Foreign Affairs: Global Role, Emerging Powers and New Markets

Lord Hannay of Chiswick Excerpts

Thursday 6th December 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick]

My Lords, I very much welcome today’s debate, and the initiative of the noble Lord, Lord Howell, in securing it, not just because it is the first occasion that the House has had to conduct a wide-ranging discussion of foreign policy issues since the debate on the Address in May but because it offers an opportunity for me to continue a dialogue with the noble Lord about some aspects of the Government’s external policies, which was cut short on that occasion through lack of time—even if his own position has changed, to my regret.

I have to say, and I hope that the noble Lord will forgive me, that I will remain completely baffled as to the significance of the phrase “network world”. In the interim, I have reflected a bit and am reminded of the character in the Molière play who said that he had some difficulty in distinguishing between poetry and prose, but who was assured that prose was what he had been talking all his life. I think that I have been doing networks all my life; it is not something that has been discovered in the past three or four years.

If the debate also reminds us of the lacuna that exists as a result of our not having a foreign affairs committee, or an international affairs committee, in this House, which could periodically report to the House on key issues, it will have served a genuinely useful purpose. Before addressing a few general issues, I just wish to say how deeply I regret the Government’s decision to abstain on the UN resolution giving the Palestinians a modestly enhanced status at the UN. It was the noble Lord, Lord Carrington, who in 1980 first persuaded the European Community, followed some years later by the United States, to back a two-state solution. I believe that we should have followed that logic in voting for the resolution, not have pursued some non-negotiable conditions to give ourselves a quasi-alibi for an abstention. It may have seemed ingenious, but it was certainly not principled.

The general criticism that I would make of the Government’s external policies are that they are a little too narrowly focused on the cultivation of bilateral relationships and are a little too mercantilist in their approach to trade policy. The Foreign Secretary’s actions to strengthen and extend our bilateral diplomatic network and, in particular, to build up our representation in the main emerging powers, is to be applauded. However the objective should not be exclusively to promote British exports and inward investment, but every bit as much to influence the policy decisions of countries whose increasing role in the major multilateral organisations will make them essential partners in shaping a rules-based set of solutions to the global challenges that we all face, whether in trade policy, climate change, development, nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation or in nurturing peace and security more generally. That second part of the narrative often seems to be missing.

Then there is the mantra du jour that we are in a “global race”. There is some sense in this as a means of galvanising the energies of business and of bringing home the fact that we live in a highly competitive world where we have fallen some way behind our main competitors, but it misses out totally the concept of international co-operation which is every bit as important a dimension of a world in which Britain, a middle-ranking power which needs partners and allies to achieve its objectives, can hope to thrive. There is a real risk that the aftershocks from the great financial and economic crisis of 2008 will undermine the gains made since the end of the Cold War in international co-operation, and that the major multilateral organisations such as the UN, the IMF, the WTO, the G20, NATO and the EU will lose political backing, be underresourced and decrease in relevance. If that were to happen, I believe Britain would be one of the main losers. So by all means let us pursue strong bilateral relationships but not at the expense of those multilateral, rules-based organisations in which we have hitherto invested so much effort with some considerable success.

Nothing is more difficult than achieving coherence in a Government’s external policies and in one important sector I believe the UK is currently falling far short of that. I do not imagine anyone will dispute that the higher education sector in this country is a world leader and that over recent years it has been a rapidly growing source of invisible exports of great benefit to our universities and to the country as a whole. Incidentally, it is also a hugely growing source of employment in many parts of this country where that is lacking. The potential for even greater benefit in both ways in the years ahead is there but the Government’s own immigration policies are putting all that at risk. Last week we had the Minister for Immigration at the Home Office, Mr Mark Harper, rejoicing at the latest immigration statistics, which showed a sharp drop in net migration, the lion’s share of which was attributable to a substantial reduction in the number of students coming here. These are not people coming to take jobs but people coming with ready cash to purchase services which our colleges and universities can provide, people who in future years, when their studies are completed, will often become a part of that worldwide network of bilateral contacts which the Government are trying so hard to build up. What on earth is going on? What are the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the Treasury doing about this truly aberrant state of affairs? I hope that the Minister, whose work in encouraging British exports, both visible and invisible, I very much admire and support will have something to say on this when he replies to the debate.

I have one final point. A debate on this subject would not be complete without a word on the European Union and the European dimension of Britain’s external policies, although we will have an opportunity to discuss that more fully before the Recess. If Britain’s influence in Brussels becomes marginal—even more so if we were to withdraw from the European Union—our influence worldwide in Washington, Beijing, Delhi, Brasilia and elsewhere would suffer too. We should have no illusions about that. Nor would our exports or our inward investment benefit—quite the contrary. It is, after all, not membership of the EU which can explain why our exports to China in recent years have developed so much less buoyantly than those of Germany. So we need to take a more imaginative, constructive approach to that European dimension than we have done recently, and to regard it as an essential and integral part of our external policies, not something that dare not speak its name.