Foreign Policy

Lord Browne of Ladyton Excerpts

Wednesday 3rd May 2023 Grand Committee

[Lord Browne of Ladyton (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a privilege to follow the noble Lord, Lord Frost. I admit that I had not expected to use such words, nor did I expect to agree with so much of what he said. However, I do not agree with all of it; I may come to some of that in due course. I join the noble Lord in congratulating the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans and thanking him for securing this debate. This is a precious opportunity to debate these really important issues. I regularly ask the Government to find more time in the Chamber to debate these issues in a longer debate, but other things are going on.

I was particularly grateful to the right reverend Prelate for opening by reminding us of some of what makes us proud to be British—the constituent elements of our soft power. I am very pleased that he made such a powerful case for our priority for peacebuilding and conflict resolution, which I have not very successfully applied much of my time in politics to trying to achieve. I agree completely that our soft power was built up through long-term strategic patience and application. Peacebuilding requires that, but we seem dramatically short of it. We are not alone in the world in doing this; how the Afghan war ended was the result of a lack of strategic patience.

In preparing for this debate about the UK’s foreign policy, I find myself somewhat hamstrung by the question, “Which foreign policy?” Noble Lords will be familiar with President Nixon’s madman theory of foreign policy. It was drawn ultimately from Machiavelli, who suggested that in statecraft it can be

“a very wise thing to simulate madness”,

to disrupt the calculations of strategic adversaries. Speaking as an observer rather than a participant, it appears that the Conservative Government have in recent years taken this doctrine to the novel extent of applying it inwards, ensuring that our diplomatic positions are sometimes incomprehensible not only to outsiders but even to ourselves. We saw the current Prime Minister’s predecessor assert that the “jury is out” as to whether France can be described as an ally of the United Kingdom, and her successor, only months later, hail the “special bond” that exists between the two countries.

We heard the Armed Forces Minister, two weeks ago in the other place, discuss the UK’s role as a champion of the “rules-based international order”, even as his colleague the Home Secretary introduced the Illegal Migration Bill, with a covering letter blithely admitting that there is more than a 50% chance that its provisions are incompatible with our duties under the European Convention on Human Rights. Further, we see the Home Secretary attempting to dilute the strength of interim measures under the European Court of Human Rights in order that she realise her dream of seeing deportation flights to Rwanda, even as Ukraine relies upon those measures repeatedly in its fight against Russian aggression.

In these 13 years of Conservative government, we have seen our approach to China veer between David Cameron’s aspirations of a golden decade of Anglo-Chinese relationships, crowned by President Xi’s state visit to the UK, and the current Prime Minister’s warnings last November of a China characterised by increasing authoritarianism that poses

“a systemic challenge to our values and interests”.

A couple of weeks ago, the Foreign Secretary signalled yet another reset, saying that a hawkish approach to China

“would be a betrayal of our national interest”

and that

“no significant … problem ... can be solved without China”.

In attempting to discern some sort of golden thread of consistency in this reflexive approach to China, it is worth remembering that this is the very same Foreign Secretary who occupied the FCDO in the Truss Administration, who planned, before their swift collapse, to designate China as an “acute threat” to British security.

We face crippling economic inflation and the loosening of the bond that ties together a currency and its value. But we have seen the same in foreign policy: rhetorical inflation that stridently declares the emergence of the new global Britain while our capacity to decisively influence the world diminishes. We can see this all around us: those who have travelled hear from residents and diplomats, and from the leaderships of other countries which were our friends and allies—maybe they still are—that we are significantly diminished.

The diagnostic work in the refresh to the integrated review has much to commend it. It rightly states that

“the transition into a multipolar, fragmented and contested world has happened more quickly and definitively than anticipated”.

My personal fear is that the more we integrate artificial intelligence into our decision-making processes, the more this acceleration will increase. We are already trying to catch up on that when it is well beyond us; I am not entirely sure where it is going to take us. It is interesting that those who were largely responsible for the development of artificial intelligence are now abandoning it because it has become so terrifying.

What has our response to this darkening picture been? We have, by the Defence Secretary’s own admission, a military that is “hollowed out and underfunded”, with the additional £11 billion promised in the recent Budget returning us only to the level of spending, by percentage of GDP, that we saw a couple of years ago. Even this is a promise and an expectation; it is not guaranteed.

Our soft power and diplomatic strength will be critical if we are to emerge from this potentially era-defining period of conflict and tension with a renewed capacity to defend our values and interests. But on the issue of our aid and development budget, it is clear that this Prime Minister is a hostage to the isolationist and regressive wing on his Back Benches in the other place. Money spent on aid and development overseas, quite apart from the supervening moral imperatives involved, represents UK influence in pasteurised form. Not only have we seen the UK resile from its commitment to the 0.7% target, but we are seeing what might generously be characterised as a creative application of the money that we still spend.

According to the Independent Commission for Aid Impact, last year the Home Office spent a third of our foreign aid budget on refugee and asylum-seeker costs here in the United Kingdom. Further, it found that this appropriation of the ODA budget has had a very

“severely negative impact across the UK aid programme”.

In seeking to address this problem, we then saw the FCDO pause all non-essential aid spending, as a consequence of which we then missed our pledge deadline for our contribution to the Global Fund, damaging our credibility with our multilateral partners even further. ICAI also found that this pause caused a delay in our humanitarian response to the floods in Pakistan and the famine in Somalia, again fraying the bonds of trust that bind this nation and others throughout the world.

I wish I had the time to give more instances, but those I have outlined indicate a simple truth. These political choices and missteps are having a real-world impact on the UK’s reputation as a reliable partner overseas. I take no pleasure in offering these examples today, and it is true that we have reason to be proud of the swift and comprehensive assistance that we have offered Ukraine in its vital struggle against Russian aggression. But that assistance does not, by itself, constitute a coherent foreign policy. It is interesting the number of times that that is what Ministers want to talk about at the Dispatch Box in this House when issues of foreign policy are raised—but not the other issues, which are now apparently being displaced by this.

Statecraft is essentially temporal in nature; it is a sphere where the strategist is inevitably outmanoeuvred by the tactician. It may be that we succeed in our inhumane plan to send refugees to Rwanda by breaching our obligations under international law, but at what cost to our long-term credibility as a reliable partner? We may succeed in deepening our involvement in the Indo-Pacific region, but how can we expect this projection of power to be seen as anything but hollow, given the assessment of a US general that our military capabilities are not only no longer tier 1 but barely tier 2?

I have to say—and I am not alone in this internationally—that AUKUS has all the hallmarks of a pre-election announcement. I fear that the scale of the cost for Australia may guarantee that the Government there do not survive the next Australian election. I cannot get any Minister in our Government to engage with this issue with regard to assessing whether we should have put our name to it. We are told that that is a matter for the Australian Government, but I read the Australian press and I know what Australian politicians are saying, and the cost to them is extraordinary.

I realise that the tone of my contribution today may be somewhat pessimistic, but its central message is not, as the right reverend Prelate said. There is nothing inevitable about any of this—all these things are political choices—and what is made by politics can be unmade by the same means. We can choose to end our flirtation with transgressions of international law and regain our reputation for probity. We can choose to work with allies in the Euro-Atlantic space on a coherent, long-term approach to broader strategic challenges while restoring our aid budget to ensure that we once again play our full part in helping the most vulnerable. We must work out what our global role actually is in an increasingly multi-polar world where norms are now contested and fought over.

These long-term challenges will be addressed only by policy-making that is equally long-term in its nature. We are not prisoners of impersonal historical forces but have agency in shaping what the future will look like. In fact, the calamity of Brexit proves that in spades. It is time to develop a more positive vision and prove that we have both the strategic patience and the endurance to see it realised.