Queen’s Speech

Baroness Fall Excerpts

Wednesday 19th May 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Fall (Con) [V]]

My Lord, I welcome the many learned speeches from noble Lords this afternoon, many of whom have vast experience and knowledge of this very important topic.

As the daughter of a diplomat, I was brought up on a diet of British foreign policy and its mantra to protect and advance British interests. The battle of my father’s time was the Cold War, but we have inherited a more complex landscape and our enemies are more diverse and agile. Alongside this are the big geopolitical challenges of our time, of which the deterioration of relations between China and the West is dominant. We see this played out like the proxy wars of old, for example, in tech and trade. But we should be wary of calling this a second Cold War. China is not the Soviet Union; its economic power is far greater and more sustainable and, whether we like it or not, we must co-operate with China to find solutions to some of the world’s biggest problems, such as climate change.

I commend the Government for the integrated review, which attempts to set out to answer the question: what is Britain’s role in the world today? I will focus on three issues in my brief remarks. The first goes back to China. In the integrated review, China is described as a “systemic competitor”. If we look across the board, to the economy, security, human rights and the need to address global problems, our approach looks pragmatic, though at times a bit inconsistent. We welcome inward investment and have rightly put in place legislation to properly scrutinise it. We rightly call out human rights abuses, yet we have been careful not to use the label “genocide”. We send our ships to the South China Sea and, at the same time, we invite China to the COP 26 meeting, recognising, again rightly, that co-operation is needed if any progress can be made on climate change.

Who are our allies in this approach? While it is clear that China has become a convening issue for many Western democracies, it is also notable that we are not are all aligned—take Germany and New Zealand, for example. Seeing Australia getting blown around by its unilateral approach suggests that we might do well to take a multilateral one ourselves, possibly tucking in behind the Biden Administration.

If we consider China a systemic competitor, this warrants a systemic response by us. By that, I mean one which brings together the security, economic, human rights and climate change responses under one umbrella. I wonder whether the Government should consider an NSC sub-group, for example, on China, to strengthen and co-ordinate our response across Whitehall.

I turn to nuclear. To me, the commitment to increase our nuclear arsenal sets a dismal example to other powers who support non-proliferation. It is also a strange priority for taxpayers’ money, at a time when the economic outlook is difficult. There seems to be little attempt to set out a rationale for the policy, which to my mind also sits uneasily with our decision to make drastic cuts to our aid budget, which I will turn to next.

The cut from 0.7% to 0.5% acts as a double whammy, alongside a shrinking economy that would already have led to substantial reductions. If you want to see global action on climate change, insure against mass migration, combat terrorism, eradicate poverty and counter world pandemics, as well as compete with China’s growing influence, the provision of 0.7% is a good way to go about it. It is in our national interests and it blatantly promotes them at the same time.

All this comes at such a critical moment for Britain, as we relaunch ourselves on the world stage post Brexit and host COP 26 and the G7. This is a G7 that puts women and girls at the centre of its agenda, and yet we witness devastating cuts to many programmes that are designed to support them. Taken together, I believe that the spending decision around our nuclear arsenal and aid does not represent the best strategy for the promotion of British national interests at this critical juncture.

I now turn to Afghanistan. I, like many others, have wholeheartedly welcomed President Biden’s return to a more multilateral approach on the global stage, but, sadly, I cannot support the decision to press ahead with American withdrawal from Afghanistan before the peace talks are finalised. This is not a peace plan but an exit plan, and I fear that it is likely to lead to instability and future conflict; it already has. So much that we and our brave service men and women have fought for over the decades—to build lasting peace in the region and within society to help women and girls—will have been in vain. No one wants for ever wars, but we are more likely to sow the seeds of a future security problem if we leave in a hurry.

Now that we have left the EU, we need to be more, not less, focused on how we maximise our influence in the world. We need to leverage a systemic approach to geopolitical issues at home and build a multilateral approach to like-minded powers abroad to promote British interests at this crucial time.