Foreign Affairs: Global Role, Emerging Powers and New Markets

Lord Dykes Excerpts

Thursday 6th December 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Dykes]

My Lords, it is always a great pleasure to follow the very wise words of the noble Lord, Lord Parekh, and his enlightened expression of the need for countries, particularly those going through very severe periods of austerity, as we are and as are other countries in Europe and elsewhere, to maintain civilised values in their external links with the outside world. It is also a pleasure to follow the equally wise words of my noble friend Lord Bates and his justified idealism about the need for a proper definition of politician and statesman. He did not have time to elaborate but I hope that he will not mind that I mention a rather cynical definition of a politician. Fifty years ago, a former US Defence Secretary, whose name I have forgotten, said to one of his friends, “Listen, honey, I’m a politician. That means that when I’m not kissing babies I’m stealing their lollipops. Never forget it”. I thought that rather harsh working definition of a politician should have been overtaken by events—and indeed that has proved to be the case in certain countries, and in Britain, too, which unlike the United States has a gentler view of the important requirements of a capitalist economy, but a modern, welfare capitalist economy, as the Germans have been so adept in creating, and the French in their own way.

I declare an interest, as I live in France. It does not mean that you have to be emotional and bombastic about your own country. We are all European countries, and we can be proud of every single level of our attachment, down from the individual street to the village and town, the county, zone, region and country. I am intensely patriotic about Britain, but I see plenty of faults here as well, as one does in other countries. But I am even keener that we resume our place as a legitimate and modern member of the European Union. I thank particularly the noble Lord, Lord Anderson, at the beginning of the debate, and the noble Lord, Lord Judd, who also referred to this in very strong terms. There is a need for this country to resume and reattach itself to its political maturity, of which we were very proud for many decades. Why have we become so insecure and immature about our European link, a very precious thing that we negotiated with great pain and difficulty over many years? We took 12 years to get in because of two French vetoes, then two years afterwards the then Labour Government decided that they wanted to renegotiate a substantial portion of the terms. No wonder our colleagues, patient as they are, begin to get very exasperated sometimes with our EU membership, particularly with the antics of what is admittedly still quite a small minority of Conservative MPs in the other place. They are going through a charade, partly because of UKIP but also for other reasons, of attachment to a pretend sovereignty that no longer exists in any country—not even in the United States, in the end, a country that is regarded by some people as being in decline.

I thank warmly the noble Lord, Lord Howell, as others have done, for launching this debate. It is always a great problem when you are talking about the whole world, but he did it very effectively, because he focused quite rightly on a number of things, particularly the Commonwealth. You can sound like one of those terrible travelogue films from the cinemas in the 1950s, which would say at the beginning, “As the sun pulls away from the jetty and the ship sinks in the east, we say goodbye to such and such a territory”. He did not do that; he focused on some of the modern requirements in this country in the sense of the Commonwealth, which is a very important body in every way. It is developing, as someone said, with an inadequate budget—but I hope that that will be changed in future. I appreciate, and have always been glad about, the attachment of the Commonwealth entity into the Foreign Office, as it is a more modern position and configuration for the modern world.

I, too, praise, as the noble Lord, Lord Howell, and others have done, the Foreign Office for the work that it has done over the years. I have always been distressed at the demoralisation of the Foreign Office by what is coming up to 15 years of cutbacks in expenditure, budgets and so on, in two or three phases. Yet another phase is now threatened by the Treasury, which is not so keen so often to cut back its own establishment in physical terms, as it lectures other departments on cutting back theirs. The Foreign Office has put up with this for many years. It does dent morale if people constantly say to diplomats, representing this country overseas with great pride, that they must just think about trade and commerce and nothing else. That is not the job of a diplomat; it is an important component, but it is not the exclusive job of a diplomat, and I think that other noble Lords have alluded to that.

I endorse the views expressed on the role that Britain can play in the Middle East, as a particular example of where we need to exert ourselves more. There was an incipient sign of this recently, but then it became rather gentle again, with the usual obfuscations that personally I find very depressing and unnecessary. This country needs to assert itself, with others, including Germany, which has always had that problem after the nightmare of the Third Reich, in dealing positively vis-à-vis the Palestinians in the search for a proper, genuine and just settlement between Israel and Palestine. It is a most important issue. The present Israeli Government are not a particularly attractive Government—and I am sad to say that, because I am a great admirer of Israel. It is a wonderful country, with many outstanding achievements. But to some extent the geopolitical wisdom of yesteryear, as with the United States, has left it a bit at the moment, and I regret that. Israel needs to understand that it cannot be defiant all the time, so that in the end the Palestinian territory is the only one in the world without civic and voting rights as a genuine entity and country. The UN charter cannot allow that. Therefore, that would mean the end of the Zionist state as we know it. I personally would prefer there to be two states, side by side, including a Zionist state with perhaps not too much religion—because a lot of Israelis are a bit worried about that as well—but an adequate, normal or normative amount. Then they could reach that solution with Palestine that would mean shaking hands and getting on. I was an official observer for the EU Commission in the South African elections, and the day after you saw the scales fall away from people’s eyes as the nonsense of apartheid was demolished and destroyed—although not immediately. It takes time. But it has happened, and it can happen between Israel and Palestine. If any two countries can work together in future, it is those two, and it is up to Netanyahu and Lieberman to see that, I hope with the advice in future of the British Government, who have been a little too hesitant.

If the United States is in decline and ceasing to be a leader of the western world, it must at least in this coming period, working on the global basis that the noble Lord, Lord Howell, has advocated for this country, make sure that it reaches the solution necessary in the Middle East. It would be the greatest tribute that there could be to Barack Obama. He was given the Nobel Peace Prize in advance of this achievement. I hope that that prize was justified.