Relations with Europe

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Thursday 10th October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, I was puzzled by the assumption in the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Hannan, that while the European Union’s negotiators have not been entirely rational in their approach to bilateral relations with us, the British negotiators since Brexit—David Davis, Boris Johnson, the noble Lord, Lord Frost, and others—have been entirely rational actors. That is perhaps something that the noble Lord will cover in a future Telegraph column.

I want to talk about the situation that we are in now. We are in a very dangerous situation for British foreign policy. For the last 60 to 70 years, we have assumed that our closest and most mutually trusting relationship is with the United States. In four weeks’ time, there will be a presidential election, which will give us either a second Trump presidency—it is highly unclear what that will mean for transatlantic relations, as he pays little attention to Britain except for his golf courses—or a Harris presidency, which will arrive contested, with law suits and quite possibly disorder, and will also distract the United States. We will have lost American leadership. In this situation, we need to go as far as we can to develop the closest possible relations and better mutual understanding with our neighbours in Europe, because those are the most trustful and important partners we have. If we are going to build closer mutual understanding, it has to include a range of relations, formal and informal, at all levels.

That is why so many of us think that youth exchanges are very important. When I first started studying the European Union, I remember discovering how much effort the French and the Germans had made to rebuild relations between their countries by encouraging student and youth exchanges and putting money into them. When we joined the European Community, as it then was, the then pro-European Conservative Government tried to do something similar, and in 1973 suggested a range of those models. Of course, in 1974, the then anti-European Labour Government cancelled those, and we have never put enough effort into it since. I say to the Minister that the argument against going back into Erasmus is that more students come to Britain than British students go there and it therefore costs us more money; the argument for going back to Erasmus ought to be that we need more British young people to travel abroad and more British students to study at European universities and learn the language. That is a matter of sufficient importance for the future of British society and British foreign policy to make going back into Erasmus worthwhile.

Furthermore, we need to have exchanges not just between parties and parliamentarians, which has already been discussed, but between police. We have lost that through leaving Europol. There is no organised crime that is purely national these days. Cross-border contacts and understanding between police forces are very important, as they are between officials at all levels. We have lost our European cadre in the Foreign Office, and the European Union works the way it does precisely because there are intense and regular contacts between officials from different countries, bilaterally and multilaterally. That is what we need to regain and what this Government need to begin to build. At that point, we will have again the mutual understanding that we need.

These are our neighbours. We need to understand each other, to work together and to negotiate with each other. For that, we need to change the way that we behave in our relationships.