Brexit: UK International Relations

Lord Selsdon Excerpts

Thursday 26th January 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Selsdon (Con)]

I am grateful for the opportunity to speak for a very short time. I begin by looking at Britain’s maritime role in the world. When I first joined your Lordships’ House, I did not know what to do, and I was grabbed by the then Leader of the House and Leader of the Opposition and told to go and sort something out with the maritime sector as I had just come out of the Navy. Effectively, shipbuilding was being shut down, and so I did a bit that helped. What was nice was that although I did not do very much, the industry was kind enough to send me a chart, which I have on my wall. It was of British Empire shipping in 1937, the year of my birth, and it showed a little dot where every British ship was at sea around the world, followed by, should I so wish to know, a list of their trade. I still have that on my wall, and it moves me quite considerably. I realised that we are a maritime nation, which we have not mentioned much today, with global relationships and a global role. There are other countries that are also maritime nations, with which we used to fight.

I am looking at the continent of Europe and saying, “What can we do in the Mediterranean?”. It seems that an awful lot of the rows going on at the moment are water-related, due to illegal migration and things of this sort, and a lack of capability to do anything about it. It is migration that is causing the problem, although it was there historically.

If rather than looking at just the economic exclusion zones around—which EEZs, and we were not sure what they were—we looked at which of the maritime countries we could co-operate with, we would see that the most logical one is France. I have to declare an interest in that I have produced some quite good rosé in Provence, but the wild boar attacked us rather severely this year and they won. There are an awful lot of wild boar around in the world and life is not too easy, but if we could look at the ganging-up between certain countries on specific projects, we would see that it is logical that France, with her links to Africa and to her own territories, could be quite a good partner.

For example, if we look at the square kilometres of economic exclusion zone interests of the United Kingdom and the overseas territories, together with the Commonwealth, we see that it comes to 60% of the world. If you add in the French, that comes to 76%. I just raise this as a little issue: that maybe we should look at the maritime sector and see what we could do. I declare my interest as secretary and treasurer of the House of Lords Yacht Club, and we are solvent.