The UK’s Relationship with the Pacific Alliance (International Relations Committee Report)

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Monday 1st February 2021 Grand Committee

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD) [V]]

My Lords, I welcome this report, with reservations. The UK has neglected relations with Latin American countries since the last war. There have been periodic attempts to increase our commitment, and to reverse the decline in trading and investment links, but we have continued to lag far behind Germany and others in the intensity of our relations with most countries in the region.

I have often acted as a guide in singing tours of Westminster Abbey, where I walk over the tomb of Admiral Lord Cochrane, who at one point commanded the Chilean navy and helped found the Peruvian fleet. Britain has strong historical ties with Latin America that we have let decline. As a policy analyst working on transatlantic relations, I have attended conferences in Chile and Mexico, and have also visited Peru. The members of the Pacific Alliance are significant states. On any definition of global Britain, we should be paying more attention to relations with Latin American states and markets, but we should not fall into the trap of assuming that trade with Latin America can somehow replace trade with the European continent; nor fall into the illusion that economic integration among South American countries is an easier process to commit the UK to than any European one. I recall when I was a young academic, 50 years ago, the optimism of Mexican economists about the prospects for the Latin American Free Trade Association and other regional schemes. These failed or stagnated as regimes changed in different South American states.

The noble Lord, Lord Howell, is correct to argue that the UK needs to pay more attention to the Pacific as a region—with the rapidly growing economies of east and south-east Asia now acting as the dynamo of global growth, and with the rise of China creating new economic and security challenges—but we need to beware of overemphasising the prospect of Britain becoming a major commercial or military player in the Pacific; nor should we see commitment to Pacific co-operation as an alternative to continued engagement with European states and markets and across the wider European neighbourhood to the Mediterranean and Africa. The enthusiasm with which the Secretary of State for International Trade has just announced the UK’s application to join the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership contrasts sharply with her antagonism towards the European Union. The CPTPP, if it develops into a serious economic grouping, which is not yet clear, will compromise UK sovereignty on issues such as animal welfare, regulation of chemicals, and investor protection. It is not clear to me why such limits on sovereignty should be more acceptable to our Government in the Pacific than across the North Sea.

The Pacific Alliance is only a small player on the fringes of the Pacific region. One of its four members is not yet a member of the CPTPP. China and the USA are its dominant external partners. The EU as a whole is less important to it. Britain, as the report notes, sends less than 1% of its exports to it. A determined export drive might raise this to 2% or even 3%.

Some of the comments in the report seem questionable. We are told about the

“importance of defence co-operation between the UK and Chile”.

Is that really important compared with our defence co-operation with France and the Netherlands, which our Government attempt to hide from their own people? It is suggested that these countries should be encouraged to have closer relations with the Commonwealth, but we are not told why or how the UK will explain the value of that to the Commonwealth’s African neighbours.

Yes, we should work harder to develop trade and investment with these and other Latin American countries. No, this is not a major element in the new global Britain that the Prime Minister has promised to recreate—to make Britain great again, in his Trumpian phraseology. We await the overdue integrated review of foreign and security strategy to learn about the Government’s vision of Britain’s global role after Brexit, in which closer relations with these four states should have a significant but small part.