Foreign Policy

Baroness Smith of Newnham Excerpts

Wednesday 3rd May 2023 Grand Committee

[Baroness Smith of Newnham (LD)]

My Lords, it is a privilege to participate in this debate and begin the winding speeches, from the Liberal Democrat Benches. It is quite common to say, “I am delighted to speak after the noble Lord or the noble Baroness”, and sometimes that seems very formulaic. But on this occasion, it really has been a privilege to participate. I am most grateful to the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans for bringing this debate to us. As so often, it is a shame that we are meeting in Grand Committee rather than on the Floor of the House. If we were there, we would get much more coverage, and the issues that have been raised could be explored much more fully.

This has been an excellent debate. One of the things we have found is that there are many areas of agreement across all four parts of the House. That begins to pay testament to the nature of the United Kingdom and our approach to foreign policy. Needless to say, I am not going to say from these Benches that I agree with everything that everybody has said—it would be a little strange if I did—and there are many things that I would like to amplify. One area in particular that I will focus on slightly more than people might expect is the Commonwealth.

The area that I am going to touch on, but perhaps not speak on as much as some people would expect, is defence. The reason for that is that my day job is as an academic. My professor of politics at Oxford used to say that I wrote good essays but that I did not necessarily answer the question, so I now look very closely at an exam question, and today it seemed to be about the implications for foreign policy. I noted that the Minister who was going to respond was the noble Lord, Lord Goldsmith, rather than the noble Baroness, Lady Goldie, so I thought I would stick primarily to foreign policy, but I will touch on defence as well.

The starting point of the debate is about the UK’s changing role in the world. My immediate sense, when I started to draft notes ahead of the debate, was that we also needed to think about the changing role of the world around us, which many speeches have touched on, particularly the changing role of China. Perhaps slightly strangely, given that we are just over a year into the war in Ukraine, a lot of the discussion has been on China.

The subject that I thought might have caused a much longer debate was actually Brexit. I had a note of just one word: “Brexit”. My noble friend Lady Northover, in her excellent speech, pointed out that the previous integrated security and defence review had a Europe-shaped hole in it. Today’s debate did not pay very much attention to Europe, but that is probably right if we are rethinking our role. The noble Lord, Lord Bilimoria, pointed out that we need to be strengthening our trading relationship with Europe. That is hugely important and something we need to focus on, as we must on security, but the questions of our role in the world are much greater than that.

I was minded to start from where the noble Lord, Lord Browne of Ladyton, started: which foreign policy? He was looking for a foreign policy from the Government. It is quite easy to see why. I have lost count of how many Foreign Secretaries we have had since the 2016 referendum. For a number of years, the Foreign Secretary and the Prime Minister appeared to set the frame of what the UK Government thought they were doing internationally. Are we going global? What is global Britain? Are we going to focus on trading relations with countries that we already had trading relations with while we were members of the European Union? It was never entirely clear. Going east of Suez sounded like something that might work very well in a Marvel cartoon, but were we going to do anything meaningful by doing so, as Boris Johnson wanted to do as Foreign Secretary? It was never entirely clear. I think we are beginning to get a sense of where the current Government are going, but there are some areas where we could help to steer the Government in certain directions.

It came as a surprise to me, just as it did to the noble Lord, Lord Browne of Ladyton, that we could agree with much of what the noble Lord, Lord Frost, said about partnership—that we absolutely need to be strengthening our bilateral and other relations. I was slightly worried, when he talked about process, that he might think that thickening up relations with our bilateral partners might fall into that, but he very clearly did not. It would be good to hear the Minister’s views on what we are doing to strengthen our bilateral relations with our European partners, as well as with the United States.

I did not entirely agree with the analyses of the noble Lord, Lord Frost, and the noble Baroness, Lady Meyer, on some of the issues about the United States, particularly on whether we are having problems because Biden is President. We might be having some problems, but they are probably not entirely dependent on which particular president the Americans put it office, because we had a few problems with Donald Trump as well. There are clearly some issues, but they are ones where we need to work very hard.

One of the biggest issues associated with the ignominious departure from Afghanistan, which my noble friend mentioned, is the fact that it is very clear that, when the United States decided to act, the other NATO partners, including the United Kingdom, had to follow suit. Your Lordships’ International Relations and Defence Committee, of which, at the time, I was a member, called on what was then Her Majesty’s Government to talk to the incoming Biden Administration and warn them of the dangers of withdrawal. All the Government said was, “We’re waiting to see what President Biden wants to do”. Surely the United Kingdom should not play a subservient role. We might want to have an appropriately humble role, but we should be talking to the United States and at least try to be equals in putting forward our views.

That takes me to the Commonwealth. The noble Lord, Lord Howell of Guildford, as we might have expected, talked about the Commonwealth, but we also heard about it in part from the noble Lords, Lord Popat and Lord Bilimoria. The Commonwealth is hugely important, and perhaps we underplay it. It is an area where the United Kingdom could and should have influence, but it is also one where we need to demonstrate a degree of humility. That is where I disagreed with the suggestions from the noble Lord, Lord Frost, and the noble Baroness, Lady Meyer, that somehow members of the Commonwealth or the global South have not been persuaded by the United Kingdom regarding Ukraine because of our issues on a whole set of social policies. It goes deeper than that. This is not about Commonwealth countries necessarily saying, “The West is too liberal” but perhaps, “We don’t want to be taken for granted”.

The noble Lord, Lord Bilimoria, suggested that there should be a state visit to India; I hope that His Majesty the King agreed. However, if we are doing that, it should not be with Ministers saying, “You need to be doing this and we want you to do that”. It should be acknowledged that our Head of State may also be Head of the Commonwealth but that King Charles is not the king of India and we no longer have the Raj. India will very shortly be the largest country in the world, if it is not already, and one that we need to speak to equals, not as a former colonial power. We need to recalibrate what we are doing to ensure that we are working with our Commonwealth partners as partners. That might help us to negotiate and persuade them in areas of the world where we have left a vacuum for China—a vacuum that has been talked about by many Peers.

In winding up, I will devote my final few seconds to the situation in China. As many Peers have said, it is not a country that is necessarily an enemy, although it has significant military power. We need to rethink our relationship while understanding that, as the noble Lord, Lord Popat, said, it is in part the IMF of Africa. We need to understand that if we in the West leave a vacuum, China will fill it, and in ways that do not require conditionality, as my noble friend Lady Tyler said. We need to rethink that, and I hope the Minister will agree with that and perhaps tell us where we can go in our relations with China under the refreshed integrated review.