The FCO and the Spending Review 2015

Stephen Gethins Excerpts

Tuesday 1st March 2016 Commons Chamber

[Crispin Blunt]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right, and I recall that it is my hon. Friend the Member for Warwick and Leamington (Chris White), who served on the previous Committees on Arms Export Controls under the Stakhanovite chairmanship of Sir John Stanley, who is taking up that role. I am confident that he will do it extremely well.

Hon. Members will know that if I can chair a Committee that produces a unanimous report and has the hon. Member for Ilford North (Wes Streeting) and my hon. Friend the Member for Basildon and Billericay (Mr Baron) agreeing on factors around our European Union membership, we will have done a singular service in producing a piece of analysis that everyone can have confidence in.

[Stephen Gethins (North East Fife) (SNP)]

The hon. Gentleman raises a good point, and I look forward to working with him in trying to bring the five of us on either side of the argument together to produce that report. Does he agree that one of our primary goals is to ensure that people in the House, and beyond, are as well informed as they possibly can be about the European Union referendum ahead of 23 June?

[Crispin Blunt]

I absolutely agree with the hon. Gentleman, and we look forward with interest to the motivation of the Scottish National party, and how it will vote, given its differing attitudes to the differing Unions in which Scotland finds itself.

Anyone attending this debate might ask why, if the Foreign Office was one of the winners from the spending review—or at least not a loser—we have sought this debate. My reply is that no one should underestimate the scale of the challenges that the UK and its allies are facing in the world today. Even with a protected budget, the Foreign Office will struggle to address those challenges. Of course we have a range of capabilities to deal with direct threats to our national security, including armed forces, diplomacy, economic policy, cyber-operations, and covert means, but in terms of sheer value for money, it is diplomacy, and the capacity to bring crises to a peaceful resolution in partnership with others, that must be the preferred solution. A diplomatic solution to a crisis, rather than one that descends into the use of armed force saves an absolute fortune, as well as avoiding the huge humanitarian cost that accompanies a failure to preserve the peace. It is my view that we should increase the Foreign Office budget to enhance that capacity and help to head off crises before they flare up.

The threats to the UK’s security and wellbeing are at an unprecedented level. As we said in our report, we cannot recall a more complex and challenging policy-making environment in recent decades—an environment that includes Syria, Daesh, Libya, Russia, the South China sea, Israel, Palestine, North Korea, Iran and Turkey, to name but a few.

That is before we take into account the requirements of the other two pillars of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office: the agenda for prosperity and consular services. In its response to our report, the Office acknowledges that there will be

“new work, including increasing spending on the Overseas Territories and hosting the presidency of the EU in 2017.”

That might be an interesting presidency if we are on the way out after 23 June.

Inexplicably, however, the Government’s response says nothing about potentially the greatest call on its resources: a British exit from the European Union. If the country votes out on 23 June, a huge effort will be needed to disentangle the United Kingdom from its existing commitments and to work on new trade arrangements, to name but one element of the work that will need to be undertaken. A very large part of that effort will fall on the Foreign Office, yet the Committee has found little or no evidence that the British civil service is making any sort of contingency plan in the event of a Brexit. We now have a date for the referendum, and Brexit is not a remote possibility but a very real prospect in the hands of the electorate and the competing campaigns. I therefore urge Ministers and their officials to begin planning, and not just in outline, for the consequences of a decision by the British people to leave the European Union. It would not just be a question of drafting in a few extra people to prepare new treaties. We will need to strengthen our bilateral relationships by increasing our presence in larger EU member states, reopening subordinate posts that have been closed or downgraded over the last five years, and picking up capabilities, particularly trade capabilities, that are currently the competence of the European Union. We should at least understand what the bill will be and prepare to address it if it happens.

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[Mr John Baron (Basildon and Billericay) (Con)]

There is an old Army adage, which has served the British Army well, that says time spent on reconnaissance is seldom wasted. I suggest that it could serve the Government well going forward when it comes to expenditure on the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

Cuts to the Office by previous Governments on both sides of the House have led to staff shortages, which have contributed to a series of errors that have cost us dear. On the one hand, I congratulate the Government on protecting the budget in real terms; that is a backstop we have not had hitherto and is very much to be welcomed. At the same time, I urge the Government to look to increase the budget in real terms, as my hon. Friend the Member for Reigate (Crispin Blunt) has eloquently suggested. If the Government seriously think that cost savings in this area work, I would suggest that all the evidence shows that to be a false economy indeed, and for a variety of reasons.

First and foremost, the false economy does not reflect the importance of how we make foreign policy in this country. That is in contrast to the United States, where foreign policy making is much more of a diffuse process, with academics, career diplomats, think-tanks and politicians all much more widely involved. In this country, on the other hand, the pyramid is much narrower and policy making is structured and put into place by a smaller number of people and organisations—primarily senior people at the top of the FCO, senior people at No. 10 and perhaps a few others. It is therefore terribly important that all the components of our foreign policy making are firing on all cylinders, because if a particular part is not working, given the smaller number of components in the process, that can have a disproportionate effect on overall policy and its consequences.

There is no shortage of examples showing that we have not done as well as we should have in responding to international crises and other incidents that have perhaps left us floundering. With the Arab spring, for example, there were so few Arabists in the FCO that we had to call them out of retirement. When it came to Russia’s annexation of the Crimea, for another example, I think I am right in saying—my right hon. Friend the Minister for Europe will correct me if he so wishes—that we did not have one Kremlinologist in the FCO, which perhaps contributed to the somewhat unconvincing response. I suggest to the Government that our interventions over the last 12 years or so have suffered from a lack of analytical skill and expertise, which has been very costly to this country.

[Stephen Gethins]

The hon. Gentleman has a long track record on these issues, and I am particularly grateful for his work in the Foreign Affairs Committee. He will probably be more gentle on the Government than I will. If we look at Libya, Afghanistan and Iraq, among other places, the lack of proper interrogation of the facts has been a disaster.

[Mr Baron]

I made the mistake of not finishing my sentence; next time I will finish it. I was about to say that my examples included Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and, I would suggest, Syria. In Iraq, there can be no doubt that we went to war on a false premise: there were no WMD. We were all deceived; the job of Chilcot is to determine whether No. 10 intentionally deceived us.

On Afghanistan, I supported the initial deployment in 2001 to rid the country of al-Qaeda, and there is strong evidence to suggest that we succeeded in that objective in the very early years. Where it went disastrously wrong—this takes us back to the fact that we did not fully understand events on the ground—was when we allowed the mission to morph into nation-building. We went into Helmand without fully realising what it involved, and we certainly under-resourced our operations, which was a bad mistake.

In Libya, we knocked down the door—that was the relatively easy bit—but the country has turned out to be a complete and utter shambles, in part because we failed to understand that the opposition to Gaddafi would splinter into 100-plus groups with different objectives. Law and order has been non-existent in Libya ever since, which has led to more bloodshed and a vicious civil war.

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[Tom Brake]

I will come back to that—

[Stephen Gethins]

rose—

[Tom Brake]

But I will take another intervention first.

[Stephen Gethins]

I was going to raise a similar point to the one raised by the Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, who discussed the Russians. If we were to take action, what would the consequences of Russian action be? Does this not go to the very heart of the debate we are having about the need to fund the Foreign Affairs Committee properly, in order to address military action?

[Tom Brake]

Indeed. To respond to the earlier point, we were being asked to leave open the opportunity of military action being taken in the future. That is what the debate and the vote were about; it was not a vote about whether we should take military action at that point. It would have left open that opportunity, but because the vote went against leaving open that opportunity, the chance to take military action in Syria was closed down at that point. I agree entirely with the hon. Member for North East Fife (Stephen Gethins) that the whole purpose of this debate is to highlight the importance of funding the Foreign and Commonwealth Office adequately.