Taiwan

Lord Bethell Excerpts

Thursday 3rd March 2022 Grand Committee

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

My Lords, I am extremely grateful for the opportunity to speak after the noble Baroness, Lady D’Souza, who has put the challenge extremely well. I endorse much of what she says.

When I was a junior Minister during the pandemic, extraordinary things happened, and I broke a great many ministerial precedents. However, one thing that I did not manage to do was put a call through to my opposite number in the Taiwanese department for health. Officials were extremely hesitant to make that happen and, despite my best efforts, I never made that telephone call, even though Taiwan had a huge amount to teach the British response to the pandemic. That is a personal example of an outdated, cautious approach to our dealings with Taiwan, one of the world’s most important democracies. That strategic ambiguity and climate of caution around our country’s engagement with Taiwan is suddenly looking out of date and dangerous. In the interests of time, I will not go into the details but we all know what I am talking about.

I echo the noble Baroness, Lady D’Souza, and recommend five of my own easy-to-take measures with which the Government could demonstrate their commitment to Taiwan—commitments that might cause a small amount of discomfort but are essential for demonstrating the strong alliance between our two countries.

First, it is time that a Cabinet Minister went to Taiwan. We have had junior Ministers there since 1994, including the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, and my noble friend Lord Strathclyde. I pay tribute to Greg Hands, who has been three times—once by cyberspace—but he is just a junior Minister. The USA has made Cabinet-level visits since 1994—I remember Alex Azar going, and he made a big impact. Michael Mullen, the former chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, flew to Taipei on Tuesday. I should like to see someone such as Sajid Javid go to Taiwan in the very near future to talk to the Taiwanese about public health; it is the kind of measure from which we could learn a lot and would show our friendship.

Secondly, I pay tribute to the Minister and ministerial colleagues in the FCDO and elsewhere for their support for Taiwan’s membership of international bodies. But they are often blackballed by China and we therefore need to be creative. I recommend to the Minister that we look at the G7, at which Australia, India, South Africa and South Korea are invited guests, and the D10, where Indonesia, Poland and Spain are invited guests. Inviting Taiwan to attend those sessions is not within our gift but the British Government should certainly be pushing actively for that.

Thirdly, on security, the integrated review recognises that coercive economic measures are a real threat. I note the commitment in the recent communiqué with the Australian Government to work together to ensure that when coercive economic measures are put in place, Britain and Australia are linked together to support each other. We should be working equally hard with Taiwan in putting together the protocols to protect each other, particularly for Taiwan, and to bring about a deterrent for anyone thinking of trying it on.

Fourthly, I echo the points made by the noble Baroness, Lady D’Souza, on CPTPP. Further expansion of the existing investment treaty into a bilateral investment treaty would be good. That should, in time, be expanded to a free trade agreement along the lines we have with New Zealand.

Fifthly, and lastly, on defence, the situation in Ukraine has shown that when NATO members such as Germany and Poland are affected, we are all affected. We know that the USA’s Taiwan Relations Act makes for the USA very strong commitments but we are not clear about the consequential commitments for the UK. I do not think we should be shy of thinking through those consequential commitments. In fact, there are very real benefits from having an earnest and documented discussion of that.

These are five tangible steps which are well within the gift of the Government. I would be enormously grateful if the Minister could commit to all five of them by the end of this Parliament, in order that we have a clear programme of activity to show our support to Taiwan.