Examination of Witnesses (Questions 20-23)
LORD HANNAY
OF CHISWICK
GCMG, CH, SIR JEREMY
GREENSTOCK GCMG AND
MATTHEW KIRK
8 NOVEMBER 2006
Q20 Richard Younger-Ross: In the
recent conflict between Israel and Lebanon, Downing street took
a very definite view, which was not to criticise Israel in ways
that perhaps some Members of this House would have wished it to
have done. Sir Jeremy, you said earlier that some of the wiser
heads in the Foreign Office were not necessarily listened to in
terms of the Iraq conflict. Do you believe that those wiser heads
in the Foreign Office were listened to over the recent conflict,
or do you believe that a rift opened up between Downing street
and the FCO on this particular area?
Sir Jeremy Greenstock: I hope
that on Iraq I was understood to be saying that the wiser heads
were not listened to by the people taking decisions in Washington.
The British approach on Iraq was reasonably united, although we
could get into questions on that. On this issue, I do not know;
I was not in the Foreign Office at the time, so I am not aware
of what advice may have been given. I am sure that the analysis
across the foreign policy area of Government as to what was happening
between Israel and Hezbollah and within Lebanon was very similar,
but what Ministers choose to say in public about that is their
business.
Q21 Sandra Osborne: May I ask your
opinion of parliamentary scrutiny of the Foreign Office? Do you
believe it is adequate or do you feel there is room for improvement
in that regard?
Lord Hannay: I am in a slightly
awkward position because I am a member of a scrutiny committee
in another place, so I spend quite a lot of my time scrutinising
mainly Foreign Office inputs into EU policy. It is the view of
our Committee, at any rate, that it is good that the Foreign Office
and other Government Departments are responding much better than
they did some years ago to the parliamentary requirements of scrutiny,
but it still has a good long way to go. There are still too many
overrides; there are too many cases in which the explanatory memoranda
are not very informative, and—you will forgive me for a
commercial—we have just had a debate on the House of Lords'
role in European scrutiny and we have drawn quite a lot of conclusions
from that to try and strengthen it.
Q22 Sandra Osborne: Do you think
that the Foreign Office takes seriously the deliberations of this
Committee, for example, or does it just pay lip service to our
recommendations?
Sir Jeremy Greenstock: May I offer
a comment without any bias or prejudice? That is to say, that
as a serving diplomat I have found the involvement of the Foreign
Affairs Committee of the House of Commons and the reports that
it produces very useful, on the whole of very high quality, and
nearly always introducing new things that we should be thinking
about or new advice from elected Members to Government servants
that we need to take account of. I am not saying that just to
flatter this Committee; in New York, I very much welcomed the
close involvement of members of the FAC in the work of the mission
there and in observing the United Nations and its various committees
and agencies. But we are talking about two things here: one is
the effectiveness of a group of people on a Committee such as
yours, the other is the power of Parliament, and on that we do
not have any real base to comment. However, as a citizen of the
United Kingdom, I would like to see greater powers for Parliament
to scrutinise and affect the policy of the Executive, because
the experience of the elected House is extremely useful in feeding
in to the kinds of considerations that we as diplomats have to
take on board in representing the United Kingdom in all its aspects.
Mr Kirk: May I add that I experienced
a considerable opening up of the relationship between the diplomatic
service and Parliament over my time in the diplomatic service?
When I joined, Parliament was very much beyond Ministers and Ministers
were what you served. The interaction between members of the diplomatic
service and Members of Parliament was quite tightly controlled.
A great deal of that has gone in the intervening time, which is
a very good thing. It is a good thing partly because it allows
the Foreign Office and its diplomatic network to expose Parliament—I
do not mean just this Committee, but Parliament more widely, because
as I mentioned, most of my work in Helsinki was done with your
colleagues in other Select Committees—to different influences,
experiences and understandings of how to tackle some of the issues
that we confront in this country. I think that that interaction
also provides a diplomat serving in a country with a very useful
and much broader projection of what Britain is and what it represents
than the diplomat can give on his or her own. Having a group of
parliamentarians who take an interest in a country—often
quite a critical interest, but none the less taking the trouble
to go there and understand—and having, in my experience,
a profound and deep inquiry into the way in which another country
is conducting policy is a useful projection of Britain in itself
and of some of the core values of British democracy. Those values
should be—indeed, I believe that they are—at the heart
of our foreign policy, but it is sometimes difficult to articulate
that quite so clearly without elected people there to do so.
Chairman: May we take just one final
question? I am afraid that we shall have run out of time then,
gentlemen, because we have another witness coming.
Q23 Mr Heathcoat-Amory: I want to
pick up on the answers about the middle east. There was an extraordinary
omission in the 10 strategic priorities, which made no reference
to the rise of militant Islam, which is basically what the struggle
is at the minute. If we are going to defend western democracy
in its most general sense and in anything like its present form,
the issue must be faced up to. There is a rather coy section in
the White Paper headed "Religion and Identity", which
skirts round the issue, but there is no reference in the priorities.
Is this not a curious omission? Is it an example of fighting previous
wars, rather than the one in which we are engaged at the moment?
Sir Jeremy Greenstock: I wonder
whether a document like this can get into very sensitive territory
of that nature and in any real detail that affects the precise
and specific things that diplomacy needs to do in the area that
you are describing. I would refer to the problem as militant Muslims
rather militant Islam. I do not think that Islam, as we have related
to it over the centuries, is really the problem. Something is
happening in the world—through globalisation and the polarisation
of politics, and cultures and religions—that is producing,
at the extremes, people of such anger and such determination to
do violence that we have a security problem and a political problem.
The issue is very complex. Anything that the Foreign Office or
Foreign Secretary might say in a document of this kind could be
constraining, as far as the actual process of specific diplomacy
is concerned. The issue is obviously an area in which the Foreign
Office is highly engaged. To put a general point, it is an example
of the fact that diplomacy has to deal with specifics that are
in no way listed in any document. We are reacting, and the Foreign
Office will always be reacting. The capacity to react wisely and
with effect depends on resources being given to the Foreign Office
that are not just constrained to a list on a particular piece
of paper.
Lord Hannay: Forgive me for taking
issue with it, but I do not think that we are fighting a war against
either Islam or Muslims.
Mr Heathcoat-Amory: I did not
use the word war.
Lord Hannay: No, but it is very
important, because we are not talking about something that will
be handled mainly through military action. We are talking about
something that can be dealt with only with the active co-operation
of large secular Muslim countries such as Turkey, Indonesia, Egypt
and many others. To some extent, you have to be a little bit careful
that what you put in a document like this might give the wrong
impression that you are organising what some people on the other
side of the Atlantic like to call the third world war. It is very
damaging to our objectives to suggest even for one minute that
that is how we think. We are dealing with a poisonous outbreak
of extremism, but that outbreak of extremism is threatening Muslims
just as much as it is threatening us.
Chairman: Thank you, gentlemen.
We could have gone on a lot longer, and there are other areas
that we had hoped to ask about, but this has been a very valuable
session, and we are grateful to all three of you for coming. We
will now break for a few minutes, and then we have another witness
coming.
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