Defence, Diplomacy and Development Policy

Lord Howell of Guildford Excerpts

Thursday 30th January 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Howell of Guildford (Con)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord McConnell, on promoting this today, although I think he needed another 10 or 15 minutes to cover all the huge issues that we are addressing here. This is a further opportunity for your Lordships to make an input both into the forthcoming review of defence, diplomacy, development and so on that has been announced, and indeed to the strategic defence review. I assume that the grand review of our global strategy and foreign policy will come before the strategic defence review—in other words, we could have a strategy before we review it—but I have no idea which way round that will happen. It would not surprise me if they came the other way around; you never know.

I say that this is a further opportunity because we have already had two major reports from your Lordships in recent years: UK Foreign Policy in a Shifting World Order in December 2018, and Persuasion and Power in the Modern World back in March 2014, not to mention several books and other reports in between, all of which covered the issues which the review is supposed to look at. The UK in a Shifting World Order report from the International Relations Committee had 66 recommendations for action to reposition Britain in the totally novel international landscape into which we have now moved. So why we need a vast review again now beats me. Whitehall moves at tortoise speed; many of us would have thought that this sort of report was obvious 15 years ago and should long since have led to decisive action and changes.

I will choose six fundamental lessons from those reports and other conclusions quickly in my few minutes. First, we are now acknowledged as the number one soft power nation in the world, if we care to deploy this enormous resource, which we should do. Hard military power is of course necessary, but it will be used in the future only with other allies and coalitions of the willing, or in conjunction with soft power resources—so-called smart power. With soft power go soft management techniques, soft protection techniques and the soft economics of a global economy increasingly dominated by knowledge products and services in the digital age and by cyberspace, transforming the whole pattern of international trade.

Secondly, we must increasingly engage with and work with the great Asian powers. People go on about the need to reassert the power of the West but, frankly, that is a completely dated 20th-century concept. The great new 21st-century areas of growth and dynamism, the new sources of influence, wealth and trade, and the new consumer markets now lie outside the European Union and no longer exclusively in the Atlantic or western sphere at all. We have to secure good access to those markets, powers and groupings to survive.

The Commonwealth network, which the noble Lord mentioned—or the

“family of people in the truest sense”,

as Queen Elizabeth put it in her recent Christmas message—is one of several hugely advantageous routes into the new growth markets and high technology zones of Asia: that is, Asia Pacific, Asia south-east, Asia central and near Asia, and increasingly of course a changing Africa as well. None of this means turning our back on the great United States of America, always our friend. But it does mean a new and different relationship and new links with Asia, as it draws ahead not just in markets and growth but in technological edge—as we see all too clearly from the Huawei issue—and its influence in the Middle East, which we tend to ignore but which is powerful.

Thirdly, we have now entered a completely new phase of 21st-century networks in which we must engage: the revived Trans-Pacific Partnership, COMESA, the Pacific Alliance, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, the new ASEAN and even the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation. The old organisations are still important—NATO is our neighbourhood watch, and we have to stay on guard against Russia of course. But I must say that anyone who has seen the Bolshoi’s latest production of “Giselle”, which is probably the most stunning ballet production ever, should marvel at this manifestation of soft power and be reminded that we are not just up against a plain old-fashioned Cold War enemy; we will have to think much smarter to deal with that than we do at present.

Fourthly, and above all, we must make much better use of the enormous and modern Commonwealth network, although we are no longer at the centre of it. If, in this information age, soft power is increasingly becoming the means of advantage—promoting brands, reputation and interests and, hopefully, trade, as well as winning allies and subduing hostility—here for Britain is the soft power network to beat them all. There is no question of trying to resurrect Pax Britannica; that has long gone, as indeed has Pax Americana. We are just one member state out of 54, with plenty to learn from the others as they expand their trade and investment links, not just with us but with each other.

Fifthly, although the old ideological divides are almost dead in the new technological age, we must promote new and fairer forms of capitalism—socialising capitalism, if you like, to bring new wealth and status to billions of households and families across the planet.

Sixthly, some say we should merge DfID into the FCO to create one giant international departmental force. Frankly, I do not very much favour too much departmental juggling—although I have done quite a lot of it myself in the past—but I have no doubt that DfID and the FCO, and other departments, including the MoD, should work much more closely together on the ground than they do now, as global understanding grows of how aid and development and poverty alleviation and security really work and meld together, and where the real solutions lie. Certainly we need a combined effort to tackle the real global causes of global warming and ever-climbing carbon emissions, rather than just contenting ourselves with greening our own lovely country of Britain. Desirable though that certainly is, it does not necessarily lead to the tackling of climate change that is needed on a much bigger scale.

Once Britain has navigated through the present dangerous seas, the nation’s luck will be in—unless of course we throw it all away. Britain will be sitting plumb in the midst of the world’s best networks, both digital and real, and will be a safe haven, even more than it is now, for the world’s investors—and that will give us more power and capacity than ever to contribute to a safer, more peaceful and fairer world.