Leaving the EU: Integrated Foreign Policy

Debate between Angela Smith and Bob Seely

Wednesday 30th October 2019 Westminster Hall

[Mr Seely]

It is critical. One of the points that I would like to touch on in the debate is the importance of the UK’s engaging multilaterally through not only, hopefully, a leading role in NATO, but a re-energised role in the United Nations. If I have time, I would like to ask the Minister about that.

What is the state of the world? Conventional war is in decline, but the world is becoming a more challenging place. There are new forms of integrated conflict and competition being developed by rivals. The international rules-based system set up since world war two has not broken down, but it is under threat and is being bent in several different directions.

A global Britain implies the use of something that perhaps we have not had enough of in this country—strategy, which is the reconciling of ends, ways and means. For the UK to be better able to achieve its ends, it has to marshal its means and ways—its resources, and how it uses them in the most effective way possible. Hence the need for integration across Government Departments, in a strategy that includes all overseas Government Departments and perhaps sometimes domestic Departments, too.

Russia and China do not have foreign policies that we should copy, but they show the worth of integrating power. Does Britain have what the great 20th-century strategist Basil Liddell Hart would call a “grand strategy”—the combination of the great tools of state power? I would argue that we do not yet have that—the Minister might disagree—but we are working towards it. We do not have it yet because, apart from anything else, although Sir Simon McDonald, the permanent under-secretary at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, pledged to the Foreign Affairs Committee to produce “something” in early 2019, I am not aware that the work has yet been produced. What has happened to the report that was promised to the Foreign Affairs Committee?

The tools of national power and influence exist on a spectrum, ranging from hard power through to soft power. As I have argued, they should not be seen in isolation from each other. British state power sometimes becomes less than the sum of its parts because our overseas engagement has come to be divided between so many competing Departments.

I will now make a point with which some colleagues may disagree. For me, there is no reason why we should not look closely at the Australian and Canadian models, whereby overseas aid and trade Departments are integrated as agencies within the Foreign Office.

[Angela Smith (Penistone and Stocksbridge) (LD)]

Evidence suggests quite strongly that the Australian decision has had a significant impact on the Government’s ability to deliver effective aid overseas; in other words, aid has lost out.

[Mr Seely]

That is not the evidence that I have read, but I look forward to reading it. If the hon. Lady would care to send it to me, I would love to have a look at it. From my conversations with Australian and Canadian diplomats and people who know about these things, I understand that their system—the integration of trade and the international development into their Foreign Offices—has actually worked quite well. This is not a criticism of DFID, which does many things very well. It spends public money considerably better than the Foreign Office does. It is not about trashing or diluting DFID, but about its full integration into an integrated overseas policy. I am also not arguing against 0.7% of national income being spent on aid, but I would change its definition.