King’s Speech

Lord Browne of Ladyton Excerpts

Wednesday 15th November 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Browne of Ladyton (Lab)]

My Lords, in welcoming the Minister to his new post, I congratulate him and wish him well. I associate myself with the words of gratitude, admiration and commendation for the work of the noble Baroness, Lady Goldie, and I thank her for her service. I also congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Roberts of Belgravia, on an excellent maiden speech. Conscious of the short time available, I shall limit myself to a few general, diagnostic observations.

Among all too many other conflicts, this debate is taking place against the backdrop of the unspooling tragedies of the ongoing conflict in Ukraine and hostilities between Hamas and Israel. On the latter, we have all been appalled by the scenes of destruction and death that we have seen over the last six weeks, including the savagery of Hamas and the wholesale abandonment of civilised norms.

I hope that the Prime Minister’s pledge in Monday’s Lord Mayor’s speech to help to create a “new political horizon” in the Middle East presages a degree of unity, at least in the UK’s response to this crisis. My honourable friend Rachel Reeves, speaking yesterday, rightly stated:

“The way to stop this killing and the way to save lives is for the international community to come together”


and for pressure to be applied to Hamas to secure the release of Israeli hostages. She also exhorted Israel to show restraint in imperilling the lives of innocent civilians.

Unity on these questions, and others in the geopolitical sphere, would conform with the stated aim of the King’s Speech: to look to the long term, making measured, strategic decisions in the interests of the nation’s security. Israel must be allowed to defeat Hamas and recover its hostages but, as politicians of all stripes in the UK, as well as the US Secretary of State, have made clear, that should not be interpreted as a licence for disproportionate, retaliatory violence against Palestinian civilians.

Of course, no international order can guarantee freedom from conflict, but the fractured global response to the crises in Eurasia and the Middle East is indicative of a deeper failure to preserve the rules-based international order. Until recently, that phrase was widely accepted as a fact rather than, as at present, a receding aspiration. When we examine Chinese intentions, Russian bellicosity and the reluctance of emergent powers in the global South formally to condemn the invasion of Ukraine, it is clear that the ebbing power of the rules-based international order is not merely a product of western decay; it is equally a product of that consensus being deliberately rejected by powers that have glimpsed the prospect of, and actively seek, an increasingly rivalrous and multipolar world.

So I am forced to ask myself whether the phrase “international community” encompasses a statement of fact at all. While the NATO powers, including Britain, showed coherence in their response to the aggression in Ukraine, the reaction from other quarters has veered between ambivalence and disinterest. India has been walking the tightrope of studied neutrality. The current Prime Minister of Pakistan describes his world view as being “every nation for itself” and responded to questions about his country’s historic defence relationship with the United States by describing China as his nation’s “all-weather friend”. In that context, and in the light of the UK’s declared Indo-Pacific tilt in foreign policy, it is also worth mentioning the first ever joint Chinese-Pakistani maritime patrols that are currently under way in the Arabian Sea.

The response from Latin America has been coloured by lingering resentment towards the West, with the US and Europe being criticised for stimulating the fighting by supplying armaments to Ukrainian forces. How can the phrase “international community” be anything other than an oxymoron at present, when we see a false moral equivalence drawn between unprovoked aggression and the provision of support for a beleaguered friendly power?

Conscious of time, I merely mention the quickening drive for de-dollarisation among the BRICS countries, the re-emergence of nuclear blackmail as a diplomatic strategy, the inability of NATO to impose a no-fly zone over Ukraine early last year and increasing tensions in the western Balkans as further symptoms of the splintering of the international community.

We are faced with a darkening international picture. There are two overlapping schisms, one between the global North and South and the other between those who subscribe to a rules-based international order and those who regard that phrase as an evasive euphemism for western hegemony. It is in the intersection between those two increasingly divergent groups that British foreign policy must direct its efforts.

These are weighty questions with which to grapple, and it is in all our interests that the newly appointed Foreign Secretary, the future Lord Cameron, is successful in engaging them. They are not insoluble. Given that the new Foreign Secretary’s recent political resurrection makes the rising of Lazarus look rather prosaic, I hope that his diplomacy on behalf of the United Kingdom meets with equal success. As Martin Griffiths, the Under-Secretary of State for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief at the UN, said this morning, the world is in a parlous, sorry state. It is incumbent upon us all to do what we can to change that.