Shanghai Cooperation Organisation

Lord Skidelsky Excerpts

Thursday 16th October 2025 Grand Committee

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords—

[Lord Skidelsky (CB)]

My Lords—

[Baroness in Waiting/Government Whip (Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent) (Lab)]

My Lords, it is the turn of the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett.

[Lord Skidelsky (CB)]

My Lords, I am so sorry—my mistake.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Skidelsky (CB)]

My Lords, I do not want to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, in her discourse on the Ukraine war. My position is known on that. As for the rest of it, I have more sympathy with the spirit of the noble Baroness, Lady Stuart, than I have with that of the noble Lord, Lord Hannan.

I may have a closer connection with Tianjin than any Member of either House having gone to school there nearly 80 years ago. I hope this will not in itself cause me to be thought of as a security risk. I agree with the noble Baroness that the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation poses challenges to the international order. I accept that, and I think we all do, but we need to be clear about the nature of the challenges and of the order being challenged.

The challenges referred to by the noble Baroness arise from the fact that power in the world is shifting. The clout of the NATO world is shrinking while that of the non-NATO world is growing, and accommodation of the international order to these shifts in the balance of power is absolutely inevitable. That has always happened throughout history, and the question is whether it will be peaceful or violent. The numbers are striking—the noble Baroness mentioned some of them.

In the late 1980s, the countries later to form the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation accounted for only about 5% of global output while western nations produced well over 50%. Today, the SCO’s member states generate 23% of global output while the western share has shrunk to 30%. To take demography, whereas in the late 1980s the west still represented close to a quarter of the world’s population, today the SCO countries account for 42% while the NATO world has shrunk to about 10%. If we take BRICS-plus, the scale of the shift is even more dramatic, with 56% of the world’s population, roughly 40% of the world’s global output, being controlled by this non-western grouping. So we should find nothing surprising about the Tianjin summits initiative. They are designed to insert a large group of countries into the structure of global governance, from which they felt they have been excluded. That is the essence of it.

Shifts in global power always hard to accommodate peacefully because we do not have a world Government —we cannot simply vote out one lot of people and vote in another lot. The reason why we in Britain find it so hard to accept the current shift is that we mix it up with morals. We claim to stand for a set of rules, institutions and power arrangements which are or should be morally binding on everyone. We therefore interpret any challenge to that order as, ipso facto, immoral and to be resisted, if possible by war.

The view from Tianjin is of course very different. President Xi calls the western rules-based international order a cloak for the “bullying behaviour” and “hegemonic ambitions” of the United States. China, we need to recall, had most of its coastline divided up between colonial powers. Tianjin, where I went to school in 1948, had just emerged from extraterritorial status. So, multipolarity is also a moral position, not just an assertion of power. It is also a moral, anti-imperial position. Properly interpreted, it means the quest for peace through agreement between powers with different value systems; that is the only way we will get a peaceful world. It means we in this country have to accept domestic policies we find abhorrent, accept the notion of spheres of influence, accept as legitimate the use of soft power by China and others to influence opinion in this country without becoming paranoid about it, as I think we tend to be.

It is our highly negative attitude to multipolarity which has caused it to spill over into economic warfare—I mean both economic sanctions and tariff wars. Can our rulers not see that it is the policy of economic sanctions which has led to the world dividing into economic blocs? That is not an inescapable tenancy of multipolarity but it comes out of the union of geopolitics and economics—economics used as an instrument of geopolitics. In addition, except for very small examples, sanctions have never deterred or stopped behaviour of which we disapprove. What they do achieve is to divert trade in money and goods away from their comparative advantage to protected areas, which therefore makes the world poorer, and that is what is happening today.

We must accept the reality of a multipolar world, and we must reform the institutions best fitted to govern it. The noble Baroness referred to one or two of them. The UN Security Council, the IMF and the WTO have to be reformed. China needs to be a partner in this process, and that means accepting China’s right to share in the governance of the world. We have not done that so far, and the importance of this debate is to draw attention to that fact.