King’s Speech

Lord Hannay of Chiswick Excerpts

Thursday 21st May 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick (CB)]

To say that we live in a volatile and disrupted world is to state a truism. Truisms can get tedious, especially if too often repeated, but one ignores them at one’s peril. For no country is that truer than for Britain, a middle power in the Canadian Prime Minister’s perceptive characterisation, which has sacrificed influence by deciding to leave the EU in 2016, and which, while still having worldwide interests, cannot hope to further them effectively on its own. Add to that the fact that our closest ally for the past 80-plus years, the United States, can no longer be regarded as dependable in all circumstances.

It is frequently said that we can no longer rely on the rules-based international order, to the development of which Britain contributed so much in the aftermath of two disastrous world wars, and that we must come to terms with the new systems which have succeeded that order. However, the hard fact is that there are no such systems emerging, merely the modern equivalent of the law of the jungle, where might is right. That certainly does not suit our interests or our values.

The capacity of the rules-based order has not lost its value to us, whether we are talking about the UN charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Geneva Convention on the Law of the Sea, the European Convention on Human Rights, the international trade rules of the World Trade Organization to secure freer and fairer world trade, or one of the many others. They are not outdated, nor would it be in our interest to allow them to wither on the bough.

Take nuclear weapons as an example. The nuclear non-proliferation treaty, which has recently held its periodic review conference, remains a cornerstone of international security. Without it, there would be many more nuclear weapon states than there are now, vying with each other in regional arms races. That treaty has ensured that only one of its signatories, North Korea, has flouted its obligations. In recent decades, Iran has come quite close to doing so too, but that point was not imminent when Israel and the US attacked it at the end of February. It is surely in our collective interest that Iran should never have a nuclear weapons capability.

That can be achieved only at the negotiating table and sustained only by a rigorous system of safeguards operated, without interference, by the International Atomic Energy Agency. That should surely be the aim, but little is being done to secure it since President Trump destroyed the best attempt to do so. Take too the dialogue on strategic stability between the recognised nuclear weapon states, which has been suspended since Russia launched its aggression against Ukraine. That too will need to be resumed at some future moment, together with agreements to limit the unlimited accumulation of those weapons.

The world needs a rules-based trading system, too, if we are not to slip back into the protectionist, tit-for-tat retaliation of the 1930s. Tariffs, unilaterally applied, are simply a synonym for taxes, which in the end negatively affect one’s own consumers and producers. There needs to be some international procedure for handling trade disputes, which is why the Government’s recent decision to join the interim procedure in Geneva was so welcome.

Later this year, an important decision will be taken in New York on the appointment of the next Secretary-General of the United Nations. The UN has taken some hard knocks in recent years, as it did in the 1970s and early 1980s, but Britain as a permanent member of its Security Council should surely be doing all it can to secure the appointment of an effective, reforming leader to take over its leadership. We should be working to consolidate and strengthen the procedures introduced when Secretary-General Guterres was first appointed to open up the choice to more transparency and to ensure that no trace of gender discrimination is allowed to interfere with that choice.

The disruption we have seen in recent years to our international relations has already wrought some real damage to our ability to shape our destiny. That destiny is as a European middle state, with most in common geographically, politically and economically with other European countries.