Chatham House: Independent thinking on international affairs
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Security, Defence and Development
In both rhetorical and organizational terms, the coalition government has sought to present a more integrated approach to UK security. The creation of the National Security Council brings together under the Prime Minister's chairmanship the Secretaries of State of all of the government departments involved in the country's external relations (FCO, Energy and Climate Change, Defence, DFID, Home Office and Treasury; the chiefs of the intelligence and armed services attend as required), with a parallel structure of meetings of senior officials. How does the coalition government's approach to security match up with the perceptions of the general public and opinion-formers?
- Afghanistan: Consensus on withdrawal
- Changing minds on climate change?
- Development: losing the debate at home
- Emerging resource security challenges
- Crafting responses to natural disasters
Afghnaistan: Consensus on withdrawal
Dr Gareth Price, Senior Research Fellow, South Asia, Asia Programme
Although international terrorism ranks highly as a threat among opinion-formers, the problems of weak and failing states such as Afganistan and Pakistan do not. The divergence between opinion-formers and the general public in relation to Afghanistan is not as great as might have been supposed. Among opinion-formers around 58% support the current strategy of gradually reducing troops and leaving by the end of 2014. The remainder are split roughly equally between those wanting an immediate withdrawal and those wanting to remain indefinitely.
Among the public at large, 48% support the current strategy, whereas 33% hope for an immediate withdrawal ( compared with 23% of opinion-formers). Far smaller proportions of both the public (11%) and opinion-formers (17%) were in favour of troops remaining as long as requested. While this fits with the assumption that the public is war-weary, the government's current strategy appears to chime with public opinion.
Changing minds on climate change?
Bernice Lee, Research Director, Energy, Environment and Resource Governance
While the general public sees climate change as a relatively low priority for foreign policy, 60% believe Britain should tackle climate change - whether unilaterally or making action conditional on the actions of others. Policy-makers have failed to persuade 31% of the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Not surprisingly, views about climate change are split along party lines. It is ranked among the top four threats to the British way of life by just 12% of prospective Conservative voters, as against 23% of Labour and 33% of Liberal Democrat supporters. More of the opinion-formers - some 14% of Conservatives, 54% of Labour and 41% of Liberal Democrats - view climate change as a high priority. There is a marked disconnect between opinion-formers and general public respondents intending to vote Labour - one of the highest discrepancies among the international issues surveyed.
Opinion-formers and the general public also differ when considering appropriate strategies for the UK in tackling climate change. While 46% of opinion-formers argue that climate mitigation should take place irrespective of other governments' approaches (down 4% on last year), 27% believe Britain's action should be conditional on those of others, while 25% think that no action is needed. Those working in businesses are also far more cautious than civil servants and political advisers when it comes to unilateral climate action.
Development: Losing the debate at home
Rob Bailey, Senior Research Fellow, Energy, Environment and Resource Governance
Perhaps unsurprisingly in the current economic climate, support for development spending among the general public is low, with 57% believing the UK spends too much on aid. C2DEs are considerably more likely to hold this view than ABC1s.a Among opinion-formers the figure is less pronounced at 37%, with a robust 47% thinking aid spending is about right. This presents a challenge for the UK government, which has committed to raise it from the current level of 0.56% of Gross National Income to 0.7% by 2013. The challenge may be compounded by the fact that across both opinion-formers and the general public, support for aid is weakest among prospective Conservative voters and strongest among prospective Liberal Democrat voters. This may create tensions for the coalition if support for aid continues to wane as domestic austerity measures bite.
Both the general public and opinion-formers consider aid largely irrelevant to Britain's international reputation, and as playing only a small role in serving national interests. This suggests that one argument in defence of aid employed by the Secretary of State for International Development, that Britain is an 'Aid Superpower,' is unlikely to resonate with voters, despite the fact that the UK is viewed internationally as a leader.
Would an international development strategy focused on sustainable, equitable and secure access to resources win greater voter approval? Maybe: as we have seen, there is a strong convergence in opinion that resource insecurity is a major threat to the UK and should be a foreign policy priority. This need not be window dressing, as there is a growing body of expert opinion that identifies resource scarcity as the major development challenge for the 21st century.
As ever, the risk with any alignment strategy is that development is captured by foreign policy concerns, and the efficacy of assistance is reduced. Nevertheless, there are good arguments - technical, economic and political - for looking at development through the lens of resource scarcity.
Emerging resource security challenges
Charles Emmerson, Senior Research Fellow, Energy, Environment and Resource Governance
Energy and resource security pose as grave a threat to the UK's way of life as international terrorism, according to the views of the country's opinion-formers. Only instability in international financial markets causes greater concern. Moreover, opinion-formers put the continued supply of oil, gas, food and water as the top priority for UK foreign policy.
Among the public, ensuring the continued supply of vital resources is ranked as the second priority, largely cutting across party, age and regional lines. Interruptions to energy supply - in effect, a supplyside shut off - are viewed the second greatest threat to the UK. Long-term scarcity of essential natural resources is ranked at the same level as nuclear proliferation.
Even though the UK has suffered no physical supply shortages during the period covered by the survey, it has experienced significant increases in energy and food prices. Widely reported stories such as the 2008-09 shut-off of Russian gas to Ukraine, this year's Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan and the 2008 and 2011 energy and food price spikes may have sharpened public perceptions around natural-resource tensions, energy security and food security.
Although opinion-formers and the public identify resource and energy issues as central challenges for the UK, their analysis of the underlying drivers and how problems might arise varies widely. There is no consensus on the policy measures needed to ensure sufficient availability of natural resources and energy for the UK. While some may regard international trade frameworks and climate change mitigation as essential, others may see domestic policy frameworks and the use of military assets as preferred means of securing future access to natural resources.
Crafting responses to natural disasters
Felix Preston, Research Fellow, Energy, Environment and Resource Governance
In contrast to resource security, natural disasters such as flooding, hurricanes and ash clouds barely register concern. This is perhaps surprising given the scale of human and economic consequences from recent disasters such as Hurricane Katrina, the 2010 earthquake in Pakistan, the 2011 tsunami in Japan and the ongoing drought in eastern Africa. Despite annual flood events and ash-cloud related disruptions in 2010 and 2011, the UK clearly sees major natural disasters as a relatively low risk.
The interconnectedness of the global economy means that in reality no country is insulated from these low-probability, high-impact events. Many of the direct impacts of longer-term trends, such as climate change and the pressures from growing demand for food, land and fuels, will be felt through shocks rather than gradual change. Manufacturers across the world were forced to halt or slow production as inventories of essential products - electronic components, car parts and fine chemicals - were quickly run down as a result of the tsunami in Japan. The 2010 heatwave in Russia led the government to restrict wheat exports, causing prices of flour to surge in Egypt, a contributing factor to the Arab uprisings. Given the UK's openness to trade and its range of international interests, natural disasters elsewhere in the world should be seen as a direct threat to the country's interests. The public's lack of concern about natural disasters is inconsistent with its prioritization of resource security: and government strategies to ensure secure access to resources should include worst-case scenario planning.