United Kingdom: Global Position

Lord Hannay of Chiswick Excerpts

Thursday 13th March 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick (CB)]

My Lords, it is customary to congratulate the holder of a debate such as this one, and I do so with all the more enthusiasm on this occasion, since that person is the noble Lord, Lord Howell, who was instrumental in setting up your Lordships’ International Relations and Defence Committee and was its first chair. I also congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Pitkeathley, on his thought-provoking maiden speech.

As for the timing of our debate, that too is pretty good. With the publication of the global strategy review from the noble Lord, Lord Robertson of Port Ellen, only a few weeks away, that report and this debate are together linking Britain’s hard and soft power, which must always be considered together if we are to get a full picture.

The first thing to be said is that the word “global” in the title of today’s debate has nothing whatever to do with that silly slogan of “global Britain” dreamed up by Foreign Secretary Johnson to characterise post-Brexit Britain. Britain’s global role has existed since the 16th century and had nothing whatever to do with whether we were inside the EU or outside it, even though we had a lot of pretty tempestuous relationships with the other countries of Europe along the road. Nor does it have much to do with that other emanation of Johnsonian imagination—the Indo-Pacific tilt, which overlooked that, if you tilt towards something, you necessarily tilt away from something else, in this case Europe. President Putin’s aggression against Ukraine has upended that tilt comprehensively.

The decision at the end of last month to substantially increase defence spending deserves full support, but the decision to finance that exclusively by a massive cut in our overseas aid budget, which had already been plundered to pay for Ukrainian refugees in this country, is going to inflict great damage on our soft power and influence around the world. The least the Government should do now is to commit themselves to increasing the 0.3% of GNI as soon as growth picks up.

One of the biggest challenges we face around the world is the damage being inflicted by the Trump Administration’s withdrawal from multilateral organisations and programmes, from the World Health Organization to the Paris climate accords to the UN’s Human Rights Council—and there could be more to come. Together with the cuts in US aid, these are serious decisions which will weaken western influence, whether or not it is replaced by Chinese involvement, and they will impact some of the poorest people in the world. We will need to do what we can to sustain and strengthen these multilateral organisations, moving ahead, if necessary, without the US, in a plurilateral framework with other like-minded countries; for example, at the World Trade Organization for the proposed pandemic convention, and at the UN. Can the Minister say whether that is the Government’s policy?

In all this we will need to work in close co-operation with and keep in sharp focus our European partners, with the Prime Minister’s aim of a security and defence pact with them at its heart. What is the proposed timetable for moving ahead with that and how does it relate to the handling of the fighting in Ukraine?

To conclude, in all this we will need international partners. Britain is no longer a great power, as it thought it was, perhaps for a little bit too long. But we are a significant middle-ranking power, so we need representation around the world, and that will need to be taken into account in this summer’s spending review, avoiding such pretty useless substitutes as regional representation. We must nurture our main instruments of soft power, such as the BBC World Service, which should be financed by the taxpayer and not the licence holder, and the British Council.

In all this, we should show awareness of how others see us and not just of how we see ourselves.