King’s Speech

Lord Alderdice Excerpts

Thursday 14th May 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Alderdice (LD)]

My Lords, when I am speaking about the gracious Speech, I normally speak in the debate day on foreign affairs. But in January of last year, I was appointed the UK trade envoy for Azerbaijan and central Asia, so perhaps it is more appropriate that I speak on the day when we are thinking about trade and the economy.

When I was appointed, I read the briefs sent by civil servants, of course, but I have always been interested in the history and culture of places that I try to engage with, so I started to read about the history and culture of central Asia. Reading books such as The Great Game by Peter Hopkirk, I came across some names that I knew: for example, that of Sir Henry Pottinger. He came from the Pottinger area of East Belfast, which I represented in the Northern Ireland Assembly, and if you go to the Foreign Office, there is still a more than life-sized portrait of that more than life-sized character. What was striking about him, however, and relevant to what I was doing, was the fact that not only was he an extraordinary colonial administrator—the first governor of Hong Kong and so on—but as a young man, when there was a great conflict and struggle going on between Britain and Russia over links to India, he went out and, like many other young men, acted with the most extraordinary venturesomeness and courage in trying to ensure the well-being of his country.

The reason I was struck by that was that as I engaged with people from Azerbaijan and central Asia, I was really struck by how venturesome many of the young people in those countries had become when they were freed from the yoke of the Soviet Union. But I was also struck by how, in our own country, we seem to have lost much of this. There is a degree of risk aversion which is not healthy for business. I also see that in government and if we do not venture out, we will not succeed. Risks have to be taken. You cannot be sure that everything will always be successful. It is a worrying world at the moment. It is a frightening place and there are lots of dangerous things happening. If we look at the questions of oil and gas, it is not just that the costs have gone up. There are all the uncertainties of managing a country and concern about other actors, including some of our allies or former allies who do not obey the rules any more. Many of our businesses and, as I say, our Government have often become risk averse. One thing surprised me, though.

The area in which I saw the most venturesomeness and success was one that I did not really think of as part of business and trade: the development of English language higher education. There is a huge appetite for this among young people in that region, and a preparedness on the part of our own universities to get out there, develop campuses and engage with universities there. I thought to myself, “Well, this is very interesting. I wonder why that happens”. Then I thought, “Maybe it’s the fact that if you’re going to be a serious academic and scientist now, you need to be prepared to go to conferences and meet others who are doing scientific work”. You would need to be prepared to engage in research across countries and borders, and, because that is part of the natural thing, you then meet with people who you start to work with. You develop a relationship with them, so some of our academics and universities are doing more and being more outgoing and courageous. They are prepared to take risks, rather than having the risk aversion that I see—not always, but often—in business and in government.

We have to face the realities, which have changed and are very difficult for us. There were things that we used to think. The noble Lord, Lord Lilley, talked about the way he had changed his perspective on things. It used to be thought that if countries could be brought to a liberal economic approach, liberal democracy in politics would ultimately follow. China is the great end to that notion. Then there was the notion that if you have military power, you will win wars. That used to be the case, but the United States did not do so well in Korea or Vietnam, or Afghanistan or Iraq, or Libya or Syria, or now in Iran. Military power can enable you to destroy things and kill people, but it does not create democracy. It can just lay waste and leave a shambles.

We thought of Europe as the centre of civilisation in the past, and that it would be for the future. But there are older civilisations, and increasingly impressive economic and scientific advancement, to the east, where we have tended not to look in the past. While we still have strengths, which are significant and recognised, we are not as rich, powerful or significant as we were, while other countries are becoming more wealthy and powerful.

Another illusion that is often around is that you can continue to cut the workforce and still have expansion. As I look at the cutting of the workforce in DBT and FCDO, I cannot see how there will be anything other than retrenchment and retraction. I ask the Government to think again about some of those cuts if we really are to achieve what they want to achieve.

We talk things up with endless superlatives. There is a danger of overplaying our hand when we talk about being world-beating and world-leading in everything we do, when we are not. Propaganda is particularly dangerous when you inhale; one of the problems is that we have started to believe some of these things that we tell. It is not that we have no world-beating things, but they are not in many of the places that we speak of. There is another problem: not only do we sometimes believe it, but our people believe it. If you tell your population that they are world-beating and leading in everything, they expect you to be able to pay for all the kinds of services that they want: for welfare services, for the National Health Service and for defence, which we need. That is playing a story to them which is not true, and you have to be very careful about that kind of thing.

I was talking to a nationalist friend from Northern Ireland and she said, “I’ve suddenly realised that I’ve made a big mistake. When I go down to Dublin, I tell them about how terrible things are in the north. I’ve suddenly realised that if I persuade them that it’s terrible, why on earth would they want to take it on? I need to go down and tell them that there are problems but that we’re able to do something about those, so please work with us on that”. We have to be careful about the kind of things we say, because people sometimes believe us, and then we are in real trouble because that is not really what we want them to do.

At the same time, we are neglecting our soft power by cutting back on the BBC, the British Council and our Diplomatic Service, as I already said, while neglecting not so much hard power as our capacity to defend ourselves. The noble Lord, Lord Robertson, will undoubtedly say something about this, because he has said a lot publicly, and quite rightly so. We are not now able to defend ourselves. We told ourselves and our people for years that the world would be more peaceful. We had a world-class military machine and, anyway, we could depend on the United States to defend us. None of these things is true any more. The world has changed, which means that we must change our way of approaching it.

Leaving the EU did not bring the benefits we were promised, but simply reversing Brexit without recognising that we have changed—and that Europe and the world have changed—will not solve the problems either. Prime Minister Mark Carney has made it clear that the world is a different place. We need to listen to his injunction that middle powers, of which we are now one, build a future based more on a variable geometry of workable relationships, rather than some of the institutional structures that are vulnerable to the vetoes of the mighty. We need to build relationships more than institutions and structures. That would be my appeal: that we address the risk aversion in business and government; that we face the realities of the world as it is now, not as it was in the past, or as we wish it was; and that we build relationships in this changing and challenging world, not just conduct transactions.