Queen’s Speech

Lord Hannay of Chiswick Excerpts

Thursday 22nd June 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick (CB)]

My Lords, this is the first debate on the Address since last June’s referendum resulted in a narrow majority in favour of leaving the EU. It is also the first since the assumption of office by a new US president, Donald Trump, whose “America First” slogan, and, even more so, policies on climate change, trade issues, NATO, the UN and human rights, put him at cross purposes with our own policy objectives. Therefore, I make no apologies for focusing my remarks on these two matters and their consequences for our own foreign policy-making.

Much of the debate about Brexit concentrates on important, but often quite narrow and technical, questions of trade in both goods and services, the status of EU nationals, including our own, and our future domestic policies on regulation, immigration, agriculture and fisheries. That is, of course, exactly as it should be, and those aspects will be debated later in this debate next week. They are important matters. We must not, however, overlook the wider strategic consequences of our decision to leave the EU in terms of Europe’s security and the future direction of the European Union’s foreign policies. It seems to have been almost completely overlooked at the time of our vote last June that we risked turning our backs on something like 500 years of British foreign policy, during which we played an integral—often crucial—part in the formulation of policies relating to European security and the balance of power among our nearest neighbours—an area you could describe as stretching from the Atlantic to the Urals, to coin a phrase. Now we risk becoming not just semi-detached but fully detached from that tradition, and that to our cost, I suggest, as we found in earlier periods when we occasionally drifted off into isolation.

It is no good thinking that these risks can be avoided simply by repeating meaningless mantras such as, “We are leaving the EU, but not leaving Europe”. Nor is NATO a full answer to the problem, although it is certainly part of the answer. It seems that the problem requires us to fashion a close, operationally effective relationship on foreign and security policy with the European Union, and in particular with its principal members, France and Germany. Several other previous speakers, including the noble Lord, Lord Howell, concentrated on that point. I hope that the Minister will say something about how we plan to set about doing that when he replies to the debate, because so far we have heard nothing but aspirations in this area.

Then there are the challenges we face from across the Atlantic, not just from the erratic and intemperate policy pronouncements which have so far been the hallmark of the Trump Administration. There are more fundamental problems than that. The policies of that Administration are already undermining the whole structure of a rules-based international community, which successive British Governments have, over the last 70 years, worked so hard to create and on which our own future prosperity and security will rely to an even greater extent if and when we leave the European Union. An adequate response cannot simply consist of the rather feeble kinds of triangulation which presumably motivated our refusal to sign up to the statement of France, Germany and Italy when the US notified its decision to withdraw from the Paris agreement on climate change, nor the rather pusillanimous attitude we have taken to supporting a two-state solution to the problem of Palestine. Nor is—I am afraid that I agree with my noble friend Lord Ricketts—the untimely invitation to President Trump to make a state visit to London this year likely to help very much. Perhaps the Minister could elucidate what the absence of a reference to that in the gracious Speech is meant to mean. However, of course we must not fall back into that knee-jerk anti-Americanism which has so often been a feature of the left in British politics. That relationship of the United States will be of crucial value to this country long beyond the tenure in office of a particular US President.

The two themes I have mentioned criss-cross when one examines the chaos in the Middle East, a set of issues which were addressed in the report of your Lordships’ International Relations Committee, which several other speakers have mentioned and which I very much trust we shall have an opportunity to debate in full before the Summer Recess. The intemperate nature of US policy-making has been clear in the Middle East most recently in the rhetorical onslaught against Iran, which took place only two days after the very welcome re-election of President Rouhani, who said that he was committed to greater engagement with the outside world. To stoke up Saudi-Iranian rivalry is not in Britain’s interest. Plenty of criticism can be levied against some aspects of Iran’s external policy. However, I hope that we will work for a kind of modus vivendi between these two important regional powers, not organise a Thirty Years’ War between Sunni and Shia. Perhaps the Minister can say how we view the current tensions between members of the Gulf Cooperation Council, which have broken out in the bans on travel between a number of Qatar’s neighbours and that emirate. That, too, does not seem to be likely to move the region into a better place.