Queen’s Speech

Lord Ricketts Excerpts

Tuesday 15th October 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ricketts (CB)]

My Lords, noble Lords might be familiar with the Haydn symphony in which, towards the end of the last movement, one by one the musicians walk out until nobody is left—so I am very grateful to all noble Lords who will soldier through to the end of this movement, which I hope will not be too long. However, we are discussing serious issues and I want to make a brief contribution.

I shall start with a general proposition. Successful negotiations are usually those where there is a degree of confidence and mutual trust between the negotiating parties, and the gracious Speech does indeed declare at the outset the ambition for,

“a new partnership with the European Union, based on … friendly co-operation”.

That is excellent—but I fail to understand how it is compatible with the behaviour of the Government in their first two months. All the rhetoric about surrender Bills, betrayal and do or die, culminating in the memo from the Prime Minister’s office to the Spectator, which is the most disgraceful document that I have seen emanating from No. 10 in my 45 years, sends a none-too-subtle message to our EU partners that they are enemies. They are not our enemies; they are our allies, our friends and our economic partners. They are countries for which generations of British soldiers have fought and died. We do not need to fabricate new enemies in the world; there are plenty of adversaries out there already.

Now, those same Europeans who have been treated to that language are the ones with whom the Government are seeking urgently to finalise a deal. As with the previous Government, the closer a potential cliff edge comes, the harder the Government work to avoid it. That is welcome, but the tactics of the first two months have not made our task any easier.

A lot has been made in recent weeks in public about the preparations for a no-deal Brexit. The £100 million spent on that has brought to people’s attention some of the myriad disadvantages of leaving the EU with no deal. I am sure that the National Audit Office will have some penetrating questions to ask the accounting officer who signed off on that spending, as indeed I think it will about the other £8.2 billion—I think that that was the figure the Minister mentioned in opening—that has been allocated to preparations for no deal. Personally, I doubt very much that that spending will make much difference to what will happen if we crash out of the EU with no deal. I do not believe that it bluffed the EU countries for one moment; they had worked out long ago that a no-deal departure would be far more damaging to this country than it would to the EU, although all would suffer.

So I agree with noble Lords who said that a deal is better than a no-deal crash-out—but, equally, we should be absolutely clear that what is on offer, as we understand it from what has come out of the negotiations, is a harder Brexit overall than was proposed by Theresa May’s Government. Given that the level playing field provisions—the regulatory and customs provisions—seem to be on their way out, the destination is then a Canada-minus agreement, largely focused on goods, leaving the services sector to look after itself. That is so far from what was ever proposed in the referendum campaign by the leave side that I am convinced it would be right to put back to the people the option of choosing either the deal that may emerge from these negotiations in the coming days and weeks or, finally, staying in the EU.

I want to concentrate mainly on foreign policy. As so often in my career, I find that my thunder was stolen by the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, in his brilliant and wide-ranging speech. I will just add a couple of grace notes to what he said. Like him, I found that my eye was caught by the phrase in the gracious Speech that the Government,

“will ensure that it continues to play a leading role in global affairs”.

I cannot think of any major international issue at the moment where Britain is playing a leading role or, indeed, having any discernible impact at all.

The noble Lord, Lord Kerr, did not mention Iran; he left me that one issue to raise. On Iran, the united western approach that was developed rather successfully by the six powers came apart not because of anything that Britain did but because President Trump decided to pull the United States out of the nuclear deal. The only initiative that I am aware of since that time to try to bring the United States and Iran into some kind of dialogue was taken by President Macron at the G7 summit. He did get some momentum going—enough, it seems, to have worried the Revolutionary Guard sufficiently for it to have carried out its very dangerous and escalatory attack on Saudi oilfields. Remarkably, Iran seems largely to have got away with that. I fear that the impunity that the hardliners in Iran will feel as a result of the—as they would see it—successful provocation of the international community must make the Gulf region more dangerous in the future.

Britain’s contribution to the Iranian crisis, as far as one can see from the outside, has not been stellar. We detained an Iranian oil tanker in Gibraltar; then we let it go and watched powerlessly as it delivered its cargo of oil to Syria. The US “maximum pressure” strategy has failed, and I would be interested to know whether Britain has any ideas about what might replace it.

A number of noble Lords have raised the appalling events that are happening in north-eastern Syria, triggered by another of President Trump’s initiatives: the withdrawal of US forces from that part of the world. I worry that the Turkish invasion is a prelude to a population movement of Syrian refugees now in Turkey into what were Kurdish areas of north-eastern Syria. If that is true, it is storing up more instability and chaos for the future. We know that the West pays the price, in relation both to refugees and terrorism, from instability in that part of the word.

The Foreign Secretary’s Statement in the other place today suggests something I would welcome. I think it is playing catch-up with decisions already taken in Washington, Berlin and Paris to put sanctions on the Turkish Government. The western response so far has seemed disjointed and not very powerful. If we are a country that still has an ambition for a global role, it is perhaps time that we took the initiative to get some more coherence into western strategy. Perhaps the Foreign Secretary should invite the US, German and French Foreign Ministers for a four-power meeting in London to try to map out a rather more co-ordinated approach. Perhaps they should then involve the Russians. As other speakers have said, Russia has major interests and probably more influence in the area than any of us at the moment. This is not a straightforward crisis for Russia either. Russia is allied with President’s Assad’s regime but also building a relationship with Ankara, including selling it modern air defence missile systems. So, to see Turkish forces coming up against Syrian forces in north-eastern Syria is not comfortable for Russia either.

I would like to see Britain take the initiative in this area and show that we are still capable of using London as a major convening centre in trying to sort out international crises. Britain will of course continue to have a strategic relationship with Washington in areas such as defence and intelligence, but on what the gracious Speech refers to as the “most pressing global challenges” we face—whether climate, preserving free trade or the Iranian nuclear deal—actually Britain’s interests have in recent months been much more in line with European interests. I find it uncomfortable that President Macron and Chancellor Merkel are now talking about European strategic autonomy. That is rather a dangerous concept if it means Europe can do without America’s 70-year role in deterring Russian adventurism in this part of the world.

This idea of European strategic autonomy, taken with President Trump’s rather erratic approach to NATO obligations, puts an enormous weight on the next NATO summit, which I am glad to see is being held in London at the end of this year. I really hope that the Government will propose measures of our own to breathe life back into what looks like a rather faltering western alliance at the moment. In responding, perhaps the Minister could assure us that there will be an opportunity for a debate in this House before that summit on what Britain will propose to get NATO back on the road.

We can already see that the EU’s approach to foreign and defence policy will change as Britain leaves. It is clear in the line being taken on European defence and in the signs that EU sanctions on Russia may well be relaxed in the months ahead.

The gracious Speech assured us that Britain will defend our interests and protect our values, which is something I am sure we can all agree to. However, the world will be full of difficult trade-offs for a Britain operating on its own account and constantly having to balance the need for trade agreements and investment with standing up for its interests and values. We see that at the moment with Hong Kong and balancing standing up for the rights we promised to the Hong Kong people against our commercial interests in China. That will become the norm if Britain leaves the EU and operates on its own account.

Of course, we will still have many assets as a player in the world: our Armed Forces, our diplomacy, our development, our soft power, the BBC, our culture, our sport. However, these will translate into influence only if there is real political leadership in implementing a clear strategy. We need the means to achieve that strategy, namely a well-funded Foreign Office. I wonder whether the Minister will be able to tell us when we will have an ambassador in Washington or when we will have a full-time national security adviser, who can spend their entire time advising the Government on plotting a national strategy in the choppy waters that lie in front of us.

It is not for me to sum up, but since I am the last speaker today, I will say that it has been a privilege to sit and listen to this thoughtful and high-quality debate, ranging across the very wide canvas that the Motion invited us to address. I am very struck that, right across that landscape of defence, trade, development and foreign policy, whether and in what terms we leave the EU has a huge impact. It is therefore all the more extraordinary that this country, with our great and glorious history, is in a position in which we cannot tell foreign friends what the country’s relationship with the EU will be in three months or three years. Whatever the final outcome, my conclusion is that Britain’s reputation in the world has suffered real damage from the chaotic way in which the whole Brexit issue has been handled.

[Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist]

I apologise to the noble Lord, Lord Ricketts, for trying to adjourn this debate prematurely. I am sure we would have all missed his thoughtful contribution. I beg to move that the debate be adjourned.

UK Foreign Policy in a Shifting World Order (International Relations Committee Report)

Lord Ricketts Excerpts

Tuesday 21st May 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ricketts (CB)]

My Lords, I had the privilege of serving under the noble Lord, Lord Howell, when he was a Minister in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and have appeared before him over many years in Select Committees of different shapes and sizes. I regard him as one of the most profound thinkers about international affairs in public life, so it is no surprise to me that the report from the committee he chairs is excellent. I am not a member of the committee, although I was privileged to be quoted as a witness; indeed, I find that I largely still agree with the comments attributed to me in the report, which is not always the case. Its conclusions have been reinforced in the six months since it was produced. I will make three points and invite the Minister’s comments on them, joining with what many other noble Lords have said.

My first point is about global Britain. This country is international by inheritance, instinct and interests, and we have done very well out of the 70 years of the rules-based international order. The noble Lord, Lord Grocott, is clearly right that it was never a golden age, but I could make a case that that set of rules constrained great power competition and allowed medium-sized and smaller countries to prosper and flourish over the last 70 years. My noble friend Lord Hennessy referred to a number of studies of future strategy which begin to sketch the scale of the challenge we now face—in particular, the 1960 Macmillan Future Policy Study. I too have come equipped with a quotation from that admirable paper which sums up our national strategy since the post-war years very well. The study concluded:

“One basic rule of British policy is clear: we must not find ourselves in a position of having to make a final choice between the United States and Europe. It would not be compatible with our vital interests to reject either one or the other, and the very fact that the choice was needed would mean the destruction of the Atlantic alliance”.


That was true in 1960 and is still true today, although many of the trends identified in the committee’s report, and the fact that we are likely to be leaving the European Union, risk undermining both the pillars of the strategy set out in the 1960 report.

The scale of the challenge is considerable: we need to define a new foreign policy relationship with the European Union and adapt our partnership with Washington to the facts that the US strategic priority is now confrontation with China and that at least some US opinion is becoming impatient with multilateralism. On many key issues of the day—on the nuclear deal with Iran, trade policy and reducing carbon emissions—we find ourselves on the European side of the debate. We will have to reconcile that in the future. We will also have to reconcile our trade interests outside the EU with, for example, our human rights values in respect of Saudi Arabia and our security interests in relation to China.

In preparing for the debate, I reread the Foreign Secretary’s Policy Exchange speech from last October, which sets out some admirable aspirations but is distinctly short on detail. It is not enough to produce incantations about an invisible chain to describe what we will be doing. We need an active, initiative-taking foreign policy, an excellent diplomatic service and a lot of soft power assets, but those need political leadership and initiative to make the most impact. As a recent example, the summit to tackle terrorist and extremist content online was an excellent initiative, and the inspirational Prime Minister of New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern, made the journey half way across the world to attend it and issued an excellent declaration. But why was it held in Paris and not London? I hope the Minister can put some flesh on the bones of global Britain for us.

On the future of multilateralism, the report makes it clear that all the institutions which have been so important over the last 70 years—NATO, the UN, Bretton Woods—are now all under pressure. They will all be more important to Britain if we leave the European Union. The report recommends that we champion UN reform, and I agree, but I have not seen much detail on how the Government will go about that. For example, could we set an example by contributing more UN peacekeepers to peacekeeping operations as a mark of our commitment to the organisation? We are having the NATO summit in London later this year, which is good, but, again, we will need to lead with ideas on how to reform NATO to keep it relevant to changing US interests—in particular, paying more attention to Asian security issues.

My third point is about the new national strategy that we will need. The place to make the difficult choices and reconcile the conflicting interests is the National Security Council. That is why the recent leak was so damaging—not because the information was necessarily very highly classified, but because it undermined the trust that this council is a safe space where Ministers and their advisers can take decisions on the basis of robust argument which can be kept in confidence. We can already see the impact of that leak. What should have been a reasonably contained discussion about where Britain was going to source its equipment for 5G has now become entangled in a much wider dispute between the US and China about the future of the internet and global dominance in new technology. I fear that we are on the brink of a high-tech trade war. The fact that the action that Google felt obliged to take as a result of the listing of Huawei has caught up hundreds of millions of people in the use of their iPhones and laptops shows the scale of the issue we are confronting. That could become a serious national security issue. But for now, the leak has made it impossible to make calm and proportionate decisions about where Vodafone and BT should source their antennae for the next generation of the internet, and it is an example of why the National Security Council will operate only if everyone can trust that it will remain a secure environment.

We will face many more contentious issues than that as we tackle the problem of defining a national strategy, and we desperately need an effective National Security Council. That is a very necessary, if not a sufficient, condition of success.

Hong Kong: Pro-democracy Activists

Lord Ricketts Excerpts

Wednesday 10th April 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon]

I am sure I speak for the whole House in paying tribute to the noble and learned Lord’s contribution in that respect and to the judges who continue to do such a sterling job and play such an important role in Hong Kong today.

[Lord Ricketts (CB)]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Wilson of Tillyorn, is too modest to say that he was one of the key architects of the joint declaration and put many thousands of hours into negotiating it. I agree with other noble Lords that we can be proud as a nation of what the JD has delivered in terms of stability in Hong Kong, but the price of that is eternal vigilance. The Minister has already assured us that the Government are going to continue to press very hard on this crucial issue.

[Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon]

I assure the noble Lord that that will be the case. On a lighter note, I am reminded that when I joined the House in 2011 I was advised, as a Minister answering in the House of Lords, “When you give a response, Tariq, make sure you look around you because as a minimum someone has probably written a book about the subject”. The experience in your Lordships’ House has been clearly demonstrated on this issue.

Brexit: UK Nationals

Lord Ricketts Excerpts

Wednesday 9th January 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon]

My Lords, the Government have sought to provide clarity at every stage. I accept the point that the noble Lord makes that we need to ensure that not just our citizens in the EU but those people who have made a life in the UK—who work, live and reside here—are given certainty. While things have happened in the past, it is important for the here and now to ensure that we give certainty to EU residents in the UK in what are challenging circumstances. Equally, we should not forget those million UK residents who are living across the EU and ensure that their rights are also understood. Our diplomatic network is doing an extremely good job in that respect.

[Lord Ricketts (CB)]

My Lords, while, I am sure, British embassies around Europe are doing everything they should to pass on information to British citizens, does the Minister accept that the withdrawal of freedom of movement presented by the Government as a great achievement is seen as a disaster by many thousands of younger people who may have had life plans to move and to settle in the EU after the date we leave the European Union, and who are now left in complete uncertainty about the rights they will have?

[Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon]

My Lords, many people who voted in the EU referendum in 2016 took the view that one of the challenges that the United Kingdom has faced over time has been that of ensuring firm and fair immigration. The issue of free movement across Europe was a challenge. The Government had a mandate from the people after the referendum and the withdrawal agreement will deliver on the result. It was clear from the referendum that the majority of British citizens felt that free movement was an issue of deep concern, and we are acting on that instruction.

United States: Foreign Policy

Lord Ricketts Excerpts

Thursday 18th January 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ricketts (CB)]

My Lords, I, too, thank the noble Lord, Lord Ashdown, for the opportunity to reflect on the geopolitical changes that are sweeping our world and what we will face as we emerge, blinking, from our 40-year membership of the European Union into that world. I agree that there are more simultaneous crises going on now than I can remember through my career. It is striking that the Syria crisis must be the first in the Middle East since the Second World War where neither the US nor the UK has been playing a key and shaping role.

The underlying trend, which I think has already begun to come out in your Lordships’ debate, is the erosion of the international security structure that Britain was so instrumental in putting together in the late 1940s. That is partly because of the US retreat from leadership of global crisis management. It started before President Trump and has many reasons—some of them lie in that grinding and difficult 10 years of international conflict that the US and UK went through in the first decade of this century. Clearly, President Trump’s dislike of multinational organisations and his preference for transactional bilateral deals is exacerbating that trend, but there are other factors too, most obviously economic ones. There is the move of economic power towards Asia and the rise of countries with nationalist leaders impatient with the constraints of the post-war institutions who want to dominate in their region—countries such as Russia, China, Turkey and perhaps Saudi Arabia as well.

In parts of the world, I think we are returning to a period of spheres of influence, which is a very uncomfortable world for many countries. The question for us is what should Britain do in that context, as we leave the EU. For me, it means putting much more energy into an active, engaged, initiative-taking foreign policy. As one of a number of former heads of the Foreign Office here today, noble Lords would expect me to support the eloquent appeal of the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, for a properly resourced Foreign Office. If global Britain is going to mean anything and if bilateral relationships with our friends and allies will have to take greater weight after Brexit, we clearly need a Foreign Office with the resources to do the job. The current balance between the money spent on international development, defence, intelligence and foreign policy seems to me to be way out of kilter.

I have two thoughts. First, we must make the most of the multilateral organisations of which we will still be a leading member. I particularly think of NATO. It is very welcome that British troops are now deployed in eastern Europe in support of our Article 5 commitment to NATO. Britain should naturally be looking to play a leading role in NATO.

But I also want to draw attention to our strategic relationship with France on the day that President Macron is here for an important summit meeting. It is an opportunity to remind ourselves that Britain and France are natural allies. We are the two European nuclear weapon powers. We have the largest defence budgets in Europe and we have Armed Forces who are trained, equipped and experienced to go out and undertake real combat in the real world. We have the two most significant defence industries in Europe. It is vital that we now put new energy back into the Lancaster House process that I played a small part in launching in 2010, both to use the capacity that we built for the two Armed Forces to work together and to drive forward defence industrial co-operation, including the potentially very important unmanned combat air system of the future. It is also time that we revisited our consultations with the French on nuclear deterrence. The factors affecting nuclear deterrence in the world, not least the emergence of a potentially nuclear-armed North Korea, make it important that the two European nuclear powers should be giving leadership in NATO on nuclear deterrence as well.

In the circumstances described by the noble Lord, Lord Ashdown, let us double down on our strategic relationship with France and let us also remember that our relationship with the United States, whatever the difficulties with the current President, remains absolutely essential in the fields of defence and intelligence, which I saw at first hand. They will continue. We need to show that we are relevant allies to the US, including in what is happening in Asia, but let us now invest seriously in our key strategic bilateral partnership.

Permanent Structured Cooperation

Lord Ricketts Excerpts

Thursday 16th November 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon]

My right honourable friend the Foreign Secretary was reiterating the importance of our continued relationship with the European Union while we remain a member of it, but also that we want a different but strong partnership with it once we leave. That includes these two important areas of defence and security, which we have just touched on and in which the UK has led the way. We are making our view known that an option should remain within Permanent Structured Cooperation in those areas of defence and security for third countries to join at an appropriate time for whatever projects are perceived to be of mutual importance to both—be it NATO and, say, this new organisation, in whatever shape or form it takes. This would allow the UK to continue to co-operate with European partners after we leave the EU.

[Lord Ricketts (CB)]

My Lords, may I endorse what the Minister says about the importance of continuing co-operation with the EU? If this initiative leads to improved European defence capacity, it would be a good thing for this country and we ought to be looking to continue working in European military missions around the world, as we have been doing, where they are in our interests.

[Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon]

I agree with the noble Lord. When we look at the detail of some of the projects—not just in defence and security; it could be, for example, hospitals that have been created through defence interventions in certain parts of the world—it is our view that projects that resonate with the common objectives of the United Kingdom and, importantly, those of NATO should continue to provide the opportunity for continued co-operation after the UK leaves the European Union.