Queen’s Speech

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Thursday 28th May 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, I welcome the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay, back to her seat. I am deeply grateful to have had a very professional and constructive relationship with her in the last Government. She is a very good Minister; it was a very good coalition in that respect. I compliment her in particular for maintaining the important work on interfaith relations, both domestically and internationally, which her predecessor—the noble Baroness, Lady Warsi—undertook. I hope that that will also continue under this new Conservative Government.

I want to talk about the area of the Queen’s Speech on international affairs and the insistence that,

“my Government will continue to play a leading role in global affairs”,

with specific references to remaining,

“at the forefront of the NATO Alliance”,

to maintaining pressure on Russia over Ukraine, to an active role in international efforts on combat terrorism in the Middle East, and to pursuing,

“an enhanced partnership with India and China”.

It goes on to say, as the noble Earl remarked, that they,

“will undertake a full strategic defence … review”,

within the next year. In a separate section of the Speech, the Government promise to,

“renegotiate the United Kingdom’s relationship with the European Union and pursue reform of the European Union for the benefit of all member states”.

I leave to one side the underlying contradiction in this sentence, between “renegotiation”, in which the UK faces the other 27 member states and asks for a series of special concessions and opt-outs for ourselves alone, on the Danish model, and,

“reform … for the benefit of all”,

in which the UK works with like-minded Governments to achieve common objectives. You cannot do both at the same time, and the Prime Minister remains deliberately ambiguous as to which he intends to pursue.

I want to focus on the assumption that there is little connection between our relations with the EU and its other member states, our foreign policy, and our role in the world. Many members of the Government are in denial of the reality—that Britain does not have a foreign policy, or a role in the world, unless it has a European policy. One of the established myths of the Eurosceptic media and political right is that we were never told when we joined the European Community that it had implications for foreign policy, and that it was just a common market, a trade arrangement without political implications. That is a convenient myth, but it disregards what Harold Macmillan as Prime Minister made clear to his colleagues when the question of membership was first raised; he recognised that it was a major shift in our international role, a commitment to European security and closer co-operation, which the United States was pushing the British to accept, and which in particular necessitated closer co-operation with France and Germany. Edward Heath spelt out the same message clearly, most explicitly in his Harvard lectures in 1969, well reported in the United Kingdom, and so did Sir Alec Douglas-Home, as he took the accession Bill through the Commons as Foreign Secretary. Jim Callaghan as Foreign Secretary was one of the first enthusiasts for European foreign policy co-operation; in 1980, the noble Lord, Lord Carrington, drafted the London report on strengthening foreign policy co-operation. The EU was always about security as well as trade, about containing Germany and Russia, and about resolving competing nationalisms among European states.

British foreign policy for centuries has been about competition and co-operation with France, Germany, the Netherlands and Spain; that has shaped our national identity and history, and it is the continuing reality today. William Hague has negotiated with Iran and on other Middle East issues in the forum of the E3+3: Britain, France and Germany, together with the United States, Russia and China. Britain, France and Germany are clearly more closely aligned with each other than with any of the three others. In containing Russia over Ukraine, the European members of NATO have worked closely together, imposing EU sanctions to parallel NATO measures. I took part earlier this week in a NATO conference in which the constant message from Americans and Europeans is that, if we are going to cope with the Russian pressure on Ukraine, the EU and NATO have to work closely in harmony, using all the measures at their disposal. They are not in entirely different worlds. The UK appears to have opted out in many ways from relations with Ukraine, so that it is Germany above all, with France, that is leading the negotiations with Russia and is the United States’ leading partner in Europe.

One recent academic study of 25 years of voting in the UN since the end of the Cold War shows that the French have voted in the same way as the British in 95% of UN votes and the United States has voted together with the British in 65%, which suggests perhaps that French and British interests are more closely aligned than those that we have with the United States. In containing disorder across north Africa and the Sahel, we already work very closely with the French in Mali and elsewhere. In containing disorder and piracy off the Horn of Africa, the European headquarters for the operation is in Northwood, in spite of the fact that very often the British have not contributed a frigate to that joint operation. The Franco-British defence co-operation arrangements launched in 1998 under the Blair Government and renewed in 2010-11 under this Government have become the core of where we are going, but the Government have always been deeply resistant to Liberal Democrat pressure to tell anyone in Britain about it for fear of the Daily Mail. We also work closely with the Dutch and the Nordic countries in pursuing closer defence co-operation.

We hear a lot of noise from leading Conservatives about what sort of future relationship they would like us to have with the European Union and its leading member states. For example, last weekend, Owen Paterson suggested that Switzerland or Norway are the models we should follow and that we should focus instead on reviving the Anglosphere. That brought back memories of my first visit to the United States when Eisenhower was President and white Anglo-Saxon Protestants still ran the United States from the east coast. That has gone. When we first negotiated to join the European Economic Community, we spent a lot of time defending New Zealand butter exports and Australian pineapples. That has also gone. We are in a different world. The United States has Korean and Hispanic congressmen and the Republicans will not win unless they have Spanish-speaking voters. The world is no longer the Anglosphere.

The Foreign Secretary appears to prefer the Danish model with a formal opt-out but following most EU legislation. The Danish Foreign Minister made a speech yesterday warning the United Kingdom against it, saying: “It has given us nothing but problems”. Daniel Hannan and UKIP would really like the UK to leave the EU completely to pursue closer and separate relationships with China, Russia and other Asian powers and to have an enhanced partnership with China and India separate from European relations with China and India. I suggest that that is not the way to get the attention of senior Chinese or even, these days, Indian leaders. There are, of course, issues of national identity behind all this. I note that the campaign for Britain now has a subgroup entitled “Historians for Britain”, some of whom will be familiar to noble Lords. They want to promote the Michael Gove version of national history. I once saw a Conservative memo that said, “We must at all costs avoid any indication that World War 1 or World War 2 has any relevance in terms of pursing European co-operation”. That is the part of the argument about national identity and national history.

None of these alternatives offers us a coherent foreign policy let alone a credible or hard-headed approach to what our role in the world should be, to quote the noble Earl. It is a foreign policy with a hole at its centre where we have left out those countries with which we most closely share democratic values: our neighbours in the rest of Europe. If we have no European policy, we have no foreign policy, so how can we set out a strategic review of defence and security before we have concluded what future relationship we wish to have with our nearest neighbours? The SDSR will list the major threats facing the UK over the next 10 years and more. None of them is a threat to Britain alone. They are all, to one extent or another, shared with our neighbours: migration, cross-border crime, Russian subversion, pandemics and international terrorism. Our natural partners in facing them are our neighbours. If we do not recognise that, we end up sending HMS “Bulwark” into the Mediterranean when it is unclear what it is there to do, what rules it is operating under or what it does with the migrants it rescues. We have a determination to renew our continuous at-sea nuclear deterrent, but we are not entirely clear why. If we aspire to a Danish role in the world, Denmark does not need a nuclear deterrent, and neither does Switzerland. Our nuclear deterrent was a contribution to the defence of western Europe against the Soviet threat. We have to put it in its European context for it to make sense.

When she winds up, will the noble Baroness say whether in making the SDSR proposal we will follow the example of the last French White Paper and invite French participation as they invited British participation—Sir Peter Ricketts—in the process of developing their defence review or whether we think that is not something we should reciprocate? Do we intend to deepen European defence co-operation, in particular with France, or do we think now is the time to step back? If we intend to deepen it, do the Government intend to inform Parliament and the British public about how far that has got?

I am told that over the past five years the National Security Council spent more time discussing Gulf strategy than European strategy. Some of us have some doubts about the preferred Gulf strategy of the current Government and their predecessor. We have a close relationship with Sunni monarchies, looking for investment in Britain, pursuing arms sales—above all, aircraft sales—and have set in train an investigation into the Muslim Brotherhood because the Saudis and Emiratis pressed us to do so, without thinking through the implications for British foreign policy or British domestic politics. Thus we are in danger of ending up on the Sunni/Salafist side of a Sunni-Shia divide.

I note a number of comments about “increasing our footprint in the Gulf” as we withdraw from Afghanistan, in particular about expanding our base in Bahrain, which is close to the American Fifth Fleet. Will the Minister tell us who is paying for the expansion of the Bahrain base? I have heard some suggestions that the Bahrainis are paying for it, not the British Government. If that is the case, what conditions have the Bahrainis put on paying for that expansion, and what conditions in return have we put on the Bahrainis for the future development of that rather authoritarian monarchy?

Over the next year we will have to discuss Britain’s role in the world and what that requires as regards responding to future threats. The noble Earl promised a “hard-headed appraisal” of the role we want to play. In a discussion a few months ago on the context of the SDSR I heard a rather senior Conservative MP say, bluntly, “Well, we don’t know who we are as a nation, and we don’t know where we are in the world”. That is close to the bone as regards the confusion within the Conservative Party. Liberal Democrats understand that the British identity is compatible with the European identity, that Britain shares values and interests with our European neighbours, and that any coherent British foreign and security strategy has to be founded on a European strategy.