That this House takes note of the Report from the International Relations Committee UK foreign policyin a shifting world order (5th Report, HL Paper 250).
My Lords, I declare my interests as set out in the register, in particular the fact that I am an adviser to two major Japanese companies.
The scope of the report before your Lordships is ambitious, but as we see the world being reshaped around us before our eyes, with a cascade of new consequences for Britain’s role, security and interests, your committee felt that ambition was justified. I want to thank members of the committee for their endless expertise, experience, patience and work in putting together this report, and I also thank our brilliant clerks and clerk assistants who also worked extremely effectively to bring our thoughts together.
In the digital age, entirely new issues have emerged for us to address, aside from whether Brexit goes ahead or does not, or whatever happens on that vexed front. Global power has plainly shifted and been redistributed worldwide, and continues to be so, demanding some deep rethinking about our national strategy and the methods by which we implement it. Major developments in artificial intelligence, blockchain technology, quantum computing and many other areas could shift the balance still further.
In one report, although we took quite a long time over it, we plainly cannot reach all the answers, but your committee felt it important to seek to understand better the roots of all these enormous changes and at least to suggest some of the ways we should be heading to preserve and enhance our security, influence and prosperity in utterly changed world conditions.
Our search obviously starts with changes in the world’s two largest powers, America and China, and our altered relations with them in the digital age. In the US, we have a president who tweets every morning and favours policies very different from those of the past. Pax Americana is clearly in abeyance, but whether just for now or permanently is something on which our many witnesses had views and disagreed. Our report inclines to the view that the abeyance is part of a permanent shift, while the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and those advising it hopefully argue otherwise. Clearly, our American allies themselves are conscious that their own primacy, their unipolar moment, is now ended, as our evidence and a visit to Washington confirmed. This was quite a strong view. This is now an America with whom we certainly want to be a partner, but not in any way subordinate. Then we have China, whose economy has grown by 10 times since 1990, lifted by new technology and successive waves of globalisation to the forefront of world affairs.
These developments are shaking to the core the assumptions on which our foreign policy has been predicated for the last 70 years and the assumptions on which the rules-based order in the conduct of international relations and affairs has been based. Neither giant country has accepted things as they were. For example, all the key multilateral institutions of the previous century are now looked at critically by the White House. I am told that the President asks his team every morning why the USA is still a member of the World Trade Organization and still in NATO.
My Lords, I am delighted to follow the noble Lord, Lord Howell, and to be able to thank him for his three years of service to the International Relations Committee. Clearly, as he has indicated, there will be further opportunities to thank him for his chairmanship.
The International Relations Committee of your Lordships’ House is a new committee which we have had for the last three years. Its first meeting was in May 2016; at that point, the assumption was that it would be a committee alongside the EU Select Committee and all its sub-committees—that we would do the international while the EU Committee was doing the European. After our first meeting, we had the now-fateful referendum. We have spent the last three years in the shadow of Brexit, something that the Prime Minister this afternoon referred to as a having a “corrosive impact” on politics.
The noble Lord, Lord Howell, and the usual channels have ensured that we have a prime slot for debating this important report. It seems at present that almost every slot is available because there is no legislative business of any substance—or so I thought when I was preparing my remarks, but then of course the debate on Kew went on for several hours. So we can clearly legislate despite the shadow of Brexit, but Brexit has overshadowed much of what we have been doing for the last three years.
The decision to have an inquiry into the UK’s role in the world was taken in the knowledge that we had voted to leave the European Union, but the committee was very clear that the report and inquiry were needed regardless of whether the UK leaves the European Union. As the noble Lord, Lord Howell, made very clear, it is timely in the sense of a changing world order. The threats of the world have changed fundamentally in the 25 years since the end of the Cold War. They have changed far more since the end of the Second World War, yet at no point has the United Kingdom sat back and asked, “How do we see our place in the world?” France did so in the immediate aftermath of World War II, and understood that it was a middle-ranking power albeit one with global aspirations. The United Kingdom has continued to aspire to being a global power, and occasionally thinks it can go global on its own.
My Lords, as the noble Baroness, Lady Smith of Newnham, has said, this report is the culmination of the first three years of existence of the International Relations Committee. Noble Lords must remember that we had to fight for years to remedy the absurd situation where the House of Lords, with all the wealth of experience within its Membership, had no foreign affairs committee. I can only hope that the committee’s work over the last three years will ensure that its future amounts to long life and permanency.
The success of these first three years of work is largely due to the leadership of my noble friend Lord Howell. Now that both of us are to be rotated off the committee, as he said, I want to say a few words that, no doubt, will embarrass him. We have benefited from his unique experience, his ardent enthusiasm for the Commonwealth, his endless patience and his clear vision of world affairs. He has led us to produce a series of reports, all of which, when debated on the Floor here, have been warmly welcomed by your Lordships.
This is not, of course, the first time that I have had the pleasure of sitting under the chairmanship of my noble friend Lord Howell. I was a member of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee in the House of Commons for 10 years, all of which fell under his chairmanship. As far as I am concerned, it has been a wonderful experience and I want to thank him for his contribution to all this work.
This report is based on what we have called a “shifting world order”. I want to refer to only one aspect of that: our relationship with the United States. No doubt many colleagues will recall my long-term enthusiasm for that relationship, because for 14 years I ran, as secretary, the British-American Parliamentary Group, which was founded during the Second World War by Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt. As the report says, our shifting relationship with the United States began years before the arrival of Donald Trump.
My Lords, last month, I learned what was for me a new concept when for the first time scientists managed to photograph the rim of a black hole. The astrophysicists called it an “event horizon”—an interesting term.
Thinking about today’s hugely timely debate, it occurred to me that that is exactly what the UK is living through in terms of its foreign policy and its place in the world. However, the metaphor is not exact because I gather that what lies inside the black hole is quite unknowable. By contrast, and partly thanks to this fine report from your Lordships’ International Relations Committee, we have a good idea of what might lie beyond the rim of Brexit if only we can reach and cross this accursed event horizon in reasonable order.
In his memoir Memory Hold-the-Door, John Buchan, statesman and incomparable spy novelist, wrote that:
“in the cycle to which we belong we can see only a fraction of the curve”.
It is a line I know the noble Lord, Lord Howell of Guildford, also likes to quote. The curve described in his committee’s report is jagged and alarming in so many ways.
In big-picture terms, what shines through for me is that the great prize in future could be, would be and should be to draw China more and more into the international rules-based system, not least its humanitarian elements. It is also plain that the same prize is probably beyond the West’s reach in terms of doing the same for Russia. The thrill of being a disruptor state with a talent for a wide spectrum of hybrid aggression appears to have an addictive quality for the current management in Moscow, as they continue to assuage the hurt of losing the first Cold War. As for the West itself, the International Relations Committee rightly and strongly stresses that:
“The UK should continue to resist US challenges to the multilateral system, and seek to strengthen key institutions particularly the United Nations, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, the Bretton Woods institutions and the World Trade Organisation”.
My Lords, I am delighted to follow the noble Lord, Lord Hennessy. He has yet again made an extremely informative and educational contribution to one of our debates. I join other noble Lords in congratulating my noble friend Lord Howell and his committee on an absolutely excellent report. I just looked at the list of witnesses, which seems to go on for page after page. I am amazed by the scope of the witnesses called and the work that must have gone into it. I recall that when I used to represent the United Kingdom in the Council of Ministers of the European Union, in the various hats I wore at different times, I pretty quickly and clearly picked up that among the inner workings of the European Union there was the greatest respect for House of Lords reports. Ministers said that they were some of the best reports they ever saw and this report is in that tradition.
I was interested in the report’s title, UK Foreign Policy in a Shifting World Order. “Shifting world order” is the understatement of the year. I thought back to my time in government, when we faced challenges. Obviously there was Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait, which more or less coincided with the collapse of the Soviet Union. The world was able to adjust to the end of an enormous Russian empire that had started to build up at the time of Agincourt and had collapsed effectively over about three months in a tolerably peaceful way. The rules-based order seemed to exist in our relationship then. I had the pleasure of dealing with Mr Dick Cheney, who is now called “Mr Vice” but was an extremely distinguished Defense Secretary. He went on to other things. At that time our relationship with the United States was an absolute model. We co-operated with 36 other countries under full United Nations resolutions to deal with the problem of Saddam’s illegal occupation of Kuwait.
We are now in an entirely different world, since the development of al-Qaeda and the invasion, adventures and awful experiences of Afghanistan. Since I made my maiden speech on our involvement in Afghanistan in 2001, I have an absolute record of how long we have been there, which is now 18 years. I look also at the situation in Iraq following the invasion in 2003, where every day still in Baghdad, IEDs and bombs are going off, people are being killed and there is misery and confusion. We are, to a certain extent, still involved in these areas.
My Lords, as a member of the International Relations Committee I was privileged to be part of this ambitious inquiry. I pay tribute to the excellent support we had from our clerks and policy analyst. In view of the time limit, I will pass on the opportunity to comment on China, Russia, cybersecurity or the US, and will use my time to draw attention only to the two recommendations tucked away in paragraphs 354 and 355, on the importance of foreign language skills. The noble Lord, Lord Howell, referred to this issue in his opening speech and it was part of our thinking on whether the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and Whitehall generally, has the skills to make it fit for purpose to shape and conduct foreign policy in the shifting world order that we described. I should declare my interests as co-chair of the All-Party Group on Modern Languages and a vice-president of the Chartered Institute of Linguists.
One of the committee’ss overarching conclusions was that:
“To maintain its influence and leadership on global issues, the UK needs a more agile, creative and entrepreneurial approach to foreign policy”.
Language skills are a perfect example of what fits that definition of agile, creative and entrepreneurial. Many recent reports from the British Academy, the British Council, the all-party group and others have stated, with increasing urgency, that in a post-Brexit world the UK will need foreign languages more than ever. But what we have is a languages crisis which risks the UK being unable to fulfil its public policy needs, notably in defence, security and diplomacy. Our committee concluded that language skills are essential for the effective conduct of diplomacy and export growth.
On the positive side, the Foreign Office language school and the Defence Centre for Languages and Culture are, to quote the British Academy’s report,
My Lords, I join in the commendation of the noble Lord, Lord Howell, for setting the IRC on the map so that it will now be a permanent feature of your Lordships’ House. I also commend him on his speech today and his general commitment during his time as a Minister. He set as the aim of the report to give a basis for general debate. The committee has certainly succeeded in that and I hope that the noble Baroness, Lady Smith of Newnham, and others might consider this report and his speech as a set piece for students of international relations, as there were so many wonderful insights.
Not surprisingly, the report follows the path of most parliamentary Select Committee reports by recommending more resources for the subject studied. We are told that the FCO accounts for only 3% of government funding for international work, but in concluding that we need a more agile, active and flexible diplomacy the committee does not examine the case for greater co-ordination and the sharing of resources between the FCO, DfID, the MoD and the Department for International Trade. The emphasis on cyber was possibly a little excessive and may have unbalanced the report. However, the starting point is surely the advice of the Oracle at Delphi: “Know yourself”. What strengths do we as a country bring to a rapidly evolving context? Is the national consensus on foreign policy likely to change, particularly with a more ethnically diverse UK? How do we reconcile our status as a medium-sized European power with our global interests and ambitions? Some, like the children of Israel in the desert, will certainly yearn for the certainties of the Cold War period.
A key question, not properly touched on in the report, is: will Brexit, if it happens, lead to an enhancement or a diminution of UK interests and clout overseas? This question was raised somewhat polemically by Sir Simon Fraser in the Evening Standard on 7 May. The report says that seeking a continued close relationship with the EU is vital. The Foreign Secretary told the committee that he did not want the diplomatic alliance with EU countries to change as a result of Brexit, but this is surely wishful thinking in the extreme. As we saw in last week’s debate on the CSDP, we will become a rule-taker and not be in the driving seat. There have been a number of straws in the wind. Cyprus has turned from the UK to France to update its naval base. We no longer have a British judge on the ICJ. The UN General Assembly has voted against us on the Chagos Islands. Inevitably, over time, as we become a country outside the EU, we will lose a degree of our clout and be disadvantaged. Contrary to the committee, I see no substantial evidence that India wishes to build an enhanced security relationship with us and, pace the noble Lord, Lord Howell, it is showing a very detached commitment to the Commonwealth as a whole.
My Lords, I draw the attention of the House to my entry in the Register of Lords’ Interests. I work for a number of companies, but I particularly draw attention to my chairmanship of the British-Iranian Chamber of Commerce and the fact that I am also the Government’s trade envoy to Iran. I join in the general congratulations to my noble friend Lord Howell, who has done a tremendous service to the House in presiding over this new committee for the first three years of its existence and producing this extraordinary, outstanding report. It is remarkable in covering a huge number of different issues but having crisp and novel recommendations on almost every area. I will concentrate on one, which has already been touched on by various noble Lords: the unilateralism that is now appearing in American policy and the difference between our own attitude and that of the US to the issues on which we disagree.
I agree with everything that my noble friend Lord Jopling and the noble Lord, Lord Anderson, said about the United States. However, it is right that when we have differences, even with our oldest ally, we should have the courage to express them openly. What is the value of a long-standing, deep friendship if we cannot speak frankly to each other and be open when we disagree? The report emphasises the need for a rules-based system. It is important to have one, but it is also important that foreign policy is not just institutionalised. Often today, particularly in the US, the foreign policy establishment indulges in lazy thinking, carrying forward the thinking of the Cold War, too often posing a completely false dichotomy between deterrence and dialogue. Deterrence and dialogue are means to an end; they are not ends in themselves and we need both of them.
Intelligence services can tell us what is happening; they are often good at that. But are they so good at telling us why it is happening, or is there a problem of interpretation? Why are different countries acting in different ways? Actions that we intend as defensive may be seen by others as aggressive. Many people feel that we have mishandled our relationship with Russia somewhere along the line. I had a lot to do with Russia in the period from 1991 to 1992 and vividly remember the optimism, the feeling that Russia was about to become a normal country. What happened? We have a narrative that circles around Ukraine, Georgia, Salisbury and cyberattacks on Estonia. Russia also has a narrative: it has been responding defensively to threats about Georgia and Ukraine becoming members of NATO, as President Putin warned at the Bucharest summit, and to the alleged broken promise not to enlarge NATO at all. This is, of course, disputed by people but Mr Gorbachev and President Yeltsin both warned that the expansion of NATO could have very bad consequences for the relationship with Russia. Again, we need a combination of deterrence and dialogue.
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This changed approach is deadly serious for us here. It means that the areas where our interests diverge from America’s are multiplying. Unlike America, we do not see high-tech China as the number one enemy, although we obviously have to be cautious; and I agree that when Beijing starts banning “Game of Thrones”, things are clearly getting pretty tense. Nor do we see the nuclear deal with Iran as something to be pushed aside, as Washington has pushed it aside. We do not see protectionism and trade wars as benefiting anybody, and the implications for us of shifting Washington views about arms control and nuclear risk, where we are in the direct line of fire, could be enormous.
Perhaps on Russia our views are closer to America’s. Here we have Russia, a declining but aggressive nation, still empowered by all kinds of new and disrupting technology, returning as an old foe, although in a quite different guise from the ideological form back in the Cold War. Anyway, thanks to digital technology, we are living in a totally transformed era in which Cold War polarities and analogies just do not apply. The threats now come in a quite new and diverse form.
As for China, its influence is now reaching into our lives and our key national interests daily. For evidence of that, although this has blown up since our report was written, one need look no further than to the ongoing furore about Huawei’s involvement in our communications and digital technology, which affects every part of our economy and reaches into the centre of our foreign policy priorities. The impact of this issue on our relations with China and America is sharp and immediate and is a classic example of the major international consequences spawned by the digital age. Apart from that, Chinese technology and investment is already all around us in the United Kingdom. It is taking the lead in our civil nuclear power renaissance, it has invested in our utilities—not to mention our football clubs—and I even read the other day that a Chinese railway company could be the sole bidder for operating our east coast main line train service, as well bidding for Southeastern and for a role in HS2.
Meanwhile, the belt and road initiative, on which we heard a good deal of evidence—the so-called new silk road in several forms by land and sea—winds through the south Pacific, central Asia, central Europe and is now, I learn, even seeking to reach our country and our historic silk town of Macclesfield, although I am not sure that the people of Macclesfield are very enthusiastic about that.
The digital age challenge is not just from China. The whole of Asia is on the march. Asia now has giant cities with infrastructure and high-speed transport unmatched in the West. Asian middle-class consumption is estimated to grow by $30 trillion between now and 2030, compared with $1 trillion—I was going to say “a mere trillion”—in the West. Asia also has the biggest armies, after the US, and is developing new weapons technology based on the microchip, whether it is underwater drones, hypersonic, unstoppable missiles or deeply disruptive cyber capacities. In consequence, the Indo-Pacific region is not only becoming the key world economic zone but also a key global security zone for all of us.
In our report, we tried to ask what all this means for our national policy direction today, our position in this changed world and how we secure and build on it. It concludes that to operate effectively in this new environment we have to combine our military hard power, our technology and our considerable soft power with a new dexterity and agility. We learned in our inquiry that the UK has strong cybercapabilities, but these will be needed to the full as a central part of our defence architecture in the digital age.
Our soft-power kinds of influence and attraction are immense, as in fact a pioneering Lords report on soft power pointed out only four years ago, although that power is not immune from clumsy visa rules and migration policies. However, when it comes to soft power, it is not just a matter of strong support for the British Council, the BBC World Service and plenty of scholarships, vital and highly desirable though all those things are; support is also needed for all the creative industries, as well as for our superb universities, our professional and training skills, and much else besides. In all these things we must invest and invest. On top of using our soft power more adroitly, we have to work harder than ever to uphold the rules-based order, which is under assault from many forces.
We now live in a world of networks, some of which have their own agendas, and we need to be fully engaged with them. Some are new, such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, which brings together all the Asian countries in the world’s largest trading bloc by far, the African Union and the Pacific Alliance. Indeed, it has been suggested, and endorsed by the Prime Minister, that we should go further and seek full membership of the Trans-Pacific Partnership. We had a welcome on that from the Japanese Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe, as well.
Some of the groupings underpinning the rules-based order and the pattern of international law are of course the familiar ones of the 20th century, such as the Bretton Woods institutions—the IMF and the World Bank—NATO and the UN, all of which need adapting and reinforcing in the digital era, and to all of which we must contribute innovative new thinking. This, we decided in our committee, is vital if they are to hold together and if the international law which underpins them, and which is the collective world expression of peaceful values and human rights, is to be respected.
One such network, of which we are fortunate to be a member but have neglected for decades, is the Commonwealth. Connectivity and the communications explosion have transformed this nexus of 2.4 billion people with common ties of language, law and values, and have brought it into a third age, far removed from the original 1949 grouping of 70 years ago. I think that then it was just eight countries; now, it is 53. We point out in our report that the modern Commonwealth network also provides a powerful transmission mechanism for our soft power and helps give both a direction and a purpose for our nation at a time when, as we know, both those things are badly needed.
Our approach to the largest Commonwealth member by far—the fast-rising India—needs overhauling. India now has a larger economy than that of the UK and it is the key to the Asian security balance with China. Nor should we overlook the way that IT and the web are transforming other middle-range developing nations, often seen as poor and struggling, into online miracles of growth, development and supply-chain integration—for instance, Bangladesh or, moving to Africa, Kenya and other African societies. A new Africa south of the Sahara is being born and many of its participants are of course Commonwealth family nations.
We conclude that our policy and diplomatic machinery will need a much stronger focus on Asia, Africa and Latin America, however things turn out here in Europe or in the Atlantic alliance. However green we make life here, it is primarily in Asia and the United States that our climate fate will be decided. Whatever we conclude about trade in the European region, it is in Asia—east and central—that the big trade growth, physical and increasingly in digital and data form, will take place in the next two or three decades.
Meanwhile, we also point out that Europe itself is changing, with populist pressures on all sides, fuelled to a large extent by, once again, the tide of electronic information, mass social media access and unparalleled transparency, and by a consequent huge rise in public expectations that Governments are not fulfilling and, in any case, probably cannot fulfil. Whatever our eventual status vis-à-vis the European Union, we will still require new administrative skills in dealing with this shifting European pattern. There will have to be many more bilateral security and defence links, more immersion in local cultures, more language skills and of course many more skills for running our own trade policy.
The report reminds us that we cannot be blind to the numerous threats to our own democracy that the communications flood poses. Fake news and false alarms are obviously part of the story, but so are narrower forms of nationalism—as opposed to normal patriotism and love of country, which of course are quite acceptable—as well as all forms of highly organised crime and international terrorism. Add to that mix the swollen migrant flows, themselves partly triggered by information access on a scale never before available, and we have the makings of the surging protest against and massive loss of trust in all governing hierarchies—the EU very much included—which fill the scene today and which we read about every day in the papers.
None of that is good for democracy. Democracy today is threatened by algorithmic manipulation and the new weapons of foreign meddling. There is also confusion with majoritarianism, which leads, as we know from history, to new levels of intolerance of minorities and false interpretation of concepts such as “the will of the people”. As Madeleine Albright observed to the committee when we met her, when almost everyone has their own echo chamber, anarchic culture, followed by much worse reaction, cannot be far away.
Finally, we conclude that government machinery is not well attuned to meet these new conditions and dangers. Our FCO, which should co-ordinate the country’s whole international interface and spearhead and safeguard our interests, is plainly underresourced. Every witness confirmed that. Nor are we convinced that the main international departments—DfID, the MoD, the Department for International Trade, BEIS and the FCO—work closely enough together. We found it alarming to see how DfID, with its very extensive budget, still seems to pursue agendas poorly co-ordinated with our foreign and security policy objectives.
It may be that the weak binding link here is the National Security Council. We find its workings much too obscure. We note that the work and activities of the National Security Council in the US are publicly shared and discussed on the media, helping to give a confused country some sense of direction. We could do with some of that here to give reassurance about the coherence—indeed, the existence—of a national strategy. In the digital age this becomes more important than ever and much more difficult to pull together.
Speaking from my own point of view, this report is my swansong as chairman of the International Relations Committee, being duly rotated, and I feel immensely privileged to have helped at its birth and over its first three years. Actually, it is not quite my swansong because the committee has one more big report for debate—on the growing nuclear risk—before the July changeover, and we will also publish two or three shorter ones. I hope the committee is felt to have been useful. I believe it is in this area of wider world turmoil and adjusting to new challenges that the future contribution of your Lordships’ committee system can be strongest.
John Maynard Keynes once said that his quarrel was not so much with those who disagreed with his economics as with those who refused to see the significance of what was actually happening in the world around them. It is hard not to feel the same today. If this report lifts even a corner of the curtain on how we adapt to an entirely new cycle in the history of international affairs and in our own national fortunes, then it will have done its bit. I beg to move.
The part of our report that I wish to address is the part that considers alliances. It will perhaps not surprise Members of your Lordships’ House that I want to focus in particular on the ongoing relationships that the United Kingdom must inevitably have with the European Union on a bilateral basis. We talk about that in the report. By way of caveat, I point out of course that, as a Liberal Democrat, my party has consistently said that we should not be leaving the European Union. Therefore, my remarks need to be understood in the context that bilateral relations matter whether we are inside or outside the European Union.
For the last 45 years, the UK’s bilateral relations with our European partners have developed and become embedded within the European Union. Our relations at the level of Parliament, political parties, Ministers and officials have all been strengthened through bilateral relations that have become semi-automatic because we are part of the European Union. Those relations happen in a much more organic way than they do within the United Nations, OSCE or even NATO.
All those relationships matter, and the Government’s response to our report made it very clear that they envisage that we will continue to have those relationships once we leave the European Union. However, what will be lacking if the United Kingdom leaves the European Union is that daily interaction—the fact that Ministers and civil servants are talking on a regular basis with their opposite numbers. About a quarter of a century ago, Tony Blair talked about the new bilateralism and wanting to strengthen the United Kingdom’s relations with the European Union. This was in 1997 or 1998, so not quite a quarter of a century ago. He envisaged it as being about strengthening relations between fellow Labour, or socialist, parliamentarians, Ministers and officials.
Clearly, the International Relations Committee would not necessarily be recommending the strengthening of relations between the Conservative Government and socialist parties in Europe, but those relations that have become organic do matter. Relations can and must continue. This is not just something that the Labour Party understood in the late 1990s and the early part of this century. It is something that opposite numbers understand in other countries; for example, the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung, the foundation linked to the German CDU, with which I spent the weekend just gone, understands that and is keen to keep relations going with the United Kingdom.
Your Lordships’ International Relations Committee is not alone in understanding the importance of the bilateral. Just this afternoon, I, like other Members of your Lordships’ House, received an email from Daniel Kawczynski about the APPG for Poland. I do not normally pray Mr Kawczynski in aid—our politics do not normally coincide—but he pointed out the importance of Anglo-Polish relations in the context of Brexit. As a key NATO ally and in a position of influence within the European Union, Poland will become a more important ally for the United Kingdom than she is now and it is imperative that a strong working relationship between our two nations is maintained. That is true not only of Poland but of Germany, France and other like-minded countries which have been key allies within the European Union.
The Government’s response to our report indicates that they see the importance of such relations. They have talked about strengthening the bilateral embassies, but can the Minister go further? Can he commit the Government to an understanding of the importance of bilateral relations, not just in the context of embassy-to-embassy discourse, but of party-to-party, Parliament-to-Parliament and Minister-to-Minister discourse too. While those relationships have mattered within the European Union, they will matter even more if the UK leaves the European Union when we will rely on our partners within Europe for the ongoing security relationship which the Prime Minister and the Government have made so clear they wish to continue in the context of Brexit.
I hesitate to refer back to my own speeches, but I will. I remember that, after visiting Washington with the Foreign Affairs, Defence and Development Policy Sub-Committee of the European Union Committee, I came back just before the Iraq war. I bemoaned the American approach which I described then as them saying, “We are going to do this. If you want to come with us, very well. We welcome that. If you don’t, get out of our way”. Of course, the election of Donald Trump has continued that regrettable shift away from multilateralism.
But much as we may deplore the new approach to issues such as climate change, the Iran nuclear deal or the threat of serious trade wars, not everything from the new Administration has been to our disadvantage. In particular, I have very much welcomed the President’s remarks to try to buck up the complacency of many of our European fellow members of the NATO alliance. I see a good deal of that complacency as a member of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly.
We should never forget that the United States remains a close and continuing ally. We still have considerable influence with them, which we must preserve and develop. I strongly support the response of the Government to the committee’s report, where they say:
“We will work with the US whenever possible but will continue to seek outcomes that reflect UK values and interests even where there are points of difference, as with the Iranian nuclear agreement”.
I believe that sums up very accurately what our approach should be. Surely this must be the right approach, in spite of our reservations about the Trump Administration’s unpredictability.
I particularly deplore the approach of those who see fit to hurl insults at the President when he comes to London in the next few weeks. It is mindless idiocy to threaten to disrupt the visit of the Queen’s guest when he comes here next month. I do not know if we shall have the opportunity to listen to him speak here, but I find it astonishing that people are attempting to prevent him coming to this building, this ancient bastion of free speech and generosity to visitors. Surely our vital, ongoing need is to continue a warm but objective relationship with our US friends. That must not be soured by boorish and mindless exhibitionism.
The other tocsin which rings out from this report is the rapidity of technological advances that can swiftly overturn familiar nostrums of statecraft and place ever more the means of asymmetric conflict into ever smaller numbers of hands—sometimes even a single pair of hands. These kinds of developments will not slow down and wait for us to catch up with them once Brexit has at last ceased to siphon off the bulk of our energies. What we need to do is make a virtue of the uncertainty that the Brexit event horizon is bringing us and build on this excellent report by persuading Whitehall to take a fundamental look at our place in the world and the resources we deploy on its sustenance.
A few weeks ago, I fell into conversation about Brexit with a very old friend in the other place, Frank Field MP. “Everybody keeps saying this is the worst event since Suez,” Frank said. “We need to see how parts of the British constitution did or did not work.” It was an intriguing thought about a stretching task, which is not one susceptible to an investigatory instrument such as Franks on the Falklands or Chilcot on Iraq. That is probably a theme for another day, but Frank Field’s idea stimulated me to take a look at the scattering of post-Suez views that Whitehall undertook. They were all secret, by the way, and there was no Select Committee inquiry into Suez.
I counted a quartet of quite substantial internal reviews: a politico-military one for the chiefs of staff in 1957; the first-ever cost-benefit analysis of the British Empire in 1957, which I have always thought was rather late; a Cabinet Secretary-led inquiry in 1957-58 on The Position of the United Kingdom in World Affairs; and finally a Prime Minister-commissioned Future Policy Study undertaken for Harold Macmillan in 1959-60 on where the UK would be by 1970 on unchanged current domestic, economic and foreign policies. That report in particular spared its readers in Whitehall nothing about the starkness of the economic prospects, not least in comparison to the six founding member countries of the European Economic Community.
The report before us today is offered as,
“part of a constructive debate”.
It should be more than that, triggering a review—in public this time of course—as broad-ranging in scope as those post-1956 inquiries. Perhaps Parliament should direct the process using a Joint Committee of both Houses. A royal commission, as suggested yesterday by the noble Lord, Lord Dobbs, might be a good idea; once an instrument of high utility, but now out of fashion, perhaps one could be created specially for the purpose. Or possibly the next Prime Minister could authorise a review as Macmillan did with his sequence of inquiries as he scrambled into the premiership across the rubble left by the Suez affair and the resignation of Sir Anthony Eden.
In my judgment, it is a first-order question that rises above and reaches beyond the usual range covered by the five-year cycle of strategic defence and security reviews. It needs to be a truly national conversation that starts with the fundamental question of whether we should still strive to be a considerable player in the influence markets of the world. There may be those suffering from post-Brexit exhaustion, as we all are to some degree, even though we are not there yet, who think that a period of reticence on our part would be fitting. It has been distressing to discover that we seem to have lost the second part of our genius for muddling through. At “muddling” we have been excelling ourselves; it is the “through” bit that appears to be beyond us.
I profoundly hope that nerves will not be lost, which would leave us in a condition of resentful torpor. A wide-ranging inquiry could be a partial antidote to that, especially if it makes a convincing and realistic case for our remaining a substantial player in the world with verve and conviction. As that great economic planner and institution builder Jean Monnet, who knew us Brits very well, put it when we were experiencing another bad patch in the 1970s, the British have not “stepped aside from history”. Monnet was right. We have not, we should not and we will not.
I listened to a Minister talking in one of our committee rooms today about the precipice of fundamental change that we are about to face. Millions are displaced by terrorism or war, with mass migration following on and population explosions in many countries. Virtually every continent faces challenges in that way. It is combined with new and dangerous weapons of war, which we never had in my time. Even in Northern Ireland we never had suicide bombers, drones, offensive cyber and the involvement of social media and fake news, which we now know are such threats. With that sinister combination you do not need to be a nation state to wage war against the organised world with some of these instruments. Just to cheer us up, this morning we heard the announcement that sea levels are rising even faster due to climate change and about what that might do to further stimulate the risk of population migration in different places.
My noble friend Lord Jopling referred to President Trump’s reluctance to be involved in multilateral organisations in this shifting world order. “America first” certainly does not make it easy to continue to promote an active global role. I see that one of President Trump’s pledges is to make US foreign policy unpredictable. He has been pretty successful in that; I think the Iranian Government would support me in that remark. I noticed that just yesterday General Jim Mattis, the former Defense Secretary, had been speaking to a distinguished audience in the United Arab Emirates, including Mohamed bin Zayed. He said that we might believe that the US is,
“coming apart at the seams”,
and that it might seem,
“like it’s chaotic in Washington”.
He said that that is the price of democracy and that on the US’s role in the world his advice would be,
“to engage more in the world and intervene militarily less”.
One or two of us would think that pretty good advice.
Of course, it is against that background that we have the complete change that my noble friend expressed so well, with the extraordinary emergence of China and the surge in its economy taking place. There is a complete change in the balance. With all these changes, the role of Russia—which in my time was so busy with internal affairs that it did not cause any difficulties more widely—is now, as the committee described it, that of a disruptor.
The noble Lord, Lord Hennessy, asked whether we should play a part. We certainly should. Perhaps we are too modest sometimes. We are uniquely well placed. We are a member of the Security Council. Whatever we may say, we have a special relationship with the United States. We are a member of NATO and of the Commonwealth. We have particular relationships in the Gulf. All around the world we have relationships that in the main are based on good friendship. We are not a superpower, which in some ways makes it easier to play our role. I hope we will not back away from playing our part. The committee made the point that we need to get the fullest public support for our foreign policy and to play a role as widely as we can in the world, including getting as many students as we can to our universities, which are referred to in the report as,
“a national industry of global importance”.
We need to make our voice known and play our part to deal with the country and a world that is not just shifting, but in great danger.
“beacons of commitment to language learning across government”.
Witnesses informed our inquiry that the diplomatic academy in the FCO has placed increasing importance on language skills and increased the proportion of posts where a foreign language is required, with a target of 80% by 2020. By contrast, the Department for International Trade told us that it had 24 designated language roles overseas but expects future free trade agreements to be negotiated in English, using professional interpreters where needed. I find that attitude from the DIT extremely worrying and a depressing illustration of the lack of awareness of the importance of language skills, and the cultural understanding that goes with them. After all, we know from research at Cardiff Business School that the UK is losing 3.5% of GDP per annum because of a lack of language skills in the workforce. Yet, astonishingly, the DIT’s new Export Strategy does not even mention language skills.
I found the Government’s response to our recommendation that there should be a cross-government language strategy, including an audit of existing language skills across Whitehall, disappointing. It simply is not good enough to point to the good work being done at the FCO, MoD, DfID and GCHQ, and assume that it will provide the co-ordination and responsibility for languages across the board. It is as much in the interests of the Treasury, the DIT and BEIS to get the message on languages as it is for the FCO. In my view, it is absolutely inadequate to assume that this is just an issue for the Department for Education to resolve. It is not just the DfE’s problem and it is unfair to expect that department to sort it all out.
One very good example of the strategic interconnectedness of languages, highly relevant to the topic of this debate, is the need to pay more attention to the 1 million or so school students in the UK who are bilingual. Children who speak languages such as Mandarin, Arabic, Korean, Turkish, Farsi and Somali at home should have their language skills recognised, developed and accredited. They should be shown how much more employable they will be as a result, whether in business, diplomacy, security or education.
The committee’s second recommendation on languages is that the Government should do more to encourage universities to restore modern language degrees in order to ensure that we produce sufficient linguists to meet the UK’s foreign and trade policy needs. The Government’s response rightly points to some of their positive and welcome initiatives in schools, designed to try to improve the supply chain to universities. These are the Mandarin Excellence Programme, the pedagogy pilot programme and the introduction of compulsory language learning in primary schools. Overall, though, I found the Government’s response on this point rather thin, lacking any sense of quite how dramatically serious the decline of languages at school and university has become. The Government set great store by the EBacc, yet the boost it has given to GCSE take-up has clearly stalled—stuck for the last three years at only 47%. In 2015, 100,000 fewer language GCSEs were taken compared to a decade earlier and A-level languages, especially German, are in freefall. No wonder over 50 of our universities have scrapped some or all of their modern language degrees. The total number of modern language graduates has declined by 54% in the last decade.
Will the Minister say whether the FCO will take a further initiative, building on the cross-Whitehall languages group, to draw in more departments and agencies? Between them, and with expert advice, they could come up with an effective mechanism for ensuring not just a cross-government talking shop but a genuinely cross-government strategy on languages, backed up by committed leadership, transparent accountability and resourcing—one which acknowledges the importance of languages and linguists for the success and resilience of the UK’s future in the world.
The text on which the committee might have sermonised is the comment by Dr Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, that,
“among the foreign policy elites … the British role is seen as having been downsized and likely to continue that way, and that Brexit reinforces that”.
I recall meeting Dr Haass after he wrote his book on US policy, The Reluctant Sheriff. The world has indeed changed, particularly with China and Russia. We certainly have concerns about authoritarian tendencies in a number of European countries but, unlike Russia, none of them has a destabilising role outside their frontiers; none has invaded and occupied neighbouring countries; none has interfered in western elections; none has tried to assassinate dissidents on the streets of our cities. We should not, of course, seek to provoke Russia; we should co-operate where it is in our mutual interest but we should be vigilant and realistic and have that awkward posture of holding out our hands but keeping up our guard.
The major change has been in US policy. Is this a continuation, as the noble Lord, Lord Jopling, sought to argue, or is it essentially a fresh start? The President has cast aside more moderate advisers, blows hot and cold on North Korea, Iran, Russia, the UN and NATO. He has imposed steel tariffs on her allies and is, in general, unpredictable and often capricious in his policies. Traditionally, we share many interests with the US, not least in intelligence and nuclear. However, the blunt truth is that we align more and more with the countries of Europe and the US no longer sees us as an interpreter of or bridge to our European allies; nor do Japan or other investing countries. Nevertheless, I stress that we should recognise the US as our most powerful ally and ensure that, during his forthcoming visit to the United Kingdom, President Trump is afforded all the normal courtesies, certainly far more than those afforded to President Putin, who faced far fewer demonstrations than President Trump is likely to.
We should be concerned about the comments by Sir Simon Fraser that he could not think of any time in his distinguished diplomatic career,
“when there has been less clarity, frankly, about the purposes and objectives of British foreign policy”.
Yes, there has been a welcome increase in diplomatic posts and personnel. Yes, we are in the premier division of soft power, but there is general puzzlement at the aspiration for a “global Britain”. Is this no more than a verbal fig leaf to cover a vacuum of policy; a part of the liberated, nostalgic future promised by the Brexiteers? Is there not a danger of falling between many stools, facing the choice of greater dependency on the United States or becoming an outrider to the European Union? This is hardly a happy posture for our country, which has so many advantages and such a remarkable history.
The US says that it does not recognise spheres of influence, whether in Georgia or Ukraine, but at the same time John Bolton tells us that the Monroe doctrine is alive and well. We need to be careful not to create the same situation with China. It would be a mistake to shut China out of the global system. It would be a great mistake to have a technology war with China. The most dangerous example of unilateralism by the US is the abrogation of the nuclear deal that was signed between Iran, the US and the E3. The International Atomic Energy Authority certified on 14 different occasions that Iran has complied with the agreement. The US is not just reimposing sanctions, it is also putting pressure on China, Japan, India and Turkey to reduce the oil exports of Iran to zero. For a country where 50% of the revenue comes from oil, this is tantamount to a declaration of economic warfare. Mr Pompeo says that there is a link between al-Qaeda and Iran. That, as he must know, is nonsense. We hear a lot about Iran’s meddling in the region. I understand that and appreciate that it is a problem. But there is still a problem of interpretation here. Is this defensive or aggressive? Iranian policy is driven largely by national interest. The most important event in modern Iranian history was the Iran-Iraq war. It lasted longer than the Second World War and they lost more people in it than we did in the whole of the Second World War. For us, the Second World War is a vivid memory, but it was 74 years ago. The Iran-Iraq war ended only 31 years ago, so it is not surprisingly that Iran’s fear of invasion remains. It is not surprising that it is determined that if it is attacked again, the fighting will be outside its borders and there will be a cost to anyone who is backing an aggressor.
When we hear talk of Iran interfering in other countries, it probably strikes the Iranians as extremely odd when they see the West tolerating the interference of Saudi in Bahrain, the interference of Saudi in Yemen, and the presence of the United States in Iraq even when the political party of the Prime Minister of Iraq is opposed to it. I fully recognise that there is a problem of Iranian proxies and the use of proxies throughout the region, but the problems of proxies of Iran will be solved only by a comprehensive security agreement in the region that gives some comfort and some security to Iran as well. The real problem of proxies will not be solved by sending aircraft carriers and the threat of 120,000 men.
A recent poll in Germany showed that more Germans thought that the US was a threat to world peace than thought that Russia was. I do not agree with that, but I do not find it entirely surprising that public opinion there came to that conclusion. John Bolton recently repeated the maxim of the ancient Greeks: “If you want peace, prepare for war”. Yes, we all understand that, but the danger is that if you prepare only for war and if you forgo dialogue, you may end up with the last thing you want; an accidental war. In the Gulf we are close to tipping the scales to an accidental war, and that would be a great tragedy.