Diplomacy

Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean Excerpts

Thursday 11th November 2010 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean]

My Lords, I, too, thank the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, for introducing this very timely debate today. The noble Lord has rendered the House two services: first, in his excellent speech he comprehensively and skilfully outlined the issues concerning a properly resourced and active Diplomatic Service; and, secondly, he has reminded us of the importance that we should attach to such proper resourcing by being the embodiment of active diplomacy himself.

I also add my congratulations to my noble friend Lord Monks. I thank him, too, for choosing a foreign policy debate for his powerful maiden speech. In another life, my noble friend and I used to sit around the same meeting tables, and I am happy to say that he has lost none of his highly persuasive and cogent powers of argument. He will be a huge asset to your Lordships’ House, as his speech today clearly demonstrated.

I begin by acknowledging that we on this side of the House know that all departments, including the FCO, must take some share of the impending cuts. As the G20 meeting in Seoul is acknowledging today, the international downturn is a global issue, in spite of what is sometimes said in our domestic politics. As a colleague of mine remarked to me in the Middle East a couple of weeks ago, the only countries unaffected are the ones that are not part of the global economy.

In looking at resourcing effective diplomacy in this country, I turned to the FCO’s business plan, in which the Foreign Secretary says that he has organised his department’s work with three overriding priorities: safeguarding Britain’s national security, building Britain’s prosperity, and supporting British nationals around the world through modern and efficient consular services. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Bates, that these bear a striking resemblance to the priorities that the late Robin Cook articulated when Labour came into office in 1997, proving that very often there is nothing new in foreign policy. To any sensible person, they must be the cornerstone of what the Foreign Office is there to do.

The Foreign Secretary also spoke of harnessing,

“the appeal of our culture and heritage to promote our values”,

including on human rights. I suspect that for many of us that is a bedrock point without which achieving security and prosperity on a sustainable long-term basis would be absolutely impossible, as my noble friend Lady Drake suggested.

I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Waverley, that the Government’s energy in relation to trade is very much to be welcomed, but I know that there is concern that the Foreign Secretary’s great emphasis on trade and investment runs the risk of undermining the FCO’s work on human rights. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have both warned us about that. Promoting human rights is not just right in its own terms; it is a matter of self-interest, too. Even countries where there is acute poverty see access to information and international communications as very obvious. Young people in all parts of the world have access to mobile phones and cameras, and of course televisions. They see injustice as it happens, and they see repression, the results of torture and the horror of innocent civilians caught up in warfare.

They have their own opinions about what is fair, just and decent. Working for human rights to protect those who cannot protect themselves is another hugely important factor in our efforts to maintain our security. It is part of how we develop our agenda on counterterrorism and counter-radicalisation. When I looked beyond the opening headlines in the business plan to see how the FCO would be maintaining and expanding its work on human rights, in the 24 pages that follow those opening headlines, the subject was not mentioned once. Can the Minister explain why not? How is that to be delivered if the business plan does not offer us a mechanism to do so?

One way in which the previous Government sought to deal with that kind of outreach, both at home and abroad, was through our support for the hajj. My noble friend Lord Patel has argued that the cut in support for British Muslim pilgrims is damaging. Like the noble Lord, Lord Sheikh, and my noble friend Lady Taylor, I strongly agree with him. I declare an interest, because it was on my watch as consular Minister that the hajj support was introduced. Apart from the huge cut to the much-valued services to thousands of British pilgrims every year, does the Minister not realise what an appallingly negative signal that sends to the very countries that the Foreign Office is trying to impress in increasing our trade?

Do Ministers really not understand that many countries in the Middle East want a rounded relationship with the United Kingdom? They want a partnership with mutual respect and mutual understanding. I hope that concentrating so hard on trade, as the Government are doing—which I understand and, in many ways, support—does not lead to some of our friends in the Arab world to feel that we are not engaging as we should in politics and in seeking their views on interfaith issues, on the peace process, on Iran, Turkey and Somalia, and on the many multilateral institutions. If we really want trade, we have to do politics properly. That is what marks a real partnership that respects opinions as well as wealth.

I agree with my noble friend Lord Anderson that at the heart of what we are discussing today is an active diplomacy, which means people. We need active diplomats, and they need to be spread around the globe. I notice that the FCO business plan says that we shall have an enhanced partnership with India and closer engagement—I am not quite sure how that is different—with China, Brazil and south-east Asia. We shall need diplomacy campaigns, apparently—can the Minister please tell us what those are? I see, too, that the education conferences launched under the Labour Government will go global to get more students into the UK. All of that needs people and resourcing. My concern is that the commitment to review the UK's bilateral relationships and to look at something that we are calling the overseas footprint is in fact code for shutting down embassies and consulates in countries in which we do not have huge commercial interests.

The noble Lords, Lord Hannay and Lord Janvrin, are right: shutting our embassies is simply not sensible, because events catch up with us and stuff happens. By the Government’s yardstick, it can backfire very badly commercially. As the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, emphasised, we need embassies to maintain our intelligence networks, for our security and to build confidence—and, yes, at a very basic level, to be ready for those commercial opportunities when they arise.

One of the passages in the business plan that I find most perplexing is what was said about consular services. The headline objective of supporting British nationals around the world is apparently to be achieved through cutting our consular services. Consular resources mean FCO staff being trained to deal with a huge variety of problems, from lost passports to natural disasters and terrorist outrages. It is hard, painstaking work, and sometimes it is heartbreaking.

In 1997, the consular services were the poor relation of the FCO, and when I was first a Minister, I was astonished that Ministers did not meet the victims of terrorism or the families of people who had been taken hostage. Officials were told to increase the numbers and provide a better service to the British public. Let us face it; most people in this country do not wake up in the morning wondering what is going to happen at an EU summit or the UN General Assembly. They are much more concerned if they cannot get consular help when they or their families need it abroad.

Let me turn to soft power. The noble Lords, Lord Parekh and Lord Hannay, emphasised its importance. The business plan states that there should be a strategy to enhance the impact of the UK contribution on conflict prevention by looking at the UK’s educational scholarships, but in a Written Statement from the FCO on 10 July, a £10 million cut was announced in this year’s programmes of scholarships. There are no Chevening scholarships in 2010-11. Soft power, so brilliantly described by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of London, is an enormously important building block in reconciliation and outreach, and we cannot have soft power without good networks. It all comes down to people and relationships. Often, we need our good diplomats to undertake that sort of soft power, and to do so they have to be properly resourced.

The World Service and the British Council have also been mentioned. I agree passionately with what the noble Baroness, Lady Afshar, and my noble friend Lord Parekh said. The BBC World Service is a huge asset. It is envied by so many other countries, particularly the United States, Germany and France. It is trusted, it is editorially completely independent of government, and it has a huge reach that is unrivalled by that of any other country. The important point is that we distinguish between the editorial independence on the one side and the responsiveness of the UK’s national interest to talk to parts of the world that are so hard to reach otherwise. Similarly, the work of the British Council is the bedrock of our national interest. It is important that its functions are recognised and properly resourced because that allows us to have the contact in helping development in many countries in the world, particularly among young people and women.

To sum up, I was enormously pleased to have the business plan. It is very much to the Government’s credit that they have published it. It is a real mechanism for accountability. It will help us and give us a real opportunity to ask questions and to get the answers we need. I appreciate the Minister’s experience and his willingness to give answers to the questions that we pose—I sometimes wish that more of his colleagues followed his example—and I look forward to what he has to say.