European Union (Future Relationship) Bill
Lord Howell of Guildford ExcerptsWednesday 30th December 2020
(3 years, 4 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate European Union (Future Relationship) Act 2020 View all European Union (Future Relationship) Act 2020 Debates Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: Committee of the whole House Amendments as at 30 December 2020 - (30 Dec 2020)
Lord Howell of Guildford (Con) [V]
My Lords, I welcome the support for this Bill and the agreement underlying it, as anyone with common sense should surely do. It is plainly an historic and remarkably comprehensive achievement.
I have two quick observations. First, now that we have an agreement on which to build, I plead for a new phase of illusion-dissolving honesty from our leadership, our opinion-formers and our phrase-makers. Could we henceforth take much more care in using the overworked phrase “taking back control”? This is accurate in narrow legal terms in that our Parliament will make our laws and British courts under British judges will implement them. But it is equally obvious that we cannot do exactly what we want in today’s conditions. Unless we wish to become a hermit kingdom, a large number of our laws and rules will be constrained by the realities of an increasingly interdependent and connected planet and by multiple international standards, treaty commitments and solemn agreements.
Therefore, could we perhaps give the “control” mantra a rest, at least until we are clearer as to who exactly is getting back this control? Is it our sovereign Parliament—as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, was urging—the devolved Administrations, the Executive or the proposed EU-UK partnership council and the arbitration bodies set up by the agreement, whose rulings on alignment and fair competition will control us, without their being subject to parliamentary scrutiny, although they will be international law? Some of these questions were rightly raised earlier by the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor, chair of the Constitution Committee, of which I am privileged to be a member.
Secondly, the Government constantly get accused of having no coherent vision—no narrative—as we move out of the EU treaty system. Actually, our future narrative is there for the telling. The International Trade Secretary, who is doing an excellent job, was rightly calling the other day for a “Pacific mindset”, or an Indo-Pacific mindset, in repositioning the UK in an utterly changed world.
Of course, we need good and settled relations with our nearest neighbours, although a Europe of constant bargaining is what we have to look forward to regionally. However, the bigger, and much faster-growing, markets, are taking shape elsewhere; for instance, in dynamic south-east Asia and in parts of the Commonwealth network, where investment is now being sucked away from China and where most future world growth in both goods and services lies.
In a networked world and in this hyper-connected age, the whole nature of global trade has changed, the distribution of power has changed, the nature of security threats has changed, and the very texture and character of international relations have changed. So, in passing this Bill and validating this excellent agreement, please could the tone and phraseology now be updated accordingly to give people an honest and balanced assessment of where we are going and by whom we will be controlled?
Great Britain and Northern Ireland: Access for Goods
Lord Howell of Guildford Excerpts(3 years, 6 months ago)
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Lord True (Con)
My Lords, I will write to the noble Lord on his very specific point about labelling. Of course, I acknowledge that there are ongoing discussions in the joint committee, and that that is an issue. But the Government have a range of measures, already taken and in hand, which we have discussed with business, to facilitate GB-NI movement.
Lord Howell of Guildford (Con) [V]
My Lords, but is not unfettered trade access what we want, what we have always wanted all along and what the withdrawal agreement guarantees, both for trade between Great Britain and Northern Ireland—with a few minor checks—and of course trade between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic? We are committed to all these things. Does my noble friend agree that, if President-elect Biden seeks reassurance against the destabilisation of the Northern Ireland peace process—reassurance that we all want—it is the European Union authorities and negotiators in Brussels who are his best port of call and whom he should be ringing?
Lord True (Con)
My Lords, I will not follow the noble Lord into international diplomacy. What I will say is what I said with some force to the House on Monday: this Government are absolutely dedicated to the Belfast/Good Friday agreement. That agreement has east-west as well as north-south aspects, and the rejection of the unfettered access commitment by your Lordships’ House was deeply unhelpful.
Constitution, Democracy and Rights Commission
Lord Howell of Guildford Excerpts(3 years, 11 months ago)
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Lord Howell of Guildford (Con) [V]
My Lords, further to the question put by my noble friend Lord Strathclyde, will the proposed commission look at the relationship between the Supreme Court and Parliament? If so, will it look in particular at the recent controversial court judgment on interim custody orders in Northern Ireland and exactly who signed them back in the 1970s, given that the judgment seemed to ignore completely the clear wishes and intentions of Parliament, to misunderstand the normal workings of ministerial and departmental government and to take no account of the practicalities of direct rule administration in Belfast at the time?
Lord True
My Lords, my noble friend has great and direct experience of this issue. Obviously, the Government will look closely at the outcome of that judgment. I regret that, as far as the commission is concerned, I cannot add anything to my prior answers on its scope and composition. I assure the noble Lord that the Government will proceed with care and consideration.
Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011
Lord Howell of Guildford Excerpts(3 years, 11 months ago)
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Lord True [V]
My Lords, the Government remain absolutely committed to replacing the Act, and I totally agree with the noble Baroness about its impact. We all lived those days, months and years, and we do not wish to see a recurrence.
Lord Howell of Guildford (Con) [V]
My Lords, this Act has clearly served Parliament badly but I worry that we are getting too many reviews and commissions confused together. Bearing in mind that many other parliaments around the world have a fixed term and that we are in a completely new age from the point of view of the electorate, who are now digitally empowered, is not the length of parliamentary Sessions a prime subject for the constitutional commission? Should not the review of the workings of this Act somehow be worked into the commission, where we will look closely at the effectiveness and functioning of Parliament, which has not been too good in the past and where people are now looking for a very much more effective and stronger performance?
Lord True [V]
My Lords, again, my noble friend makes important points. It is certainly the Government’s intention to improve electoral procedures—separate announcements have been made on that—but Section 7 of the Act lays specific duties on the Prime Minister, and the Government must observe the law of the land.
Beyond Brexit (European Union Committee Report)
Lord Howell of Guildford Excerpts(4 years ago)
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Lord Howell of Guildford (Con)
My Lords, I am the first to acknowledge the excellent work of our EU committees and their reports, under both my noble friend Lord Boswell and the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull. However, in the case of this report and as we come to the end of this debate—it is not really a debate at all, but a series of statements—I have to register my profound disappointment. The strong commitment in the report for scrutiny both during the transformation period and in the future is admirable, but my disappointment can be summed up in a single sentence. Neither the Committee on the Future Relationship with the European Union nor this report takes any account whatever of the fast-changing events and trends on the other side of the channel, within the EU and its institutions.
Everyone acknowledges that Brexit will profoundly reshape the EU, and many European leaders and thinkers accept that the EU needs fundamental reform, having been created in the pre-digital age. Many also see that these changes are going on fast anyway, regardless of whether officials in Brussels recognise them. Treating the EU as an unchanging monolith, as a hierarchy, will take our future relations straight into a brick wall. This is over and above the major effects on the EU of the current pandemic crisis, which themselves will have considerable long-term impact on the whole EU structure and the relations between member states and the central authorities.
These enormous forces of change in Europe long predate this crisis and will continue long after it has subsided. My question to the Minister is: when are we really going to address them?
EU: Future Relationship
Lord Howell of Guildford Excerpts(4 years, 2 months ago)
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Lord Howell of Guildford (Con)
I warmly welcome my noble friend to his new role, and I warmly welcome the comments he has just made and the whole tone of his speech, particularly its emphasis on the principles of our co-operation with the rest of Europe—in a sense, our European policy for the decades ahead. Does he accept that the Statement might have benefited from a description of what is going on in the EU, where radical change is under way? It is adjusting to a completely new style and emphasis in the digital age. Would he applaud a statement from the 19th century and the famous statesman Leopold von Ranke that
“the union of all depends on the independence of each”?
If we stick to that principle, old though it may be, we will be able to influence our Europe—which we still belong to—constructively in the future, along his lines.
Lord True
I thank my noble friend and agree with him, but this Government are not going to lecture the European Union on how it should manage its own home. We respect their right, as 27 sovereign nations, to determine their own future, but the points that my noble friend made are germane and important. We will, and I personally will, bear them all in mind.
G20 Summit
Lord Howell of Guildford Excerpts(4 years, 10 months ago)
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Lord Howell of Guildford
To ask Her Majesty’s Government, following the recent G20 Summit in Osaka, Japan, and the letter relating to the summit from the International Relations Committee to the Prime Minister, dated 13 June, which outcomes they judge to be of most importance for the safeguarding and furtherance of Britain’s national interests.
Lord Howell of Guildford (Con)
My Lords, I declare my interests as listed in the register and in particular that I advise two major Japanese companies.
This debate arises from a short inquiry by your Lordships’ International Relations Committee, of which I was then chairman, and a subsequent memorandum to the Prime Minister before she set off for the G20 meeting in Osaka, Japan, 10 days or so ago. The G20 meeting is supposed to co-ordinate responses to the tensions in world affairs and to take an overview of all the disruptive forces of change sweeping the globe—and, as I think is generally agreed nowadays, to do so with rather more relevance than the old G7 in modern conditions. Frankly, it does not look as though much co-ordination or overviewing went on this time in Osaka.
When she returned, the Prime Minister was subjected to two full hours of questioning on the G20 in the other place—incidentally, a longer time than was allocated for the whole of our debate this evening—and that of course came after her 11-hour flight back from Tokyo. I do not think that that kind of battering treatment of a nation’s chief executive would be allowed or considered even faintly sensible in any other legislature in the world. Anyway, let us hope that the next Prime Minister, not to mention the ranks of Theresa May’s persistent critics, have even half her remarkable stamina.
The questions to her in the other place covered a huge range of topics, from the Chagos Islands to Scotch whisky. Even so, some key issues were completely missed in the exchanges. Therefore, perhaps it would be useful for me to comment first on those key issues—in other words, what should have been there but was not.
I begin with Japan itself, where it all took place. In her Commons Statement, Mrs May mentioned the growing strength of the relationship between the UK and Japan, but in all her questioning no one repeated it or referred to it. That is rather odd because Japan is by far our best friend in north-east Asia, the world’s fastest-growing area. We may not like some aspects of Japan, such as its judiciary or the persistence in whale killing, but it remains the third biggest industrial power in the world, with immense creative momentum, especially as the “globotics” revolution takes hold. We will need it very much in the future.
I have argued for 30 years that our foreign policy experts should take the Japan connection much more seriously and creatively. Osaka should have been—and I hope that in the sidelines, it was—a golden opportunity to carry forward our defence and security links, as well as our trading ties with Japan and all Asia, with the new networks of trade and investment that are rapidly developing there.
Then there is our China policy. The G20 coverage was dominated by the US-China trade wrangles, but it is our interests that badly need developing and clarifying. America is not going to do that for us. Unlike America, we do not see China as the enemy. Of course, we have to treat our China connections with great caution, but this nation will stand or fall by its agility in balancing its connections with both China and America and not by being trodden flat between the two in the totally new pattern of world power that has now emerged, nor simply by clinging to the coat-tails of Trump’s America all the time, as some of the shallower columnists in the media keep urging. I hope that is not what we were doing last week in taking over the Iranian oil tanker in Gibraltar that was bound for Syria, and that it is not what the new Prime Minister will do; that would not be the right pattern to follow.
There are aspects of China in the human rights area that we rightly dislike—some nasty stories circulate about its treatment of minorities, especially the Uighurs and their culture—but there should be no illusions: China is now a major global player as a supplier, a market, an influence and an investor across the world and right up to our own front door. It is the world’s largest trading nation. Its R&D expenditure soared to $298 billion last year, the second highest in the world. I believe that we can box much cleverer with China than the hot and cold, unpredictable views that come from Washington, using track-two and three diplomacy to the full on issues such as Huawei, 5G and the East/West technology split that some Americans apparently want to see and which at all costs we should avoid.
Hong Kong was not actually mentioned in the communiqué or the report back to the other place but it is certainly right for us to insist on Hong Kong freedoms under the law, including the freedom to protest, the principles of the 1984 Sino-British declaration and so on. However, the violent physical trashing of the Hong Kong legislature is something else. It is wrong, and in my view we should have been much more forthright in saying so than we have been.
As for the Russians at the G20, Vladimir Putin may not be the nicest of characters, as the Prime Minister’s handshake photo made crystal clear, but undoubtedly he has a super-sharp mind and a mastery of prodding us at our weakest points. Liberalism may not be dead or obsolete in the West, as he claimed, but it is undoubtedly under severe assault from narrower varieties of populist nationalism, coming from both left and right, vastly amplified and empowered by digital communications and pushing Governments all the time inward, towards more protection and reluctance to co-operate internationally in line with the rules-based order.
As for climate concerns, the Prime Minister spoke proudly at Osaka of our Government’s new commitment to zero emissions by 2050. By itself, as everyone knows, this would hardly move the needle in fighting climate change. Indeed, if we manufacture less and import more carbon from overseas, it might actually have the reverse effect. So the key aim has to be, and can only be, through example impact, especially on the really big global emitters: China, India, Russia and the United States. China is going to be decisive in this situation, with 28% of global emissions and rising fast. We need to hear much more about how the example process is actually going to work. Assurances that the big emitters are listening is not enough, and neither is costly virtue-signalling.
The nature of international trade has changed dramatically in the last decade, especially now that trade relations between China and the rest of the world are entering a whole new phase. Much of our thinking about China is badly out of date, as my noble friend Lord O’Neill reminded us as a witness to our committee. I hope we shall hear from him a little later. It is cultural and professional exchange, the creative industries, the newest technologies and soft power networks that are reshaping world commerce, with Asia taking the lead.
In the forums of the world, we are going to have to defend our core ideas much more effectively. We will have to fight for liberal values with new techniques, methods and expressions. We will have to defend international rules and build as fast as we can new types of social and fair capitalism, as they do in Asia, to counter the inchoate pressures of populist extremism that are growing everywhere and are definitely here to stay.
The G20 was—or should have been—a forum in which to make these tasks a lot clearer and to focus on them more vividly, but this time I am not sure that that is what happened. That may be because technology is moving ahead too fast for Governments to keep up, but that is a debate for another day.
Economy: Productivity
Lord Howell of Guildford Excerpts(8 years, 1 month ago)
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Lord Bridges of Headley
My Lords, I am bursting with enthusiasm and full of energy to get things done. I cannot claim that this Government will not encounter some of the problems that previous Governments down the ages have encountered when implementing their plans, but I refer the noble Lord to chart 2.B in the National Infrastructure Delivery Plan, published a fortnight ago, which shows that, of the 602 projects that the plan sets out and are in the pipeline, 61% are in construction, 50% will have been completed by 2020-21 and a further 49% will by that point be either under construction or part of an active programme. So we are full of enthusiasm, full of energy and we are getting going.
Lord Howell of Guildford (Con)
Will my noble friend explain to the noble Lord, Lord Harrison, that the Office for National Statistics figures which so worry him may not tell the full story by any means, because they take too little account of the huge output of data and information in the digital age, which now generates more economic value than the whole of global goods trade?
Lord Bridges of Headley
My noble friend makes an extremely good point. Sir Charles Bean recently completed a review of the UK’s economic statistics, and one of his findings was, as my noble friend said, that if the digital economy had been properly taken into account, economic growth would have been one-third to two-thirds of a percentage point higher over the past decade, with similar implications for productivity. However, I stress that that would not explain the UK’s recent poor performance in comparison with other countries, nor why productivity has worsened since the financial crisis, so we are not complacent.
Soft Power and the UK’s Influence (Select Committee Report)
Lord Howell of Guildford Excerpts(9 years, 2 months ago)
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Lord Howell of Guildford
To move that this House takes note of the Report of the Select Committee on Soft Power and the UK’s Influence on Persuasion and Power in the Modern World (Session 2013–14, HL Paper 150).
Lord Howell of Guildford (Con)
My Lords, in asking your Lordships to take note of this report on power and persuasion in the modern world, I begin by thanking the excellent members of this committee, who worked tirelessly and showed great patience towards their chairman. I particularly thank the superb service we received from the clerks to the committee, particularly Susannah Street and Tristan Stubbs, our adviser Ben O’Loughlin and additional helpers. What they were able to do in terms of producing at rapid speed immense drafts covering immensely complex areas was quite remarkable. The whole committee is very grateful to them.
I also thank the Foreign and Commonwealth Office for replying to our report in a helpful document. It did not, of course, accept all our recommendations or agree with everything, but it clearly recognised the validity of a number of our themes. However, this report was not directed solely at the FCO, or even solely at the Government. It certainly concerned a range of departments and aimed its remarks wider than government altogether, because we are talking about both a governmental and national story. I also thank the witnesses who came before us—we had a great many—and those from all over the world who put in written evidence in enormous volumes.
Although it is a year since the report was published, it has, in a sense, improved with age—rather like a fine claret or a good cheese. Its relevance seems to have increased with time. We have seen in the past year how Vladimir Putin and the barbaric, so-called Islamic State can bend and abuse soft power and communications techniques in the digital age to persuade the world of their ugly aims, to misinform and recruit, and to terrify and outwit the West. We need to learn lessons from this. A sort of “cold peace”—not quite a cold war—has descended, which creates entirely new conditions to which we have to adjust. We can also learn from the billions of dollars being spent by many other nations in developing their soft power messaging nowadays—although some of this is, frankly, naked propaganda. One of the points emerging from our report is that propaganda, if that is what it becomes, loses all credibility. Persuasion through soft power is much more subtle.
This brings me to the first of four messages from the report that I should like to highlight. First, soft power is not an alternative to hard power. In the new global landscape, if we are to safeguard our national security and interests, and sustain our global influence, both soft power and hard power are needed. This point has not been grasped by some commentators. This mixture has been dubbed “smart power”, but it goes further than that. To defend ourselves, however well equipped are our Armed Forces, as they must be, we need to win the narrative as well. In the information age, with half the world on the world wide web and, apparently, more mobile telephones than human beings on the planet, this involves priorities and resources far outside the usual definitions of military spending. We now have to operate on new strategic frontiers, as the very eloquent director of Chatham House, Dr Robin Niblett, pointed out to us. We may not want any conflicts, but there are new tools of conflict that we have to be ready to use. In other words—as General Sir Graham Lamb shrewdly observed in this morning’s papers—while we need more expenditure to defend our nation, it needs to be of the right kind and we must be careful not to prepare to fight the last war under the totally new conditions that now exist.
Secondly, Britain has enormous assets of power and influence to operate in this completely changed environment, but we could use them much better. Britain is remarkably well regarded around the world, and our report gives a long list of our strengths. Our global reach and influence in terms of culture, creative industries, education, sports, health, services of every kind—particularly financial—legal procedures, accounting methods, scientific research and technical ingenuity is enormous, right across the planet. Our language carries its own internal DNA and attitudes across the planet, and across cyberspace. Our institutions are widely admired and copied, including the monarchy and Parliament itself, despite the rotten press that Parliament gets at home. Our instruments of communication and cultural diplomacy, notably the BBC World Service and the British Council, are highly effective and seen as models. Our scholarships and exchanges, though not nearly as extensive as some of us would like, are a powerful added attraction.
The BBC World Service, by the way, is reckoned to be the world’s most trusted news medium, even though it faces huge competition from digital media and other TV channels developing around the world, such as Al-Jazeera—and there are many others. Perhaps most of all, as power and wealth shift eastward, we in Britain are embedded in the institutions and structures of this new global network as few other countries are—we are very fortunate in that respect—notably through the 53-nation Commonwealth. I declare an interest as President of the Royal Commonwealth Society. Frankly, however, the committee was not entirely convinced that our policymakers have grasped the full value of the Commonwealth network in modern conditions, both in itself and as a gateway to the new great powers and markets such as China and Brazil. Nor am I satisfied. Only the other day, sweeping cuts were announced in UK contributions to key Commonwealth institutions. These were, luckily, swiftly reversed by a very understanding and efficient Secretary of State at DfID—but it is symptomatic all the same that that sort of thing could happen at all.
In the report we do not shy away from some negatives. Probably the less I say on our visa regime the better, because it always gets twisted. However, almost every one of our witnesses pointed to the negative aspects of the visa regime. There have been some improvements in the past year but it seems to cause bad feeling all round, clearly without having much impact on immigration totals, as we can see from the latest figures. I cannot for the life of me see why we should not at least try to have a Commonwealth business and tourist visa concession, to make things less difficult for genuine Commonwealth students, and perhaps even have a proper gateway at our airports for the 140 million subjects from Her Majesty the Queen’s realms when they visit us. Our attractiveness would be vastly enhanced if we made those sorts of improvements.
I come to my third message. We have all read commentators telling us that Britain has lost its way in this new hyperconnected world. A senior ex-diplomat said the other day that Britain is “without ambition or direction”. In truth, it is more that the commentators have lost their way—clinging to the 20th century view of Atlantic hegemony, superpowers and trading blocs when in fact the great new markets, growth, capital flows, influence and political power are shifting to the rising nations of Asia, Africa and Latin America. The UK, our report urges, must engage more actively with the networks of the future. It is in these huge new markets, and in parts of the world that are growing in power and influence, that the UK must re-establish its reputation. Given our Commonwealth connections and experience, this is a world in which Britain most definitely has a major role and is well placed to succeed and stay ahead in what Prime Minister calls “the global race”. That, of course, depends on the UK staying strong, confident and united at home and within.
I would add in brackets—this is a personal observation —that I greatly regret that your Lordships still have no proper international committee to bring to bear the House's collective wisdom and wide knowledge of these very fast-changing new patterns of international relations and trade. I think that this is a real omission.
Our report offers a long list of to-do recommendations to government—and not only to government—about how to adapt to these new global conditions. I will not tire noble Lords with a full catalogue, as they can read about them in the report, but we emphasise that in this changed world embassies, far from becoming less important, as the futurologists used to tell us, are becoming more crucial in protecting our interests and promoting our British story. Therefore, resources should be added to, if possible, and distributed in that direction.
We argue that the main departments of state concerned with projecting the British case and narrative to the world should co-ordinate more—that is, mainly DfID, the FCO, the Ministry of Defence and the DCMS, although many other departments have an overseas face. This is one of the remarkable changes: that every department of state in a sense also has a face outwards to the rest of the world. We suggested that they should review closely how well they have got on together in Afghanistan over this past decade. There is a long list of other recommendations, which I shall skip but which I am sure will come up in the debate.
Our fourth message is that to be effective, and safe, the United Kingdom needs to widen its diplomacy and understand that it is dealing with empowered and e-enabled publics everywhere and in every country. This is a completely new development in this hyperconnected world. Perhaps I may put it in the words of the former German ambassador here, Wolfgang Ischinger. He describes it very succinctly and reflects what we say in our report. He reminds us in the Foreign Affairs magazine that has just come out that,
“new technologies have already fundamentally changed the practice of diplomacy and statesmanship. Today’s diplomats must be prepared to speak to a global audience and to constantly contend with an international media circus. They must be both hard-nosed negotiators and global communicators”.
He goes on:
“Most notably … cyber attacks and hybrid warfare”—
in which, of course, we are deeply involved at present—
“have demonstrated that cyberspace has already become a battlefield on which familiar concepts such as deterrence and even defense need to be defined anew”.
In the end, as I think our report indicates, it all comes down to building relationships of long-term trust with nations large and small around the globe, and developing a mutual respect and attractiveness. It takes a lot of patience but, if we can build up our soft power relations in all their varieties and forms, then in the hours of crisis, which are bound to come, that is what will guarantee co-operation and support in winning our struggles and preserving our safety and prosperity.
The established world order has now unravelled. The strategic imperatives of a transformed global order demand that the United Kingdom becomes the best networked state in the world and that we use all our persuasive powers to full effect. That is the key message of our report—and, if it makes a marginal contribution to the big changes of government, of policy and of mindset which we now desperately need to survive and prosper in this puzzling and dangerous new world, it will have been worth while. I beg to move.
Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth (Con)
My Lords, as the debate gets under way, I remind noble Lords that there is an advisory speaking time of nine minutes, and that when the digital clock shows nine, their time has elapsed.
Lord Howell of Guildford
My Lords, it remains for me to thank your Lordships for your very favourable reception for this report. There were some terrific speeches and I think that we were all very pleased to hear the maiden speech of the noble Baroness, Lady Wolf of Dulwich, about her expertise in universities. I hope that we will hear a lot more from her.
I am left with the overwhelming impression that there is a lot more to be said on this subject—not merely by the Minister, who has to fit within his time, but generally. So many leads were opened by fascinating speeches. The report probably should have said more on healthcare innovation. I very much take that point. The most reverend Primate was saying the other day that we should have said a bit more on religion and the churches, and we probably should have. I can tell my noble friend Lord Addington that the report gave quite a lot of coverage to sport. We had a number of hearings, which included the absolutely stunning statistic that 1.4 billion people watch English Premier League football on television. That is almost a quarter of the entire human race. There is no doubt where the source of sports inspiration comes from; it comes from this island and this country.
My final hope is that we do not just leave it here, so that this was a one-off debate on a one-off subject. In our report, we say, “Please could the National Security Council move on from dealing with incidents and look at this strategic issue once every six months?”. We also asked, “Please could a government department, maybe the Cabinet Office, report to Parliament at least once a year?”, and, “Please could we make it a habit of having annual debates, rather like the one we have just had today?”. Despite Dean Acheson’s jibe many decades ago, a very clear role has appeared for a nation like ours in this new digital world. We have the assets, the skills and the experience. All we have to do is to make them work much better.
Soft Power and Conflict Prevention
Lord Howell of Guildford Excerpts(9 years, 5 months ago)
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Lord Howell of Guildford (Con)
My Lords, I am particularly pleased that the most reverend Primate should have brought this issue before your Lordships’ House today. I am honoured to be following his words and flattered that he has referred to the report, which we published in March this year, of the inquiry that I had the honour of chairing with my many distinguished colleagues.
We were not the first to come to this concept; it is one to which your Lordships have given considerable attention over the years. There have been excellent debates in 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013 and indeed this year. We are dealing with central issues in the completely changed international order in which we now have to operate and think our way.
It will be noticed that in the title of our report we avoided using the words “soft power”. We called it, as the most reverend Primate has already pointed out, Persuasion and Power in the Modern World. We did this because we believed that the term “soft power” was rather open to misunderstanding by certain commentators and was seen as a sort of easy, appeasing option to necessary harder and rougher methods, a way of trying to duck hard action in response to violence, cruelty and hideous persecution, especially the persecution of Christians in a uniquely violent and dangerous world today. I have in mind one particularly absurd and ill informed article about British foreign policy in the Daily Telegraph, which tried to depict soft power as some sort of weak alternative to the firm use of guns and killing power in the face of terror and the shadowy wars against brutal but elusive enemies. It seemed to be an argument for more of Iraq and Afghanistan, ignoring the lessons of those difficult campaigns.
Of course, soft power is no such thing. Hard and soft power, as the most reverend Primate has made crystal clear, are all parts of the same armoury—along the same spectrum of choices in our work to defeat violence and evil and protect the oppressed, promote tolerance and uphold both our values and interests and our nation’s position against brutal attack and terror. The big difference from the past is that we are now in a world not of armies and states at war with clearly established declarations of war, but of the mass involvement of peoples and networks in constant conflict. Thanks to the information revolution, we have almost total connectivity on the one hand combined with the terrifying absorption of civilian populations in violence and guerrilla wars to a greater degree than ever before. In these conditions, it is not the side with the biggest battalions, the most missiles and the most killing power that wins; it is the side with the best narrative and the best and cleverest communications techniques. We are in what the director of Chatham House, Robin Niblett, with great ability and clarity, has called a world of “hybrid wars”. This is a situation in which we require entirely new forms of diplomacy and a new power in conveying our message in order to ensure the results that we want, and that the direction in which we would like others to go is achieved in a way that old, pure hard power conflicts—more tanks, more rockets—clearly cannot achieve and no longer achieve.
That is the first point that I wanted to add to the most reverend Primate’s most excellent presentation of our report; indeed, I think that he did rather a better job than we did ourselves in putting forward its contents, and I thank him very much. My second point is that people say, “Well, it’s all very well talking about tolerance, values, the rule of law and good governance and so on, but you can’t eat those things; they don’t put food on the table”. That is what the sceptics say. They are wrong. In fact there is a kind of equation that exists in the modern world that I do not think has been fully understood by all Governments: values equal trust, trust equals confidence, confidence equals investment and investment equals prosperity, business, growth, jobs and food on the table. It is not necessarily the preaching but the conveyance of that message of values, and the urging of others to uphold them, that produces the prosperity and the development that everyone wants.
It is not just a matter for Governments. A committee of Parliament reports and its thoughts are directed at departments, Governments and so on. We have already had a useful reply from one department, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, to our report, but this is a world in which agencies and professions are as deeply involved as government. The most reverend Primate mentioned the British Council and the BBC World Service. They are more than ever the spearhead of promoting soft power stories and the case for our country and its place in the world. However, it goes far beyond on that. All the professions are now weaving together fantastic global networks. Business and markets are just as much our ambassadors as they are concerned with commerce. The media are central to the story. It goes far beyond that into journalism, electronics, engineering and the creative arts, which are central to the story of promoting our soft power. As we have seen in this morning’s newspapers, museums have a key role to play. While one expects a lead from the Government, this is an endeavour, a story, in which everyone is involved.
In our report, we came to the conclusion that a number of other countries were doing a great deal as well. In fact, many of them are spending far more resources on promoting the story of their country, their version of soft power, than we are doing in Britain. Nevertheless, that does not detract from the point that the soft power assets of this country are simply enormous. They cover the whole range, as the most reverend Primate mentioned, including respect for the monarchy, understanding our parliamentary system, our traditions, our experience, our legal system, and even our accounting system and our educational network, which includes huge global linkages between 530 universities through the Association of Commonwealth Universities, which is run from Tavistock Square and links the entire planet into the higher education system.
It will probably not surprise your Lordships that I mention the place of the Commonwealth in this story, and in the United Kingdom’s role and ability to prevent conflict and to carry forward the case for this country’s position in the new world in which we have to compete avidly and vigorously in entirely new markets and new conditions. Why do I bring the Commonwealth into it? Some people would say that it is not really the best example. We read in the media of endless quarrels between different Commonwealth countries and of doubts about whether all Commonwealth countries are keeping up to the standards they are signed up to and so on. We saw an example of that with the Heads of Government meeting in Colombo last year. That is just the visible tip of things that the media can see. The genius of the real Commonwealth network is that it is people-driven, civic society-driven, community-driven, common interest-driven, certainly education-driven and increasingly market and business-driven. Increasingly it weaves together non-governmental forces, including in the central role the message of the church, of course, in an age of weakened Governments and empowered groups, tribes, interests and, indeed, the street. That is why the age of hyperconnectivity has acted like a blood transfusion to a network covering almost a third of humankind, half of them under 25, half of them women struggling to have their full and rightful place, millions of them young entrepreneurs aspiring to break out of development dead ends, many of them from smaller states and small islands—there are 32 of them in the Commonwealth network, to which globalisation has given not much chance at all, and 16 of them are realms of the Queen’s subjects under Her Majesty the Queen.
I conclude by again congratulating the most reverend Primate on bringing forward this central theme. The reality is that the transformed international landscape is now filling up with a quilt of networks and new alliances, some involving the old West, where we belong, but some excluding it altogether. Not only economic power but political power has to a very large extent shifted eastwards. The Commonwealth is only one of these new or renewed systems, but it is a mighty one, and for a heavily interdependent Britain it is a huge potential asset in every respect, from both the trade and business point of view and the point of view of our contribution to peace, stability and development and to the effective containment, prevention and resolution of conflicts around the world. We on this island have an amazingly fortunate position. We have rather inherited the Commonwealth in ways that perhaps we do not always deserve. Over the past 40 years, it has not had the attention that it should have had, but the wheel has turned, and new growth, markets, savings and power now lie either in Commonwealth countries or in the countries to which they are a gateway, such as China and the great rising powers of Asia, which are also using soft power weaponry to full effect. We should grasp these opportunities brought to us by the new technology, the new age and the digital world and share them with our excellent European neighbours who are struggling at the moment. We have to work with them as well, as the good Lord has placed us in Europe and that is where we have to be, work, operate and co-operate. The two horses can be ridden, if I can put it that way, so long as we keep our balance and our confidence in what we can do and achieve. I repeat my gratitude to the most reverend Primate for enabling us to put forward these thoughts in this debate.