Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1-19)
LORD HANNAY
OF CHISWICK
GCMG, CH, SIR JEREMY
GREENSTOCK GCMG AND
MATTHEW KIRK
8 NOVEMBER 2006
Q1 Chairman: Welcome gentlemen. Thank
you for coming along this morning. We are very pleased that you
have all found the time to be with us. We are about to begin an
inquiry into the Foreign and Commonwealth Office's active diplomacy
document and its overall strategy. The expertise and experience
of all three of you is extremely valuable to us. Let me begin
by asking whether you think that the White Paper is significant.
Does it mark any significant changes or break any new ground,
or is it simply an agglomeration of headings relating to things
that are already happening?
Lord Hannay: In my reading of
it, the organisation of the tasks for the diplomatic service—the
nine points at the end—is an excellent tool of the trade
and is to be greatly welcomed. It is coherent and well set out,
and it is probably extremely useful for members of the diplomatic
service serving all over the world to have the priorities set
out in that fairly well assembled way. As a political statement
of foreign policy, I think that it errs in the direction of blandness,
and, as you say yourself, a little bit of everything is piled
in. I regretted that the then Foreign Secretary's introduction
did not manage to mention a single thing about the European Union
or the direction in which we wish to see it moving.
Sir Jeremy Greenstock: I agree
with Lord Hannay. I am not sure that the White paper is significantly
different from the Foreign Office's annual reports or the statement
of objectives that it has been doing over the years. I do not
know what else might have gone into it without revealing a much
more careful analysis of where the world is going and getting
into territory that might have been controversial. The decision
behind the document seems to have been not to risk getting into
controversial territory, which is perhaps a pity if there is to
be a strong debate on where British foreign policy should go over
the next 10 years. I believe that the world is changing fast in
a number of significant directions, that we have to analyse those
changes rather carefully, and that that may become a different
debate from the one started by this document.
Mr Kirk: Just to add to what Lord
Hannay said, the statement of priorities—the work plan at
the back—did not operate under this document but it did
operate under its predecessors, and it was a helpful framework.
However, it was important to treat it as an enabling framework
and not as a constraining inhibitor of activity as a diplomat.
Q2 Chairman: Thank you. As you are
aware, when the new Foreign Secretary was appointed a few months
ago, she added an additional priority—that of climate change.
Do you think that she simply took with her work that she was doing
in her previous Department, or does it mark a significant change
in the approach of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office?
Lord Hannay: I do not think that
it is either one of those two exactly. Climate change has moved
sharply up the agenda. As the post-Kyoto timetable inexorably
advances, the science—and the economics, with Sir Nicholas
Stern's report—remind us that we do not have a limitless
amount of time to get the international community's act together.
It is also a reflection of a priority that is rising irrespective
of who is Foreign Secretary. Moreover, particularly since the
Gleneagles summit of the G8, there has been a little coming together
of the international community, at least in discussion. Climate
change is now a really high priority—it is, of course, being
discussed in Nairobi this week—to get into a process of
negotiation, and to try above all to draw into that negotiation
people who have been outside the climate change debate or who
have been taking a free ride on what other people did—for
instance, the United States, Australia, China, India and Brazil.
That effort obviously has a much greater priority now than it
did two or three years ago. You might say it was great priority
then, but other people did not agree and you therefore did not
get the necessary critical mass. People are now beginning to focus
more on that, and I therefore very much welcome the Foreign Secretary
giving the issue that priority.
Q3 Chairman: Does it mean that the
attempt to make priorities had been undermined within a few months,
and that the prioritisation had already fallen apart because another
priority had been added within a very short time?
Lord Hannay: I think that it reflects
the fact that you cannot make foreign policy by blueprint. No
single country, not even the United States, can say foreign policy
is to be thus, thus and thus. It is made by a lot of tiresome
foreigners out there who have different ideas about what their
priorities are, and you have to respond to them. It reflects the
fact that documents such as this will always be outdated fairly
quickly, because events will come along that will drive you to
find responses that are not laid down in such documents.
Q4 Sir John Stanley: This question
is directed particularly to Sir Jeremy. As you know, the first
priority listed in the document is making the world safer from
global terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. There were obviously
no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, so that can be set aside,
but do you consider that our intervention in Iraq has made the
world safer from global terrorism?
Sir Jeremy Greenstock: First of
all, Sir John, we must note that that priority, like several others
in the document—and I do not exclude climate change—is
an example of an area in which the Foreign Office has an important
input, but it does not cover the whole field without liaising
with other Government Departments, or indeed other Governments.
Terrorism was becoming a huge threat to our security, to our allies
and to other countries around the world before 9/11 and, of course,
the threat was much more obvious after 9/11. That process would
have continued whether or not the coalition had decided to invade
Iraq. What has been risked in Iraq is an invasion that became
an occupation and later a coalition working with the Iraqi Government.
That has not yet settled Iraq into a stable and peaceful state,
and because of that security deficiency, terrorists are able to
operate as they might not have done under Saddam Hussein. If that
state continues or deteriorates further, there will be a longer-term
opportunity for al-Qaeda, for instance, or for a franchise loyal
to al-Qaeda to commit terrorist acts in Iraq, to train terrorists,
and to harden their people in battle. In my view, terrorists are
no longer the main threat to a stable Iraq. There are very strong
sectarian divisions that lead to immense violence every day and
night between the sects in Iraq. Therefore, there are a number
of different problems that the coalition, the allies of Iraq and
the current Government in Iraq have to deal with that go way beyond
terrorism. To answer your straight and literal question, the world
is not yet safer from terrorism because of the invasion of Iraq.
Other things have to be done to defeat terrorism in many other
places.
Q5 Sir John Stanley: Do you agree
with the view, which has been widely repeated in the media, that
the invasion of Iraq has provided the best possible recruiting
ground for those who may wish to engage in terrorist violence
in any part of the world?
Sir Jeremy Greenstock: I think
the picture is more complex than that. There are other reasons
for terrorist groups to recruit new people to their cause. I do
not think that the situation in Iraq on its own has led to distaste,
or worse, in the Islamic world among some, although certainly
not all, Muslims for the west and what the west has done over
the past five years. It goes much wider than that. However, Iraq
has become a great cause in the Islamic world and beyond, and
some young Muslims have been recruited to terrorism in response
to the situation in Iraq.
Q6 Sir John Stanley: Lastly, on a
point that has been put to me personally and I am sure is regularly
put to many others, the British Foreign Office had a unique insight,
by virtue of history since the end of the first world war, into
the make-up of Iraq and the latent forces that were being suppressed
by the Ba'athist regime. The Foreign Office knew and had every
reason to know that once the Ba'athist regime was removed, Iraq
would take a fairly similar course to what has now happened. Do
you believe that, before the invasion, the Foreign Office had
such a view and was that expressed more widely to the Government
as a whole?
Sir Jeremy Greenstock: First of
all, Sir John, I do not think that the Foreign Office's collected
knowledge of Iraq, its people, its history and the way things
may go after invasion was unique. Many people in the American
system, for instance, beginning with the Secretary of State at
the time, Colin Powell, had studied that part of the world quite
well and served as American diplomats in the middle east, and
warned that if Iraq was invaded and the Saddam Hussein regime
removed, that place would be very difficult to govern. The Foreign
Office understood better than some what Iraq might become, but
there were also Americans—clearly, given the way things
went, their advice was not heeded—who understood. There
were also, of course, friends of ours in the middle east, Arabs
and Muslims, with whom we talked as diplomats, who warned us very
clearly that Iraq would be a very difficult place to manage after
the invasion. Yes, those in the British system went over some
of this ground with their American opposite numbers. Our input
was stronger at that time into the State Department, the CIA and
the National Security Council than into the Pentagon, and we found—this
is perhaps another story—that the advice on how Iraq might
need to be dealt with, which was received sympathetically in the
United States, was not the advice that got to the decision makers,
so there was clearly some disappointment in that respect.
Chairman: I am conscious that we will have opportunities
to come on to these issues later. I want to move back to the overall
White Paper, but I shall just bring in Paul Keetch briefly on
this point.
Q7 Mr Keetch: Does this not show
the danger of having priorities? Something will come along such
as Iraq, which was undoubtedly the No 1 priority of the President
of the United States, but it then became the obsessive priority
of the British Government against other priorities such as, for
example, Afghanistan or perhaps even what was happening and developing
in Iran. Suddenly, the one great priority of Iraq overshadowed
other priorities and made us as a country take our eye off the
ball in other areas. In particular, the criticism has often been
made that the diversion of troops and effort into Iraq ensured
that Afghanistan was not dealt with properly. Does this not demonstrate
that we can create priorities—we can write 10 priorities
today—but the political priorities of the President or the
Prime Minister of the day two months down the line might be on
a subject about which we have no idea? It might be the Falklands
or whatever, but suddenly that will become the overriding priority
that, if we are not careful, will distract us from all other priorities.
Lord Hannay: The example you give
of the Falklands is perhaps not a good one, because the priority
that was given to the Falklands was chosen by General Galtieri,
not by the British Prime Minister. That illustrates that the foreigners
out there do have a capacity to throw your best ordered priorities
into a certain amount of confusion.
Mr Keetch: President Bush is also
a foreigner, of course.
Lord Hannay: Frankly, if you do
not have priorities, you have no anchor at all—you have
no sense of direction whatever—so you need those priorities,
but you also need the flexibility to be able to respond to events
and you need structures in your diplomatic service that give you
enough capacity to be able to switch between the priorities a
bit if the circumstances demand that.
Mr Kirk: I want to add that one
aspect of this document that seemed to me, having moved out of
the diplomatic service into the private sector, to be missing
and which I think is relevant and would be found in a corporate-sector
equivalent is something about values—values in foreign policy
and values in the way the diplomatic service is managed and goes
about its business. To me, priorities inevitably shift as the
environment around you shifts. The values ought to be constant,
clearly set out and deliverable, but there is very little in this
document about them.
Sir Jeremy Greenstock: We have
to think of this set of priorities as the base from which the
British diplomatic effort leaves to conduct its operations. It
is extremely useful to have the fundamental values set out, so
that public opinion understands where British foreign policy is
coming from, but if you judge the British diplomatic effort or
the resources it needs only by the base, you do not give the resources
for the operations. British diplomacy is far more than this document.
We can have a discussion about the document this morning, or we
can have a discussion about British diplomacy. They are two different
things.
Q8 Mr Horam: If we have a discussion
about British diplomacy, let us move on to your chosen subject,
Sir Jeremy, and the role of the Foreign Office. It has been said
in recent years that the role of No 10 Downing street in formulating
foreign policy, which has always been very great, has become almost
comprehensive and total. I have a quote—I do not know whether
it is accurate—from Sir Rodric Braithwaite, who criticised
the Prime Minister for reducing the Foreign Office to "a
demoralised cipher". Whatever your views, I would be interested
to know, first, whether that has happened—that the Foreign
Office has become handmaiden to No 10—and, secondly, what
effect that has had on the formulation of foreign policy.
Sir Jeremy Greenstock: First,
it is a trend of our age that as international affairs increasingly
interlink with domestic affairs, the Head of any Government should
be closely and in a detailed way concerned with foreign policy.
Secondly, it is a diplomat's job to adjust to circumstances and
to do his or her work with the relationships and contacts, and
in the environment that he or she finds. I think you will find,
if you had long conversations with members of the Foreign Office
now and with us with our experience of being senior diplomats
over the past 10 years, that we adjust to things and provide what
the Government require from diplomacy.
Q9 Mr Horam: Do you recognise any
truth in the statement by Sir Rodric about "a demoralised
cipher"? Is that anywhere near the truth?
Sir Jeremy Greenstock: If the
Foreign Office has a touch of demoralisation about it—I
think that is true at the moment—it is for wider reasons
than the relationship with No 10.
Q10 Mr Horam: Such as?
Sir Jeremy Greenstock: First,
the demoralisation, if it occurs between No 10 and the Foreign
Office, starts at the political level between the Prime Minister
and his Secretary of State and Ministers. The civil service behind
that will fit in with what is required by the Government and do
what work is necessary. We could get into some comment about the
use of special advisers and the difference between the civil service
now and the civil service 30 years ago when special advisers were
not so much used on operational work, but it is more than just
the Prime Minister or No 10 taking over certain aspects of diplomacy.
The world has led to that. Another serious factor in the Foreign
Office's challenge today has been resources. No doubt we will
come to that with other questions—
Mr Horam: Yes, we will.
Sir Jeremy Greenstock: We are
finding that the size of post, the spread of the Foreign Office's
work, the capacity to construct relationships and to negotiate,
the experience gained by a slimmer number each year of men and
women in important but more junior roles in embassies abroad because
numbers have been cut is leading to a progressive decline in the
capacity of the Foreign Office to cover every aspect of diplomacy.
That is something that we should discuss seriously.
Lord Hannay: May I add that the
Foreign Office in my experience—I have not been a serving
member of the diplomatic service for the past 11 years—is
a pretty robust animal? It is highly motivated, enjoys a great
deal of team spirit and can put up with some quite difficult circumstances.
If you cast your mind back to Baroness Thatcher's reign, she was
not invariably an admirer of the Foreign Office and she said some
quite hard things about it, but it weathered that and worked loyally
for her Government, as it works loyally for every Government.
Such things can be exaggerated. Moreover, we must not forget that
the Prime Minister has a much bigger role, as Sir Jeremy said,
because Heads of Government are now much more involved in the
day-to-day business of diplomacy. That has nothing to do with
our country or the way in which our Government is organised; it
is about the way in which the world, European Councils, G8 meetings
and so on are organised. You may like it or not, but it is there.
Mr Horam: I think the point that
Sir Rodric was hinting at in his comment was that foreign policy
would have been better conducted if No 10—
Lord Hannay: Sir Rodric did the
most right thing that he could have done. He advised the Prime
Minister for whom he was working that his job should be abolished
and that he should rely on the Foreign Office. That is not the
view that everyone takes. One final point: it is worth remembering—this
could be very different—that the two principal advisers
to the Prime Minister in his office are both senior serving members
of the diplomatic service. That makes a very big difference. If
they were people completely from outside, or political advisers,
I think you would get a much greater degree of demoralisation.
Q11 Ms Stuart: It is about the ownership
of these priorities. The White Paper states, "These priorities
are Government-wide, they are interdependent and reflect the linkages
between domestic and foreign policy" and says that all Departments
must be seen to have a role in pursuing them. We all know how
incredibly difficult it is to co-ordinate across Whitehall. To
what extent do you think there is cross-departmental ownership?
I go back to the example of environmental policy, which the current
Foreign Secretary seems to have brought with her. Do you think
it will make the Foreign Office's job more difficult?
Lord Hannay: No, it is the modern
world. It has been like this to an ever increasing degree for
the past 30 or more years, as domestic and foreign policy—the
clear distinctions, the different boxes—have become confused
and overlapped. If you were to go round Europe or the rest of
the world, you would tend to get the view that Britain has been
better at recognising that and concerting a British policy on
these matters than most other people. That is not to say that
we are yet very good at it; we are just better than some people
who are quite bad at it. There are plenty of examples of that;
at European meetings in Brussels, one finds people taking completely
different views in one council compared with another, and so on.
On the whole I think that the British tend to avoid that. It is
a very difficult art—it is more an art than a science—to
get a concerted view and then carry it out. What this document
does that I think is good is to tell the people out in the field,
who are of course all members of the diplomatic service—although
they may temporarily be drawn from other Departments—how
to put together these priorities and what fits with what. That
is very good, because out in the field you do not have the co-ordination
problem that you have in London. If you allow the co-ordination
problem in London to reflect through into the field, then you
get a very poor performance.
Q12 Ms Stuart: I put it to you that
that is more a reflection of the way in which British diplomats
and politicians perceive power in negotiations. We always think
that sharing is extremely important, and any British Minister
who goes into negotiations knows that the rest of Whitehall is
behind them. But when it comes to the final stages, where you
play poker, the British, having negotiated everything and been
very safe, cannot play poker.
Lord Hannay: I see. Well, if that
is your view, that is your view. It was not the impression that
I got when I was involved in European Union or United Nations
affairs. I do not criticise the Ministers who were involved and
whom I was advising on those occasions. I thought, for example,
that Baroness Thatcher did rather well on the British rebate,
and she showed every sign of not being somebody who folded her
hand. She upped the ante quite often.
Q13 Ms Stuart: That was the Prime
Minister actually acting against the advice of the Foreign Office,
which told her in the run-up that she could not get that rebate.
Lord Hannay: No. I was one of
her principal Foreign Office advisers, and we did not advise her
in that way. The advice that we gave was that a two-thirds rebate
was what we should be aiming for, and that was what we got.
Q14 Ms Stuart: Can I ask just one
very specific question? Do you think that the Government made
a mistake in 1997 when they separated the Department for International
Development from the Foreign Office?
Lord Hannay: I would rather like
to pass on that, because I am not an expert in that field.
Sir Jeremy Greenstock: There were
advantages and disadvantages. The advantage was that DFID became
a much more focused conveyer of British aid policy. The expertise
was refined because it had its own objectives, its own office
and its own Secretary of State in the Cabinet. Therefore there
was a momentum given to the British aid programme that probably
was not there under the Overseas Development Administration. The
downside was that the co-ordination between aid policy and foreign
policy became a little less well conducted. Naturally enough,
jealousies grew, there were budgetary problems and difficulties
and there were two Secretaries of State in the Cabinet. The politics
and the bureaucracy of the combined area probably diminished to
some extent, whereas the professional delivery of an aid programme
improved. I want to go back to Ms Stuart's previous question.
I think that the Foreign Office is well used to the fact that
diplomacy begins at home. We have always had channels to other
Government Departments involved in international affairs and with
increased globalisation and as the Government have become more
used to international and domestic affairs coming together, the
Foreign Office has adjusted through contacts round Whitehall,
constant meetings and responses to the Cabinet Office's co-ordination
of things. I think that that has been done very well by Whitehall
in international affairs. There is a problem, however, in the
business of divided budgets and payments being made for every
detailed little thing that one Government Department uses from
another. Budget mentality has become divisive as the requirement
for united Whitehall and Government-wide policy has grown. That
is a pity. It might be necessary in accounting terms, but it has
not been good for the traditional British strength in combined
bureaucracy across Government.
Q15 Mr Keetch: May I ask about resources?
Obviously, the Gershon report suggested some huge savings from
the Foreign Office in particular. Do you think there is a danger
that the drive for ever greater efficiency, the constant consideration
of whether posts should be kept open and of which posts should
be closed and the desire all the time to make savings—I
am sure we would want to see savings—is now taking diplomats'
time away from their principal job, which is being a diplomat?
Is there a sense that the management of the estate of the Foreign
Office and its buildings should begin to be done separately from
those people who are diplomats? In other words, should the diplomats
continue with diplomacy and could the management of the bricks
and mortar of the Foreign Office be better done by someone else?
Mr Kirk: May I kick off on that
one, as the most recent serving diplomat of the three of us? I
did not find it at all unusual as the head of mission that I should
have quite a strong focus on the resources that I was using to
fulfil the objectives, which obviously included the bricks and
mortar resources as well as the people and the money that you
need to enable both to do their job. I think the Foreign Office
could be more professional in its management of people and in
its management of physical resources. It could inject more external
professionalism into that process. I think there is an underlying
concern, as well, which is that the more you manage resources
by strictly and tightly defined objectives—in a sense that
is one of the concerns about the way in which objectives are set
out here and whether they are a constraining framework or an enabling
framework—the more difficult it is to value the existence
of a capacity that is available to be used when necessary. I see
that in the job I am doing at the moment. As a company, we call
on the Foreign Office for help in many different places and many
different ways. We cannot predict what those are in advance, nor
can the Foreign Office. The knowledge that there are people there
who have the knowledge of the country, the people and of how decisions
are taken and so on, and who can advise us, help us and lobby
us at short notice is invaluable to us. If the management by resources
starts to erode that core capacity level, that would do significant
damage to the Foreign Office's long-term capability.
Lord Hannay: Two points, if I
could. First, I think it is always very important to remember
that in the Foreign Office the staff—the people—are
a much higher proportion of the budgetary cost than in any other
Department. I think I am right in saying so. Therefore if you
do extract savings it means you are removing people. There is
no fat to be removed on non-people parts—or there is very
little. The second thing is that I think the trend is towards
smaller posts in a lot of countries, because that is what some
of these reductions result in. Personally I am strongly opposed
to the belief that you can, by multi-accreditation, which is,
say, having one ambassador for five countries, do a decent job—you
cannot; but you can do a decent job with a very small post. If
you have very small posts, as many smaller European countries
than us have done for hundreds of years, frankly, then you cannot
impose on them a template of management and administration which
is the same as a post with 100 people. I am really not sure that
it has been properly understood that if you are going to have
just one person, with some locally employed people, or perhaps
two people, in some country, you cannot ask them to do the same
form of management controls as if they were in Paris or New York.
Q16 Mr Hamilton: Can I follow on
from the discussion about posts and how they are distributed with
a few questions about whether the current diplomatic network of
posts is really necessary? Obviously as a Committee we travel
extensively. We meet our diplomats in posts all over the world
and we are never less than impressed. I think British diplomacy
and our posts are renowned in the countries that they are based
in for being among the best diplomats in the world. Having said
that, I think, Sir Jeremy, you referred earlier to changing priorities
and the globalisation of the world, and the way that diplomacy
is now done between Heads of State. Of course diplomatic posts
were established in an era when we did not have the communications
we have now. My question really is—having said how excellent
our diplomats are and how important I think our posts are—are
they are really any longer necessary, especially in Europe? Indeed,
the White Paper points to the reduction of diplomatic posts in
Europe. Do you think we actually need any? Mr Kirk, I know you
have recently left the post in Finland, where we were just last
month. Do we really need to have an embassy in Finland now we
have got the European Union? Should we just be concentrating on
the emerging markets of China, India and Brazil, and some of the
emerging global priorities for the United Kingdom?
Sir Jeremy Greenstock: I am sure
that my colleagues will have things to say on this question, Mr
Hamilton, but may I just make a fundamental point about what we
are discussing this morning, which is the nature of diplomacy
and how it should be resourced? There is a reason why the British
diplomatic service, person for person—man and woman for
man and woman—is better than most other diplomatic services.
There are reasons why the British soldier is more effective man
for man than nearly every other military. The reason is the British
professional approach to doing something down to its roots and
the British habit both of collective team approaches and of pushing
delegation down as far as possible to more junior officers, so
that independent decisions are taken at quite a low level. The
Government's capacity to handle international affairs is not just
a matter of direct communication between the most senior members
of Government. It is the product of a wide-ranging amount of teamwork,
built on the knowledge and understanding, the contact and communications,
that the British Government have, through all their capillaries,
with other people in other countries. You cannot, at the top,
seal a deal that has not been thoroughly prepared further down
the system. You cannot negotiate at a conference without knowing
what everybody else with whom you are about to negotiate may be
thinking or may be carrying in their suitcase. You cannot understand
what is happening in a country without having on the ground people
who know, who understand and who have analysed the roots of that
change, that problem or that particular development. This is actually
an old debate. Now that we have the telephone, do we need diplomats?
Now that we have the internet, do we need diplomats? Compare what
posts deliver day by day to the Foreign Office and other Departments
with what you may take as you find and find is incorrect on the
internet, and you will see the difference between the diplomatic
service's supply of analysis, judgment and advice to Ministers
and what you can get from public sources.
Lord Hannay: When I was doing
the job that Sir Jeremy subsequently did, as ambassador to the
UN, the world had an inconvenient habit of finding itself in the
middle of crises in places where Britain did not have embassies:
Kigali in Rwanda, Haiti, Somalia and Afghanistan. Your capacity
to operate effectively was cut by a large amount by not having
an independent, objective flow of information coming in. As it
has since transpired in the case of Rwanda, the United Nations
Secretariat was not passing on as much information as it should
have done, and we really were groping around in the dark. If we
had had a post in Kigali, as we now do, we would have been much
better informed. It does not prove that we would have done any
better, but we would have been better informed. Secondly, your
EU point is not very well taken. Look around you at the embassies
of our EU partners in London or throughout the rest of Europe.
Are they getting smaller all the time? They are not. And why not?
Because making EU policy is a complex affair that involves a great
deal of work by our posts in EU capitals. The bigger the EU gets—it
is about to go up to 27—the more complex this is and the
more necessary it is that you do not just rely on the collective
discussions in Brussels, which are the tip of the iceberg, but
make a proper input through your missions in EU capitals. I am
not saying for one minute that the only point of our embassies
throughout Europe is to do EU business, because there are many
other things; however, that is one quite important part of it.
Mr Kirk: May I make two comments
from my previous perspective, and one from my present one? Picking
up on what Lord Hannay has just said about EU business, when I
was in Helsinki, our role in relation to EU decision taking was
first, to provide background analysis of why Finland was adopting
the positions it was adopting across a range of issues. We did
not involve ourselves in the Brussels negotiation, because that
was done by UKREP, the UK permanent representation to the European
Union. We followed what was going on in order to monitor whether
the people we were dealing with were starting to cause a blockage
or difficulty from the UK point of view. If they were, we then
sometimes—not always—had a second role, which was
to push the Finnish Government on a particular issue that had
been reflected from the negotiations in Brussels. As we discussed
earlier, decisions are increasingly moving to Head of Government
level, so the push involved lobbying the office of the Head of
Government, which could be done by only two people really; one
sitting in No 10, the other being the ambassador on the spot.
If you were to rely on No 10 to do all that communication, you
would need a much bigger No 10 dealing with European business
than you have now. So, we ended up doing quite a lot of it. My
second point from my previous perspective again picks up on what
Lord Hannay was just saying. A great deal of our work in Helsinki
was on issues such as education, innovation, health care, reducing
the levels of cardiac disease and that kind of thing. They were
areas in which Finland had an acknowledged world lead, and where
your colleagues in other Committees, the rest of Whitehall and
parts of British academic and public analysis were interested
in understanding better why the Finns were performing so well.
Our job was to try to translate that which was relevant from Finland,
which involved a lot of understanding of Finland, into that which
was relevant in the UK, which involved a lot of understanding
of the UK. My third point is from my current perspective. In the
past month, I have been in touch with six FCO missions overseas,
three of them within the EU, and on top of that, I have regularly
been in touch with UKREP about processes of European legislation.
With the bilateral missions, we are looking for a knowledge of
the country, its people, politics and how our business fits into
that—how best we can look after the substantial investment
that we have made, or are thinking of making, in the countries
concerned. That could not be done by anyone who is not present
in the country. We have tried various models using private sector
advisers to look for that same information. The quality is much
higher from the Foreign Office.
Q17 Andrew Mackinlay: I was very
content just to listen and to absorb all that you said, but what
tempts me to ask one quick question is that as we speak Kyrgyzstan
is in turmoil. We do not have a mission there. There has been
a long-playing gramophone record from me about this. Could you
give us your view on whether the absence of a United Kingdom mission
in Kyrgyzstan this morning is a substantial disadvantage to our
interests and our information gathering?
Sir Jeremy Greenstock: If Her
Majesty's Government wanted to do something about what is happening
in Kyrgyzstan, they would be less able to do so and less well
based to make judgments from not having, as Lord Hannay recently
said, a mission on the ground there. I doubt whether the British
Government would want to take independent action in a country
that is not so immediately connected to our interests as Kyrgyzstan.
We are more likely to react with our partners in the European
Union or, if the case came that way, in NATO. We would accept
a collective analysis and a collective judgment with allies or
within the United Nations on what to do in Kyrgyzstan. There have
to come points where the British Government, independently, cannot
reach out and mend something awful that is happening for those
people on that territory.
Q18 Mr Purchase: I have reason to
agree with Fabian Hamilton about the excellence of our services.
Forgive the massive over-simplification but my constituents care
about two things in this setting. Can we keep them safe and out
of military adventures as far as possible, and can the diplomatic
service of the Foreign Office ensure that we have sufficient friends
in the world to trade successfully? If I then look at outputs,
we are in more struggles and difficulties than I can recall in
any period since the end of the war, and our exports are not getting
a bigger share of world trade. Given all the excellence that we
hear of in the Foreign Office and the diplomatic service, what
can you tell us about how we might improve on those two factors?
Sir Jeremy Greenstock: To take
security first, clearly the Foreign Office has a particular role
within a much larger Government role for the defence of the realm
and everything that that means. I do not think that your constituents
will be looking just to the Foreign Office to keep them safe and
to keep the world free from war. It depends on many other factors,
starting with the police in their own streets. But let me make
two brief points. First, your constituents, Mr Purchase, have
not had to suffer a war on British territory or affecting British
territory since the end of the second world war. With the things
that have happened, with the establishment and the activity of
the United Nations and with a much more globalised set of relationships
around the world, inter-state war, particularly affecting the
developed world and democracies around the world, is an extremely
rare thing. We have moved on from the 20th century and the heritage
that the 20th century had from previous centuries, including from
empire and colonialism. We have moved on in terms of war. But
the human race will never be free of violence. There will always
be violence for some reason, somewhere, some of it affecting us,
some of it on our territory. We will not be violence-free, and
many aspects of government and many factors in society will bear
on whether a particular area, a particular country or a particular
county will be suffering from violence. The Foreign Office has
an input there, in terms of understanding the way the world is
going and working with other Government Departments and allies
in order to ensure that the forces for peace are stronger than
those for violence. In the economic sphere, although we are not
winning a higher spread of world trade, our exports consistently
go up in absolute terms. The fact is that other economies are
growing faster than ours because they started further back and
have room to grow. The spread of opportunity is much wider in
a globalised world, which this country fought for throughout the
20th century. So that is a product of our own values earlier in
our history. Other countries are freer, beginning to be more democratic,
more economically prosperous, growing and giving us more markets,
but we are not growing as fast as they are because we are an older
industrialised country.
Lord Hannay: I should like to
add a point on that question. Because world trade is growing much
faster than the world economy—that has been true for decades—we
are increasing our exports considerably, even if we are not increasing
our market share, as Sir Jeremy said. That is hugely important.
Also, of course, our economy has been shifting steadily away from
manufacturing towards services, at which we have been reasonably,
if not very successful. I do not think that the picture is bleak.
However, I wish to make a point: as in security, so in economics.
More and more now depends on getting an international framework
that will ensure that Britain can, if it is competitive enough,
make a living, protect itself, further its interests and so on.
In the case of trade, that international framework might be the
World Trade Organisation, and obviously the stalling of the Doha
round is a thoroughly bad thing and we ought to be exerting ourselves
to restart it. That should cover the climate, which we started
with, and of course all the issues of peace and security, many
of which go to the United Nations and involve major peacekeeping
obligations around the world. After all, the UN has nearly 100,000
troops deployed in different peacekeeping operations around the
world. They are mainly doing a very necessary, important and good
job, but they will not be able to do that if a country such as
Britain, which is among the top five economies in the world and
a member of the Security Council, does not pull its weight.
Q19 Richard Younger-Ross: Coming
back to strategic and international priorities, the paper that
Sir Jeremy took us down slightly earlier talks about Afghanistan,
Iraq and North Korea. There is no mention of Lebanon and Israel
or the Israel-Palestinian conflict. Is that a mistake?
Lord Hannay: Well, I think that
it is a mistake if it implies that the Foreign Office has taken
its eye off the single most poisonous abscess on the face of the
international body politic—that is what I would call it.
Going back to what Sir Jeremy said on terrorism, I think that
the failure, over many decades, even to move the Arab-Israel confrontation
towards any kind of solution has fed that atmosphere in Muslim
countries and allowed a very small minority of people to take
up violence and to wrap themselves in a kind of Islamic cloak
and a set of values that in my view is completely pernicious.
Nevertheless, they have managed to do that. We should learn the
lesson of this summer. If we believe that neglecting the Arab-Israel
problem or that a unilateral, imposed solution will solve it,
as did Mr Sharon's Government and as, in part, Mr Olmert's does
as well, forget it. It is not going to work that way. That is
what the events of the summer showed. It is right that this should
be a very big priority in the period ahead. Not because it is
likely to yield results quickly—it would be really silly
to think that—but because if we do not get some kind of
resumption of a process that could lead towards a settlement,
something quite nasty will come along quite soon.
Sir Jeremy Greenstock: I think
that it is fair to point out that this document was presented
to Parliament in March 2006, but I subscribe entirely to what
Lord Hannay said. The Palestine issue remains at the core of so
many of our problems that it has to be a central part of the Foreign
Office's work on political and security matters that we handle
it. That is being evinced by the Prime Minister's approach to
this problem now, and indeed during his premiership. We have shown
that we understand the need for a settlement of the Palestinian
issue more sharply than some of our allies.
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