Defence Policy (International Relations and Defence Committee Report)

Lord Boateng Excerpts

Friday 30th June 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Boateng (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a particular privilege to follow the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Stirrup, with whom I had the honour of serving on the committee. As I commend this report to the House, I pay tribute to our distinguished former chairman, the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay. She was an exemplary chairman: she was firm, she had a sense of humour—which always helps in a chairman—and she led us with marked distinction, so I give heartfelt thanks to her on behalf of the committee.

In commending the report to the House, I draw attention in particular to recommendation 162, which acknowledges and praises the deployment of military soft power and makes specific recommendations in relation to it. The integrated review of 2021 sets out the UK’s position and strength with regard to soft power:

“The source of much of the UK’s soft power lies beyond the ownership of government—an independence from state direction that is essential to its influence. The Government can use its own assets, such as the diplomatic network, aid spending and the armed forces, to help create goodwill towards the UK”.


The Defence Committee in the other place had cause recently to draw attention in a report to the deployment of soft power and made this observation:

“Whilst soft power does not instinctively fall within the remit of the Ministry of Defence, it plays a part in ‘defence engagement’, which is the military contribution to soft power. ‘Defence engagement’ itself is defined as ‘the means by which we use our Defence assets and activities, short of combat operations, to achieve influence’”.


I will draw attention to two specific areas of this in relation to the integrated review: implementation and that definition of engagement. Its implementation was reinforced by the mention made of it in the integrated review refresh as recently as March of this year, when the Government pledged to promote the soft and cultural power that the UK possesses and do more to bring soft power into their broader foreign policy approach. That is all well and good, and much needed on the ground when you look at the activities of our “strategic competitors”. That is one phrase the Government have used on occasion; they could also be described in a number of instances as our opponents and, in Ukraine, as our direct enemies, because that is what Russia and its surrogates—the Wagner Group—are. They are the enemies of this country and of the wider world.

Only today, we learned that, despite the events earlier this month, it is business as usual as far as Wagner is concerned. As we speak, Wagner is recruiting in Moscow and St Petersburg. Whether those recruits will be deployed in Ukraine or not remains to be seen, because it may well be that Wagner’s forces are integrated with Russian forces in Ukraine, but we know that they continue to be deployed in Africa. Africa is at the centre of Wagner and Russia’s policy—a policy of enrichment and aggrandisement. It is about both those things: the aggrandisement of Russia and the enrichment of Wagner and the plutocrats that lie behind it.

As we speak, Wagner’s forces are deployed in Sudan, Mali, Burkina Faso and the DRC. In all those places, they are seeking to destabilise and, wherever possible, defenestrate the natural resources of those countries, both metaphorically and literally, because the impact on the environment is as grave as the impact on peace, security and development.

We need a response to that, and it must build on our soft power and, importantly, our military engagement and our military defence diplomatic network—the network of military attachés and peacekeepers who do such good on the ground but who, all too often, are forgotten when it comes to deployment and resource. We seek assurances from the Minister on this. I speak from the experience of my time in South Africa here; they are a critical part of what happens in any mission. They are at the heart of our diplomacy and of development. They should not be forgotten, and we seek a clear and categorical assurance that in Africa, at least—but not just in Africa, and I shall come to that in a moment—that network is being enhanced and strengthened. If it is not, we will pay a price.

We are already paying a price and we see that in the deployment of Russian and Chinese naval assets off Simon’s Town. That ought to give us cause for concern. We ought to be concerned that the People’s Liberation Army is the fastest-growing military presence in Africa, as we speak. We ought to be concerned that our impact on the Caribbean is diminished by our failure adequately to provide scholarships at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst and the Britannia Royal Naval College in Dartmouth, where Caribbean forces have traditionally been trained. I urge the Minister to assure us that those scholarships will once again be available to Caribbean Governments and that we will use the soft power we possess to the benefit of this nation and the wider world.

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[Lord Boateng (Lab)]

Can I press the Minister a bit on that? Wagner is in Burkina Faso and it threatens Ghana. It threatens the whole of that region. Have we increased our military attaché presence in west Africa in order to counter it? Frankly, if we have not, then we are whistling in the wind in terms of any hope of addressing the threat that it represents.

[Baroness Goldie (Con)]

I do not have an answer to the specific question about the number of defence attachés we have there, but I will make the inquiry and undertake to write to the noble Lord.

Queen’s Speech

Lord Boateng Excerpts

Wednesday 19th May 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Boateng (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I join other noble Lords in welcoming to the House and commending the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Udny-Lister. His speech was particularly welcome in its focus on the importance—while recognising the Indo-Pacific tilt of the integrated review—of being active in Africa. He will find a ready echo of that sentiment on all sides of this House. I declare an interest at the outset as an ambassador for the Global Alliance for Vaccine and Immunisation and chair of Water and Sanitation for the Urban Poor.

Global co-operation and solidarity are vital to effectively responding to and mitigating the health and socioeconomic effects of the Covid-19 pandemic. The measures in the gracious Speech fall to be delivered at a time in which there is, globally, an increase in inequality, a threat to livelihoods and an increasing threat to peace and security and in which environmental sustainability and a capacity to respond effectively to natural disasters are threatened by the impact of the pandemic.

The challenge the virus presents to global diplomacy, to the work of effective multilateral organisations and to the effectiveness of a developmental response to the global crisis requires us, as a nation, to have an effective response to the pandemic and the health of the developing world, which is absolutely essential to our own continued health, and indeed to our security as a nation. The World Bank has rightly drawn attention to the need to ramp-up vaccine production to overcome current shortages in the world, and to develop partnerships across sectors to that effect. As such, it supports licensing deals and technology transfers to developing countries to increase supply and local production in different parts of the world, especially sub-Saharan Africa.

That raises the question, which I hope the Minister will address when winding up, of what position the United Kingdom will take in response to the United States’s very welcome acceptance of the need to address the issue of intellectual property and to bring about the changes in the WTO that will permit the manufacture and license of vaccines in countries such as South Africa, Nigeria, Ghana, Egypt and Senegal, which have the capacity, with some support, to manufacture vaccines. What will be the United Kingdom’s response to the US’s welcome initiative? We know that the EU has been lukewarm, to put it mildly, in its response. This is an opportunity for us to exercise our much-vaunted new post-Brexit freedoms outside the European Union, and come behind the United States to adopt a position in the WTO—with its welcome new, and very effective, leadership—to enable Africa and the developing world to develop their own pharmaceutical industries, and indeed to manufacture vaccines.

In the short term, there will clearly be a need for greater distribution of vaccines in the world. I have something to say briefly in response to the Minister’s quite correct assertion that we are now living much more in a time of competition in this regard. China has already provided vaccine assistance to 53 developing countries and has exported vaccines to 22 countries. China has exported 115 million doses of Chinese vaccines and India has exported 63 million. How many million doses have we exported? The answer is none. What are we doing, not just to support COVAX but to address this very real need, which exists throughout the developing world but particularly acutely where there are conflicts? What are we doing in Tigray and Cameroon to ensure that vaccines are distributed more effectively and provided in those war-torn areas? What are we doing to help bring those conflicts to an end?

Likewise—and I end my remarks on this—what are we doing in response to natural disasters, such as in St Vincent and the Grenadines? Will we deploy our ship in the region to help with the clear-up? How will we assist the country to respond to the very real need that exists there, at the moment, as we speak, for vaccines, because Covid has a hold in that country? These are questions that the Minister needs to answer, and answer in a spirit that we all understand and appreciate that we need a response—

[Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)]

My Lords, I remind noble Lords of the advisory five-minute limit.

[Lord Boateng (Lab) [V]]

Indeed. I end on this note, with this challenge to the Minister. We are rightly thinking about the Middle East at this time. There was a great teacher by the name of Hillel in the Middle East, who lived at the time of our Lord. He said:

“If I am not for me, who will be for me?”


Yes, it is important to recognise our national self-interest, but he added:

“If I am only for me, what am I?”


We share a common humanity. He also asked: “If not now, when?” We need focus, we need resources and we need to act now.

[The Deputy Speaker (Lord Russell of Liverpool) (CB)]

I call next the very patient noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe.

UN Mission in Mali: Armed Forces Deployment

Lord Boateng Excerpts

Monday 14th December 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Goldie (Con)]

The noble and gallant Lord raises a very important point. We very much hope our Armed Forces remain safe and that they will not come under threat of loss of life or of injury. He is right to inquire why they are there, what we expect them to do and how we expect them to do it. As I said earlier, this is part of our contribution to the security response. We recognise that security interventions alone will not address the instability in the Sahel and continue to advocate for state-led progress in the peace process in Mali. As I said earlier, that involves political and institutional reform in the wider region.

We believe it is very important the United Kingdom supports the United Nations in attempting to deal with this area of instability. It matters because if that instability is not addressed then it has an effect of contagion. Instability is a threat that can spread. It can allow hostile operators to flourish and can encourage them to take their unwelcome activities to other countries. That could include the United Kingdom. There is an underlying purpose and we believe it is important that the United Kingdom supports the United Nations in this important mission.

I said earlier that the mission, being a United Nations mission, is led by a civilian—a special representative of the United Nations Secretary-General. The peace- keeping force element involves our own military and highly trained soldiers. Because it is a peacekeeping mission, and our forces are principally concerned with reconnaissance, this is clearly slightly different from an operation such as Operation Barkhane. But our force will provide critical capabilities at a vital time. MINUSMA was selected as a mission on the basis that it was where the UK could provide maximum benefit based on the expertise the UK Armed Forces have to offer. I reassure the noble and gallant Lord that this is a carefully constructed contribution from the UK; it is for a specific period; it involves an identified, set number of personnel; and it is a contained contribution.

[Lord Boateng (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, the struggle against poverty and for development in the Sahel requires peace and security in that increasingly troubled region. No country has invested more in development in ECOWAS than the United Kingdom. So, will the Minister recognise that, in addition to enjoying the support and appreciation of these brave men and women this House offers, the whole of the ECOWAS region, anglophone and francophone, welcomes their deployment? Will the Minister also take the opportunity of the review of ODA and the newly created FCDO to strengthen our military diplomacy in our missions in Africa as part of our development offer?

[Baroness Goldie (Con)]

I thank the noble Lord for alluding to an important point. He is right; I outlined earlier the principal objectives identified by the Foreign Secretary for ODA. In respect of our military activity, it is important we align these two so that there is a complementary effect. He is correct that these are not problems that one solution will address; there has to be a multifaceted approach.

Reconciliation: Role of British Foreign, Defence and International Development Policy

Lord Boateng Excerpts

Friday 14th December 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Boateng (Lab)]

My Lords, all of us in this House owe the most reverend Primate a debt of gratitude for initiating this debate. Many of us who live and work much of the time in Africa owe him an even greater debt of gratitude for the practical work he has done on the ground in that continent. And it is about the practice of reconciliation and the challenges that arise from it that I shall say a few words this afternoon.

In my experience, culture and language lie at the heart of the effective practice of reconciliation. I was christened and brought up in the eastern region of the Gold Coast—Ghana, as it became. We are Akan peoples and we set great store by symbols: we call them the adinkra symbols. The symbol of reconciliation is of the knot that binds people together after differences. The knot symbolises reconciliation, peacebuilding and forgiveness, and we call it the mpatapo. When one thinks of that symbol and of the knot that binds, it is a knot of common humanity, the humanity that we all share. That common bond exists in the South African principle, in and among the Xhosa and the Zulu peoples, of ubuntu: we are what we are because of others. It is for us too in our British tradition, is it not? It is what John Donne referred to when he said, “No man is an island”. We are interdependent.

Reconciliation in the African tradition is symbolised and represented in that way, but reconciliation, by virtue of its roots in culture and language, is not easy. Identity goes to the heart of so much of the human condition and identity, and a sense of identity lies at the heart of so much conflict. I do not think, frankly, that we in this country, at this time, are immune from that. The role of identity in the debates we are having round Brexit cannot be ignored.

So identity is very important, and as we look at the practice of reconciliation I want to share one particular conflict in Africa today, in Cameroon, where identity around language lies at the root of conflict between Anglophone and Francophone. In the past three months, not only have we faced a situation in which, according to the Deputy Permanent Representative of the United States at the Security Council just last Thursday, more than 400,000 people have been displaced, we also know from the UN High Representative, who spoke at that same session, that more than 10,000 have now been displaced to Nigeria. Many thousands have been killed. In the past three months, three Christian ministers have lost their lives in the conflict—the Reverend Attoh, the Reverend Wesco and the Reverend Ondari; a Ghanaian, an American and a Kenyan—all victims of a conflict based on linguistic discrimination and a flawed plebiscite and process of independence but all men of peace, actively promoting reconciliation. Reconciliation is a hard and tough business. It is not a soft option. We have to be prepared for it, and we have to apply the resources that are necessary to practise it meaningfully.

I will say a few words, if I may, about resources. When Archbishop Tutu inaugurated the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, that was part of a process that had been ongoing for many years, including at the height of the conflict, in which many on both sides of your Lordships’ House and in the other place were actively engaged—my noble friend Lord Anderson referred to this. The current Minister of State at the Foreign Office and the Department for International Development, Alistair Burt, was very much part of the fellowship at the time that underpinned a discussion between people of faith—all faiths—in South Africa and in the UK. That process, which went back those many years, required people who spoke Xhosa, Zulu and Afrikaans to sit down at a table and not just speak in their own languages but listen to each other in their own languages. Effective communication, when it comes to reconciliation, demands that we do not just speak but that we listen. British diplomats were able to participate in that because at that time we gave real attention to linguistic skills when we trained our diplomats. It cost money but, because our diplomats based at that difficult time in Pretoria, Johannesburg, Durban and Cape Town were able to speak Xhosa, Zulu and Afrikaans, they were able to make a real difference. If we do not invest today in the nuts and bolts, including language training in our foreign service, we will not be able to marshal the skills that will enable us effectively to promote reconciliation.

I put my hands up: I am a former Chief Secretary to the Treasury—I have the scars to show it—and I have the form: we have not always given the Foreign Office the money that it needs. But if we do not apply resources to this and we are not prepared to pool resources to underpin the work of the proposed joint reconciliation unit, it will not work. I make the case for pooled budgets. They are absolutely vital, for reasons that a number of noble Lords have touched on. Our Army and defence forces have a crucial role to play in the business of reconciliation in supporting the Kofi Annan school out in the field. It should be a cause of concern to noble Lords that the fastest-growing military and diplomatic presence in Africa today is that of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army. It should be a cause of concern that we are not applying resources to enable our own military to contribute to reconciliation and peacekeeping. That will not happen unless we pool budgets. That is my experience of government, and I do not believe that the situation has changed. It is not just a question of DfID, the Foreign Office or the MoD spending the money, and each working within its own silo; we have to pool budgets in order to promote reconciliation effectively. I wholeheartedly support the most reverend Primate’s proposal, but I urge the Government in adopting it—as I hope they will—to ensure that the Treasury backs it by requiring pooled budgets upon which it is possible for all the departments, having made the case, to draw.

As I draw my remarks to a conclusion, I will make these final points. We have heard movingly of the Coventry experience. As a young man, I was often challenged and inspired—and sometimes irritated, I have to say—by Canon Paul Oestreicher of Coventry Cathedral, who was a remarkable man. He said something which has stayed with me always and is so profoundly true: reconciliation must be built on truth. It is not easy, but he was right to remind us of that. But I have also learned that reconciliation will not endure without justice. In 2014 Archbishop Tutu, the Nobel laureate who initiated the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, was reflecting, honestly, on its operations. He said one of the reasons why South Africa had suffered and was suffering—as it does today—in the aftermath of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which achieved so much, was because it had not effectively addressed one of its central recommendations, which was for reparations and resources to address the hurt and damage that the process of reconciliation had uncovered, and that as a result of that, reconciliation itself was threatened. We need to underpin work on reconciliation with work to deliver economic and social justice. That is the answer to the conundrum that the noble Baroness, Lady Brady, touched on. We have to be able to deliver to the Army in its work on peacebuilding, but we also have to deliver a process of economic reform and distribution of resources that underpins social and economic justice because, without that, peace cannot and will not endure. It is not one or the other; it is all those things working together.

That is the extent of the challenge. In relation to Cameroon, I hope that the Minister will indicate in his reply how the UK Government intend to act to promote reconciliation there. As our own representative at the UN, Jonathan Allen, said in the Security Council just last Thursday,

“words alone will not improve things”.

We have had plenty of words about Cameroon. But when the bishops and the imams tried to come together on 22 November, there was not the support in the Anglophone conference to enable them to meet. The Government of Cameroon had not created an environment where it was possible for that conference to build and assist in the delivery of a process of reconciliation, so the Commonwealth Ministerial Action Group and our membership of it must act in this area.

We cannot continue just to rely on words and exhortation. Reconciliation demands activism on the part of civil society and government, and not words alone. When we have that, then perhaps we will have met the call that Martin Luther King reflected when he called for a world in which—and in this, he was of course reflecting Amos’s original call—justice rolls down like the waters and righteousness like an everlasting stream.

Zimbabwe

Lord Boateng Excerpts

Thursday 23rd November 2017 Lords Chamber

[Earl Howe]

My Lords, DfID is already active on a number of fronts in Zimbabwe, as the noble Lord will be aware. If there are free and fair elections, Britain and indeed the international community would be prepared to support the country in whatever way is thought appropriate. We are putting together a package of support that will be tied to political and economic reform and implemented alongside international partners.

[Lord Boateng (Lab)]

My Lords—

[Lord Chidgey (LD)]

My Lords—

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[Earl Howe]

My Lords, several steps need to happen before Zimbabwe can rejoin the Commonwealth. First, it falls to Zimbabwe itself to apply to the Commonwealth Secretariat and to make it clear to the Commonwealth that Zimbabwe fulfils the criteria on human rights, the rule of law and democracy that are necessary for Commonwealth membership. Its eventual readmittance to the Commonwealth will obviously be a matter for all Commonwealth members to decide following a formal approach by Zimbabwe in the way that I described.

[Lord Boateng]

My Lords, effective election monitoring will be key to the holding of free and fair elections in Zimbabwe. What support can Her Majesty’s Government give to the churches and other civil society organisations in the work they do on the ground so successfully in Africa, because that at least belongs to Africa, is rooted there and can be owned by the whole community in Zimbabwe?

[Earl Howe]

I very much agree with the noble Lord. We are putting together a potential package of measures to support a credible election process and encourage economic recovery, to be delivered alongside our international partners—but, I emphasise, in exchange for meaningful political and economic reforms.

Strategic Defence and Security Review

Lord Boateng Excerpts

Friday 12th November 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Boateng]

My Lords, at the outset I declare an interest as a non-executive director of AEGIS Defence Services and as a trustee of a number of charities operating in conflict and post-conflict regions in Africa and the wider world.

There is an interest that I do not need to declare because I bear the marks of it on my body still, in that I served in the Treasury between 2001 and 2005. As Chief Secretary to the Treasury, I conducted two comprehensive spending reviews. I bear the marks inflicted by a number of noble friends and noble and gallant Members of this House. It is not in my defence that I speak, but I did note that the noble Lord, Lord Robertson of Port Ellen, referred to the Treasury as predatory. It is incumbent on me to spring to the defence of my erstwhile Civil Service colleagues in the Treasury to say that the defence and intelligence spending teams of Her Majesty's Treasury are dedicated public servants—indeed, the armed services and the intelligence services have no better friends in Whitehall—but they have their job to do.

[Lord Robertson of Port Ellen]

I just want to clarify that I was talking about the leadership in the Treasury, more than the people who executed the policy.

[Lord Boateng]

I am comforted by that, and I am sure that the civil servants, who follow with great attention the debates in this House, will be similarly comforted. In response to the noble Lord, I make one observation about my time as Chief Secretary that he may find comforting. My experience is that if you are to have comprehensive spending reviews, which are necessary, and if you are to have strategic defence reviews, which are certainly necessary, it is better that the strategic defence review follows the comprehensive spending review, in this sense. The strategic defence review ought to impact on the comprehensive spending review that follows it, rather than the other way round. To have the two at the same time runs a danger—and it must be said that this strategic defence review demonstrates that danger all too clearly. As Chief Secretary, it is a help to have your feet held to the fire by the chiefs and Ministers who are able to refer you to a strategic defence review, to say that this is the commitment that the Government have made and then to expect you, as Chief Secretary, to live up to that commitment. That was certainly the approach taken during the two CSRs that I conducted and, yes, I was duffed up—Chief Secretaries always are—but at the end of the day there was a result that I think did justice to the cause, the national interest and to the service.

I fear that this strategic defence review has been unduly impacted upon by the fact that a CSR was taking place at the same time. There is too much influence of the concerns that have to dominate a CSR evident in the strategic defence and security review, but we must give it time to sink in, and we will see what emerges.

There is one very welcome statement within the review:

“Recent experience has shown that instability and conflict overseas can pose risks to the UK, including by creating environments in which terrorists and organised crime groups can recruit for, plan and direct their global operations ... A lack of effective government, weak security and poverty can all cause instability and will be exacerbated in the future by competition for resources, growing populations and climate change”.

That is true, and during my time as a high commissioner in sub-Saharan Africa, I certainly found that to be true.

One of the greatest bulwarks against that insecurity is an all too often under-remarked upon and under-recognised aspect of the Ministry of Defence’s effort: defence diplomacy. It is the soft power instrument applied by the MoD and by the dedicated band of men and women who do the business of defence diplomacy, which the MoD described in its policy paper 1 of 2000. Defence diplomacy is,

“activities undertaken by the MOD to dispel hostility, build and maintain trust and assist in the development of democratically accountable armed forces, thereby making a significant contribution to conflict prevention and resolution”.

That is a very important task, and it is conducted by very skilled and experienced service men and women who deserve credit for what they have done and are doing. However, the sad thing is that—and my own Government must take their fair share of responsibility for this—having made a very good start in the strategic defence review of 1998, which identified Africa as being a place where we ought to be applying this form of soft power, in the intervening years defence diplomacy activity in Africa and elsewhere has slowly declined. We have in fact cut back on the British military advisory and training teams, the short-term military teams and the consultancy services undertaken by security sector advisory teams. They have all been cut back as a result of the distorting influence of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I hope that this new strategic defence and security review will begin to reverse that process. I hope that the conflict pool, which is now to be increased to some £300 million by 2014-15, will not be used just to fund programmes but will be underpinned by a strategy. That is the one question I have for the Minister. Is there to be an Africa strategy? Is there to be a strategy that calls upon DfID, the FCO, the MoD and, importantly, on the very considerable resources available to DfID that are not available to the FCO and the MoD to underpin that strategy? If so, that will be welcome news in Africa because there cannot be development without security and there are no better men and women at doing it than those in our military services. They deserve credit and support, and I hope they get the resources from this conflict pool and a strategy that underpins the application of those resources. All of us across government, in both Houses and on all sides, need to be concerned about not just the quantity of our spend, but its effectiveness, and give the strength and support to the men and women of our services that they deserve in their valuable work in Africa.