United Kingdom: Global Position

Lord Sherbourne of Didsbury Excerpts

Thursday 13th March 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Sherbourne of Didsbury (Con)]

My Lords, in an episode of “The Simpsons”, Homer Simpson says of the Economist magazine, “I don’t need to spend $4 a week to be told that Indonesia’s at the crossroads”. Today, we in the West really are at the crossroads, as my noble friend Lord Howard of Lympne and many others have said. The international chessboard has been thrown up and we still do not know where the pieces will land. I congratulate my noble friend Lord Howell of Guildford on securing this debate at such an important time.

It seems to me that we now face three main challenges, and I would be interested to hear the Minister’s reflections on them. The first is our relationship with the United States. Until now, the Anglo-American alliance has been the cornerstone of British foreign policy. The question we are all now asking is: how far can we rely on the United States? We know we have to take on more defence, but how reliable is the US as an ally?

The second great challenge is our relationship with Europe and how we recalibrate it. The Prime Minister sees himself, I think, as a bridge between Europe and the United States. I do not quite know how that will work, so the Minister’s reflections on that would also be very helpful.

The third great challenge is defence. Of course, we should have been spending more on defence for many years, so I very much welcome the Government’s decision to increase defence expenditure, going up to a target of 3% of GDP. But I would like to know a bit more about not just the percentage but what exactly the defence expenditure will go on, what it will provide and how it will help meet our objectives. I am sure that this will also come out in the defence review in due course.

I want to make two other points. First, as my noble friend Lord Waldegrave said, the strength of a country lies in not just its hard power but its economic strength. We know that for many years we have been falling behind the United States in particular, which has had much greater economic growth than we have. We need to make sure that we do everything we can to secure—I know that this is the Government’s objective—a more successful and stronger economy, because that gives Britain strength in the world.

The second point, referred to by my noble friend Lord Howell of Guildford, is soft power. He referred to the report published in 2014 when he chaired the committee that looked into soft power. I urge the Government to go back and take that report off the shelf. It is full of recommendations and really worth pulling out again to see what else the Government can do.