Integrated Review of Security, Defence, Development and Foreign Policy

Baroness Northover Excerpts

Thursday 22nd April 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Northover (LD)]

My Lords, we waited a long time for this review. What arrived has some extraordinary omissions, contradictions and, frankly, double-speak. The words on the page do not square with the actions that the Government are taking.

We are, of course, a smaller player outside the EU, more dependent on the US and their interests and buffeted by China. The review says that we are in a multipolar world—indeed so. One of those poles is the EU, and yet there is an EU-shaped hole here. The review rightly emphasises that we achieve more by working with others. Why then is there nothing here on how we work with the EU properly or rebuild our relationship?

The review emphasises an “Indo-Pacific tilt”. Of course, this region will be very important for trade, and challenging with the rise of China, but being in the EU never stopped trade with China, or India or Indonesia, and would have given us a stronger base for tackling China’s threats.

The review was pre-empted by the merger of the FCO and DfID, without having worked out any strategic reason for this. Then, during the pandemic, which demonstrates how interlinked we are globally, there was the decision to cut ODA. Both actions undermine our outstanding previous reputation in international development and poverty reduction. Much of the review was clearly written before that cut was decided, and this undermines the rhetoric throughout.

There is something of an industrial strategy here, at the same time that we learn that we are not really going to have one. It says that we need to be a science and technology superpower. That was at the heart of the 2012 industrial strategy and helped to lay the foundations for our strength in the biotech sector, but those cutting ODA clearly did not know how it supported the science and tech sector, and that cuts would savagely undermine the review’s claims.

See, too, soft power. The review rightly recognises both the British Council and the BBC. It says:

“The BBC is the most trusted broadcaster worldwide”.


Yet the British Council is closing offices because of cuts and the BBC is under systematic attack from the Government.

The review does not even try to define global Britain, which is what the Government say we are post Brexit. I quote:

“What Global Britain means in practice is best defined by actions rather than words.”


Indeed: we have cut aid, threatened to break international law and lost allies. Our effort on

“global leadership on reducing space threats”

amounts to a UN General Assembly resolution. We appointed

“the UK’s first Special Envoy for Famine Prevention”,

but cut assistance to Yemen, as Mark Lowcock said, to

“balance the books on the backs of the starving people of Yemen”.

The review says that we will uphold human rights, but we have agreed an unconstrained FTA with Cambodia, despite human rights abuses, in contrast to the EU’s approach.

The review says that

“the UK will remain deeply invested in the security and prosperity of Europe”,

but we have slashed support to the Balkans. There is a chapter entitled “Arms control, disarmament, and non-proliferation: our commitment to international treaties”—and then it says that we will increase our nuclear warheads. George Orwell would have been impressed.

I welcome this review for being useful, as we are better able to hold the Government to account on what they say that they want to do. What is extraordinary is the contrast between that rhetoric and the reality of the Government’s actions.