EU Foreign and Security Strategy (EUC Report)

Lord Selsdon Excerpts

Tuesday 7th June 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Selsdon (Con)]

My Lords, I have on the wall of my office a large chart that was given to me by the Ministry of Transport when I tried single-handedly and with no support to save the shipbuilding industry. It shows the position of His Majesty’s ships and at harbour in the year of my birth. It is quite an amazing chart because we were totally global. I have been brought up always to believe as a Scot, when my family went off and helped to colonise Australia and things of that sort because we earned more money abroad, that we are a global nation. However, other people do not feel that. It is not a question of the Commonwealth.

At the moment, we look at defence and fear. The biggest single fear, I gather, is immigration or migration. This seems to worry people more than it worries me because we have been a nation that built ourselves on immigrants and things worldwide. I play with this chart regularly, I take it out and with the new technology I look first at what is the British Empire. You look not just at the land but at the 200 nautical mile exclusion zone. I have raised this before in your Lordships’ House. You find that the United Kingdom, with the Commonwealth, effectively has approximately 21% of that exclusion zone. You then look at who are the other people with power over the sea. The next one, not surprisingly, is France with its own dependent territories and things. France and the United Kingdom together have some 25% or 26%. Now, this is totally irrelevant information to other people but to me it is a form of hidden power.

Then I found other things from time to time. I did not know that my grandfather when Postmaster-General laid the underground cables from America across the world, or that those are the only secure methods of communication that exist today because everything that goes through the airwaves can be hacked into or picked up. We look at the pattern of our trade. When I came here, I was told that I had better go and learn about things where things were going to happen. Lord Shackleton put me on the East European Trade Council and, with a lot of people, I was dragged off to places where I did not know where I was, and came back. Afterwards, I got to go to Ukraine, Albania where we looked at chrome, and the whole of east Europe. I found it fascinating.

Then I was told that I ought to know something about Africa and read that book, The Scramble for Africa. I took a look again at that and spent time repeating this to your Lordships’ House. Why did we go to Africa in the beginning and what were the resources that they had? Where have those resources that were underground and in other places disappeared to? I did not know that Ghana was about gold. Then I found that my great-uncle was Stafford Cripps and that his daughter—my cousin—Peggy married Joe Appiah, who was known as “Veranda Joe”. I had not realised that when the King of Ghana went to the Middle East to visit Mecca, he took with him so much gold that the price of gold collapsed for 50 years. These are all historical things but our knowledge of other people’s countries these days is very limited.

First, take our great fear. As I mentioned, the fear of the nation is migration or immigration. That must be addressed because, with all the queues of people hanging out waiting to get into the United Kingdom, it may have an impact for some time to come. We must look at where we go ourselves. We must accept that we are and always will be a global nation. By “global”, I mean every single country in the world. We have one of the strongest economies. We do not seem to have any fear; we have a good defence operation—it is pretty good, but sometimes people seem to be frightened of goodness knows what. I live in the very happy hope that having been here for 52 years I may have a few years longer.

However, there needs to be some decision-making as to where, who and how we develop overseas countries to our own benefit. We do not have the resources here now. It is amazing that having been such a great steel country we should rely on individual foreigners to save our manufacturing of iron and steel. I have great hope for the future. I have enjoyed this place. As somebody said, “You’re jolly lucky. You have been drip-fed by geriatrics who know what they are taking about, and now you have become one”.