Brexit: Foreign and Security Policy Co-operation

Lord Hannay of Chiswick Excerpts

Thursday 20th October 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick (CB)]

My Lords, amid the cacophony of public debate about hard and soft Brexit, the relative priority to be given to immigration controls and remaining in the single market, barely a word has been spoken by the Government or anyone else about the subject we are debating today: foreign and security policy co-operation with the European states following the referendum. All the more praise, therefore, to the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, for bringing this matter forward, because it is an important issue which merits full and careful consideration before the Article 50 process is invoked. It is good, too, that this debate will enable the noble Baroness to fill in part of that otherwise blank piece of paper which so far contains nothing except the words “Brexit means Brexit”—for all the world like the examination paper of a student who discovers that he or she has not got any of the answers.

Why is the matter important? Because the EU’s CFSP is a living, working, policy-making network which makes itself felt in every part of the world and in every international organisation; because it has enabled the UK to extend its foreign policy influence, ever since the noble Lord, Lord Carrington, helped to set it up in 1980; and because it has some notable successes to its credit—pointing the way to a diplomatic solution to the Iranian nuclear crisis in the face of early US resistance, making progress on the relationship between Serbia and Kosovo, responding with economic sanctions to Russia’s aggressive actions in Crimea and eastern Ukraine and combating piracy off the Horn of Africa.

All this will be at risk if we simply sit here and allow Brexit to sweep us out of the EU foreign and security policy co-operation with nothing put in its place. Not only will we have sharply reduced influence on foreign policy decisions taken in Brussels and in Washington, where our voice has so far been amplified by our seat at the EU table; we will become what I would describe as a “me, too” country, falling in with decisions reached by others—by the US and the EU, by the US and China, and by the EU and its many developing country partners, who will find it more useful to work with the EU than with the UK living on its own. If we stand up on our own against human rights abuses, for example, we will now be that much more vulnerable to retaliation—and alas, I fear, therefore that much more timid about raising those issues.

So what needs to be done? First, I suggest, we need to make it clear straight away that we will be aiming to achieve the closest, most intimate external relationship with the EU’s common foreign and security policy that can be agreed, something more far-reaching than the EU has ever had before with a third country. Is that realistic? I believe it is. After all, we come to the table with important assets—a worldwide diplomatic network and a permanent seat on the UN Security Council —and we are one of the two most effective member states in Europe in projecting power. We should make it clear that the EU and the US will remain our partners of choice, whose values and interests we share.

A positive approach like that will also be of value in demonstrating that we are not just cherry-picking, and in balancing other parts of the forthcoming negotiations, where more adversarial considerations will necessarily come into play. What, then, should this new external relationship with the EU’s CFSP look like? Here, we should not, I suggest, be too prescriptive. There will be plenty of institutional ayatollahs on both sides, in Brussels and in Whitehall and Westminster, who will be drawing red lines and saying that this or that form of co-operation is inconceivable on ideological grounds. We should surely regain some of that pragmatism on which we pride ourselves, and have only one criterion: will it work? If it requires a proportionate financial contribution or needs us to co-operate with the sort of Brussels-centred military planning and headquarters arrangements that are clearly in the offing, we should not jib at that.

Other issues of great importance will of course be at stake in the Brexit negotiations, but we should not let them overwhelm the importance of the sector that we are discussing today. If we do so, we will live to regret it.