Middle East (IRC Report)

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Tuesday 4th July 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, I, too, congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Howell, and the committee on this excellent report. I welcome the Minister to his new post and very much hope that he will continue the occasional briefings that his predecessors had for Members of the House of Lords; I suggest that some of the issues in the Middle East might be a very strong candidate for such a briefing.

I am not a Middle East expert, and I learned a lot from this report, including about the incoherence of British responses to the changes which are under way. It sets out very clearly the underlying instability of the region, the rapid rise in its population, with unemployed but educated young people, and the rapid transition from traditional society to cities and mass communication in one or, at the most, two generations. It has weak states, mostly run by old men or military men, but now some Gulf states are run by young men in a hurry. The Arab spring was a failed attempt at transition away from autocratic regimes, but the conditions that led to those popular eruptions across the region are still there and unresolved and are likely to create further eruptions.

Climate change threatens to make the situation worse. The likelihood of outward migration on a large scale is there for multiple reasons: refugees, economic migrants and the politically discontented. Migration from the Middle East and North Africa, not from eastern Europe, is the long-term immigration challenge that the UK and other European states face, unlike what Migration Watch UK and the leave campaign have been trying to sell to the British public over recent years.

The report also sets out very well the loss of western influence and the limits of British influence. After all, Britain’s moment in the Middle East ended 60 years ago with the disastrous intervention in Suez. The report does not go very far into the influence of Middle East states and elites in Britain, but the complexities of the relationship work both ways. Qatari, Kuwaiti and other Gulf investment in London property and British banks and companies is highly visible. The personal links between Gulf royal families and others and British high society is evident to anyone who goes to Royal Ascot or walks through Belgravia and goes into its restaurants. The question of who is influencing whom is not easy to determine.

At the other end of the social scale, there is a significant flow of influence and finance to Muslim communities within the UK. Saudi and Salafi influence within Pakistan flows indirectly back into British cities, mosques and madrassahs. The diversity of our British Muslim community means that conflicts across the Muslim world risk spilling over into our own country with attacks on Ahmadis or Shias in our cities. Much of the Turkish community in London is Kurdish, and some is Alevi. In Britain, Arabs and Turks, Iranians and Kurds breathe the freer air and plot peaceful or revolutionary change at home to the concern of their autocratic Governments at home. So we cannot disengage, but we have to recognise, as the report makes clear, that we have limited influence on our own and must work with others—above all, as the report suggests, with other major European states, mainly France and Germany, and, in so far as we can with the volatility of the Trump Administration’s policies, the United States.

The latest crisis is that between Qatar and rest of the GCC. Some of us are quite worried that this could become a long-term breach. For example, there have been suggestions from ambassadors of the UAE, which were reported in our newspapers, that third countries may after a while have to choose whether they wish to trade with Qatar or with the UAE and Saudi Arabia. It is not at all in our interests to have to make choices like that. Given Saudi claims that Qatar is the main sponsor of terrorism across the Middle East, the case for publication, at least in part, of the UK government report on the Muslim Brotherhood and on Saudi support for radical groups in the UK and elsewhere is now even stronger than before. Will the Minister say what the Government’s intentions are on this? If we are to understand and respond to the comments and lobbying that some of us are getting about the positions we take on this dispute, it would help a great deal to have some sense of the Government’s interpretation of the Saudi record. There were promises to Liberal Democrats before and after the 2015 election that these reports would be provided. At the very least, we need a confidential briefing for parliamentarians. I note that this report supports a cautious dialogue with the Muslim Brotherhood, which is a rather different position to the hard lines adopted over the past week or two by Dubai and Riyadh, and is cautiously critical of Saudi support for Wahhabi approaches to Islam in other Muslim states. I recently read a very worrying article in the Atlantic magazine on King Salman’s recent visit to Indonesia and the influence which the Saudis have had in Indonesia in changing the tolerant attitude which Islam has had to other faiths and to different varieties of Islam into a much less tolerant version.

There is a real danger that the UK will end up too closely aligned with the Sunni Gulf states in their political and sectarian conflict with Iran. I note that a number of noble Lords say that it is a fundamentally political not sectarian conflict, but when it reaches the ground, some Sunni kill Shia, so it unavoidably becomes deeply sectarian. The report again recommends a cautious but positive approach to Iran, encouraging the moderate and open elements in that country’s complex political system against the hard-liners. Iran is a major potential trade partner and a necessary element in any more stable Middle East. British Conservatives should not fall in behind US Republicans in their obsession with Iran as a global threat, which is itself fuelled by Benjamin Netanyahu’s Government in Israel.

The next crisis in the region will be over the future of Iraq and Syria after the defeat of Daesh, with Turks, Kurds of different factions and from different regions, Iranians, Saudis, Qataris, Russians and Americans all with different preferences to push. Britain, again, will have only limited influence but will be affected by what happens, and our influence will best be exercised in co-operation with our European allies.

The report is rightly critical of the confusions of British policy towards the region and of Britain’s failure to adjust. Boris Johnson’s speech last December on returning “east of Suez” was a blast of imperial nostalgia that had no strategic rationale behind it. Why are we expanding our military footprint in the Gulf? Is it to join the GCC states in containing—or even fighting—Iran, to impress the Americans with our claim still to be a global power, to compete with the French in selling arms to the Gulf states, or what? Was it wise to accept the Bahraini Government’s offer to pay for an expansion of our naval base there, which must look to the majority Shia population of Bahrain as a British commitment to defending the current regime against future change? The Government promised us a Gulf strategy paper before the end of last year. It has not appeared, presumably because there is no coherent Gulf strategy. Can the Minister tell us what plans the Government have to publish such a strategy?

The report notes that Brexit makes UK foreign policy more dependent on relations with other regions outside Europe and that Liam Fox, as International Trade Secretary, sees enormous potential for further growth in economic interdependence with the Middle East, above all with the Gulf states. But the report also notes time and again that we have to work with others and that it will be wise to co-ordinate our approaches as closely as possible with France and Germany—as the UK government did successfully in the nuclear negotiations with Iran.

I worry about the incoherence of government policy towards the Middle East almost as much as I worry about its incoherence towards the European region. It is still operating on the assumption that we should follow the United States as closely as we can and still sees ourselves as wiser and more global than other European states. I wish that government policy were closer to that which this report recommends.