Foreign and Commonwealth Office: Funding

Lord Wilson of Tillyorn Excerpts

Tuesday 9th February 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wilson of Tillyorn (CB)]

My Lords, the subject of this debate is broad and important, but time is very short indeed, so I shall concentrate on one issue: the importance of regional and country expertise if we are to have an effective foreign policy and, it follows from that, the need for consistent funding to support it.

A good many years ago, when I was a relatively junior member of the Foreign Office, I was summoned to 10 Downing Street to brief the Prime Minister on a visit to south-east Asia. The meeting started with the Prime Minister, the then Mrs Thatcher, roundly condemning the Foreign Office for its written briefing: what was the point of it all? She could get just the same sort of thing from the special supplements in the Financial Times.

Of course, that was all to ginger people up, and there is no harm in that, but it reflected a view that was beginning to be current then and which has continued in the minds of some people that globalisation means that the whole world is coming together, similarities between countries are now much greater, so why, then, have specialist diplomats? Rely instead on the newspapers and the news media. It was not true then; it is not true now. I am no expert on the area, but it seems clear that in recent years, we have desperately needed more and greater expertise on Iraq and Afghanistan and now on Syria and Libya as well.

There have been very welcome signs that the Foreign Office, particularly under the noble Lord, Lord Hague, has again taken to heart the traditional need for regional and language expertise. The setting up of a new Foreign Office language school, to which my noble friend Lord Luce referred, just over two years ago, is a very welcome sign. After all, the value of learning a language is not just the ability to speak it; it is a means of understanding the history and culture of a country—in other words, to understand how people think. This sort of training cannot be short-term; it needs time, effort and consistency.

I hope that the Minister can reassure us all that regional and country expertise, together with language training, is now high on the agenda of the FCO, and that funding will be there to achieve it. It would also be useful to know how many people are now being trained in each year in so-called hard languages: in particular, Arabic, Japanese and Chinese. Perhaps it is not fair to ask for an answer of the cuff, but if the Minister would like to write to me and place the letter in the Library, that would be very useful.