Brexit: Foreign and Security Policy Co-operation

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Thursday 20th October 2016 Lords Chamber

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[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

That this House takes note of the implications for foreign and security policy co-operation with European countries of the result of the referendum for the withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the European Union.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, this is the second debate on this theme in three days, so the Minister will now be prepared for the questions that many of us will pose. The purpose of this debate is to ask the Government what their intentions are in terms of continuing participation in or withdrawal from European institutions, networks and exchanges of information and intelligence in foreign policy, defence, defence procurement, policing, counterterrorism and internal security after we leave the EU.

Posing these questions does not, as David Davis has suggested, amount to a demand to micromanage the Government’s negotiations; it asks the Government to set out their overall objectives—their negotiating guidelines, without which they can neither conduct a successful negotiation with others nor carry their domestic public and the interested parties with them. The Prime Minister’s repeated assurance that leaving the European Union does not mean that we are leaving Europe is as vacuous as her statement, “Brexit means Brexit”.

For the past 43 years, substantial aspects of British foreign policy have been conducted through the mechanisms of European political co-operation, now rather optimistically entitled “common foreign and security policy”. I remember Jim Callaghan’s enthusiasm, as Foreign Secretary, for the usefulness of regular meetings with European Foreign Ministers, and the contributions of the noble Lord, Lord Carrington, to strengthening the mechanism and developing a secretariat.

British Ministers meet their European counterparts more often in such meetings than in any other multilateral forum. Co-ordination of policy with our most important neighbours—France, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy and Spain—flows from such meetings and the conversations around them. Western negotiations on nuclear weapons with Iran, for example, were conducted by the E3, as we called it—France, Germany and the UK, ably assisted both formally and informally by the noble Baroness, Lady Ashton, as the EU High Representative for Foreign Policy. Western responses to Russia on Ukraine have been managed through EU sanctions—though the British Government inexplicably opted out of the more active Normandy process, leaving it to Germany and France to handle the tough negotiations with Moscow. The EU caucus is one of the most effective groups within the UN General Assembly and its various committees, and in other global international organisations.

Do the Government propose to withdraw from the now extensive network of CFSP meetings, and to withdraw UK staff from the European External Action Service, as well as from the externally related directorates-general of the European Commission? If so, we will become an outsider, a marginal participant in multilateral discussions on approaches to Russia, the Middle East, north Africa and beyond.

Since the end of the Cold War, the subsequent transformation of European security and the withdrawal of most US forces from the European continent and the UK, the EU has also begun to develop a defence dimension, encouraged by the Americans and by NATO, as NATO lacks the range of military and civil options to respond to hybrid warfare, state collapse and non-state conflicts. The UK has played an active role in this, while at the same time insisting as far as possible on avoiding public commitments, first under the Blair Government, then under the coalition and now under the Conservatives. We signed a bilateral defence agreement with the French in 1998, intended to provide a lead for the reshaping of other EU forces towards operations outside NATO territory. Liam Fox, no less, signed a reinforced UK-French agreement in 2010. We led, with the French, in developing cross-national battalion groups for such potential deployments. While resisting French proposals for an autonomous European headquarters, we have provided the multilateral HQ for Operation Atalanta—the anti-piracy patrols off Somalia in the Indian Ocean—at Joint Forces Command HQ Northwood.

As a Liberal Democrat Minister, I worked hard to attract more attention to this successful multilateral operation. My Conservative colleagues agreed to invite EU ambassadors to visit Northwood, and even a small number of MPs, but not of course to allow the press in. We take part in Operation Sophia in the Mediterranean and in assisting local forces in Mali and elsewhere across the Sahel. We are also a member of the European Defence Agency, a body of active interest to UK defence manufacturers. Do we intend to withdraw from all this as being incompatible with British sovereignty, or do we want to negotiate some way of remaining associated, like Norway, in a weaker and subordinate marginal capacity?

Then there is multilateral co-operation in development, which was mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Collins, in Tuesday’s debate. Reviews of the European Development Fund have rated it as one of the most effective multilateral bodies in aid and development. It helps many poorer Commonwealth countries as well as others in Africa, the Caribbean and the Asia-Pacific. Do we intend to walk away from that as well and to spend UK development funds through less efficient multilateral bodies or to shoulder the additional administrative costs of managing our entire development spending ourselves, unco-ordinated with other states?

Then there is co-operation among police forces, intelligence services and border control. I remember my first introduction to this area of European co-operation when in early 1990 the Metropolitan Police approached Chatham House with a request for us to host a seminar with police and interior participants from continental countries. They understood that, with the steady increase in the numbers of British citizens crossing the Channel and EU citizens visiting Britain, closer co-operation was becoming essential and that the demolition of the Berlin Wall had made all European borders more porous. Eurosceptics should take note that this was in no way an attempt to build a mythical European superstate or to push powers away from Westminster to Brussels; it was a practical response by senior British police officers to changing patterns of cross-national movement. Those noble Lords who listened to the “Today” programme this morning will have heard a senior British police officer saying again how vital it is that we should remain a member of the European arrest warrant procedures.

British Ministers have led in pressing for exchanges of information on cross-border criminal networks, on passenger name information on travellers by air, while also asking for access to Schengen databases and playing a positive role within Europol. Do the Government now intend that we should withdraw from all of this when we leave the European Union, thus risking a deterioration in British security which tighter border controls will only partly mitigate? Or, again, will we try to find some way of hanging around the edge of the institutions and networks that the EU has established to manage common challenges, which any British Government must continue to deal with?

The leave campaign refused to address any of these issues before the referendum and the Government have said nothing substantial about them since then. Boris Johnson and Liam Fox are in effect security deniers, sweeping such concerns away with assurances that NATO will look after us and that the EU is irrelevant to UK security. However, if we are going to depend solely on the United States, let us hope that we do not get President Trump, although the Foreign Secretary and the Secretary of State for International Trade would no doubt welcome him as a soulmate. The most curious speech in Tuesday’s debate came from the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, who mentioned neither peace nor security, let alone the complex threats facing the European region and the UK as part of that region. He spoke as if he was defending the sovereignty of Mauritius against imperial Britain, standing up for a little island secure from all threats in the middle of an ocean. Perhaps that is the image of England that grips hard Eurosceptics, obsessed with the fantasy that Brussels is the front for a German-dominated empire.

In Tuesday’s debate, both the noble Baroness, Lady Helic, and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leeds quoted extensively from chapter 5 of the current Government’s own strategic defence and security review of 2015. The decision to leave the EU now makes much of that chapter redundant and requires, as the noble Baroness suggested, a new overseas strategy and SDSR for a non-European UK. Paragraph 5.40, for example, states bluntly:

“A secure and prosperous Europe is essential for a secure and prosperous UK. We want Europe to be dynamic, competitive and outwardly focused, delivering prosperity and security”.

Paragraph 5.42 continues:

“We will also continue to foster closer coordination and cooperation between the EU and other institutions, principally NATO, in ways which support our national priorities and build Euro-Atlantic security”.

Few Eurosceptics appear to have read, let alone understood, last year’s SDSR. When the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, repeated the uninformed comment in a debate some months ago that, “the EU has nothing to do with security”, I gave him a copy with marked-up sections in chapter 5, but he and others still seem to think that Britain needs a royal yacht sailing around the Gulf and the Indian Ocean rather more than close, continuing co-operation with our neighbours and allies.

If the Government are sincere in wanting to maintain mutually beneficial co-operation with our European neighbours after we leave the EU, which I think is the implication of what the Prime Minister is hinting at, they also need to pay more attention to the tone in which Conservative Ministers pitch their arguments. Several of us heard at a meeting earlier this morning from several contacts on the continent that willingness to offer the UK reasonable terms for continuing co-operation has lessened since they read or watched the nationalistic rhetoric of the Conservative Party conference. Playing to the Europhobe right may help to hold the Conservative Party together, but it loses the trust of those whose co-operation we will continue to need after we leave the EU.

Any effective foreign policy has to balance between domestic opinion and international diplomacy. We face a great many international challenges, from organised crime, cyberattacks, global migration and climate change to Russian hostility and instability across Africa, the Middle East and Asia. We will not make a constructive contribution to meeting these without working together with our European neighbours and allies. Outside these established European networks of co-operation, we will punch a long way below our weight.

So I have a final question to the Minister. When will the Government provide an outline of British foreign policy post-Brexit? We have heard nothing substantial from the Foreign Secretary in three months in office. The Government have not responded to the Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy’s report of July, which urged that, “a detailed analysis” of the security implications of the UK leaving the European Union, “should begin immediately”. We all suspect that silence indicates confusion, that Ministers do not know what foreign policy priorities to pursue next, or with whom. They need to work that out soon and give Parliament and the British people an answer.

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[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I thank noble Lords for taking part in this debate. The debate demonstrates how far Parliament needs to be allowed to ask questions about the implications of Brexit in one area after another. Unless one takes the Bernard Jenkin approach to Brexit, which is that we simply abrogate unilaterally all our obligations and re-establish absolute British sovereignty, the simple decision to leave has all sorts of knock-on effects. If we wish to continue to be engaged in co-operation with our neighbours, we have to work out ways to do so.

Some of those here are just old enough to remember a very odd organisation called the Western European Union in the 1950s and 1960s, which the British did our utmost to keep alive when it served virtually no other purpose than that it was the one area in which we could discuss security and defence policy with the then six members of the European Union. We are going to have to try to invent things like that again. I recall talking in strong terms to a senior official who was the British permanent representative to the WEU, who told me that his major objective was to abolish it so that he did not have to go to the meetings.

Leaving the EU has real costs in terms of influence and access. Those who say we can simply go back to the Common Market that we had in the 1970s simply do not appreciate how much more complicated the international agenda has become. We did not have cyberattacks in the 1970s because we did not have computers. Heathrow was a relatively small airport in those days because people did not travel so much. The extent to which the world has become so much more interconnected, as the noble Lord, Lord Howell, reminds us so regularly, requires this sort of complicated response.

I say to the Minister that the complacency with which the Government insist that we are the largest spender on defence in Europe will not survive a further fall in the value of the pound. We spend money on defence in pounds but buy defence equipment largely in dollars, and that is going to get harder and harder as we go on. I expect part of the trigger for the next SDSR will be that we are running into another spending gap in our defence budget and are forced yet again to cut.

So there is a great deal more to discuss, and we will need to return to this topic. Few of us are yet persuaded that the Government have begun to have answers to some of the questions we have raised, and they need to develop them before they trigger Article 50.

Motion agreed.