26/01/2017 House of Lords

That's the end of the day in the House of Commons. We'll now be going

to the House of Lords. Remember you can watch recorded coverage of all

of today's business in the Lords after the Daily Politics later

tonight. Should be on acquiring skills in preparation for return to

their own countries. We will however need solutions in third countries

for those who won't go home. A report rightly calls for a global

plan. Large and developed states will have a vital part to play. For

example, the United States, Canada, Brazil, with Australia and New

Zealand. Some cities have been so destroyed that a huge input will be

needed to make them habitable. I saw this in homes and Aleppo. I welcome

the new Secretary General said he has served as High Commissioner for

refugees. I hope Mr Gutierrez agrees with the report on the point of

redefining who is a refugee. We should perhaps distinguish those

with individual fears of persecution. There will be other

people who have fled because of genuine fears. Group violence, war

or natural disaster. Their plight is real, but different from the more

personal kind. The report shows that UN peacekeeping cost over $8 billion

a year employing 86,000 troops and a total personnel of almost 120,000.

We can all agree it must be possible to get better results from such

massive resources. Sexual abuse and exploitation by so-called

peacekeepers has been a long-running scandal. This cries out for

reflective reform. Given that protecting women and children should

be top priority for peacekeepers. I have two questions for the

government. Will they make the case for enhancing the use of the UN

Secretary General's good offices, which have been mentioned already?

In particular in order to prevent conflicts. Will they insist on

Article 99 powers for preventing wars, genocide and refugee flows.

I ask, what relations does the Secretary General have with groups

like The Hammers, and the free Canton is of northern Syria. They

are all, I believe, too important to be ignored. My Lords, I trust that

leaving the EU will not absorb all our energies. We must, surely, try

to help the UN to perform more effectively than ever before.

My lords, like others I wish Lord Hall well and I congratulate Lord

Jopling on his introduction to this debate. I want to talk about

relations with the US and with the European Union of 27, of course,

after our departure. Relationship with the US will be tested tomorrow,

when the Prime Minister and others have said meat President Trump. She

will no doubt talk to him about a possible US-UK trade deal. On which

we can expect the Americans, like the Indians, like the Australians

and like others, to negotiate as toughly in their own interests as we

shall I hope in hours. The Prime Minister will also be able to say

that we share the US's view on the need to counter international

terrorism, and will want to continue to work together with them to do

that. Including by sharing intelligence. But I hope she will

also say that we do not countenance torture, which includes water

boarding, that we are not in favour of closing our borders to those who

are fleeing conflict and repression in the Middle East and elsewhere.

And I agree with my Noble Friend. And that we believe that the UN will

continue to have a key role to play in an uncertain world. I hope the

Prime Minister will also seek to convince President Trump that the

continued coherence and indeed strengthening of Nato is in Western

interests, and that as she has promised, the promotion and

protection of Western values needs a strong European Union, albeit

without Britain, and that the break-up of the European Union and a

retreat into a world of protectionist nation states is not

in any one's interest. And it follows from that that Britain's own

interest lies, it seems to me, in a continuing close relationship with

the European Union, even after we have left. We shall not be members

of the European Union. We shall not be members of the Common foreign and

security policy. And we will not be present when EU heads of state and

government meet to discuss the crisis of the day. But it is surely

in our interest, as much as in the interest of the EU themselves, that

we continue to work closely with them. And in particular,

bilaterally, with France, on, for example, the approach to and

sanctions on Russia on the Middle East and North Africa. My lords,

none of that will be easy. The conduct of foreign policy seldom is.

But I hope the BRIAN NOBLE:, the minister, will be

able to confirm that it will be in a clear sense of our own national

interest that will determine how a relation with others, including the

US and the European Union. My lords, I welcome this report and I welcome

the work of the new committee. I welcome the UK's commitment to the

preservation and strengthening of the liberal global order, to the UN

and the international suggestions of the UN family and the extensive

framework of international law included in the global human rights

regime. International law, international courts and

institutions, of course, constrain national sovereignty. Successive UK

governments accepted that trade-off, that treaties and international

norms share sovereignty and build an open international order. Now it

appears we have a US administration that rejects many of these

constraints on global order, global institutions and international law.

That puts Britain in opposition to the current thrust of US foreign

policy, and I very much hope he is we all do, that the Prime Minister

will be robust in warning President Trump of the dangers of his

approach. But while British unselect support a global institutions, they

reject the constraints of the strongest and most effective

regional order. They are in favour of global human rights but

passionately reject the invasion of British sovereignty by the European

gym and rights regime. There are uncomfortable parallels with what

drives the trump regime and the British antagonism towards the EU.

The potentially negative impact of Brexit on Britain's impact in the

UN, and the Commonwealth as a potential alternative framework. It

has been a valuable asset to British local influence. We are now

abandoning that dramatic framework. Since we are also debating the UK's

international relations in the light of Brexit, I have looked for a

declaration of British foreign policy by senior ministers in recent

months. There has been remarkably little, beyond empty repetitions,

that by becoming a much less European Britain, we will somehow

become more global. It's a bit like saying that Brexit means Brexit.

Boris Johnson's Chatham House speech on the 2nd of December, however,

promised that this was, I quote, the first in a series of speeches

setting out our foreign policy strategy. It wasn't very strategic.

He spent more time discussing the fate of the African elephant down

the future pattern of corporation on international issues with our

European neighbours. And more time on the residence of Harry Potter

novels on children in South Asia. There was much discussion of British

involvement in Afghanistan over the past 200 years but no reference to

the central to you of British foreign policy, since, before the

English estate became the United Kingdom, on relations with France,

the Netherlands, Spain and Scandinavia. The most he would say

was that Britain would be a flying buttress to the European church,

whatever that may mean, and I suspect he does not know himself.

But he did repeat the old Tony Blair line, that Britain, and I quote, is

a breach between Europe and America, and that we are at the centre of a

network of relationships and alliances that span the world, in

which, I quote, people in the world are looking for a lead from Britain.

Well, he wrote a book on Winston Churchill. It got mixed reviews, and

he should know that Churchill's concept of the UK at the centre of a

network of relationships depended on our retaining a key role in the

European circle, as well as on a transatlantic relationship and in

what Churchill called the British Commonwealth and Empire. Cut the

European dimension out of Churchill's three cycles concept,

and our position in the world is sharply diminished. The only

substantial speech by Mr Johnson that I can find since then was given

at a conference in Delhi on the 21st of January. He made no mention in it

of the Commonwealth, in the capital of what has been the jewel in the

crown of the British Empire, probably because he had been told by

his staff that the Indian government is not enthusiastic about returning

to a subordinate role in a British-led network. There was much

in the speech on Scotch whisky exports, about the pesky terrorists,

he said, that India imposes to limit whiskey exports, and how

nevertheless, Britain and the UK stand together in their commitment

to free trade. Pesky is a term that I last came across when I was a boy

in comics. It is interesting the language of Foreign Secretary still

uses. He went on to say, we have just decided to restore our military

presence east of Suez with a ?3 billion commitment over ten years

for a naval support facility in Bahrain. We have a commitment to the

whole world, and as our naval strength increases in the next ten

years, the Noble Lord Lord West will be very glad, including two new

aircraft carriers, we will be able to make a bigger contribution. In

the Indian Ocean, we have a joint UK-US facility on Diego Garcia which

is vital for our operations in the region. It is exactly 50 years since

Harold Wilson PHIL JONES: Governance announced the

withdrawal from Cillilers on the grounds that it no longer made any

sense to continue to defend and Empire now that it had been given

its freedom. Boris Johnson is too young to remember that. He was only

three at the time. We mean tamed athlete at that time which included

between 35-40 frigates against the 16 we have now, as well as bases in

Aden and Singapore. The Foreign Secretary claimed that Diego Garcia

is a vital UK, as well as US facility. Perhaps the minister can

remind us how much we have in the way of UK military personnel there.

The last time I was told, I think it was two, perhaps it is now four, and

whether or not there are any British military assets based in Diego

Garcia. This image of the world is not about taking back control, it's

about taking Britain back to the 1960s, boys' comics included. And

now we have thepm going to the USA to tell President Trump, according

to the media this morning, that together we can leave the world,

phrase straight out of Daniel Hannan's book on how the

Anglo-Saxons invented freedom and the modern world. Is Theresa May

going to attempt the same subordinate relationship with Donald

Trump that Tony Blair pursued with George W Bush? Does she share the

same illusion that Anglo-Saxon Americans love Britain above all

others, and that clinging to American coat-tails gives us global

status superior to the international roles of Germany and France?

Independent from Europe, pendant on the United States? Commitment to a

liberal international order but dependent on a Republican

administration which is against many of the assumptions of that

international order? That's not a coherent strategy for a post-Brexit

foreign policy. My Lords, I want to thank all Noble Lords who are

members of the committee for an excellent report. And I want to

thank Lord Howe for initiating this debate, and also to pass on my own

best wishes for a speedy recovery. In one of our earlier debates on

this subject, my Lords, the noble lady the Baroness Goldie, in

acknowledging that we face significant challenges to peace and

stability ahead, asserted that they are not ones brought about by the

UK's decision to leave the EU, and that they will not be exacerbated by

our leaving. Well, my Lords, I think that is the crux of today's debate.

And it has been highlighted by all Noble Lords. The question is, how

will a call deliver on that assertion? Man-made and natural

humanitarian crises, poverty and climate change, can only be met by

international co-operation. And the report highlights the year 2015, the

international community, facing up to its responsibilities by reaching

agreements like the disaster risk reduction, the financing for

development, the Agenda 2030 and of course, the Paris climate change

record. The report acknowledged that the watchword for the UN and the new

Secretary-General will be implementation of these agreements.

And Paul Williams from the finance, wealth office said they would be key

to maintaining credibility in the UN itself among other places. Of

course, the challenge to in fermentation, as we have heard in

the debate, are both political and economic, and not least, as all

noble Lords have said, is our future relationship with the US and its new

president. The Prime Minister will remind President Trump tomorrow that

the United Kingdom is by instinct and history a great global nation

that recognises its responsibilities to the world. Downing Street sources

say Theresa May prefers a grown-up relationship with the new president,

rather than by remaining aloof. The benefits of a close, effective

relationship is, we will be able to raise differences directly and

frankly with the president. Well, my Lords, clearly, this week, we have

seen in a little more detail what those differences may look like.