The FCO and the Spending Review 2015

Debate between Lord Benyon and Tom Brake

Tuesday 1st March 2016 Commons Chamber

[Richard Benyon (Newbury) (Con)]

I congratulate the Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Reigate (Crispin Blunt), and his Committee—albeit perhaps in its previous form—on making a recommendation that the Government have actually listened to. I entirely agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Basildon and Billericay (Mr Baron) that the Chancellor’s announcement on Foreign and Commonwealth Office spending drew a line under the reductions that had taken place over many years. Like many who have spoken in the debate today, I believe that those reductions have damaged Britain’s ability to project soft power.

I have just come from a meeting of the Defence Committee, at which we heard about an organisation called the Conflict Studies Research Centre, which used to be based within Whitehall. It was a Government organisation, but it was cut in a similar way to that described by my hon. Friend the Member for Basildon and Billericay when he talked about our ability to inform the Executive of what was going on. However, I am delighted to say that it has re-emerged in the private sector. With London continuing to be a major hub for international organisations, think-tanks and other sources of expertise in foreign affairs and defence issues, we need to be smarter and more fleet of foot in using those resources—much as similar resources are used in Washington, perhaps rather better than we use ours.

In my capacity as a Minister and subsequently in roles on Select Committees and on the NATO Parliamentary Assembly, I have been privileged to see our Foreign Office posts working abroad and I have huge respect for those who work in them. The programme of post closures was reversed under the coalition Government, and that was very welcome, but I believe that what we have in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office has become broad and shallow. We need to concentrate on finding depth, and I therefore agree with many of the sentiments that have been expressed today. William Hague’s reopening of the language school is a welcome part of the re-engagement with those important skills.

Through Foreign and Commonwealth Office posts abroad, the UK projects soft power. I often see this in my capacity as a trade envoy. Cuts to the FCO are short-sighted. When we engage with countries and build relationships over long periods of time, that is reflected in jobs at home, in exports and in helping our balance of payments. I have seen our influence way exceed expenditure because of the hard work being put into relationships being built with Governments, people of influence and countries. I am kicking the dust off my feet following a trip to Jordan and Lebanon last week with the Defence Committee. I should like to put on record my thanks to those two outstanding posts and to the ambassadors, the defence attachés, the political officers and the security staff operating in those countries. The United Kingdom’s stock is high over there, and we are benefiting from trying to keep those two countries stable in the face of unbelievable threats from over the border in Syria and Iraq.

I want to concentrate on what my hon. Friend the Member for Basildon and Billericay called trouble spots. He perhaps looked back with a degree of Schadenfreude, and in some cases he was justified in expressing that, although in other cases I might question it. In looking at trouble spots, he said that we should look forward and ask where the trouble spots of the future might be. I suggest that a glaring example is a resurgent Russia.

Whitehall had real experts on the Soviet Union throughout the cold war, as my hon. Friend the Member for Reigate said. When the Soviet Union fell, many of those posts were stripped out as the people retired, were let go or moved to other areas of the Foreign Office or other Departments. At that point, our corporate knowledge fell to an alarming degree. I may be straying from the point slightly here, but the Defence Intelligence Service had no Ukraine desk officer at the time of the uprising. It had to borrow one from the South Caucasus desk. I imagine that similar problems existed elsewhere in the Foreign Office as the glaring reality of a major threat to the interests of Britain and NATO suddenly emerged. There is a real need to understand these threats and to examine how we should resource them in the future.

I am not making any excuses for the Soviet Union, but at least in those days there was some kind of group accountability in that country and we did not feel that the regime was simply being run by one individual on his whim. Now, Russia is ruled by one autocratic mega-thief, a kleptocrat of quite staggering proportions who can annex the sovereign territory of another state, who can have people murdered on the streets of London and no doubt elsewhere, and who oversees a regime that murders people such as the lawyer Sergei Magnitsky in prison in Russia. I wonder how many more Litvinenkos and Magnitskys there are. This is a man who can do to parts of Syria what he did to Grozny and who can threaten states that we are treaty-bound to defend under our membership of NATO. This is an individual for whom rules-based governance is anathema. We should therefore govern much of our thinking—and much of the way in which we resource our foreign policy and defence policy—by the use of one clear question: “What would Putin want?”

[Tom Brake]

And what does the hon. Gentleman think Putin would want in relation to the UK’s membership of the European Union?

[Richard Benyon]

The right hon. Gentleman must have read the next page of my speech. I shall answer that question precisely in a moment; I think he will agree with what I have to say.

What President Putin would want first is for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office budget to be curtailed. He would also want a weaker NATO that was riven by infighting and that continued to run down its armed forces, as it has done in years gone by. He would also want a NATO that did not respond to an escalation in aggressive actions against states on Russia’s western border. He has had a bit of bad news in that regard, however, because there has been a reversal in the decline in defence spending, not least by Britain but also by some of our allies. This situation requires massive efforts of diplomacy to keep our alliances moving in the right direction, showing resolve and showing the ability to stand up to the actions of his regime.

To answer the question from the right hon. Member for Carshalton and Wallington (Tom Brake), Putin wants a west in which influential countries such as Britain become less influential. I think the right hon. Gentleman can see where I am going here. Putin wants a weakened European Union. Let us remember that it is the EU, not NATO, that can impose damaging sanctions against his regime. He hates having an economic rule-setter on his western border.

As the leader of the UK delegation to NATO, I recently attended a meeting with other delegation leaders at NATO headquarters. Informally and formally, our allies crossed the floor to ask me, with varying degrees of incredulity, whether Britain was really going to leave the EU. I hope that the Foreign Affairs Committee’s report will look not only at the costs of a possible Brexit but at the impact it would have on the geopolitics of our European foreign policy. These people, including Americans, were coming up to me and saying, “Now? At this time? Really? With all that threatens Europe, economically, militarily and societally?” There is much that our diplomats and intelligence services have to do in the coming years: shore up our alliances, particularly NATO; encourage more spending on defence among our allies; and use all methods, through both our hard and soft power postures, to deter Russia. This is about how we invest; how we work with our allies; and how we exercise our armed forces and show strength.