Queen’s Speech

Lord Cormack Excerpts

Tuesday 15th October 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

I do not recollect anyone saying that the UK was now its colony; I look forward to receiving chapter and verse. The European Union is a confederation of countries in which Britain, from the time that we joined, has played a major part, alongside its other major players. That is what we believe and that is what we wish Britain to continue to do.

Once we have escaped from our neighbours, the Prime Minister promises that we will rediscover ourselves as a more global Britain. But no one has defined what the phrase “global Britain” might mean. A lengthy Commons inquiry concluded last year that it had entirely failed to discover a plausible definition, including from the Foreign Office or from outsiders.

Seventy years ago, Winston Churchill, on whom the Prime Minister apparently models himself, redefined the foundation for Britain’s place in the world as resting on three pillars: our special relationship with the United States, our position in Europe and our role in what was then the Commonwealth and Empire. Ten years later, Harold Macmillan realised that we could maintain the special relationship with the United States only by embedding ourselves in the developing institutions of European co-operation and applied, with American pressure behind him, to join the European Economic Community. The right-wing lobby within the Conservative Party that bitterly opposed this shift was then called the League of Empire Loyalists—the European Research Group is its lineal descendant.

Macmillan recognised that the end of Empire would leave the Commonwealth a useful association but not a strategic partner. Harold Wilson, as his successor, withdrew British forces from their expensive deployments and bases east of Suez.

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

The noble Lord has made a profound mistake. He knows that I sympathise with him on many things, but the League of Empire Loyalists was never a member or part of the Conservative Party. It disrupted Conservative conferences, including one that I was at in 1956. I know a bit about it and he is wrong.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

I apologise to the noble Lord. I am glad to hear that they were at Conservative Party conferences, but at that point on the outside rather than on the inside. I withdraw that point.

Lord Carrington, as Margaret Thatcher’s first Foreign Secretary when she became Prime Minister, played a leading role in developing European foreign policy co-operation, as did his successors, Geoffrey Howe and Douglas Hurd. British foreign policy over the past 45 years has been shaped through European co-operation—above all, through working with our French and German partners, from the creation of the Group of Seven as a forum for concerting European influence in transatlantic relations to the close co-ordination of the three Governments’ positions in the nuclear negotiations with Iran, which reached an agreement that President Trump has now torn up.

British influence in the world has been amplified because we spoke as a leading member of a European caucus of nearly 30 states, working together with the UN, in other multilateral organisations and in negotiations over regional conflicts. A British foreign policy without European co-operation at its heart is like a polo: it has a hole in its centre. Leaving the European Union takes away Churchill’s European pillar and takes it away at a time when the special relationship with the USA looks to be in more doubt than at any point since its creation in World War II, with an American President who is entirely transactional and has no truck with myths about the Anglosphere or the special virtues of the English-speaking peoples.

The Commonwealth network remains an asset to the UK, but we should not exaggerate how far it enables us to punch above our weight. Yes, many Australians and New Zealanders feel a continuing affinity with Britain but there are limits to how far they will offer us trade or business concessions out of family sentiment. Liam Fox and other Eurosceptics expected India to welcome freer trade with Britain in return for supposed fond memories of the past benefits of British imperial rule, but the Indians’ interpretation of their national history, unsurprisingly, is different from ours. They will have noticed the recent neglect of the Indian role in World War I in how we commemorated the centenary of that conflict. There was not much evidence of British gratitude for the major Indian contribution, so there is little encouragement for Indian gratitude from the descendants of those who fought.

When Boris Johnson was Foreign Secretary he promised, in a rambling speech, that the new global Britain would return our forces east of Suez. He spoke of British ships passing through the Malacca Strait to patrol the South China Sea, as if we still had a massive Navy which could intimidate the Chinese and partner the United States on the other side of the globe. He referred to Diego Garcia, in the middle of the Indian Ocean, as “a major British base”, although it is actually a major US base, with somewhere between 10 and 20 UK personnel to maintain a British presence, and he spoke of expanding our presence in the Persian Gulf, without explaining where we would find the ships or men or what would be the strategic rationale for doing so. It was wonderful stuff for a newspaper column, though perhaps best for something like the Boy’s Own Paper, if the older Members of this House remember that, but it was deeply irresponsible for a Foreign Secretary to conjure it up when he had not the faintest idea of how to put such a proposal into practice.

Certainly, we have a strategic relationship with the Sunni Arab monarchies. Half of our arms exports go to Saudi Arabia and the Emirates, which makes us as dependent on them as they are on us, and we depend on flows of investment from those oil states to cover our persistent external deficit in trade and finance. I note that the owners of the Daily Telegraph, the newspaper that has vigorously demanded that we must take back control of our country from foreigners, are now hoping to sell the Ritz hotel to the sovereign wealth fund of Qatar or Abu Dhabi. Another bit of prime London property will thus slip out of British ownership and control.

If the Government are to fulfil their promise to place Britain,

“at the forefront of efforts to solve the most complex international security issues … alongside international partners”,

they would be actively engaged in multilateral diplomacy on the overlapping conflicts between Syria, Turkey, the Kurds, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the Emirates and Yemen. Instead, the Conservatives’ most experienced Middle East Minister, Alistair Burt, has had the Whip withdrawn and will be standing down at the forthcoming election. We are withdrawing from ongoing consultations with our European partners on Middle East issues, which is the opposite of demonstrating that we are a “strong and reliable neighbour”, so we are left to cope with the contradictions of American foreign policy towards the region—withdrawing forces from Iraq and sending extra forces to Saudi Arabia.

The Prime Minister’s determination to negotiate a looser future relationship with the EU than even Theresa May envisaged means that we will lack the mutual trust or the institutional links to maintain a partnership with our neighbours in foreign policy. We will therefore be dependent on the United States as our global partner, as the United States becomes a less reliable partner. The Government have only just realised that a US-UK trade agreement would not get through the US Congress if the British Government had been seen to be hostile to Irish interests. They are still in denial that their repeated promises of freer global trade have come up against the US Administration’s attack on the World Trade Organization and its developing trade conflicts with China and the EU. The White House has even picked on Scotch whisky exports as a target for higher tariffs on the European Union.

Boris Johnson’s global Britain looks like an empty phrase. We will have no close international partners to work with and no strong and reliable neighbours whom we trust in a world facing a global recession, rising trade conflicts, violence across two continents and the threat of climate change. If the hard Brexit we are negotiating leads Scotland and Northern Ireland to drift away, leaving England alone without one-third of the UK’s land mass and the vital Scottish base for its nuclear deterrent, we will find ourselves a little England, standing alone without friends or influence. Is that what Conservatives are willing to contemplate?

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Cormack]

My Lords, the noble Lord’s last words indicate not only his own wisdom but the fact that, as I have said in this House before, if we get a deal at the end of this week, we will be at the beginning of the beginning. There are years of negotiations ahead, both within Europe and outside it.

I do not know whether your Lordships have noticed it, but every Queen’s Speech has one sentence in it—I have heard them all since 1970:

“I pray that the blessing of Almighty God may rest upon your counsels”.


I have never said “Amen” more fervently than I did yesterday. I genuinely hope that the Prime Minister gets a deal. I also hope that he will become more realistic about 31 October, and that when he and others say that they will obey the law, they will obey both the letter and the spirit of the law. How palpably absurd it would be if we were on the verge of an acceptable deal, but because the clock reached 11 pm on 31 October, we tore it all up. That is manifest nonsense.

The noble Lord, Lord Kerr, in a very interesting and diverting speech, in effect described how Brexit has dominated the agenda for so long that it has distorted everything else. He talked about foreign policy with a knowledge that very few of us, if any, can emulate. He talked about John Major’s leadership at the time of the bombing of the Kurds and about the fact that earlier this week, we did not send the Foreign Secretary to a high-level meeting of Foreign Ministers. I have absolutely nothing but praise for Dr Andrew Murrison, who did so much during the commemorations of 2018, 100 years after the end of the war. However, he is not the Foreign Secretary—his colleagues in Europe and beyond know that—and the Foreign Secretary should have been there. The noble Lord, Lord Kerr, also said how strange it was that, in a speech delivered by Her Majesty, who is the head of the Commonwealth, the Commonwealth, which comprises such an enormous proportion of the world’s population, was not even mentioned. My noble friend Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon mentioned it this afternoon, and I applaud him for doing so, but there was no mention of it in the Queen’s Speech. The noble Lord, Lord Desai, a few moments ago referred to the Commonwealth and how important it is that we build relations where they already exist.

Again, there was no mention of Russia in the Queen’s Speech. It is a sobering thought, but when we leave the European Union, we and Russia will be the two great European countries outside the European Union. Russia is a European country. Although it does not have the sort of infrastructure of democracy that we have—we have not done too well recently—Russia bled more than any other single nation during the last century. I am not an apologist for President Putin, and I do not entirely admire his statecraft. However, think of Stalingrad, and of how the Russian people suffered. Was it not rather churlish that they were not invited to the D-day commemorations earlier this year? We should be building relations with Russia, developing our cultural relations, which are considerable, although they have suffered since the closing down of the British Council. However, we should also seek to get alongside Russian parliamentarians, to give a degree of quiet encouragement to those who are struggling for democracy in Russia. Those of us who remember the Soviet Union—I was chairman of the All-Party Parliamentary Committee for the Release of Soviet Jewry—know what a sea-change came about with Gorbachev and perestroika. We know that Russia is a country of great people with a great culture, and that, frankly, we have a lot in common. We have nothing in common with the dictatorship or with Soviet communism—but with the Russian people, yes.

It should be a prime objective of British foreign policy, as we move out of the European Union, not only to maintain and to cultivate our relations with the European neighbours whom we are leaving but to make other friends in Europe, and to try to ensure that there is a balance and stability in our continent—it is our continent. By the middle of this century, the dominant world power will of course be China. We know what China has done, is doing and will continue to do in Africa. We know what China is seeking to do on its own continent. We know that China, which has the most ancient surviving civilization in the world, is a country of enormous human and natural resources. I am not advocating in any sense that we should not have cordial relations with China, but we should remember that we are dealing with a country that has the power to become an aggressor. An earlier speaker referred to the number of huge aircraft carriers the Chinese are building. What are they doing that for? Well, there could be a variety of reasons, but we should be aware of all of them.

With our diplomatic infrastructure—with our history—we need to play that leading role in the world, to which there is a passing reference, mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, in the gracious Speech:

“As the United Kingdom leaves the European Union, my Government will ensure that it continues to play a leading role in global affairs, defending its interests and promoting its values”.


Amen to that as well, but we are not doing that at the moment and we have to make a commitment to doing it. At the moment we are not playing a leading role. We are not even playing a bit part. I find that shaming.

I was very glad to hear the absolutely excellent speech of my noble friend Lord Jopling, who knows a thing or two about parliamentary organisation, and I agreed with virtually every word he said. Like him, I am not advocating that we do not come out. That was the result of the referendum. I regret it as deeply as he does but I acknowledge the fact. But I also acknowledge the fact that my party has behaved in a shameful and stupid way, particularly in recent weeks and months. I have referred to this before but the expulsion of 21 of the finest members of the party—in the process turning the Government into a real minority Government—was hardly sensible.

We can come together—and we must. But the most important thing of all is that we come together across this House and across the other place. In the words of the late Jo Cox, there is more that unites us than divides us across the parties and within the parties. I would like to see something that I have advocated since the Monday after the Reformation—

[Noble Lords]

Oh!

[Lord Cormack]

—not quite that long ago, but after the referendum I advocated, as noble Lords know, having a Joint Committee of both Houses looking at these things. We did not for Brexit but there is no reason why we should not do so for the future. There will have to be a lot of bridge-building in the years ahead. There will have to be a lot of compromise and mutual understanding. If what the gracious Speech says about aspirations for leadership on the world stage is to be realised, we have to play a part in this and so have all our colleagues in both Houses. If that comes about, what was an election manifesto could be transformed into a genuine national manifesto for all our people.

I wish the Prime Minister luck. I ask him to recognise the mistakes he has made. I just hope that we can start to put things into some sort of order of priorities so that Brexit does not dominate everything, as it has done for the past three years.