Foreign Affairs: Global Role, Emerging Powers and New Markets

Lord Naseby Excerpts

Thursday 6th December 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Naseby]

My Lords, I concur in congratulating my noble friend on the initiative of holding this debate. I do not want to embarrass him but, frankly, he is the best Foreign Secretary that we never had. I couple that with the role that the noble Lord, Lord Marland, plays as part of the team with the noble Lord, Lord Green. He is probably the most energetic ambassador for British trade and commerce overseas that I have ever witnessed. I saw him in action in Sri Lanka in April and that visit was a whirlwind success. I do not know how many other countries he visited on that occasion but I congratulate him and the team behind him.

Forty-five years ago I wrote a pamphlet for the Bow Group entitled Helping the Exporter. I was one of three authors, all of whom had worked overseas for two or three years prior to writing that pamphlet. It was based on the fact that in the previous 10 years this country’s percentage of world trade had dropped from 20% to 13.5%. That is what prompted us, as young men aged around 30, to take an initiative and try to move the then Government to think creatively about how we should export and how we could improve our exports. We looked particularly at what the Government of the day did and at the agencies that were quasi-government at that time. One of the areas that we looked at was the Plowden committee report, which was basically about part of the structure of the Foreign Office at that time. I venture to suggest to my noble friend Lord Green that he should dust down that report and have another look at its conclusions. I had a look at them and many of them are very valid today, as they were then.

I shall pick out two of the 28 recommendations in the pamphlet. One concerned the Queen’s Award. If I am absolutely frank, I think that it is pretty tired at the moment. Here in this jubilee year we have a wonderful opportunity to relaunch that award, and I venture to suggest that we might look at that creatively. Secondly, the personnel within the Foreign Office that I meet overseas are, frankly, too young in terms of trade and business. They are too inexperienced and do not have the relevant knowledge, depth or contacts. That needs to be looked at.

I turn to the other half of the Motion: the United Kingdom’s new global role. We should be realistic: we do not really have a global role. We do not have enough of a defence facility and we do not have enough stretch in terms of contact on the ground. Therefore, we have to prioritise and select. We have to be brave enough occasionally to say no to certain ventures that we might morally think we should be involved in but do not have the resources to do properly. With regard to the Arab spring, north Africa and that area, we thought that Tunisia had undergone a relatively easy transition. However, demonstrations are now bubbling up, mirroring what is happening elsewhere. The recent murder of the US ambassador in Libya brings into question whether we were right to intervene there. I thought from the beginning that we were not, and I question whether the £1 billion or thereabouts that we spent on that venture was good value for money.

It has taken the Muslim Brotherhood some 84 years to get power in Egypt. Those of us who know Egypt a bit need to reflect on that. Are we confident that we backed the right side in getting rid of Mubarak if we end up with the Muslim Brotherhood? I am not at all sure. Jordan, you could say, is another country, but we are very silent on Jordan. As for Syria, I ask myself why we are backing anyone. It never was our sphere of influence; it was a French one. Why did we not leave it to the French? Who are we really backing? We have formally recognised a group but the stretch of the power base of that group is pretty illusory and does not seem to have too much basis as far as I can see. I ask myself: is the real risk that we are going to change from the Ba’ath Party autocracy to the Islamic jihadist movement? Certainly, we need to reflect on that. That is why two weeks ago I wrote to the Prime Minister, which I rarely do, saying that in my judgment there was absolutely no case for the British military to go in on humanitarian grounds; that is the role of the international Red Cross. Those of us who work in and know those areas should not forget that there is also the Red Crescent, which is as powerful and objective as the Red Cross, and it is a facility for some, but not all, of the UN agencies.

I turn lastly to an area that I know well, south and south-east Asia. I have lived and worked in three of the countries there: India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. I think that I have visited every other country in that region with the exception of Burma. Today, apart from in India, the infrastructure and influence in that region is Japanese and Chinese—and now we have the Obama vision moving into that part of the world. As the noble Lord, Lord Bilimoria, said, that part of the world used to be very close to us but, whether we like it or not, over time we have alienated many of the countries there for all sorts of reasons. Even today we sometimes show little understanding of them.

When the then Foreign Secretary, Mr Miliband, went to India in 2009, he drew the allusion that the problem of Mumbai terrorism was associated with Kashmir. Not only was that wrong—in fact it was categorised as a diplomatic disaster—but so were the nuances that went with it. I shall quote from the Independent, which said:

“To make matters worse, he”—

Mr Miliband—

“kept addressing India’s septuagenarian Foreign Minister by his first name and putting his arm around him”.

There are certain traditions and methods of greeting and understanding people in that part of the world that are very different from what we do in the United Kingdom, and it is no credit to any of us if we forget that.

With the Commonwealth conference coming up next September in that part of the world, in Sri Lanka, which is greatly welcomed by the rest of the Commonwealth countries, we should remember Kipling’s epitaph, which states:

“A Fool lies here who tried to hustle the East”.