The UK’s Relationship with the Pacific Alliance (International Relations Committee Report)
Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts(4 years, 5 months ago)
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Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD) [V]
My Lords, I welcome this report, with reservations. The UK has neglected relations with Latin American countries since the last war. There have been periodic attempts to increase our commitment, and to reverse the decline in trading and investment links, but we have continued to lag far behind Germany and others in the intensity of our relations with most countries in the region.
I have often acted as a guide in singing tours of Westminster Abbey, where I walk over the tomb of Admiral Lord Cochrane, who at one point commanded the Chilean navy and helped found the Peruvian fleet. Britain has strong historical ties with Latin America that we have let decline. As a policy analyst working on transatlantic relations, I have attended conferences in Chile and Mexico, and have also visited Peru. The members of the Pacific Alliance are significant states. On any definition of global Britain, we should be paying more attention to relations with Latin American states and markets, but we should not fall into the trap of assuming that trade with Latin America can somehow replace trade with the European continent; nor fall into the illusion that economic integration among South American countries is an easier process to commit the UK to than any European one. I recall when I was a young academic, 50 years ago, the optimism of Mexican economists about the prospects for the Latin American Free Trade Association and other regional schemes. These failed or stagnated as regimes changed in different South American states.
The noble Lord, Lord Howell, is correct to argue that the UK needs to pay more attention to the Pacific as a region—with the rapidly growing economies of east and south-east Asia now acting as the dynamo of global growth, and with the rise of China creating new economic and security challenges—but we need to beware of overemphasising the prospect of Britain becoming a major commercial or military player in the Pacific; nor should we see commitment to Pacific co-operation as an alternative to continued engagement with European states and markets and across the wider European neighbourhood to the Mediterranean and Africa. The enthusiasm with which the Secretary of State for International Trade has just announced the UK’s application to join the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership contrasts sharply with her antagonism towards the European Union. The CPTPP, if it develops into a serious economic grouping, which is not yet clear, will compromise UK sovereignty on issues such as animal welfare, regulation of chemicals, and investor protection. It is not clear to me why such limits on sovereignty should be more acceptable to our Government in the Pacific than across the North Sea.
The Pacific Alliance is only a small player on the fringes of the Pacific region. One of its four members is not yet a member of the CPTPP. China and the USA are its dominant external partners. The EU as a whole is less important to it. Britain, as the report notes, sends less than 1% of its exports to it. A determined export drive might raise this to 2% or even 3%.
Some of the comments in the report seem questionable. We are told about the
“importance of defence co-operation between the UK and Chile”.
Is that really important compared with our defence co-operation with France and the Netherlands, which our Government attempt to hide from their own people? It is suggested that these countries should be encouraged to have closer relations with the Commonwealth, but we are not told why or how the UK will explain the value of that to the Commonwealth’s African neighbours.
Yes, we should work harder to develop trade and investment with these and other Latin American countries. No, this is not a major element in the new global Britain that the Prime Minister has promised to recreate—to make Britain great again, in his Trumpian phraseology. We await the overdue integrated review of foreign and security strategy to learn about the Government’s vision of Britain’s global role after Brexit, in which closer relations with these four states should have a significant but small part.
EU Ambassador to the UK: Diplomatic Status
Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts(4 years, 5 months ago)
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Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon (Con)
My Lords, the EU’s representation and that of EU member states is very much a matter for the European Union and those member states.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD) [V]
My Lords, I follow on from the question asked by the noble Lord, Lord Robathan. We have talked about the importance of sovereign equality in our relations with the European Union, so do we intend to accept that our representation in Brussels should be reduced both in status and in size? As a point of comparison, the United States regards its representation in Brussels as one of its most important; it is also one of its largest. Do we not think that ours should be similar?
Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon (Con)
My Lords, I agree with the noble Lord. I am sure that he will recognise, from his time as a Minister at what was the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the appointment of the new ambassador to the Permanent Mission at the European Union, who is a very capable official and acts at a very senior level. Indeed, he was centrally involved in the discussions on the new agreement that we have reached with our European Union friends.
Alexei Navalny
Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts(4 years, 5 months ago)
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Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon (Con)
My Lords, I believe that I have already addressed, in part, the issues of human rights and sanctions, and of course I will be talking to the noble Lord as we bring forward some of the broader sanction applications. On the report, we have acted. I have already alluded to legislation, and we continue to step up our activity, both domestically and internationally, to tackle illicit finance. The National Crime Agency has increased the number of investigations into corrupt leads and, among other things, the UK has used existing immigration powers in dozens of cases relating to hostile state activity. We will also review all tier 1 investor visas granted before 5 April 2015.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD) [V]
My Lords, we all recognise that the UK, as a democracy, is far more open to Russian influence than Russia is to British. Does the Minister agree that Russian interference, including finance in British politics, is at least as severe a threat to UK sovereignty as the European Court of Justice? Does he accept that the Government’s response to the ISC report is widely considered to have been “defensive and uninformative”? Can the Government assure us that they are working actively to tighten the law on foreign agents in British politics, on financial contributions from abroad to political parties and on espionage?
Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon (Con)
My Lords, I can give the noble Lord that assurance. On the question of interference in elections, he will be aware that various legal matters are already under way, so I cannot speak specifically to those. On the other matters that he raised, I have already said that we are acting, and will be responding, and have already taken steps, as our response to the ISC report has demonstrated.
International Soft Power Strategy: Role of BBC
Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts(4 years, 5 months ago)
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Lord Wallace of Saltaire
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the role of the BBC in their international soft power strategy.
The Minister of State, Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon) (Con)
My Lords, the BBC plays an important role in promoting our values globally through its independent and impartial broadcasting. It is a central part of British soft power and influence. The role of soft power is being considered as part of the integrated review of security, defence, development and foreign policy. This will be informed by the conclusions of the cross-government work already undertaken on our strategic approach to this area.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD) [V]
My Lords, what steps are the Government taking to co-ordinate their domestic approach to the BBC with their international soft power strategy? Does the Minister not consider that the repeated criticism of the BBC by Ministers, including the Prime Minister, and the right-wing press weakens the standing of the BBC and its reputation abroad?
Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon (Con)
My Lords, as I already said in my original Answer, we recognise as a Government the important role the BBC plays and continue to support its work around the world. Since 2016, the Government have invested heavily in the BBC, with over £370 million of funding. We continue to recognise the important role it plays on the world stage.
Treaty Scrutiny: Working Practices (EUC Report)
Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts(4 years, 10 months ago)
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Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD) [V]
My Lords, I was struck by the quotation from Walter Bagehot’s volume, The English Constitution, in paragraph 8 of the most recent report we are debating. He clearly stated 150 years ago:
“Treaties are quite as important as most laws, and to require the elaborate assent of representative assemblies to every word of the law, and not to consult them even as to the essence of the treaty, is prima facie ludicrous.”
This is not a new issue. Long before the huge expansion of treaties and international agreements that we have seen since 1945, 19th-century constitutional authorities considered Parliament’s role in scrutinising treaties before and after they had been signed to be inadequate. Bagehot saw Crown prerogative as unjustified and outdated on treaties long before any of us were born.
The Vote Leave campaign fought the 2016 referendum with a promise to restore parliamentary sovereignty. This Vote Leave Government are now determined instead to restore executive sovereignty, and to put Parliament back in its box. Yesterday and today, No. 10 has been briefing that UK sovereignty entitles the Government unilaterally to reinterpret international agreements that they have recently signed. Treaties limit national sovereignty. If you assert an absolutist interpretation of sovereignty, as the noble Lord, Lord Frost, has stated in recent speeches, no other Government will trust you to observe international agreements.
There are those on the hard right of American law and politics who deny that international law can override American decisions because of the exceptional nature of the US constitution. But however exceptional our Government think England is, they should be wary of undermining trust in our observance of agreements, whether on Northern Ireland, human rights or commercial regulation. If our Government assert their unilateral sovereignty, no deal with the EU will be followed by no deals with a lot of other countries.
Nine months ago, the Conservative manifesto promised to
“look at the broader aspects of our constitution”
and
“set up a Constitution, Democracy & Rights Commission”.
No. 10 briefings now suggest that the Government have also made a U-turn on this and instead want only to address specific judicial and other issues. But the scale of the transformation of our international obligations and commitments, now we have left the European Union, requires adjustments in our constitutional arrangements which any Government committed to the maintenance of constitutional democracy should address.
The reports we are debating also note that the issues to be covered in future trade arrangements will require an extension of co-determination with the devolved Governments if we are to avoid drifting into a position where England emerges from a broken union, sovereign over only a shrunken country. In the light of her speech, I remind the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, that constitutional arrangements which may suit your own Government when you are in power must be strong enough to work when other Governments are in power.
The Prime Minister looks to Australia and New Zealand as models for our future relationship with the European Union, as well as for recruits to advise the Government. The Parliaments of both countries have trade committees which play “a significant role”, as Alexander Downer told the Constitution Committee. Our Government should not resist this Parliament gaining similar significance in scrutinising treaties.
Libya
Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts(5 years ago)
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Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon
My Lords, I assure the noble Lord that the UN arms embargo on Libya needs to be respected. We take very seriously any reports of breaches of the embargo. They are considered by the UN sanctions committee, of which the UK is a member.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD) [V]
My Lords, the Government now have some hundreds of British troops in other parts of the Sahel working closely with the French in combating tribal warfare and Islamic extremism. How far does the conflict in Libya, with the explosion in the number of weapons there, spill over to the rest of the Sahel? Do we share the view of the French and the UAE that the Muslim Brotherhood is promoting extremism which may also spill over into the rest of the Sahel?
Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon
My Lords, as the noble Lord knows well, Islamist extremism is a scourge of not just that region but globally, and we should take all the steps necessary to ensure that it does not add to an already very long and bloody conflict in Libya.
Hong Kong: Human Rights
Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts(5 years, 1 month ago)
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Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)
My Lords, Britain cannot resist Chinese Communist pressure on Hong Kong on its own. We have to work with others. I read that our Government is thinking of promoting a new “club of democracies”. The world already has two such clubs: the Commonwealth and the European Union. It is characteristic of the incoherence of British foreign policy that we are calling for the creation of something, half of which we have just left.
When Boris Johnson was Foreign Secretary, he boasted that global Britain would send a carrier task force through the Malacca strait into the South China Sea. He never explained what purpose such a deployment would achieve or what place it would have in overall British relations with China. Our Prime Minister appears to have no clear idea at all of what should be Britain’s place in the world. Beijing’s abrogation of the 1997 agreement on Hong Kong requires a strategic reassessment of our relationship with China. Will the Minister tell us if this is under way?
Middle East: Security Update
Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts(5 years, 6 months ago)
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Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon
First, I agree with my noble friend that Her Majesty’s Government do not and will not seek to be associated with any terrorist organisation. We condemn all acts of terrorism, wherever perpetrated and whoever the perpetrator. On my noble friend’s specific question about proscribing this organisation, I have already said what our view of the organisation is. If it meets the requirements of the criteria for proscribing an organisation, I am sure it will be looked at at the appropriate time.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)
Can the Minister confirm how far British forces are able to operate autonomously in the Gulf? I have been led to understand that the evacuation of British forces on the ground in Iraq depends on American support. I note that the air officer commanding is embedded in a US airbase and I understand that British ships are part of the US-led task force. Are we, in effect, embedded in whatever the Americans do, or can we take back control, to coin a phrase?
Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon
The noble Lord will know from his time at the Foreign Office that we work closely with our allies, and the United States is a key ally in our operations in Iraq. I am not going to go into any particular measures that have been taken, suffice to say that we and the US have made it clear to Iraq that the gains made on the ground have been achieved because of the operations of both US and UK forces, as well as other personnel. We hope that, through discussions, the stability that has been achieved will continue.
Queen’s Speech
Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts(5 years, 9 months ago)
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Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)
My Lords, the Minister’s opening speech displayed a spirit of faith-based optimism worthy of Boris Johnson himself. In the hard light of the real world, after three and a half years of internal arguments within the Conservative Party and the right-wing media, Brexit negotiations are being crammed into the narrow gap between the end of the Conservative Party conference and the parliamentary deadline of 19 October. So far, we know only that any agreement reached would leave the UK in a looser relationship with the EU than Theresa May had proposed, and that in future Britain would be looking for other preferred international partners than the member states of the European Union.
I will focus on the pledges in the Queen’s Speech that the Government will continue to,
“play a leading role in global affairs … be at the forefront of efforts to solve the most complex international security issues … champion global free trade and work alongside international partners”,
to which I add the Leader of the House’s declaration yesterday that the UK will be,
“a strong and reliable neighbour”;—[Official Report, 14/10/19; col. 19.]
I am not sure to whom.
There is a central contradiction at the heart of the Government’s rhetoric about our place in the world after we leave the EU. Yes, the Prime Minister refers from time to time to “our European friends”, but the mood music—which our continental neighbours hear loud and clear—is of hostility, in particular to Germany and France: that we are escaping from a new German empire; that British Europhiles are traitorously plotting with the French Government, or even the Belgians; and that we can be free only if we cut the multilateral ties we have negotiated with them for half a century. Last week Jacob Rees-Mogg again referred to the EU as the German empire—I say to the noble Lord, Lord Lilley, who is intervening from a sitting position—displaying as weak a grasp of European history as his recent book displayed of English history.
Lord Lamont of Lerwick (Con)
The noble Lord just referred to people referring to the EU as an empire. What was his reaction to Mr Verhofstadt saying to the Liberal Democrat party conference that the EU was indeed an “empire”, and to one of his aides being revealed in a BBC documentary as having said that the UK was now its “colony”?
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
I do not recollect anyone saying that the UK was now its colony; I look forward to receiving chapter and verse. The European Union is a confederation of countries in which Britain, from the time that we joined, has played a major part, alongside its other major players. That is what we believe and that is what we wish Britain to continue to do.
Once we have escaped from our neighbours, the Prime Minister promises that we will rediscover ourselves as a more global Britain. But no one has defined what the phrase “global Britain” might mean. A lengthy Commons inquiry concluded last year that it had entirely failed to discover a plausible definition, including from the Foreign Office or from outsiders.
Seventy years ago, Winston Churchill, on whom the Prime Minister apparently models himself, redefined the foundation for Britain’s place in the world as resting on three pillars: our special relationship with the United States, our position in Europe and our role in what was then the Commonwealth and Empire. Ten years later, Harold Macmillan realised that we could maintain the special relationship with the United States only by embedding ourselves in the developing institutions of European co-operation and applied, with American pressure behind him, to join the European Economic Community. The right-wing lobby within the Conservative Party that bitterly opposed this shift was then called the League of Empire Loyalists—the European Research Group is its lineal descendant.
Macmillan recognised that the end of Empire would leave the Commonwealth a useful association but not a strategic partner. Harold Wilson, as his successor, withdrew British forces from their expensive deployments and bases east of Suez.
Lord Cormack (Con)
The noble Lord has made a profound mistake. He knows that I sympathise with him on many things, but the League of Empire Loyalists was never a member or part of the Conservative Party. It disrupted Conservative conferences, including one that I was at in 1956. I know a bit about it and he is wrong.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
I apologise to the noble Lord. I am glad to hear that they were at Conservative Party conferences, but at that point on the outside rather than on the inside. I withdraw that point.
Lord Carrington, as Margaret Thatcher’s first Foreign Secretary when she became Prime Minister, played a leading role in developing European foreign policy co-operation, as did his successors, Geoffrey Howe and Douglas Hurd. British foreign policy over the past 45 years has been shaped through European co-operation—above all, through working with our French and German partners, from the creation of the Group of Seven as a forum for concerting European influence in transatlantic relations to the close co-ordination of the three Governments’ positions in the nuclear negotiations with Iran, which reached an agreement that President Trump has now torn up.
British influence in the world has been amplified because we spoke as a leading member of a European caucus of nearly 30 states, working together with the UN, in other multilateral organisations and in negotiations over regional conflicts. A British foreign policy without European co-operation at its heart is like a polo: it has a hole in its centre. Leaving the European Union takes away Churchill’s European pillar and takes it away at a time when the special relationship with the USA looks to be in more doubt than at any point since its creation in World War II, with an American President who is entirely transactional and has no truck with myths about the Anglosphere or the special virtues of the English-speaking peoples.
The Commonwealth network remains an asset to the UK, but we should not exaggerate how far it enables us to punch above our weight. Yes, many Australians and New Zealanders feel a continuing affinity with Britain but there are limits to how far they will offer us trade or business concessions out of family sentiment. Liam Fox and other Eurosceptics expected India to welcome freer trade with Britain in return for supposed fond memories of the past benefits of British imperial rule, but the Indians’ interpretation of their national history, unsurprisingly, is different from ours. They will have noticed the recent neglect of the Indian role in World War I in how we commemorated the centenary of that conflict. There was not much evidence of British gratitude for the major Indian contribution, so there is little encouragement for Indian gratitude from the descendants of those who fought.
When Boris Johnson was Foreign Secretary he promised, in a rambling speech, that the new global Britain would return our forces east of Suez. He spoke of British ships passing through the Malacca Strait to patrol the South China Sea, as if we still had a massive Navy which could intimidate the Chinese and partner the United States on the other side of the globe. He referred to Diego Garcia, in the middle of the Indian Ocean, as “a major British base”, although it is actually a major US base, with somewhere between 10 and 20 UK personnel to maintain a British presence, and he spoke of expanding our presence in the Persian Gulf, without explaining where we would find the ships or men or what would be the strategic rationale for doing so. It was wonderful stuff for a newspaper column, though perhaps best for something like the Boy’s Own Paper, if the older Members of this House remember that, but it was deeply irresponsible for a Foreign Secretary to conjure it up when he had not the faintest idea of how to put such a proposal into practice.
Certainly, we have a strategic relationship with the Sunni Arab monarchies. Half of our arms exports go to Saudi Arabia and the Emirates, which makes us as dependent on them as they are on us, and we depend on flows of investment from those oil states to cover our persistent external deficit in trade and finance. I note that the owners of the Daily Telegraph, the newspaper that has vigorously demanded that we must take back control of our country from foreigners, are now hoping to sell the Ritz hotel to the sovereign wealth fund of Qatar or Abu Dhabi. Another bit of prime London property will thus slip out of British ownership and control.
If the Government are to fulfil their promise to place Britain,
“at the forefront of efforts to solve the most complex international security issues … alongside international partners”,
they would be actively engaged in multilateral diplomacy on the overlapping conflicts between Syria, Turkey, the Kurds, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the Emirates and Yemen. Instead, the Conservatives’ most experienced Middle East Minister, Alistair Burt, has had the Whip withdrawn and will be standing down at the forthcoming election. We are withdrawing from ongoing consultations with our European partners on Middle East issues, which is the opposite of demonstrating that we are a “strong and reliable neighbour”, so we are left to cope with the contradictions of American foreign policy towards the region—withdrawing forces from Iraq and sending extra forces to Saudi Arabia.
The Prime Minister’s determination to negotiate a looser future relationship with the EU than even Theresa May envisaged means that we will lack the mutual trust or the institutional links to maintain a partnership with our neighbours in foreign policy. We will therefore be dependent on the United States as our global partner, as the United States becomes a less reliable partner. The Government have only just realised that a US-UK trade agreement would not get through the US Congress if the British Government had been seen to be hostile to Irish interests. They are still in denial that their repeated promises of freer global trade have come up against the US Administration’s attack on the World Trade Organization and its developing trade conflicts with China and the EU. The White House has even picked on Scotch whisky exports as a target for higher tariffs on the European Union.
Boris Johnson’s global Britain looks like an empty phrase. We will have no close international partners to work with and no strong and reliable neighbours whom we trust in a world facing a global recession, rising trade conflicts, violence across two continents and the threat of climate change. If the hard Brexit we are negotiating leads Scotland and Northern Ireland to drift away, leaving England alone without one-third of the UK’s land mass and the vital Scottish base for its nuclear deterrent, we will find ourselves a little England, standing alone without friends or influence. Is that what Conservatives are willing to contemplate?
United Kingdom’s Ambassador to the United States: Leaked Messages
Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts(5 years, 11 months ago)
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Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)
My Lords, I will follow my noble friend Lord Campbell of Pittenweem in asking about the malice with which this leak was clearly intended. It was clearly intended to undermine the position of our ambassador in Washington, and it did so very effectively. It therefore takes us to the question of the relationship between officials and Ministers. One has to look at people close to the new Administration who wanted to undermine someone who was seen as not entirely one of them.
The basis of central government in Britain is that Ministers decide and officials advise, and the officials provide expert advice based on the evidence as they understand it. That is what Kim Darroch was doing. I am concerned about the extent to which evidence is currently swept aside by a number of leading people in politics. Faith, optimism and the dismissal of evidence as the product of gloomsters and doomsters undermine democratic and good government, and public confidence in the quality of government, and take us away from the necessary hard detail of Parliamentary democracy. I entirely agree with the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, that we need to come back to the question of the overall impartiality of the Civil Service and the importance of defending it, as it is now under attack, both from the right and the left.
I have some worries about the press, and I agree with other noble Lords who have spoken about its behaviour on this. We have a free press, but it has a degree of responsibility, and the question of what you publish—which pieces of evidence you get that you decide are in the public interest—is something that even the Daily Mail should consider on occasion.
I am also worried by what Tim Shipman said in the Sunday Times:
“There are lots of rumours that Farage is choreographing this”.
Farage was the first to demand that Kim Darroch should go. I noted a later report stating that when President Trump sent his congratulations to our new Prime Minister, Nigel Farage was with him. That begins to worry me quite a great deal, and it would worry me if I were a Conservative who wanted this Government to succeed. One is not entirely sure that one wants the “idiot right” to get at the Conservative Government from alongside them, with privileged access to the President of the United States. The test to come of who now replaces our ambassador is extremely important for those of us who want to have some confidence in there being a foreign policy of some sort for the new Government—no political appointee.
I note that Kim Darroch spoke in one of the leaks of the “diplomatic vandalism” of the Trump Administration. I fear a degree of diplomatic vandalism in this new Administration, particularly in their attitude to the European Union, and in the attitude of our new Prime Minister, who says that if the European Union is not sensible enough to accept what we are going to propose, it will be its fault and we will have to walk away. That is not the way in which anyone who wants to conduct successful diplomacy should be thinking.
In these circumstances, we wish to see, as far as possible, reasonable voices within the Foreign Office. I think that all of us within this Chamber recognise that the noble Lord, Lord Ahmad, is one of the reasonable voices in the Foreign Office, and we very much hope that we will see him in his current post, or better, as one of those who is trying to keep the thing on track in September.