North Africa and the Near and Middle East

Debate between Kwasi Kwarteng and Rory Stewart

Monday 28th November 2011 Commons Chamber

[Rory Stewart (Penrith and The Border) (Con)]

How very jealous George Canning would have been in 1823 to see the scope and ambition of this debate. Triumphant from Waterloo and Trafalgar, with the greatest economy and Navy in the world, he hesitated to get involved in affairs in France and Spain, whereas we have skipped in this debate from toxic waste in Somalia to minorities in Sudan, the situation in Yemen and the Baha’is in Iran. We have touched elegantly on the military in Syria and in Egypt, on elections in Morocco, on Islamists in Libya and in Tunisia, on refugees in Niger and on the fishermen of Mauritania. How jealous he would have been.

Given that we can pack the House for a debate on the fair fuel tariff, one would imagine that we would now find the journalists leaning over the railings, the Gallery packed and the House stuffed, with everyone desperate to get involved at this moment of deep crisis when the middle east and north Africa are teetering on the edge, and Europe is in trouble—but no. Why not? It is because at the heart of our problems in the middle east and north Africa is the situation of Britain for the past few decades. As our relative economic power declines, our ambitions become ever greater and our rhetoric becomes ever more inflated. We wish to get involved in countries that would have been obscure to us at the time of our greatest power, yet at the same time we hollow out the institutions on which we depend to deliver our policy.

Let us consider the middle east and north Africa and what we have done in this Arab spring. On Tunisia, the reality is that we had abandoned not just Mauritania but Tunisia itself to French diplomacy and French policy. In Libya, we contented ourselves with kissing Gaddafi on the cheeks and handing out a doctorate to his son at the London School of Economics and our connection with Egypt was contained to snorkelling as guests of Mubarak in Sharm el Sheikh.

[Kwasi Kwarteng]

I am particularly grateful to my hon. Friend for giving way—

[Kwasi Kwarteng]

This is not a point about snorkelling. My hon. Friend the Member for Penrith and The Border (Rory Stewart) is making an impassioned and eloquent speech, but surely he must recognise that the reason why we are more committed to intervention in such areas—more so than in imperial times—is that we are part of a wider comity of nations. We are part of the UN and of NATO and as part of that joint venture we are committing and projecting ourselves in the region. In imperial times, such circumstances did not prevail. We acted unilaterally and, as he is right to say, in many instances we chose not to intervene and interfere in the internal politics of other countries.

[Rory Stewart]

My hon. Friend makes a very good point, but the problem is not our desire or our commitment to the multilateral system but our capacity and what we can actually do. Our engagement with the United Nations and NATO and our various grand views about globalisation and economics lead us to believe that we should be involved in all those areas, but what capacity do we have to deliver, what understanding do we have of those specific countries and what power do we have in our hands to do one half of the things that have been discussed in the Chamber today?

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[Kwasi Kwarteng]

My hon. Friend knows, probably better than anyone in this House, the extent to which modern media and modern technology have completely revolutionised the way in which we gather information and deploy our authority. I have listened to the debate for a number of hours now and I was intrigued to discover that people were harking back to colonial times, the empire and that sort of thing. They had nothing like the technology we have today and although I completely agree with my hon. Friend about the need for languages and cultural expertise in the Foreign Office, it is not remotely apparent to me that we should have exactly the same infrastructure today as we had in 1930 or 1880. That model is completely false in today’s environment.

[Rory Stewart]

This is a very tantalising and attractive argument and I can see exactly why it is made. Of course, we should not have the same structure as we had in 1880 or 1930—and nor do we—but the notion that technology and the related aspects of the 21st century have somehow transformed our relationship with a country such as Afghanistan is fundamentally misguided. In the recent Helmand police intake, eight out of 100 people could write their name or recognise numbers up to 10. There is no electricity between Herat and Kandahar. The notion of a Facebook revolution in Afghanistan, Somalia or South Sudan is a distant fantasy. The fact that in the British embassy in Kabul two years ago, there were exactly two people who had passed a Dari exam at an operational level and that there was not a single Pashto speaker is testimony to the fact that we believe we live in a globalised world in which it is unnecessary for us to study other people’s languages or understand their culture.

[Kwasi Kwarteng]

With respect to my hon. Friend and the House, I have always said in relation to these issues that linguistic competence is absolutely vital, and it is a scandal that the Foreign Office should have turned its back on that. He must acknowledge, as I think he is doing, that the technological environment in which we operate allows us to have certain levers and information that we did not have 15 or 20 years ago.

[Rory Stewart]

I could not agree more—it certainly allows us to have a great deal of information. However, at the fundamental core of the Foreign Office’s work, which concerns politics and power, there appears to be a problem. The same problem was apparent when nobody challenged the Government’s policy on Iraq, which is the single most humiliating mess into which the British Government have got themselves since Suez. Not a single senior British diplomat publicly or even privately challenged the Prime Minister on that issue. Why? Because at the same time as we imagine that everything is manipulable through technocratic processes and technology, the knowledge and the confidence that came from country immersion and language is lacking, as is the confidence that would allow one to challenge power.

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[Rory Stewart]

This is fundamental because we live in a world in which there is not enough challenge in the system. There are not enough checks or balances. I have mentioned that our newspapers have fewer and fewer foreign correspondents. The quality of foreign reporting in Britain is not as good today as it was 20 years ago because we simply are not investing as much in foreign reporting. At the same time, the military is increasingly preponderant in the United States, and brings with it the inherent optimism and determination to say, “We’ve inherited a dismal situation but we have the resources and the mission to deliver a decisive year,” pushing aside the civilian advice. We are flattered by English-speaking, upper-class Afghans, Iraqis and Libyans who feed our fantasies and tell us what we want to hear.

In that context, and in the context of the temptation across Europe and the United States to have more and more centralised power, we need our Foreign Office to act as a check and balance. We need it to challenge policy and to speak truth to power. Above all, we need it to say not just what the UK interest is, what our ethical limits are or what we are not prepared to do morally, but, most fundamentally of all, what we cannot do. When somebody comes forward and says, in country X, “In this failed state, we will create governance, the rule of law and civil society,” it should be the job of our Foreign Office to ask “How?”, “With whom?” and “With what money?” It should ask, “What possible reason have you to believe that you can achieve this grandiloquent objective you have established?”

We also need to explain matters to the public, because this entire rhetoric is the rhetoric of a poker game. It is the rhetoric, perpetually, of “raise” or “fold”, and of driving people to ask, “Have you met your $3 billion objective on trade this year?” or “Have you or have you not set up the rule of law and civil society?” and if not, “Why have we got an embassy in Mongolia? Why have we got to bother having any representation in Peru? Why don’t we drag it all back to London and do it down the internet?” The way to cease that is to be honest—not just internally but with the British public as well.

[Kwasi Kwarteng]

My hon. Friend raises a particularly pertinent point about the operations of the Foreign Office. He will remember that in times gone by, that was the Foreign Office’s job and it consistently said no. If we are to believe the memoirs of politicians, it consistently set itself as a roadblock to ministerial action and said, “No you can’t do that,” to Ministers who wanted to intervene or act purposively. He will also remember that a former Conservative Prime Minister once commented that she understood that the Agriculture Department looked after farmers, that the Labour Department looked after workers and that the Foreign Office looked after foreigners. It is well known that the Foreign Office has been the check that my hon. Friend describes.

[Rory Stewart]

The Foreign Office has a very distinguished tradition of doing that. With many of the things it challenged, it did so correctly. It challenged Lord Salisbury’s insane idea of launching an invasion into Afghanistan in 1879, it challenged Lord Grey’s absurd ideas about secret treaties with France in 1912 and 1913, and it challenged the absurdity of Suez. In all those ways it acted responsibly, but increasingly it is no longer performing that role.

Of course the politicians can, when they want, overwhelm the Foreign Office, push it aside and push ahead, and that is fine, but—on this, I think, we should conclude—we are now in a very strange position in this country. We are hollowed out. We are facing an enormous crisis. Europe is teetering on the edge. The German Chancellor is invoking ghosts of European destruction. The middle east and north Africa have seen more tottering regimes and dynasties than in any period since the end of the first world war. At this time we need to remember that that very modest investment in the Foreign Office—only £1 billion a year on its core costs, if we exclude the British Council and the World Service—is an extremely wise insurance and investment.

We need to remember at times like this how vital is the ability to set out our limits, to set out a strategy and vision, to explain exactly, as this Government are doing, and to continue to explain more clearly to the public, exactly what Britain believes and what our strategy is—that peculiar mixture of pragmatism and belief in rights, a belief not just in ideals but in common sense, expressed in a world that understands that today of all times a residence can be much more powerful than a regiment, a Tuareg specialist than a Tornado, an Arabist than an aircraft carrier, and that the Foreign Office is our strength, our nation, and our defence.