noble friend Lady Northover pointed out, we are likely to see many more severe climate events. These events in turn could lead to large-scale population movements and mass migration in the tens of millions.
We are also witnessing massive shifts in the tectonic plates of global geopolitics and its economic architecture. US global dominance has been replaced by a multipolar world where China is challenging the US for global leadership and where Russia is trying to reassert its claim to be considered a major global player. In my view the Government’s 2021 integrated review identified the right global risks by highlighting the rise of China as
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Of course, there are times when tyrants and bullies have to be confronted. However, it is equally important to develop and deliver a foreign policy that seeks to build a more peaceful world—and peace is dependent on justice. Unaddressed injustices and inequalities breed resentment, and in that dark pool of bitterness is born conflict. It is well said that peace is not the absence of conflict but the presence of justice. This is why Christ calls us to share in the difficult and challenging work of building peace. It is why he said:
“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God”.
This is why the Church of England and other major Christian churches around the world have collaborated and established a peacebuilding team, to support the Church in being a reconciling presence in the midst of conflict. We have urged and continue to urge the Foreign Office to make peacemaking a major plank of its work. It is good that the Office for Conflict, Stabilisation and Mediation in the Foreign Office has a negotiations and peace process department. As far as I know, it is the only place in His Majesty’s Civil Service and Armed Forces architecture where a dedicated unit is focused solely on peacebuilding. It is a significant step in the right direction and I congratulate the Government on this. I suggest that a dedicated expert team feeds directly into foreign and defence policy at the strategic level of all policy formation, to offer solutions to conflict built on negotiation, mediation, dialogue and conflict resolution. This is the important strand of a strategic level policy design that appears to be missing from the integrated review.
Allied to this is the need for us to develop and use all the forms of soft power also available to us. The BBC World Service is a vital element of this peacebuilding process, so it is disappointing to see the cuts to expenditure. Impartial reporting is one of the most important contributions we can make to a world that is often economical with the truth or promulgates false news. It was particularly shocking when, during the protests in Iran—when women and young children were being killed while protesting against the tyranny of the Iranian regime—our Government announced cuts to the BBC Persian radio services.
The Government have now pledged a £20 million uplift to the BBC World Service, but that will do very little to restrict the planned cuts. Many BBC language services, which have played a vital role in covering not only the protests in Iran but the war in Ethiopia and the pro-democracy protests in Myanmar, are set to be cut. For example, just £800,000 could save BBC Persian radio and preserve a service relied on by 1.6 million Iranians currently in an uprising against their Government.
Similarly, our overseas development aid not only provides much needed help for some of the most vulnerable people in the world but supports our strategic goals across the world. For example, countries in the Horn of Africa face devastating famine following war, drought and crop diseases. Nearly 22 million people are in desperate need of food. Many are likely to die but many others will join the ranks of those who decide to migrate and will be added to the queues of desperate people who want to get into the UK. There is a real reason why we need to think about trying to help these areas develop. We know that our failure to deliver aid to the very same region in 2011 led to millions of deaths, but it also led to increased security threats, as terrorist groups exploited hunger to recruit people to sign up to their radical groups.
Over the past few months, I have asked His Majesty’s Government a series of Written Questions. It is significant that we have slashed our aid to these very countries. The return to the 0.7% aid commitment would help promote security around the globe—let us be in no doubt. Meanwhile, China is entering into the vacuum and buying its way into these countries across Africa and other parts of the world.
I move briefly on to climate change, which is set to have important consequences for foreign policy in the next decade. We have already witnessed how climate-caused famine can lead to instability in the developing world. Furthermore, as the situation gets worse in the Middle East and Africa, we can expect more refugees to arrive on our borders. The UK’s long-term strategy needs to be aware of the consequences of climate change and focus on environmental peacebuilding. This includes providing loss and damage payments for regions most affected by climate change, be that through famine, rising sea levels or other extreme weather events.
Going forward, our foreign policy needs to be conscious of the severe impact of climate change on the developing world and to ensure that we can adequately protect against its consequences. This also means supporting sustainable development, investing in renewable energy and promoting environmentally responsible policies across the globe. One way we can do this is by investing in green technologies, which not only support the developing world but promote British business.
At a fundamental level, the UK has been, and should continue to be, a country that stands up for human rights across our world. Tyrants are watching with interest as some people in our country want to water down some of our human rights. Surely this is the very time when we need to defend such rights and work with all those who promote them, not least in places such as Myanmar, where Rohingya Muslims are being persecuted and killed.
China’s disregard for human rights is a significant threat to the world. The CCP’s treatment of its own citizens, particularly those of religious and ethnic minorities, political dissidents and activists, is deeply concerning. I am shocked to see the continued ill treatment of Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang province by Chinese authorities, or Beijing’s increasingly harsh treatment of Hong Kong protesters and activists, such as Jimmy Lai, who has recently been given a very long sentence.
We have to face the fact that China is not taking a lot of attention from the rest of the world, but we must continue to protest for the sake of all those other countries which may be seeing how the majority respond to China’s bullying tactics. China’s increasing assertiveness in the Indo-Pacific region presents a particular challenge to what the strategic review calls “our Indo-Pacific tilt”. How do the Government plan to counter an increasingly active and aggressive China while simultaneously favouring a strategy promoting relationships in the Indo-Pacific?
I turn briefly to the role of and the treatment of women around the globe. This is an area in which our country has been proud to take a lead. The takeover of Afghanistan by the Taliban just two years ago stands as a clear example of how quickly hard-won victories can be lost. This was a country where the vast majority of women were getting education; they were taking roles in leadership in all sectors of society. What representations have His Majesty’s Government made to the authorities in Afghanistan to ensure that girls will again be able to get an education? This is a fundamental issue that we need to stand for.
Another important area is found at the intersection of our foreign policy and our domestic policy. One of the great successes of the UK is our universities and, in particular, the many overseas students who study at them. This is one of the main forms of soft power that we can exercise in the world, and we have been brilliantly successful at it in the past. A study as recently as 2017 found that 58 world leaders had been educated at British universities, compared with only 57 in America and 33 in France. Not only did these students bring in very welcome income, but it means that we sometimes recruit from their ranks as well some very bright people. Even more importantly, they will get a taste of what it is to live in a different sort of world.
Of course, the problem is that this sort of soft power does not cash out immediately in tangible ways, but it does further our values. For example, to go back to the point I made a few minutes ago on women’s rights, someone educated here will have a deep experience over several years of studying as equals with women. This is something we cannot simply argue; the experience will far outweigh any theory.
These are just some of the many aspects of our role in the world. There are many others that I have not been able to touch on. I am looking forward to hearing how those who are experts in our Committee can speak particularly on areas of defence and trade, in which I have very little experience. I hope this brief introduction will set the scene for others as we reflect on our place in today’s world.
The IR refresh also states:
“Today’s international system cannot simply be reduced to ‘democracy versus autocracy’, or divided into binary, Cold War-style blocs”.
It is certainly true that that is not the only thing going on in the world, but at the same time it is hard to deny that it is a—perhaps the—major feature of the current world scene. The newly revived strength of purpose of NATO and its east Asian partners on the one hand, and, on the other, the closer relationship among China, Russia, Iran and others is surely a clear organising principle at the moment, and it is foolish to think that the latter countries wish us well or to deny that we are engaged in some sort of global competition with them.
It is true that many states around the world are not in either of those camps, but in this world, the strength of purpose and attractiveness of the main players is crucial in determining how those other states play their hand. We have seen in the reactions to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine that many of those countries, even those with broadly free societies and those we regard as our friends, do not necessarily always wish to line up with us in condemning Russia if it affects their own direct interests.
There are many reasons for this, but one, I fear, is the current perception that many have of the United States. The US remains the most powerful single country in the world, and it is our closest friend and ally, but it is made less attractive as a society and as an ally by its uncertain leadership under its current President and by the apparent grip that hard-left values have on the Democratic Party and on some parts of US society. We know from comment in other countries round the world that this is weakening US soft power. To many, the US seems in decline, as do we, its western allies.
Where the US and its allies withdraw, we see others occupy the space, most obviously in the recent China-brokered rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Iran, in the gradual rehabilitation of Syria in the region and in the readiness of Turkey—an ally, at least on paper—to play with both sides in the Ukraine war. We must hope that the US finds it in itself, as so often in the past, to renew its strengths and return effectively to the world stage.
How can our country play its hand in this increasingly difficult world? I will suggest four ways from the many that one could list. First, we should not give in to those who say that we cannot have influence on our own—only as part of a bloc. Obviously, big countries are stronger and more powerful than smaller ones, but the same is not true of large groups of countries compared with smaller ones. The collective uncertainty of purpose shown by the EU in the early weeks of the Ukraine war and, more recently, with regard to China, suggests that the EU as a unit is, more often than not, less than the sum of its parts. Our ability to assess, decide and act quickly and show leadership is a huge advantage, as the early days of the Ukraine war showed.
Secondly, we must invest in our friends, new and old, through thick and thin, and build genuine partnerships and alliances through difficulties, avoiding a tendency we sometimes have to preachiness. Raising our own defence spending on hard power is a crucial part of building the credibility of these relationships. We have begun that with AUKUS and the incipient defence arrangements with Japan, and I hope that in due course the CPTPP will help us to strengthen all those relationships in Asia still further. We have newly strong partnerships with the countries of central and eastern Europe as a result of the Ukraine war, but we must also keep investing in others that matter, particularly the Gulf countries. I worry that some of our long-standing friends think we might be losing interest in them and beginning to look elsewhere.
Thirdly, one country that I am concerned that we do not influence as much as we should is the United States. Although the defence and security relationship is strong, the political relationship and the relationships between much of the bureaucracies are not as taut as they used to be. When I entered the Foreign Office 30 years ago it was a much stronger and closer relationship. I fear there is a view in Washington that the British effort, via the embassy and beyond, is not as dynamic or effective as it once was and not as well plugged into the Republican Party than it could be. Indeed, I have heard it said by well-placed commentators that not just Israel or Ireland but countries such as Poland or France are more effective on the Hill than the UK nowadays. I welcome the Minister’s thoughts on this.
Finally, we need a clear policy towards China. We had the Foreign Secretary’s speech at Mansion House last week. I did not see it as quite as accommodating as many commentators seemed to, and it certainly got across the multidimensionality of the relationship, but it still seemed to be trying to have it all ways and to overestimate our ability to persuade China on issues that are of importance to us. The four elements of our policy might be, “We talk to you, we seek to influence you if we can, but we don’t really trust you and we certainly want to make ourselves less dependent on you”. Overall in that relationship, the right place for us to be is tougher than the EU and closer to the US.
This is a difficult, dangerous and turbulent world. If we are to navigate it effectively, we must stick by our friends, raise our game and stand up to those who wish us harm. I am confident that this is the Government’s intention. If we can do this, I am sure that we will survive, prosper and succeed.
We heard the Armed Forces Minister, two weeks ago in the other place, discuss the UK’s role as a champion of the “rules-based international order”, even as his colleague the Home Secretary introduced the Illegal Migration Bill, with a covering letter blithely admitting that there is more than a 50% chance that its provisions are incompatible with our duties under the European Convention on Human Rights. Further, we see the Home Secretary attempting to dilute the strength of interim measures under the European Court of Human Rights in order that she realise her dream of seeing deportation flights to Rwanda, even as Ukraine relies upon those measures repeatedly in its fight against Russian aggression.
In these 13 years of Conservative government, we have seen our approach to China veer between David Cameron’s aspirations of a golden decade of Anglo-Chinese relationships, crowned by President Xi’s state visit to the UK, and the current Prime Minister’s warnings last November of a China characterised by increasing authoritarianism that poses
“a systemic challenge to our values and interests”.
A couple of weeks ago, the Foreign Secretary signalled yet another reset, saying that a hawkish approach to China
“would be a betrayal of our national interest”
and that
“no significant … problem ... can be solved without China”.
In attempting to discern some sort of golden thread of consistency in this reflexive approach to China, it is worth remembering that this is the very same Foreign Secretary who occupied the FCDO in the Truss Administration, who planned, before their swift collapse, to designate China as an “acute threat” to British security.
We face crippling economic inflation and the loosening of the bond that ties together a currency and its value. But we have seen the same in foreign policy: rhetorical inflation that stridently declares the emergence of the new global Britain while our capacity to decisively influence the world diminishes. We can see this all around us: those who have travelled hear from residents and diplomats, and from the leaderships of other countries which were our friends and allies—maybe they still are—that we are significantly diminished.
The diagnostic work in the refresh to the integrated review has much to commend it. It rightly states that
“the transition into a multipolar, fragmented and contested world has happened more quickly and definitively than anticipated”.
My personal fear is that the more we integrate artificial intelligence into our decision-making processes, the more this acceleration will increase. We are already trying to catch up on that when it is well beyond us; I am not entirely sure where it is going to take us. It is interesting that those who were largely responsible for the development of artificial intelligence are now abandoning it because it has become so terrifying.
What has our response to this darkening picture been? We have, by the Defence Secretary’s own admission, a military that is “hollowed out and underfunded”, with the additional £11 billion promised in the recent Budget returning us only to the level of spending, by percentage of GDP, that we saw a couple of years ago. Even this is a promise and an expectation; it is not guaranteed.
Our soft power and diplomatic strength will be critical if we are to emerge from this potentially era-defining period of conflict and tension with a renewed capacity to defend our values and interests. But on the issue of our aid and development budget, it is clear that this Prime Minister is a hostage to the isolationist and regressive wing on his Back Benches in the other place. Money spent on aid and development overseas, quite apart from the supervening moral imperatives involved, represents UK influence in pasteurised form. Not only have we seen the UK resile from its commitment to the 0.7% target, but we are seeing what might generously be characterised as a creative application of the money that we still spend.
According to the Independent Commission for Aid Impact, last year the Home Office spent a third of our foreign aid budget on refugee and asylum-seeker costs here in the United Kingdom. Further, it found that this appropriation of the ODA budget has had a very
“severely negative impact across the UK aid programme”.
In seeking to address this problem, we then saw the FCDO pause all non-essential aid spending, as a consequence of which we then missed our pledge deadline for our contribution to the Global Fund, damaging our credibility with our multilateral partners even further. ICAI also found that this pause caused a delay in our humanitarian response to the floods in Pakistan and the famine in Somalia, again fraying the bonds of trust that bind this nation and others throughout the world.
I wish I had the time to give more instances, but those I have outlined indicate a simple truth. These political choices and missteps are having a real-world impact on the UK’s reputation as a reliable partner overseas. I take no pleasure in offering these examples today, and it is true that we have reason to be proud of the swift and comprehensive assistance that we have offered Ukraine in its vital struggle against Russian aggression. But that assistance does not, by itself, constitute a coherent foreign policy. It is interesting the number of times that that is what Ministers want to talk about at the Dispatch Box in this House when issues of foreign policy are raised—but not the other issues, which are now apparently being displaced by this.
Statecraft is essentially temporal in nature; it is a sphere where the strategist is inevitably outmanoeuvred by the tactician. It may be that we succeed in our inhumane plan to send refugees to Rwanda by breaching our obligations under international law, but at what cost to our long-term credibility as a reliable partner? We may succeed in deepening our involvement in the Indo-Pacific region, but how can we expect this projection of power to be seen as anything but hollow, given the assessment of a US general that our military capabilities are not only no longer tier 1 but barely tier 2?
I have to say—and I am not alone in this internationally—that AUKUS has all the hallmarks of a pre-election announcement. I fear that the scale of the cost for Australia may guarantee that the Government there do not survive the next Australian election. I cannot get any Minister in our Government to engage with this issue with regard to assessing whether we should have put our name to it. We are told that that is a matter for the Australian Government, but I read the Australian press and I know what Australian politicians are saying, and the cost to them is extraordinary.
I realise that the tone of my contribution today may be somewhat pessimistic, but its central message is not, as the right reverend Prelate said. There is nothing inevitable about any of this—all these things are political choices—and what is made by politics can be unmade by the same means. We can choose to end our flirtation with transgressions of international law and regain our reputation for probity. We can choose to work with allies in the Euro-Atlantic space on a coherent, long-term approach to broader strategic challenges while restoring our aid budget to ensure that we once again play our full part in helping the most vulnerable. We must work out what our global role actually is in an increasingly multi-polar world where norms are now contested and fought over.
These long-term challenges will be addressed only by policy-making that is equally long-term in its nature. We are not prisoners of impersonal historical forces but have agency in shaping what the future will look like. In fact, the calamity of Brexit proves that in spades. It is time to develop a more positive vision and prove that we have both the strategic patience and the endurance to see it realised.
Now we come to the refreshed review. It is very different in tone; there is now no talk of global Britain. We discover that we have fulfilled the tilt to the Indo-Pacific and can concentrate, sensibly, on our near neighbourhood. Encouragingly, it says that we will reinvigorate our European relationships. Could the noble Lord spell out what this means? There is a depressing chart listing all sorts of bilateral arrangements, which looks laborious and cumbersome—a contrast to being at the table as of right.
We now hear that in relation to Ukraine and NATO:
“The enduring strength of the European family of nations, and of the UK’s ties within it, has been reaffirmed”.
The foreign policy priority in the short to medium term is the
“threat posed by Russia to European security”.
As we have heard, it also has a different approach to China. Could the Minister spell out the detail? I am sure the noble Lord, Lord Alton, will expect no less.
Again, there is an emphasis on science and technology. Now we are not exactly claiming to be a superpower but to have strategic advantage—but only if we specialise. What does this mean in terms of an industrial strategy and significant support? Where is the reference to the Horizon programme? The head of one of our leading scientific institutions told me recently that, before we left Horizon, he would get many inquiries every year from scientists whom he did not know across the EU about potential collaboration on projects. Now that has completely dried up. It is urgent that this is reinstated. Can the Minister update us? It was very concerning to hear of wobbles in the Cabinet on this.
The review rightly points to the stability and resilience of our economy as a precondition of our security. We have not yet seen trade agreements that deliver or look like they have the prospect of delivering trade at the level of that with our nearest neighbours. It points to London as a key financial centre; it is, but it is a wounded one. We should note that Arm listed in New York instead of London, with the co-founder pointing out the damage caused to London because of what he called “Brexit idiocy”.
What of the soft power of aid, the justice of which the right reverend Prelate spoke to and the influence to which the noble Lord, Lord Browne, pointed? There are no commitments for extra funding, even as we see the impact of conflict in Sudan and the impact of climate change. The Foreign Office and DfID had very different aims, each vital, and the forced marriage has not been a happy one, whatever gloss the Minister will have been given to say and which the review repeats. That is tacitly recognised in this document, which speaks of “reinvigorating” its position as a global leader on international development.
There is some attempt to give development more emphasis, with the Development Minister—and I pay tribute to Andrew Mitchell in this regard—attending Cabinet and a second Permanent Secretary in FCDO. I am not sure how that one is going to work. It is all a rather tacit administration that that merger was disastrous. Given that so much of the aid money went to support refugees in the United Kingdom, which is allowable under DAC rules for one year, surely now that the Afghans and Ukrainians who were benefitting have been here for more than a year, this should now have ended. Can the Minister clarify? What does that then release?
There are no new commitments here on tackling climate change. Meanwhile, President Biden is turning the US approach around. Acutely aware that in the new green technologies, China has a huge head start, he set in place the formidable Inflation Reduction Act. We should welcome this because of the huge investment in green technologies—that is globally important. But while the EU has immediately set in place its critical minerals Act and is engaging closely with the US and allowing countries to support their green industries—something that we were told could not happen—the Chancellor says that the United Kingdom is considering its position. If it considers its position much longer, we will not have a position to consider.
The UK’s automotive transformation fund is only £1 billion, dwarfed by the IRA. The refresh review speaks of “illegal migration” being one of the major challenges of our time, but climate change—and it rightly recognises this—is likely to exacerbate migration, which it does not then call illegal. That is why the development and climate change budgets are so critical. It speaks of climate change and biodiversity loss as
“important multipliers of other global threats”.
They are surely far more than that—they are existential threats.
There is a change between the once-in-a-generation review of 2021 and its refreshed version now. The Government’s feet are more firmly on the ground, setting aside aspirations for global Britain while ignoring our own continent. But with its emphasis on defence, about which my noble friend Lady Smith may say more, and the lack of resources in other areas, this review underestimates the significance of climate change and the need to use aid to ensure that others elsewhere also prosper, so that the seeds of conflict, as right now in Sudan, can be tackled, and populations do not see the need to uproot themselves and undergo great hardships to find a better life. So I suppose we should expect another refresh in a couple of years or so.
Will the Government be raising the Motion passed in the House of Commons on 22 April that declared events in Xinjiang against Uighur Muslims to be a genocide; or the UK prohibitions on the purchase of goods made in China by slave labour; or recent reports that Uighur Muslims were banned from offering Eid prayers at mosques or even in their homes during Eid ul Fitr, as well as the reported persecution of people with religious beliefs, including Buddhists and Christians in China and other Article 18 violations; or the continued imprisonment of Zhang Zhan for reporting on the origins of Covid in Wuhan? Will the Government be raising the forced organ harvesting, which the noble Baroness, Lady Northover, has raised in your Lordships’ House, along with Members from all sides, on a number of occasions; the persecution of Falun Gong; the crackdown on civil society, lawyers, bloggers and dissidents across China and the alarming threats to Taiwan whose almost 24 million people face increasing dangers and, indeed, an existential threat to their vibrant democracy and self-determination? Perhaps the Minister could also explain why Han Zheng is being welcomed at the Coronation at all instead of being sanctioned.
I also have questions about the recent visit to London of Hong Kong’s Secretary for Financial Services, Christopher Hui. Will the Minister tell us whether the three Government Ministers who met him raised with him the case of Jimmy Lai; the seizure by the Hong Kong Government of more than £2.2 billion of Hong Kong BNO pension savings, as reported by Hong Kong Watch, of which I am a patron; the destruction of Hong Kong’s freedoms and autonomy; the breach of the joint declaration; the genocide that I have referred to of the Uighurs; and the threats to Taiwan? If those three Government Ministers did not, why not? Perhaps that is not the sort of engagement that the Foreign Secretary had in mind. Given that the CCP regime consistently breaks its promises and obligations under international treaties, and as the CCP under Xi Jinping is so much a part of many of these problems, do we seriously—and rather naively—believe that red carpets, tea and golden era trade deals are the correct response to genocide and egregious violations of human rights?
Last week, as Vice-Chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Hong Kong, I spoke at the launch of the APPG’s report on the crackdown on media freedom in Hong Kong—which, on this World Press Freedom Day, I hope the Minister will refer to—and specifically the case of Jimmy Lai, the founder of Apple Daily. I also spent time with Jimmy Lai’s son, Sebastien. Jimmy Lai is a 75 year-old British citizen, and yet he has spent the past two and a half years in prison serving multiple trumped-up charges, facing the prospect of spending the rest of his life in jail. I know Jimmy and his wife and, in happier times, they were visitors here to your Lordships’ House. Later this year, Jimmy Lai’s trial under Hong Kong’s draconian national security law will begin. He has already been denied his choice of defence counsel, and it is likely that he will receive a severe prison sentence with little hope of a fair trial.
Please will the Minister look at the statements made by Mr Lai’s international legal team—led by Caoilfhionn Gallagher KC, who has herself received rape and death threats—and also raise with the parliamentary authorities the absurd and ridiculous decision to force attendees at last week’s press freedom event to hand over leaflets on press freedom in Hong Kong? Officials apparently said that “Political slogans and materials are on our list of restricted items”—I mistakenly thought that politics was the whole point of Parliament. But, beyond the absurd, Sebastien has specifically and repeatedly requested to meet the Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary. Like his father, Sebastien is a British national. Will the Minister explain why that request has so far gone unanswered? Can he establish whether the Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary will commit to meeting Sebastien at the earliest opportunity to discuss his father’s case and become more proactive and more public in speaking up for the rights of this British citizen in the future?
Margaret Satterthwaite, the UN special rapporteur on the independence of judges and lawyers, recently wrote to the Chinese Government stating that the draconian national security law has interfered with the rule of law in Hong Kong by undermining the independence of the judiciary and removing safeguards to protect fair trial. Will the Minister please provide the Government’s assessment of the current state of the rule of law in Hong Kong?
Turning briefly to North Korea, I declare an interest as co-chair of the all-party group. This year marks the 10th anniversary since the establishment of the UN commission of inquiry into crimes against humanity chaired by the Australian judge Justice Michael Kirby. What steps are the Government taking to follow up and implement the commission of inquiry’s recommendations, particularly its call, 10 years ago, for its findings of crimes against humanity to be referred to the International Criminal Court?
On Iran, which has been referred to, will the Minister explain why the Iranian national guard has not been proscribed as a terrorist organisation and say whether we can expect to see action on this soon? Can he tell us about the plight of Iranian journalists, especially women, who are still in prison and about the gender apartheid faced by Iran’s women and girls?
Finally, I have spoken repeatedly in the House about the short-sighted decision to cut BBC Persian radio services and attacked the decision to abolish the Arabic services. I welcomed what the right reverend Prelate said about this in introducing the debate. Yesterday, the BBC said that the crisis in Sudan had led it to open a new radio service in Arabic on shortwave—QED. It is essential that we continue to broadcast the values of democracy, human rights, the rule of law and an open society. Are the Government re-examining the funding models for the BBC World Service to ensure that vital language broadcasts to closed societies continue?
I hope that our values will always be at the very heart of our foreign policy as we face the challenges of a changing and increasingly divided and unstable world. If the Minister cannot respond to all my points in detail, I hope he will undertake to write to me on them. In closing, I again thank the right reverend Prelate for giving us the opportunity to raise these matters.
For example, I have been met with incredulity in Germany and elsewhere in Europe when we make statements about the importance of the rule of law, and our moral demand that countries such as Russia and China should stand by it, at the same time as we draft legislation that consciously seeks to breach it. Just remember the internal market Bill, the overseas operations Bill, the attempt to prorogue Parliament and so on. Our rhetoric has to be supported by our action, for the latter speaks louder than the former.
The 2021 integrated review was a good start in recalibrating our self-perceptions, and the 2023 refresh helpfully illustrated how a nation’s role can change quickly depending on the shifting and sometimes dramatic intervention of unexpected factors, unpredicted behaviours or uncontrollable contingencies. At least, it was an attempt to join up different areas of foreign policy to focus on perception, priorities and planning.
To return to Andrew Mitchell, partnership holds the key to future progress and prosperity, not hubris or romantically hanging on to what we think Britain used to be. One way of thinking about this is to look through the lens of those who look at us from the outside. A week or two ago Der Spiegel published a very unflattering piece about a number of aspects of decline in UK culture, referring, for example, to food banks, poverty, the cost of living crisis and neglected urban infrastructure. Read other newspapers and listen to serious political programmes in neighbouring countries: waving a flag does not change hard reality. We might not want to agree with the perceptions of outsiders, but we would be unwise not to take them seriously.
I want to be positive about a change in direction, signalled by Andrew Mitchell’s grown-up approach to partnership, which inevitably assumes what I call a renewed sense of confident humility. I read his speech before considering the conversation among Robert Kaplan, John Gray and Helen Thompson in a recent edition of the New Statesman, which took as its starting point the ideas behind Kaplan’s new book, The Tragic Mind. Indeed, any pragmatic search for policies that drive partnership and progress and dream of prosperity has to be set against the wider and deeper thinking about the existential challenges of great-power rivalry, resource scarcity and what they call the crumbling of the liberal rules-based order in a “global Weimar”. The assumptions underlying political rhetoric and the language in which this is framed must be honest about these challenges, not seduce people into thinking that domestic or foreign policy can inevitably be forged in a world of depleting resources and increasing military threat around finite resources.
Given my previous career as a linguist, it might not come as a total surprise that I want to conclude with this plea: if we are to take seriously the existential as well as pragmatic challenges we face as we seek to plough our furrow in a field that is becoming ever more rutted and poisoned, we must listen through the ears of those beyond our shores who might not think as we do in the UK. This means that we must prioritise the learning of the languages of others if we are to know how we are seen and therefore how we might behave or speak—even framing any future foreign policy in a way that can be accurately understood by those we oppose or with whom we might partner.
Language learning is impoverished in the UK. The assumption that everyone else speaks English is both arrogant and ignorant—a dreadful combination of non-virtues. Our children need to be educated in the confident humility of learning to look through the eyes of others. Only then, as the late German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt repeatedly emphasised, can we understand our own culture, by seeing how we are seen and hearing how we are heard. The Empire has gone, and imperial thinking is embarrassingly redundant —although I strongly commend Timothy Garton Ash’s recent piece in Foreign Affairs, “Postimperial Empire”. We will waste time, energy, money and resource if we in the UK do not learn quickly that learning the languages of others is a massive strength and not a sign of weakness.
The UK’s role in the world must be framed in terms of realism and what I have called a confident humility. It must be framed in the languages of others, and rooted in deeper thinking than mere pragmatism or flag-waving optimism.
The good news is that the African continental free-trade agreement is creating the largest free-trade area in the world by a number of countries, with a market size of over $3 trillion. Digitisation, improvements in infrastructure and political reform are driving the continent forward. Africa has grown more democratic in the past 30 years, with multi-party elections being commonplace. Opposition parties are gaining ground and most leaders are leaving office peacefully rather than in coups. We noticed that in Ghana. We saw President Mutharika in Malawi challenged by the court, as was Uhuru Kenyatta, and we saw how the rule of law made the opposition leader the new president. Politics is becoming more competitive because of the free press and an open society.
Look at the impact Africa has in other countries. Four out of the five most senior Cabinet Ministers here are of African descent or origin, including our Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, from Kenya; our excellent Foreign Secretary, James Cleverly, from Sierra Leone; Suella Braverman, from Kenya; and Kemi Badenoch, from Nigeria. You can see the impact Africa has in our country as well. This shows that Britain remains a force for good because of its strong institutions, and stands ready to help develop its fellow nations.
Your Lordships can see why I am in this debate: to encourage a reshaping of our foreign policy to take hold of the trade opportunities in Africa, to ensure prosperity for that continent and for the UK, and to help Africa to get out of poverty. The UK’s trading relationship with Africa is worth about £27 billion, with £18.5 billion in exports. Not long ago, our share of trade was 30%. Today, it stands at less than 4%. We have had a significant trade deficit for the past four decades which currently stands at over £100 billion a year. We have had a major problem with our trade balance for the last 40 or 50 years. We do not have enough exports to pay for our imports. We can see why China’s goods exports to Africa are eight times higher than ours, while we have dropped from being the biggest exporter to the continent to the 13th biggest. China has said to African Governments, “We are your IMF”.
Politicians and others often ask me why China is so successful in the region that I cover. The simple answer is that it is not their success but our failure. By engaging with African countries, we can ensure that they co-operate with us rather than with other, potentially hostile nations, such as China. The noble Lord, Lord Alton, spoke very well about human rights and China at the moment.
However, perhaps the biggest barrier that we have is perception. When I first came into Parliament, my interest was in SMEs, so I set up a Select Committee to see what could be done to help SMEs to increase their exports. I took evidence from a large number of businesses in the UK. Our perception of Africa was through a “Band Aid” lens. We saw it as a poor continent, begging for money, with tribalism, civil war, dictatorship and corruption. Now, we are dealing with a new Africa which is more progressive than ever it was. We must accept that, and that a young democracy takes time to shape its democracy into a good form such as ours.
We should see this as a glass that is half full. By bringing the departments of business and trade together, the Government are acknowledging the importance that trade brings to UK plc. However, this work must be in partnership with the FCDO, and we must ensure that we have the same approach across government. Co-operation between governmental departments will be key to the UK’s success on the world stage. I want to see the Government have the political will for more trade and investment with Africa. The UK is the second-largest investor in Africa. We will hear later from the noble Lord, Lord Howell, about our historic ties, particularly with the 18 Commonwealth countries in Africa, which are English-speaking and share a commonality of a judiciary and the rule of law. All that will help us. Africa will continue to develop through this century, with or without our support. We must be at the forefront of this development, with British firms playing a key role. Through increased trade levels with Africa, we can help to bring about the political and social reforms needed as a by-product, with increased prosperity and stability correlating with increased trade.
We need a fresh approach to Africa, which builds on the deep and historic links that we have with the continent and the affection that many Africans have for our country, and with large African diaspora living in the UK. We need a clear trade plan for each African country, working with our embassies and high commissions to identify the key sectors and opportunities available, including on visas. I will give a good recent example. Some four years ago, just before the pandemic, I invited the Mining Minister of Rwanda, Francis Gatare, and 80 UK companies to Parliament to see what opportunities were available. We came up with a French-to-English regulatory framework, and now there are four mining companies in Rwanda. I tried a similar exercise six weeks ago, inviting the Mining Minister and the President of the DRC. The DRC has $30 trillion of minerals. People flew from South Africa, two from Ireland and three from Scotland. On the day that we all got together, the Minister and the president did not get visas and it had been known for six weeks. I am hosting the president on Friday, and I will be embarrassed and ashamed.
We need to sort out our visa problems. Africans with passports, Ministers, could not get visas to come here, and people knew about this six weeks earlier. It is no wonder that the Chinese are there and we are not. We need to open our African market and speed up trade agreements. Currently, we have only eight trade agreements with African countries in place.
I conclude very briefly, because time is against me. Africa is not a continent of problems but one of solutions. One thing is for sure: Africa will shape the world’s prospects. Post Brexit, the future should be Africa.
“the most significant geopolitical factor in the world today”
and in identifying Russia as
“the most acute direct threat”
to UK security.
The risks facing us in the UK have increased substantially since the integrated review in 2021, as Ukraine has so vividly demonstrated. In addition, there could be a further major shock to the global system should an isolationist new US president emerge in 2024 and decide, for example, to withdraw from NATO and cease support for Ukraine. We need to be prepared for all these eventualities.
Of course, as others have mentioned, there is still a huge agenda in the areas of tackling gender inequality, seeking to protect human rights and further reducing global poverty, including unacceptable levels of child poverty.
As many commentators have pointed out, the West is losing significant ground to China, in particular, but also to Russia when it comes to the alignment of what is called the global South. Indeed, together, they often seem to be locked in an epic struggle against the West to redesign the whole world order.
In a recent UN Ukraine votes, 141 countries supported Ukraine and the West’s position, only six countries voted with Russia, but 32 countries abstained, including China, India, South Africa, Pakistan and Bangladesh, representing well over 50% of the world’s population across much of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. China’s approach to the global South should give us in the UK real food for thought. China has for decades been developing relationships across the global South with individual states as “equal partners”. China offers very long-term and attractive state-to-state partnerships on major infrastructure and agricultural projects, together with massive—and usually non-conditional—financing, including delivery teams on the ground.
Russia has been actively developing state-to-state energy partnerships with many individual countries across the global South, focusing not just on fossil fuels but on seeking to build 50 to 100-year partnerships in the area of new nuclear. Both China and Russia offer long-running education exchange programmes and large-scale support for international students. There are also arms sales and, in many cases, direct military support, including Russian private military contractors. Both China and Russia make no challenge on corruption or governance issues. Critically, both China and Russia have been effective in engaging with many global South states with a history of western colonialisation, leveraging their history and present relationships with their former colonial powers. It is a heady and potent cocktail.
Given all that, what can the UK do to increase our ability to influence international partners and to shape global and regional responses to these critical issues? I think there is a lot that we can do. The relatively easy bit should be rebuilding the UK’s comparative strengths, which have been so eroded in recent times. We need to significantly strengthen our trading security and political relationships with Europe and also try to secure much lower-traction trade with Europe. We need to reinvest in BBC and British Council international operations, and we absolutely need to restore international aid expenditure to 0.7% of GNI.
As acknowledged in the Integrated Review Refresh this year, our overriding defence priority must be the security of the Euro-Atlantic region. We need the dedicated resources and the capability to do that for the role that is set out. What assurances can the Minister offer on this point?
On the wider security front, we should work with NATO and EU partners to take action now to reduce significantly the risk of further Russian aggression against the Baltic states, Moldova and Belarus. This should involve significantly more military force on the ground in the Baltic states, together with a step change in terms of provision of equipment, training and joint exercises. Next, we should significantly strengthen our partnerships, in particular with China’s neighbours, in both trade and security. In parallel, we should seek creative opportunities to work bilaterally with China on specific issues of potential joint interest, including net zero and decarbonisation.
Finally, the UK should seek to develop new strategic long-term partnerships with European, US, and regional friends and players in each region to develop much more competitive long-term offerings to states in the global South. We should be seeking to weaken the competitive position of both China and Russia in the global South. In developing these offerings, we should be mobilising our private sector, universities, and scientific, research and technology communities, among other things.
I conclude by saying, having listened very carefully to today’s debate, that we have a very proud heritage as an international player, but we need, as others have said, to repair our tarnished reputation, built up by so many people of all political persuasions over so many years, as a serious and stable player on the world stage, committed, of course, to democratic values and human rights but also to international co-operation and peace resolution. Not everyone will agree, but it is my view that the shenanigans of Brexit, the extraordinary domestic political turmoil that followed and the sight of having three Prime Ministers over a three-month period was not a good optic for our country. We need to act strategically and collaboratively to re-establish trust, credibility and clout on the world stage. I endorse many of the sentiments expressed by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leeds in his excellent speech. Without re-establishing that trust, credibility and clout, we are at risk of being seen as an empty vessel on the world stage. I, for one, would hate that.