EU Foreign and Security Strategy (EUC Report)

Lord Balfe Excerpts

Tuesday 7th June 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, I join many speakers in thanking the chairman for his wise chairmanship. He will get two sets of thanks because he will be back with another final report next week. My experience of the chairman goes right back to 1979, when I was part of the group that overturned the European Parliament budget, so ably introduced by the then budget commissioner, Christopher Tugendhat. I also welcome my noble friend Lady Morris, a distinguished contributor to our party’s foreign policy and who I know will be a good successor.

I want to make a few points of administration first and then a few points about Russia. A number of speakers, including the noble Lord, Lord Desai, mentioned 28 policies. Of course there are not 28 foreign policies, there are three or four foreign policies and then 20 to 24 followers of foreign policies. There are some major actors, but we must realise that most of the countries of the European Union see in the development of a common foreign and security policy an opportunity for them to maximise an influence which for many of them is pitifully small at the moment. It is small because they do not have the resources. They do not have the embassies, the money or the staff.

We as a big player may be driving policies forward, but for many other countries our influence rests not only on being in the European Union—which seems to be more or less a consensus—but on acting within the European Union in such a way that we become one of the three or four major countries that other nations want to support and move forward with. That can and has been done, and we have been a very successful actor in that. However, it helps to recognise that the work done by Commissioner Mogherini and, before her, Commissioner Ashton has been both distinguished and for our benefit. It is something that we can build on. We can maximise our direction by working strongly within the CFSP strategy.

My next point picks up on a comment made by the noble Baroness, Lady Suttie, on the very important issue of staff. The atmosphere that Britain has projected in recent years is not one that has made young and able people want to go and work in the European Union. They look at the hostility to the EU that has come out of this country over the past few years—I will not put a dividing number on it—and say, “No; I might not have a career in a few years’ time”. I was talking today to a friend in Brussels who said of some members of the British Labour Party there that, “Quite a few of them are looking to take out Belgian nationality”. We have got ourselves into a mess. We have a situation, confirmed this week, whereby the President of the European Parliament is a German, the Secretary-General of the European Parliament is a German and the new Deputy Secretary-General, appointed just this week, is also a German. For the first time in the history of the European Parliament, all three of the top posts are in the hands of one country. I am not saying it is a country that is hostile to us, but I do not think it is good that we have withdrawn to the extent that we have from involvement and from encouraging our brightest and our best.

The final policy point I want to make is this: I am surprised at the lack of interaction between this Parliament —I include both Houses—and our democratically elected Members of the European Parliament. We send them there; we give them a mandate; our parties put forward manifestos; we knock on doors to get them into the European Parliament; and then we forget them. We have to involve them more. In particular, I mention two names—Charles Tannock from my party and Richard Howitt from the Labour Party—who are widely and deeply respected Members of the European Parliament. They have influence well beyond being “the Brits”, but they are seldom seen or counselled. In fact if you want to bring them into the building the first thing you have to do is get them through the door.

I remember Caroline Jackson, a Conservative Member of the European Parliament, chair of the Environment Committee of the European Parliament and a leading figure in the European Parliament, who said to me, “Well Richard, I have far more rights as Robert Jackson MP’s wife than I do as chairman of the committee in the European Parliament”. I just mention that. We have to sort it out.

I want to say just a few words on Russia. We have somehow to get a dialogue going again. We are in a situation not dissimilar to where we were before Helsinki. Relations are bad, there are many things that we want and many things that the Russians want. One thing we should be looking at is getting them back into some sort of relationship with the Council of Europe. The situation makes no sense. Okay, they have been suspended, but there is no strategy for how they get back, except that we say they have to withdraw from Ukraine. They are not going to do that. We have to work out a strategy for dealing with them.

Many of the surrounding countries have been mentioned. I shall not go through them all but will mention one or two. The Baltic states are a key point, but they themselves must also realise that a fairer treatment of the Russian minorities is needed. They have to get to a position whereby the Russian minorities in those three Baltic states say, “Aren’t we lucky we live here?”, not “Oh God, we can’t vote”. I was in Latvia last year and the Russian party in the Latvian Parliament is basically a social democratic party. It is excluded from government by all of the other parties from the far right to the far left. The only thing they have in common is that they are Latvian parties and will not do a deal with the Russians.

That is not the way to run a democracy. The Baltic states, in return for our support—I believe that we can give them support—must learn to play the proper democratic game of involvement. They have to give their Russian population a reason for wanting to be there. They are now addressing the NATO concerns of 2% defence expenditure. I am afraid that one of the points that comes out of this report is the idiocy of this division that we are somehow a European Sub-Committee but we cannot look at defence. Defence, NATO and the EU are so intertwined that it is very difficult to say, “Well, you can’t look at troop movements but you can look at cybersecurity”. So, one of the challenges for our new Madam Chairman will be to work out somehow how we can slightly expand the terms of reference.

My final comments are on Turkey. The words “strategic disarray” were mentioned, and that is absolutely right. Turkey is in crisis. It has 3 million refugees on its hands and its Government are not sure whether they believe in democracy, to put it bluntly. Or, they are not sure how much they believe in democracy—let us put it that way. It has elections—it has fair elections—but it also has a structure of government that has a very weak opposition where there has effectively been one-party rule for the last 12 years. I have always said that once you are in power for 10 years you go mad. We have plenty of British precedents for that. I hope that we will manage to find an accommodation with Turkey that keeps it onside. I would much rather have our boundaries in Turkey than a bit closer to home. Turkey is another big challenge for us and I hope it is one we can rise to.

[Lord Judd (Lab)]

My Lords, it is always good to listen to the noble Lord, Lord Balfe. He and I have been friends for many years. I find myself in so much agreement with so many of the wise things he says. It is terribly sad that he left our party. It was a serious loss.

[Lord Balfe]

I am not coming back.

[Lord Judd]

I read this report and thought, “That’s a good report”. I then read it again and said to myself, “That is a very good report—a particularly great report and of great significance”. The House owes a very real tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Tugendhat, and his colleagues.

It has been delightful to sit and listen to this intelligent debate about the realities of the world when we are surrounded by this introspective, vicious, unimaginative, vindictive debate on whether we stay in Europe. That depresses me beyond measure. One of the things that depresses me most about that debate—others have referred to this—is that whether we like it or not the first reality of life, from the day we are born, is that we are locked into a global community. We cannot escape that. History and succeeding generations will judge us by the success we make of handling that reality. We will not solve the issues or meet the challenges by running away. From that standpoint, the debate about our future in Europe, or so much of it so far, has been disastrous.

That interdependence is obviously there in economics, on issues of the climate, and on migration. On migration, we have to keep remembering that what we face today is probably child’s play compared with what we will have to face as the impact of climate change begins to accelerate. We are all told that that interdependence is there in trade, but it is also there very clearly in security. When I was on the EU home affairs sub-committee we listened to witnesses on the issue of our future if we were to withdraw from the Community and certainly from the European Convention on Human Rights. We could not find a witness—it was almost impossible to find one—who was working in the sphere with real responsibility on behalf of us all who did not say that it would be madness to leave, because all these issues demand co-operation. How will we handle them better if we are on our own? The question was put about the fact that we know—it is true, in many respects—that our intelligence services, for example, are not matched by the quality of intelligence services in much of Europe.

I was impressed that these people, working in the heart of the issue on our behalf, were all saying, “Surely that is a challenge to us to strengthen them”. It is not a challenge not to join them, because you are only as strong as your weakest link. In this realm, where everything is so closely interlinked, if there are weak links our job is to strengthen them. I do not like putting it in melodramatic language but I really mean this as a grandfather: I am afraid that we are betraying our younger generation in much of this debate about being in or out of Europe.

All of us in this House have been shocked, grieved and deeply troubled by the sight of drowning refugees and especially deeply hurt and worried by the sight of drowning children. The words of John Donne echo in my ears all the time:

“never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee”.

The biggest challenge in this dreadful story is: where is our own sense of values? The world has seen a Europe led by Britain preoccupied with keeping people out, instead of a Europe led by Britain saying, “These are the issues of the future. These are the issues we must face. How do we work together in finding lasting strategic solutions?”.

Of course, I read carefully what the report said about concentrating on our immediate neighbouring region. There is no shortage of issues there. Turkey will be immensely important. We simply must work out a sensible future with Turkey. Personally, I feel that having offered Turkey membership, the impact of withdrawing that offer could be horrific. Turkey is the meeting point of Islamic and Christian civilisations. Surely it is essential to work with Turkey and find the way forward. In the Middle East, all the issues we face are still profoundly, in emotion and attitude, part of the ongoing story of the Israel/Arab issue. That is unresolved. It always seems that if we are real friends of Israel—I regard myself as such—we have a huge job in Europe to point out in absolutely categorical, unapologetic terms what her policies do towards aggravating the situation. Collectively in Europe, we must do everything we can to bring pressure on Israel to behave in a way that will make a secure future for her children possible rather than to pursue her current policies, which provoke nothing but insecurity and danger for her future generations.

There are also the issues of north Africa, of Syria and of Libya. In Europe, as we—I still hope—face the future together, we must learn to snap out of this attitude of trying to find management solutions for crises of this kind. You cannot simply manage a solution in this area. The confidence of the people in what solutions you offer as management programmes is just not there. You must build confidence with the people. Whatever happens as a way forward in both Libya and Syria, there has to be a future which rests on local realities and comprises real reconciliation and real understanding between the very different historical links in the historical traditions and associations in both communities.

Russia has been talked about a lot. For four years I was the rapporteur to the Council of Europe during the ghastly conflict in Chechnya. I visited the conflict area 11 times and met the most senior Ministers in Russia, the FSB and the rest nine times. I came to see that Chechnya could not be approached as just Chechnya because Chechnya was symptomatic of the issues in Russia. The same underlying arrogance, whatever its cause, led to the ghastly things that happened in London. We cannot forget that. We had Russian agents trailing radioactive poison across our capital, quite apart from the brutality and horror of the murder itself. We have to work at finding ways forward with Russia but let us be realistic about what we are up against and look at our own responsibility for the missed opportunities with Russia after the fall of totalitarian communism, and at the failure to build a positive political programme towards Russia—even perhaps the willingness to consider a joint security pact for the future.

One feels anxious to say much more following such an excellent report. However, I confine myself to the following. I honestly believe that many of the challenges and difficulties that we face stem from the crisis within our own value system. What is it that we really believe in? We talk about western civilisation and our values but what are those values? We must have a real debate with Europe on reinventing and strengthening our concept of responsibility, particularly humanitarian responsibility, and on how we believe that we can build a strong society. Of course, human rights will be absolutely central to that debate.

I again thank the committee for having produced such a thoughtful and encouraging report. I pray that we get it right on 23 June. But when we have got it right on 23 June, there will be one hell of a challenge. The first part of that challenge is to belong to the Community to which we have reasserted our membership, because it is by belonging, and being seen to belong, that we begin to influence events. If we are seen as the awkward, reluctant customers all the time, what kind of influence will we ever have?