Foreign Policy

Lord Maples Excerpts

Thursday 1st July 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Maples]

My Lords, it is a very short walk from the green Benches at that end of the building to the red leather Benches here, but in my case it has been a very long journey, both chronologically and spiritually—27 years it has taken. I have been made to feel incredibly welcome here by people I had never met before, by friends on all sides of the House and by the staff and Doorkeepers. I detect a slightly less partisan attitude and tone of voice than I found at the other end, but maybe the malice and daggers are better hidden and more subtly used—I wait to find out. I hope that your Lordships will forgive me if, from time to time, I lapse into the old terminology and attempt to address the “chair” or refer to a noble Lord as “my honourable friend”. I will learn as quickly as I can.

It is 27 years, almost to the week, since I made my last maiden speech. I do not remember very much about it and I do not suggest that anybody should read it, but I do remember that it was on a Friday morning—the House sat on Friday mornings, as your Lordships’ House does—and after it I ran into the noble Lord, Lord Goodlad, then Alastair Goodlad, an old friend, who said, “Come on, let’s celebrate and have lunch in the Members’ Dining Room”. When you were a new boy in the House of Commons, like me, you sought out the most low-profile, sub-zero part of the Members’ Dining Room to eat in—but not with Alastair. I found myself at a table with two of the party’s grandees: the noble Lord, Lord Lawson, who was then Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Lord Hailsham, who was then Lord Chancellor. To say that I was overawed would be an understatement.

I do not think that I said anything, but I remember one thing about the lunch. Lord Hailsham told a wonderful story which was characteristic of him. Waiting for a gap in the conversation, and a propos of absolutely nothing, he said—noble Lords who knew him will have to imagine the voice, because I cannot imitate it—“When my father was at Oxford, there was a don who had met Napoleon”. This was a bit of a showstopper: you start to calculate if the arithmetic adds up and decide that perhaps it could. “My father asked the don what he was like, to which the don said: ‘Well, you could tell he wasn’t a university man’”. That was a wonderful illustration of Oxford’s attitude to the man who dominated Europe for 25 years, and also a wonderful and typical Lord Hailsham story.

Another friend who is now here and was there said to me: “You will find that the difference here, John, is that in the House of Commons the Back-Benchers do not know what they are talking about and here they do”. We have just had an illustration of that from three noble Lords in a row, and I can see several more on the list, so I hope that I do not disprove the assertion.

There are many things that I would like to say about foreign policy in the course of the next few months. I am conscious of the fact that I am in the presence of people who have spent their lives practising diplomacy at the highest level. Much of what I will say is perhaps too controversial for today. However, I will leave the House with a couple of thoughts. The first is that foreign policy must be pursued more clearly in our national interests, and rebalanced in that direction by the new Government. Secondly, I hope that the conflict in Afghanistan can be brought to an early conclusion. It is becoming too costly in terms of both blood and treasure, and I hope that in future we will be more circumspect about military intervention.

I want to make one more substantive point. Your Lordships will find no greater friend of the United States than me. I lived there; I went to business school there; I visit it frequently; and I love and admire the place enormously. I think that we in Europe owe it a huge debt of gratitude. However, I do not think that anyone can follow United States politics or maintain contact with successive Administrations without coming to the conclusion that the special relationship is an awful lot more special to us than it is to them. That is very understandable. Since 1989, the focus of United States interest and policy has shifted away from Europe and towards the Middle East and Asia. The US expects us in Europe to sort out Europe’s problems and to pull our weight in a way that we pretty spectacularly failed to do, for example, in the Balkans. There is still in the United States a propensity to unilateralism, with which we feel a little uncomfortable. The US needs diplomatic allies but it does not really need military ones. We have always had our feet three-quarters in the transatlantic camp and one-quarter in the European camp, and I think that we need to rebalance that.

I should like to pick up on a point made by the noble Lord, Lord Hannay—that is, the use of the European Union’s common foreign and security policy, or at least the intergovernmental part of it. I used to be, and still am, a Eurosceptic, but I used to be incredibly favourably inclined towards the European Union’s economic policies and rather disinclined towards its intergovernmental efforts. However, I now find myself standing on my head over that. I think that its interventions on the economic front are on the whole unproductive but that there is perhaps an opportunity in the various mechanisms and institutions of Europe, at their widest, for us to conduct part of our foreign policy in a more effective way than we have been able to do in the past. I do not think that I or my Eurosceptic friends have to fear this, because the European Union will not have a foreign policy initiative that Germany, France and the United Kingdom do not all agree with, so effectively we would have a veto on it. However, I think we agree that the weight, authority and various diplomatic weapons that the European Union could bring to bear would be valuable and could be used much more effectively.

Foreign policy is about the long-term protection and enhancement of the United Kingdom’s interests. Sometimes that will involve the promotion of values and democracy, but more often I believe that it will and should be about achieving stability.