Integrated Review of Security, Defence, Development and Foreign Policy

Earl of Sandwich Excerpts

Thursday 22nd April 2021 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Sandwich (CB) [V]]

My Lords, anyone who follows developing countries will long remember Frank Judd for his advocacy of poverty reduction and sustainable development. Here, we miss him right now for his eloquence and the determination he would have brought to this debate.

Like the noble Lords, Lord Wei and Lord Bilimoria, I am generally impressed with the spirit of the review and the direction of travel, and even by the impatience with which the Government have raised their flags overseas. I do not go with buzzwords like global Britain, but I welcome their recommitment to the international and the multilateral. I am pleased that the FCDO wants to be a force for good—soft power is here to stay—although without enough visas. There is also a determination to deal with online harms, sexual violence and a range of human rights violations, and we see new approaches to science and technology, with phrases such as “building national resilience”. Some of these are either brave promises, far ahead of reality, or they are things the Government ought to be doing anyway.

All this laundry list, as the noble Lord, Lord Ricketts, dubs it, comes at a more positive time, when the new US leader, Joe Biden, is back with similar aspirations, scrubbing out policies left behind by his predecessor. Climate change, Covid and SDGs are all getting proper attention. Of course, I welcome the recommitment to aid and the sustainable development goals, but the cuts are damaging and unnecessary, and the departmental merger blurs the line further between aid, defence and diplomacy. The Government have ignored their own aid target and the Minister will, I hope, repeat the assurance that the legally binding 0.7% target will return next year. The Minister was rightly besieged with questions about this this morning and I am sure he will look forward to the debate brought by the noble Lord, Lord Alton, on this next week.

On the merger, I focus briefly on the Government’s intention to tighten up the cross-government Conflict, Stability and Security Fund. Was the merger really necessary, if we already had joined-up arrangements for that fund? The FCDO claims that the fund will receive £874 million for 2021-22, but Bond, on behalf of aid agencies, says that the fund has been cut by £363 million and that aid to conflict-affected states could be cut by between 50% and 90%. Could the Minister please confirm these figures? For states such as South Sudan and Yemen, a cut on that scale would be devastating. Could the Government not publish a breakdown of aid cuts by country and sector, so that we can all speak from the same statistics in future?

We are seeing the relaunch of Britain as a trading nation, with rollovers and FDAs signed almost every week. The question arises whether the new official enthusiasm for human rights is being properly translated into trade deals. The answer is that there is a formula of words in the explanatory memorandums and in some of these agreements, but we have yet to see consequent actions anywhere. On China, of course, we have a difficult and at times impenetrable way between sanctions on human rights and the benefits of normal diplomatic and trade relations. Meanwhile, what is happening to the Foreign Office post Brexit? Is it becoming submerged in trade and aid? The letters F and O surely need more attention.

Can we really be global without Europe? Chatham House puts it quite bluntly: the Government’s

“longer-term ambitions for relations with the EU are notably thin”.

We will be living under the shelter of the US again, and our policy towards Ukraine will follow NATO rather than EU initiatives. We may see reconciliation with Iran, but we must, as many have argued this afternoon, continue to work closely with our European neighbours on all these issues, even if we have—blindly, in my view—shut ourselves out of their meeting room.