EUC Report: EU External Action Service

Lord Lamont of Lerwick Excerpts

Monday 3rd June 2013 Grand Committee

[Lord Lamont of Lerwick]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Teverson not just for the way in which he chaired our inquiry into the European External Action Service but for all the work that he has done for the committee. He has been a very open-minded but firm chairman, and we had some extremely interesting sessions thanks to his very firm leadership.

I also thank our clerk, Kathryn Colvin, and researchers, Roshani Palamakumbura and Edward Bolton, for all their hard work.

I was a little confused about who would reply for the Government in this debate. I read in the newspaper that my noble friend Lady Warsi had escaped from the entertainment in the Chamber and so I was not surprised to find her name on the list here, but now she seems to have been replaced, not just in the Chamber but in this Room, by the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire. If what I read in the newspapers was correct, the noble Lord had some nostalgic recollections over the weekend, as I think he sang at the Queen’s coronation over the road. Anyway, we are delighted that he is answering on behalf of the Government today.

I am not sure that it is appropriate that I should be the first representative of the committee to speak after the chairman. Mind you, not many members of the committee are present at this moment. I was hesitant about being the first because, although I think I was the first person to suggest an inquiry into this subject, I do not think that my views in the committee were representative of the committee as a whole. I was certainly sceptical about the EAS at the beginning of the inquiry, and I have to say that after all the discussions and all the evidence that we had I remain very sceptical about it.

I say that without in any way implying any criticism of the noble Baroness, Lady Ashton, who I think has been in a difficult situation and has done a very good job. Nor do I imply any criticism or make any attempt to diminish the importance of the aid work that goes on through the legations and the embassies. The focus of my scepticism and criticism is much more on the network of offices and embassies throughout the world. It seems to me to be a bureaucracy that has been brought into being before anyone has decided precisely what it is meant to do.

An awful lot of the evidence that appeared before the committee seemed to be self-justification. I should not speak for other members of the committee, but listening to some of their questions I got the impression that some of them could not work out what the EAS was meant to be doing either. That, I think, is reflected in our conclusion on page 1 of the report, that,

“the EEAS encountered uncertainties about what the Member States wanted it to do”.

On page 2, the report states:

“Member States should clarify what they want the EEAS to do”.

I suggest that it would have been rather better, before we decided to spend around €500 million a year, to have decided what we wanted it to do. As I say, a number of witnesses who appeared before the committee out of choice seemed astonishingly unable to define what the EAS was for or what it was meant to do.

The basic problem, of course, is that there is no single foreign policy of the EU as such. On Iraq, Syria, Libya, Cuba, Kosovo, and trade and energy issues with Russia, despite the achievements of the noble Baroness, Lady Ashton, in recent weeks, there is no agreed line. One or two witnesses attempted to imply that Europe had been a major actor in what had happened in Egypt. Well, it spent a lot of money in Egypt and made a number of representations, but I have met no one from Egypt who believes that the European Union has had a big impact there. I also followed up on claims that were made for the extraordinary influence of the EAS in the Yemen by asking various Yemeni people I met whether they were aware of it. I found little awareness, if any. Where in European foreign policy there is an agreed line, I cannot see why that cannot be communicated diplomatically, if it needs to be, through the embassies of Germany, France, Italy and other countries. I cannot see what the European embassies can do on the ground that cannot be done by the national embassies, certainly of the major countries.

In a previous EU committee session, we had evidence from the prospective EU ambassador to China. I asked him what he thought he could do that could not be done by the German embassy, the French embassy or the Italian embassy. He said, “We, much more than them, are going to major on human rights and place all the emphasis on those rights”. I do not think that will get him a long way in raising the profile of the EU in China.

Under the Lisbon treaty, foreign policy remains largely under the control of member states. Having looked at this, and presumably thought about it, the committee’s recommendation, on page 10, was that it should remain so. Also on page 10, the report states:

“The EEAS should not … seek to project its own foreign policy”.

In that sense, the question “What is the telephone number for Europe?” is not the right one. There are telephone numbers for the different major actors, and it is unreal to think that there should be a single telephone number on all questions for Europe.

On page 31, following the logic that foreign policy is the prerogative of member states, the report states:

“The scrutiny role of the European Parliament should not go beyond its current level”.

Members of the committee who went on the visit to the European Parliament and heard Elmar Brok speaking on this subject there have no doubt that it is the ambition of Mr Brok and other members of the European Parliament that it should play a major role in directing European foreign policy.

There are 141 delegations around the world. At the time of our report there were 1,922 EAS staff plus 3,514 commission staff, making a total of 5,436 people around the world. There is quite generous staffing in places. There are 44 people in Barbados, 32 in Mozambique and 30 in Uruguay. The EU is represented in 11 Pacific island countries, including the Cook Islands, Micronesia, Fiji, Kiribati, the Marshall Islands and lots of others. A point made very clearly in the report and echoed by the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, in his speech was that the location of offices ought to be determined not by history but by what is in the best interests of the European Union and what is likely to contribute most to the solution of real problems. What the noble Lord and the report say about reviewing the offices and their location makes a lot of sense.

The report was, if anything, rather lenient on the failure of the EAS to achieve budget neutrality. It is not an excuse to say that it is a young organisation. It was set up on the strict condition that there should be budget neutrality—you take money from one pot, and you put it in another—but we have had a litany of all the familiar excuses, which will be familiar to anyone who has ever been in the Treasury, about what had been inherited and the difficulty of the current climate. In the current climate, in which austerity and budget cuts have been in place all over the EU, it is very regrettable that there was a failure to achieve budget neutrality, and I strongly endorse the report’s conclusion that there should be zero real increases in expenditure in future.

It was unfortunate that the report did not go further into salaries. We had a firm statement from Mr Shorter of the office of the Minister for Europe that salaries are very high by national standards. Another witness described them as outrageous profligacy, and another as a ridiculous amount of money. Certainly, they seem to be higher than national salaries. In the report, the argument was made that it is difficult to make precise comparisons, but it would have been better had we looked at this rather earlier in our inquiry and gone somewhat deeper.

Particularly singled out for criticism were the salaries of the 11 special representatives dealing with certain crisis areas and certain geographical areas of crisis. It was said to us that several of those special representatives have salaries higher than that of the Secretary-General of the United Nations. It was argued that high salaries were necessary in order to get figures of genuine international standing, but I think that only three out of the 11 special representatives have actually gone to people who were not former officials. Only three have gone to people who are former Ministers, for example. We have a lot of distinguished people here. Perhaps they could be considered for some of the special representatives in future.

Again, I emphasise that my criticism is largely directed at the physical network. We heard several witnesses, and one extremely senior one in private, say that the delegations in Brazil and in India, the so-called strategic partners, have had no impact on that relationship or on changing it. The lady witness from the WTO said that the EAS had no noticeable impact on trade negotiations and that the cards and the brass plates on the tables had changed but the method of working and the negotiations methods had not changed at all.

One justification that was put forward for the network of offices was that one needed to see trade in a political context. I remain sceptical about that. Of course one needs to know the political motivation and the local context in which people have a particular view on a particular trade issue. However, that is easily ascertainable through national embassies, or indeed through reading newspapers. One has to distinguish between trade policy and trade promotion. Sometimes in the arguments that were put forward, trade promotion was confused with trade policy. In trade policy, the EU definitely has a valuable role: in trade promotion, I would say hardly at all, although I do not think that that was clear in all the statements that were made before the committee.

The EAS exists, and we have to make the best of it. I agree with the points that the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, made about training and secondment. I have to say that I was somewhat disappointed by the Government’s reply to the report, and I wonder whether it really said what the people in the Foreign Office actually say in their heart of hearts about the EAS. It does not explain away the number of ambassadors—I shall not name them—who, late at night over a glass of whisky, have asked me “What does this thing actually do? What is its purpose? What is it for?”. It seems to me that the logic that we are going with is that we should actually start considering closing down some British embassies just as we start expanding the EAS network, but of course the Foreign Office would never dream of agreeing to that.

House of Lords (Cessation of Membership) Bill [HL]

Lord Lamont of Lerwick Excerpts

Friday 29th June 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I am tempted to say that I would like to give the House an absolute assurance that I will speak severely to the noble Lord, Lord Ashdown, immediately after the end of this debate. It would give me immense pleasure so to do. I will make sure that in his next speech he refers to the immense experience and expertise of the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes.

[Lord Lamont of Lerwick]

If I understand what the Minister said, under the Government’s proposals Members of this House will be paid according to attendance. He has also said that they will not have to do constituency work. Does not this fall into exactly the phrase that the Deputy Prime Minister used as a criticism—that people are being paid just for turning up?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, again, we do not wish to go too far into the other Bill. We are all conscious, if we are critical, that of those of us who turn up regularly, many of us work extremely hard but not all of us work as hard as the others. That will very likely be the same in an elected House, but we hope that the level of hard work will be even broader than now.

Queen’s Speech

Lord Lamont of Lerwick Excerpts

Monday 14th May 2012 Lords Chamber

[Noble Lords]

Order!

[Lord Lamont of Lerwick]

Some of the jury is on this side of the House.

[Lord Elystan-Morgan]

I am sorry. However, it seems to me that I am surrounded by many people who subscribe to the same ideas as me. That may very well be the choice. Although the noble Lord, Lord Ashdown, and others may argue that there is no great significance in a written constitution, I believe that it makes all the difference. I would put it, very humbly, in this way: if you have a written constitution dealing with two elected Houses, it is very much like having two rail tracks running parallel with each other. With luck, no great disaster will ever occur. If you do not have a written constitution, with two elected Houses you have an open highway where each of those heavy, dangerous vehicles is competing with the other for road space and where there is, in the long term, the certainty of disaster. That is the situation.

If I am right that those are the stark choices now confronting our community, then we have gone about it the wrong way altogether. We have sought to deal with this matter in a piecemeal, tunnel-vision manner. That is a fair criticism. The 1911 and 1949 Parliament Acts dealt solely with powers. Since 1949, virtually all the discussion has been about membership. How can you possibly deal with membership save in apposition to powers or with powers save in apposition to membership? How can you possibly deal with a tripartite entity, such as parliamentary government—the House of Commons, the House of Lords and the devolved Assemblies—through totally changing the character and the constitution of one of them?

I believe that one of the most unwholesome proposals in the draft Bill is the 15-year term. I can well understand, and have sympathy with, the motives behind it. I came to this House 31 years ago, although I am sorry that I have not been here for the entire intervening time, having very improperly played truant for a period. I can well understand why a modern legislator should feel that they should have the independence to be able to deal with an issue as they see it on merit without having to look over their shoulder to the next election or to dictate into the columns of the local rag. It is a perfectly understandable and decent motivation, but I think it is a very wrong one. Democratic representation means two things: it means being elected in a democratic way and being answerable in a democratic way. It is not the fact of election that is so important but the fact of facing re-election: that is the mandate that has sovereign value, if you look in a purely tunnelled way at popular election.

I end with this: I believe that the most sensible answer to this situation has come from the alternative report. It states that, bearing in mind all these issues and more, there is only one place to start, and that is with a constitutional convention to examine all these matters in depth with maturity, common sense and statesmanship. To start anywhere else would be wholly unthinkable.