Written evidence from The Rt Hon Lord
Owen CH
David Owen was a Member of Parliament for 26 years
from 1966-92. Under Labour Governments, he served as Navy Minister,
Health Minister and Foreign Secretary. From 1992-95 Lord Owen
served as EU peace negotiator in the former Yugoslavia. He currently
sits as a Crossbench Peer in the House of Lords. His business
interests include director of Abbott Laboratories Inc and Hyperdynamics
Corporation and Chairman of Europe Steel. He was formerly Chairman
of Yukos International, Global Natural Energy and a director of
Coats Viyella.
SUMMARY OF
EVIDENCE
- The National Security Council should be put on
a statutory basis to ensure it is a sustained innovation. Legislation
should enshrine:
- the specific personal responsibility of the Foreign
Secretary and the Home Secretary for the overall Ministerial control
of the intelligence agencies; and
- the over-arching role of the Foreign Secretary
in relation to the UK membership of the United Nations, and in
particular our permanent membership of the Security Council, NATO
and the Commonwealth clarifying the relationship with the MOD
and DFID.
- Our shocking record of incompetence over the
last decade in foreign and security policy at many levels will
not begin to be set right if we focus only on Ministerial decisions
and do not attempt to correct, in the case of the Diplomatic Service,
its overriding culture of wanting, not just acquiescing in, ever
greater integration within the EU.
- We have no interest in damaging or destabilizing
the euro even though the UK should stay outside the eurozone.
The smooth working between the eurozone and the non eurozone within
the EU is in the interests of all Member States. The UK coalition
government, in this context, is right to take special measures
to help Ireland facing grave difficulties within the eurozone.
1. Though there are matters of detail that I
will briefly touch on, the main thrust of my evidence is to focus
on Question 1 on "What is the FCO's role in UK Government?"
and the "creation of the National Security Council".
2. I begin by asking how we can put right the
defects in the working relationship between the Foreign Secretary
and the Foreign Office and the Prime Minister and No 10 that have
been revealed in many different ways during the Prime Ministership
of Tony Blair, but particularly from 2001-07.
3. The Blair presidential style is not a totally
new problem. There are at least three major warnings from the
last hundred years of the adverse consequences of concentrating
the determination of foreign policy in No 10 with a Prime Minister.
4. The first warning comes from the period of
1921-22 when Lloyd George's personal diplomacy meant that the
then Foreign Secretary, Lord Curzon's role and that of Foreign
Office advice was greatly diminished on a number of Treaty negotiations
to the detriment of British interests. Lord Curzon, however, put
up with every form of humiliation in order to stay in office.
Sadly he was not the last Foreign Secretary to adopt such a posture.
5. The second warning comes from 1937 when Neville
Chamberlain began to bypass the Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden,
over Anglo-Italian rapprochement. Then Chamberlain without consulting
Eden in 1938 poured a "douche of cold water" on President
Roosevelt's proposal for Anglo-American cooperation. Eden's brave
resignation, sadly, had little effect on Chamberlain's dominance
in developing the policy of appeasement. Eventually when Lord
Halifax, stiffened by Cadogan, the then Permanent Secretary in
the Foreign Office, criticized the Godesberg demands in Cabinet
on 25 September 1938, it still did not stop Chamberlain flying
off to sign the Munich Agreement.
6. The third warning came from the handling of
the Suez Crisis by Prime Minister Anthony Eden. As the months
went by following the nationalization of the Suez Canal, Eden
became ever more controlling of foreign policy. This was highlighted
by him summoning the then Foreign Secretary, Selwyn Lloyd, to
return overnight from New York, where he was negotiating with
the Egyptian Foreign Minister, only to immediately fly out with
Eden to France to meet the French Prime Minister Guy Mollet. At
that meeting Eden confirmed that if an Anglo-French clandestine
agreement that Israel would attack Egypt took place Britain would
intervene militarily on the Canal with France. This momentous
decision was taken with no time for the Foreign Secretary to be
advised by officials of the consequences of denying any prior
involvement for relations with the United States and the Arab
world.
7. It will be argued by some that a similar bypassing
of the Foreign Secretary and the Foreign Office took place under
the Prime Ministership of Margaret Thatcher. I do not think that
the Thatcher period came anywhere near as far in undermining the
collective handling of foreign policy as the Tony Blair period.
In my judgement the best, briefest, and fairest, description of
Margaret Thatcher's relationship with the Foreign Secretary and
the Foreign Office comes from the concluding chapter of Sir Percy
Cradock's book, In Pursuit of British Interests,[1]
pp. 200-210. Over Rhodesia, the Single Market, Hong Kong and China,
as well as German reunification, the Prime Minister's initial
positions were substantially modified and Cradock as her foreign
policy adviser from 1984-90 was in a unique position to assess
relations between the FCO and No 10. Another insight comes from
a former Permanent Under Secretary at the Foreign Office, Sir
John Coles, in his book, Making Foreign Policy,[2]
pp. 38-39.
8. The years of Tony Blair's Prime Ministership,
in relation to foreign and security policy, has already been analysed
in the report on intelligence under the Chairmanship of Lord Butler.
It will soon be reported on more generally by the Inquiry chaired
by Sir John Chilcot. I have written a chapter entitled "The
Ever Growing Dominance of No 10 in British Diplomacy" in
British Diplomacy: Foreign Secretaries Reflect[3]
and a chapter on "Bush, Blair and
the War in Iraq" in In Sickness and In Power.[4]
9. Amongst the mass of information on the handling
of the aftermath of the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions, the Committee
might find it useful to focus attention on two specific illustrative
aspects of the decision making between the Foreign Office and
No 10 in the Blair period. Both have, hitherto, received, in my
judgement, insufficient attention though this may be corrected,
in part at least, by the report of the Chilcot Inquiry.
10. Firstly, the handling of the second UN Resolution
from early January 2003 until 8 March when it became apparent
that the French Government had counted the votes in the UN Security
Council more precisely all along than the UK Government and that
the six undecided countries, Angola, Cameroon, Chile, Guinea,
Mexico and Pakistan, would not support the UK's advocacy of a
second Resolution. It has been a long standing practice that the
Foreign Secretary is the main determinant on how the UK positions
itself in the Security Council relying on an assessment made within
the Foreign Office of other countries' voting intentions by a
specialist unit drawing on all available information. Though of
course the Permanent Representative's Mission in New York plays
a key role, it cannot be the sole source of guidance. In many
cases it is essential to have a feedback from the Member States'
capital and to rely for this not just on the British Mission in
that country but sometimes information from the intelligence services.
Did such a system operate in 2003? To what extent were judgements
made inside No 10 rather than in the FCO?
11. Secondly, the handling of the de-Ba'athification
and the disbandment of the Iraqi army. Also the memo of our then
Ambassador in Egypt, John Sawers, on 11 May 2003 suggesting bringing
the British 16th Air Assault Brigade in Iraq, but due to return
home, to Baghdad, also supported by Major General Albert Whitley,
the most senior British officer with US land forces, serving in
the US Headquarters of Lt General David McKiernon. De-Ba'athification
was an area of policy on which the Foreign Office had considerable
knowledge, particularly from the time in 1990-1991 when detailed
consideration was given as to whether or not the British Government
would support going on from liberating Kuwait to using armed force
to take Baghdad and dismantle by force Saddam Hussein's command
and control of Iraq. The reasons why it became an agreed policy
between the US and UK under President Bush and Prime Minister
John Major not to do so at that time was highly relevant to the
necessary preparation of planning for the aftermath of the military
invasion of Iraq in 2003. Yet not only does it appear that there
was an insufficient input from the FCO but one official has recalled
"I don't think that the Prime Minister felt he had to take
any more of a personal interest in stabilizing Iraq. He was leaving
it all to the Americans."[5]
The Sawers' memo was of immense potential importance, coming from
someone who had been asked to go to Baghdad as the Special Emissary
of the Prime Minister. According to Anthony Seldon "when
Blair heard the plan, he gave his full backing. But nothing happened.
It ran into the implacable opposition of Michael Walker who had
succeeded (Admiral Sir Michael) Boyce as Chief of the Defence
Staff".[6]
Yet this was one of the rare moments when a British decision to
deploy British forces into Baghdad could have had a profound effect
on the continued success of the US/UK military operation. Had
the Prime Minister ensured such a deployment was implemented it
would have been virtually impossible for President George W Bush
not to have increased American forces in Baghdad as well. The
US Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, would also not have been
allowed by the President to bring home the 16,000 soldiers of
the 1st Calvary Division. How did the decision-making procedures
in No 10 relating to this request operate? Why did no UK deployment
result?
12. The coalition government established on 12
May 2010 a new National Security Council (NSC) to oversee all
aspects of Britain's security as their response to perceived failings
in the previous arrangements. The Prime Minister, David Cameron,
appointed Sir Peter Ricketts (Permanent Under Secretary at the
FCO) as his National Security Adviser, a new role based in the
Cabinet Office and charged him with establishing the new Council's
structures and to coordinate and deliver the government's international
security agenda. The Council is chaired by the Prime Minister
and its permanent members are the Deputy Prime Minister, the Secretary
of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, the Chancellor
of the Exchequer, the Home Secretary, the Secretary of State for
Defence, the Secretary of State for International Development
and the Security Minister. Other Cabinet Ministers and the Chief
of Defence Staff and Heads of intelligence services attend as
required.
13. Sir Peter Ricketts reported to a meeting
in Chatham House on 21 October 2010 on how this NSC process was
working. He described in a published document, the NSC as "classic
cabinet committee government as far as I am concerned. But the
key thing is that the Prime Minister is driving it" …..
"That, in itself, drives Whitehall because if departments
can see that there is a prime minister-chaired committee meeting
systematically, taking decisions on national security issues,
then Whitehall pays attention." The Prime Minister has regularly
chaired weekly meetings and the Chief of Defence Staff, the Chairman
of the JIC and the heads of the intelligence agencies have normally
attended NSC meetings. In this sense the NSC is different from
previous Cabinet sub-committees.
14. The NSC clearly has important implications
for the role of the Foreign Secretary and the Foreign Office.
It should ensure that they cannot be sidelined by the Prime Minister
as has happened before and the very existence of an NSC could
enhance the FCO's role. Sir Peter Ricketts mentioned, for example,
that joint working on conflict prevention and on stabilisation
has meant that "we have found more money for the conflict
pools in Whitehall, most of it coming from the DFID budget but
to be useful, you have to have not just DFID money which has to
be spent under the ODA (Official Development Assistance) rules
set by the OECD, but also money from other Departments for more
military training and the military assistance programmes for which
ODA money does not qualify. So you need a mix of it, and it needs
to be flexible and as rapidly usable as possible." There
appears to be scope in the context of the NSC for the FCO and
DFID to operate in a more integrated way. At present the separation
of their activities seems less cost effective and driven by an
agenda which appears to want separation for its own sake and is
suspicious of sharing tasks and facilities. We cannot turn the
clock back to the situation in 1977 when I was sworn in as Minister
of Overseas Development as well as Secretary of State although
Judith Hart was responsible for overseas development and able
to attend Cabinet. We have, however, lost something important
in the Foreign Secretary's dual role and it is worth the Committee
examining this area to see if a more structured relationship can
be achieved. There are no doubt many questions about the NSC which
the Committee will also wish to tease out in oral evidence from
Ministers and officials. But I wish to highlight one matter.
15. First and foremost, in order to be sure that
the NSC represents a real and sustained innovation and not one
subject to the whim of a particular Prime Minister, as the Cabinet
Committee structure has been, I recommend that the Foreign Affairs
Select Committee examines whether the NSC should be put on a statutory
basis. This would make it very difficult in the future for any
Prime Minister to bypass the NSC without first having the legislative
authority to do so.
16. As part of that legislation the Committee
might wish to consider some aspects of the statutory role of the
Foreign Affairs Minister in the Dutch government. There is much
to be said, in my view, for defining the role of the Foreign Secretary
in legislation covering the National Security Council and some
other Ministers' roles. In particular I think it is very necessary,
in view of the private wish and pressure from many former Prime
Ministers to take over responsibility for MI6 and MI5, to enshrine
in NSC legislation the specific personal responsibility for the
overall Ministerial control of these agencies to the Foreign Secretary
and to the Home Secretary. These responsibilities, it should also
be made clear, are not ones that can or should be delegated to
other Ministers within their Departments.
17. It would be worth clarifying in relation
to the MOD and DFID the over-arching role of the Foreign Secretary
in relation to the UK membership of the United Nations and in
particular our permanent membership of the Security Council, also
our membership of NATO and of the Commonwealth. In relation to
the UN and the Committee's Question 5 "What should be the
role of the FCO's network of overseas posts", I believe strongly
that the closure of Missions in UN member states must stop. There
is a need for the permanent members to keep in direct contact
with all member states and narrowing UK representation in the
Member States is of itself damaging to our credibility as a permanent
member.
18. Inevitably the conduct of UK government policy
in relation to membership of the European Union, because so much
of its activity relates to domestic affairs, will have to extend
across many departments. This is best coordinated, therefore,
by the Cabinet Office and the present system should continue where
the Prime Minister of the day determines the cabinet committee
structures for dealing with EU matters and which Ministers should
chair such committees when they are not being chaired by the Prime
Minister. But it is nevertheless a fact of life that EU membership
has recently weakened the power of the Foreign Secretary and the
FCO on overseas policy, so much so that the growing public backlash
to ever greater integration has in part stemmed from concern that
the powers of the UK as a sovereign nation have been stretched
so tight that they are in danger of breaking. There is legitimate
public concern over the Lisbon Treaty's potential to further erode
essential sovereign powers and the public demand for referenda
as a restraining mechanism is both understandable and correct.
19. There are gathering pressures within the
EU for the European Council to take ever more decisions on EU
foreign and security policy. The Council now meets regularly four
times a year and has increasingly taken to having ad hoc
meetings, something that is likely to increase with the two new
positions of a single President of the Council, Herman Van Rompuy,
for a renewable two and a half year term to a maximum of five
years and the new powers for the High Representative for Foreign
and Security Policy, Baroness Ashton now chairing all meetings
of EU Foreign Ministers. These pressures are compounded by the
frequency of visits to London by Heads of Government from all
over the world. They expect to meet the Prime Minister. These
pressures to focus all decision making around one figure, the
Prime Minister, needs to be resisted if one wishes to retain Cabinet
government and reject the presidential model. This is quite apart
from the difficulty any one person has in being able to involve
oneself in so much of the detail that accompanies many of these
issues. One of the ways that this pressure on the Prime Minister's
time can be reduced is if the Foreign Secretary adjusts their
travel schedules to be more available in London and in Brussels.
The days of leisurely travel around the world are over if the
Foreign Secretary wishes to exercise their role as the Cabinet's
principal adviser in developing, discussing and agreeing British
policy overseas.
20. Finally, Question 8 relates to using the
FCO to promote UK trade and economic recovery. There is apart
perhaps from a new emphasis little that is original in this proposition.
It was discussed and advocated by the CPRS Report on our overseas
representation published and in part implemented in 1977 when
I was Foreign Secretary.
21. Firstly, a few words of caution. One of the
lessons arising from the internal report I commissioned in 1979
over the fall of the Shah, which is soon to be made public, was
that we had focused too much attention in the FCO on trade and
economic activity in the Embassy in Teheran and that this had
been done at the expense of political reporting.
22. We also need to remember that there has been
no more persistent an advocate of British entry into the eurozone
within government than that of diplomats within the FCO often
in open conflict with Treasury officials. There was little readiness
within the diplomatic service generally to learn the detailed
economic lessons from the structural problems in the design of
the Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) and the reasons why the UK had
to leave the ERM in 1992. It was also a tragedy that the very
valuable contribution British diplomats made to the negotiation
of the intergovernmental pillars in the Maastricht Treaty by John
Major gave way to embracing the dismantling of most of this structure
in the run up to the proposed Constitutional Treaty ensuring that
much of that valuable ground was never recovered in the subsequent
negotiations over the Lisbon Treaty.
23. It is easy for diplomats to claim that they
only serve politicians and that it is the political leaders who
are responsible for all that has gone wrong. But this is too simplistic.
The Diplomatic Service is given a special role in overseas policy,
not wholly dissimilar to the special role of the Armed Services
in the development of defence policy. The climate of opinion amongst
officials within both the Diplomatic Service and the Armed Service
can have a profound influence on the end result of Ministerial
negotiations and decisions. The last decade has seen in the actual
conduct of our foreign and security policy a quite shocking record
of incompetence at many levels. We will not begin to set this
right if we focus only on Ministerial decisions and do not attempt
to correct, in the case of the Diplomatic Service, its overriding
culture of wanting, not just acquiescing in, ever greater integration
within the EU.
24. Without the commitment to a referendum, forced
on the Conservative Party in large part by the Referendum Party,
before the 1997 General Election, and reluctantly conceded in
opposition by the Labour Party and Liberal Democrats, it is almost
certain the UK would have entered into the eurozone during Tony
Blair's Prime Ministership and be now having to cope with a far
deeper crisis than just our structural fiscal deficit. It also
has to be faced that the culture within which Foreign Office diplomats
work has been insufficiently concerned about the exact wording
of EU legislation. This has had a profoundly adverse effect on
British life and business practice. Examples are the European
health and safety legislation, the working time directive, and
EU regulatory activity concerning the financial services industry.
There are many other examples where too great a readiness to go
along with the majority within the EU has had damaging consequences
on efficiency, unit costs and the competitiveness of British industry.
There will have to be a fundamental change within the FCO itself
if diplomats are to carry much conviction in any enhanced role
in trade promotion and economic recovery.
25. It is undoubtedly a good idea that UK Missions
abroad should focus more on promoting UK trade and economic recovery
but it is questionable how much this should become a specialized
skill of diplomats. It is at least worth the Committee very seriously
considering the alternative of more mixed Missions with representatives
from other departments in Whitehall serving overseas. They have,
provided they can acquire the language skills, the requisite specialized
knowledge and can arguably make a greater contribution to this
necessary reorientation. One of my personal regrets is that some
of the aspects of the CPRS Report that were agreed by Ministers
in the Labour government were never fully implemented after we
lost the election in 1979. While there have been some notable
exceptions, there has not been the cross fertilization between
the home and overseas departments that was envisaged in terms
of secondment both ways. Nor have we maintained our global representation
by cutting back to one person Missions supported by local staff.
Such a single representative does not always have to be a diplomat;
in some very poor countries a representative from DFID might be
more appropriate and in other small islands for instance someone
with a Treasury or a Ministry of Trade background to deal with
an offshore financial service industry might be more appropriate.
26. In the summer of 1977 the Labour Cabinet
held an all-day meeting on the European Community, on the basis
of a detailed memorandum which I was asked by the Prime Minister
to prepare personally. Under the 30 year rule it should be available
within the National Archives but it has not been placed there
despite the document being referred to as the "Property of
Her Majesty's Britannic Government". Perhaps this is because
it was written to form the basis of a party political discussion
as well as providing guidance for a distinctive policy over the
EEC for the then government. For anyone interested I have forwarded
a copy to the Clerk of the Committee. There is an important section
in it dealing with the enlargement of the Community from nine
to twelve to include Portugal and Spain as well as continuing
with the enlargement negotiations for Greece. It was argued that
enlargement, in the section on Commitment to Confederation, would
provide an antidote to federalism and so it has, in the main,
proved to be.
27. Today's challenge for the UK is how to help
restructure the eurozone. Many of us who have long argued against
British membership have nevertheless accepted that a euro currency
within the EU was a legitimate objective for other Member States
and that we had no interest in damaging or destabilizing the euro.
In this regard it was reasonable for the Prime Minister, David
Cameron, to assure other Member States that the British would
not stand in the way of sensible changes in the working practice
and running of the eurozone, even if they involved Treaty amendment,
with the essential proviso that they would have no consequential
changes in powers relating to the UK and the provisions for our
opt-out of the eurozone. Such a clean separation will, however,
be very difficult to achieve. For example, the Swedish position
outside the eurozone is not really compatible with the existing
Treaty language. There is also a strong case for the UK helping
to establish that Member States not in the eurozone are part of
a settled structure within the EU and not in some anti-chamber
waiting for inevitable entry to the eurozone. It is, for example,
very apparent that as a result of the present difficulties of
Ireland, Greece, Portugal and Spain and even Italy, there will
be a far greater reluctance of eurozone countries to enlarge membership
than existed hitherto. Therefore the non eurozone part of the
EU needs to have a less transient nature with each country free
to make their own mind up as to whether they wish to join the
eurozone and entry not to be assumed to be automatic if they fulfill
specific criteria. The UK coalition government, in this context,
is right to take special measures to help Ireland as it faces
its economic difficulties within the eurozone, particularly since
we have a common border, history and a great many economic links.
28. What this crisis within the eurozone has
revealed are structural problems that may yet still require some
countries to leave the eurozone and for a period, at least, have
the freedom to fix their own exchange and interest rates. We are
facing growing demands within G20 and from countries dependent
on commodities currently linked to the dollar, for consideration
of a basket of currencies. The non eurozone part of the EU may
consider it worthwhile examining some of the detailed discussions
about a hard Economic Currency Unit (ECU) along with other innovative
ideas being discussed in the wake of the 2007 global financial
crisis. There are dangers in the UK adopting a totally hands-off
attitude to the changes and rebalancing that is starting to emerge
as a result of the continuing crisis in the eurozone. We are proving
day by day that we are not hostile to the eurozone itself but
that we will not become a member. How the non eurozone operates
is a matter of fundamental interest to the UK and the smooth working
between the eurozone and the non eurozone within the EU is in
the interests of all Member States.
18 November 2010
1 Percy Cradock, In Pursuit of British Interests:
Reflections on Foreign Policy under Margaret Thatcher and John
Major (London: John Murray, 1997), supplied to the Committee
in hard copy. Back
2
John Coles, Making Foreign Policy: A Certain Idea of Britain
(London: John Murray, 2000), supplied to the Committee in hard
copy. Back
3
Ed. Graham Ziegner, British Diplomacy: Foreign Secretaries
Reflect (London: Politico's, 2007) Back
4
David Owen, In Sickness and In Power: Illness in Heads of Government
during the last 100 years (London: Methuen, 2008) Back
5
Anthony Seldon Blair Unbound (London: Simon & Schuster,
2007) p 191 Back
6
Ibid, Anthony Seldon, pp 189-190 Back
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