Bronwen Maddox
Hello, everyone, and a very warm welcome to Chatham House. I’m Bronwen Maddox. I’m the Director, as of last week, so this is in fact my first event, not here on this platform, but first event as Director here and very good to meet you all. I’ve met quite a few of you already. A very warm welcome online. I look forward to chatting with some of you afterwards and in the many months to come. So, well done for getting here, through the spectacular rain, that nearly ruined Liz Truss’s first moments. We’re here to discuss A New Prime Minister, a New Place for the UK in the world? and I’ve got a terrific panel here to do it. Also, remarkably dry in the literal sense. I’m not going to presume on their politics or what they’re going to say.
I’ve got here Chris Bryant, MP for Rhondda for many years, a great warm welcome. Catherine Philip, Diplomatic Correspondence for The Times, Alicia Kearns, Conservative MP for Rutland and Melton, Sunder Katwala, Director of British Future, the think tank specialising in immigration, integration, race and identity, and John Kampfner from here, running our UK in the World Initiative, which looks at many of these questions, and he’s been writing expansively on all these things.
Well look, let’s kick off. We do, indeed, have a new Prime Minister. I’ve asked them all to say very briefly, really very briefly because we have one hour now, what difference they think Liz Truss is going to make to Britain’s position in the world and what they most wish or fear? Chris, I’m going to start with you. We’ll come back to that point about – a few brief remarks there, we can expand on at length.
Chris Bryant MP
I feel like I’m being told off even before I’ve started.
Bronwen Maddox
No, no, you don’t. Come on. Come on.
Chris Bryant MP
But, well, I’ll start with Chicago The Musical because there are lots and lots of songs that you probably remember very well, but the one I think most applies to Liz Truss is Mr Cellophane Man. You can see right through him, and my anxiety about really good diplomacy on the world stage needs somebody with a strong personality, an open character, an ability to project on behalf of your country, and I just don’t think Liz Truss has that. We will see endless tumbleweed moments. We’ve seen it on the Foreign Affairs Committee. There was one yesterday in that strange thing about Carlisle, there’ll be more, and I think that that’s a problem for us.
On policy, I think the Macron moment in the leadership contest was a really worrying one. How can you not know whether France is a friend or a foe? It, you know, it’s our closest ally upon whom we rely in nearly every United Nations and NATO meeting. I hope that she’s not going to be obsessed with this, “We got Brexit done” because Brexit is not done. It will never be done. It will be an endless process of trying to achieve a proper relationship with our nearest and dearest, and I’ll just mention one fact.
Only the other day, the Spanish authorities charged some South Wales cyclists who were going to cycle in Spain in a charity race for leukaemia, I think, £8,500 to get their buses out of Customs – their bikes out of Customs. That kind of thing is going to happen all over unless we get to a better relationship with Europe. Final thing is, I don’t think – the thing that’s got to change is, we’ve got to connect all the dots. So, I remember being in here, listening to Liz Truss give what I thought was one of the most vacuous supposed visions about foreign affairs I’ve ever heard. And the biggest problem for me was, she was asked, this was before the second invasion of Ukraine, the first was obviously 2014, she was asked about financial services in the UK and whether there was a problem. I think one of the things that so far, the government has failed to admit is that since 2010, we were inviting – and perhaps before when there was a Labour Government too, we were inviting people into this country just because they had large pockets from Russia and other authoritarian regimes and we didn’t do due diligence, and that’s one of the things that ended up emboldening Putin.
Bronwen Maddox
Okay, thanks very much indeed. Tumbleweed, Macron, Europe, Russian money, thank you.
Chris Bryant MP
Chicago.
Bronwen Maddox
That too. Catherine.
Catherine Philp
I was also at that Foreign Policy speech by Liz Truss and so I hope for a foreign policy that does not resemble the speech, ‘cause like you, I found it vacuous in the extreme. It spoke of networks of liberty around the world that I think has been touched on by the new Prime Minister outside Number 10 today. This is a very, sort of, black and white thinking that doesn’t really mean anything and I don’t think that Ms Truss has given much thought as to how our more complicated relationships in the world pan out. That people do not fit, countries do not fit neatly into these enemies and friends definitions that we try to force them in.
Like Chris, I also think that it is absolutely fundamental that the new Prime Minister tries to reach out to our European allies and steady the ship. Britain – we’ve changed Prime Minister’s now four times in six years. We do not look like the sober, reliable ally that we have been in the past. We talk casually about breaking international law when we are meant to be one of the pioneers of that and one of the upholders of that in the international system.
I’m concerned by, what I hope has been Ms Truss’s campaign mode in which she has attacked friends and also picked fights with enemies that were not necessary and of their time. Some of the attacks on China just seem to me inappropriate in the context of a campaign, and I think she needs to sit down and think much more carefully about what words she says in public and the effect that those can have on both friends and allies, because you can’t just wing it as Prime Minster, and you can’t just make remarks like the remark about Macron.
Why are you calling in the Chinese Ambassador, for example, over a bilateral dispute they have with America that’s got nothing to do with your country? So, steady the ship, become the reliable partner that we are, show our allies that we can be trusted, and don’t pick fights with enemies when you don’t know where you’re going with that fight.
Bronwen Maddox
Thank you, and don’t pick fights with friends, as you’ve been saying as well.
Catherine Philp
It seems unnecessary to say, but apparently we have to, yes.
Bronwen Maddox
Yeah, no, thanks very much indeed for those points again about Europe, and as you said very eloquently about style as well, which is already running through this. Alicia.
Alicia Kearns MP
Very dangerous threats that I think she’s going to focus on and then in two years’ time you can tell me whether I was completely wrong. But I think that we will hear a lot about threats. I think we will hear a lot about China, we will hear a lot about Russia, we will hear a lot about the Integrated Review and trying to put some meat on it and translate it and update it. I think we will hear a lot about “Putin must lose.” For me, I want to see what that means. What does “Putin must lose” actually look like meaningfully? I think for too long we’ve allowed Civil Servants and Politicians alike to get away with that phrase. It doesn’t actually mean anything. There is no foreign policy objective outcome impact that you can see from that statement, so I think we’re going to hear a lot about threats.
The second thing is you mentioned at the start, Bronwen, is we’re going to hear a lot about this “network of liberty.” Again, that needs to be translated. What does it mean? For me, I’d love to see us operationalise the Commonwealth and recognise that that’s a key way for us to bring people together. We need to live up to our multilateral commitments and make sure we are making more of those and that we are fighting for the multilateral system we believe in, rule of law, things like that. I would also love to see her use it to target, what I am starting to think about, as abstentionist foreign policy.
There are too many countries across the world who are abstaining from taking difficult positions, abstaining from taking the place they need to support us. We need to work out how we support them and get them to a better place, and I also think she needs to look at the Global South in particular because, particularly as food crisis bites, the Global South with leave us and they will not stay with us and so she needs to use that network to bring them together.
I think we’ll also hear a lot about the Indo-Pacific and I don’t think she’s going to move away from the tilt, in any way, sense or form. We saw some quite strident comments about Taiwan when she appeared before the Foreign Affairs Committee recently. So again, that’s something that she needs to look at and explain, and I’m worried that there’ll be too much of a focus on the Indo, although I think India is something that’s been missing in UK foreign policy, if I look at the last two years, and I think that’s a real error. But the Pacific states, we need to have a specific focus on supporting our Australian partners; we provide a very different voice in the Pacific and we don’t come with the same baggage that other countries do.
I think we’re going to hear a lot about Israel and that’ll be something that’s slightly more unique. We saw how to run a campaign that Israel’s the UK’s greatest friend. Now that’s not something we’ve heard in the past, we’re all very used to it being the US. So, I think there’s a balance piece there where it’s very important that yes, we rely on Israel for some very specific roles, but that isn’t to counteract the Middle East. We have to maintain those friendships across the piece.
And the final thing I think we’ll hear her talking about a lot is, countering hostile states, so moving further beyond just Russia and China, to how do we prepare our powers and protect ourselves? I want to see us talking about that AUKUS strand B, you know, the really interesting technology of the future that’s going to protect us or protect our allies. I want to see her talk about resilience, all of government, how we build the capabilities within government, the China expertise, the Russia expertise, the understanding of how we actually fight hybrid warfare as a state in a responsible manner without falling to rhetoric, to defence of multilateralism. But I would also like to see that resilience, please look at food security, business supply chains, we all know we can’t stand up to hostile states if we are entrenched and struck with this, kind of, at the last moment, supply chains they can easily choke.
Tech is a big absence of the conversation at the moment about protecting our rights. There is too much of our individual liberties being taken away by technology that is cheap and subsidised by China that’s coming into our system and that cross-government capability just isn’t there. So, that’s what I think she should focus on, what I’d like to focus on, but I would also like to see more of a focus on recognising that we can’t be everywhere and that actually, the Foreign Office has got to get more strategic.
We need to focus on what our priority is, which is to keep our people safe and to uphold our international commitment to those we’ve promised to support or that we are in alliances with. And that actually takes a real confidence, to say that we’re not going to be everywhere and help everyone and to recognise where we need our allies to pick up and where we need to balance against them. So, there’s a few things there that I think she’s right to focus on, there’s a few where she needs to put a lot more meat on the bone, but I think we have to wait and see really what comes out in the next few days.
Bronwen Maddox
Okay, thanks very much indeed for weaving in very adroitly what you want now and what she wants. Thank you very much, and we will…
Alicia Kearns MP
What I thought.
Bronwen Maddox
Yeah, no, okay. No, fair point, and on the first one, we can indeed come back and task you in a year’s time, but it’s going to be a long year with a lot happening. Sunder, what do you make of this and what difference do you think she will make?
Sunder Katwala
It’s going to be tough and it’s a stormy time to become the Prime Minister. I don’t think any Prime Minster, any peacetime Prime Minister has had a tougher inheritance, in terms of the economy, in terms of the domestic political management. What she’s won, which I think is very important to us, she’s won a half-term in power. Two years to make a difference at home, a difference in the world, to work out. So, this election is looming. She’s probably our least known Prime Minister to the British public, never mind the wider world since John Major took office.
A quite similar situation to John Major really. He had the regicide of Margaret Thatcher, who had us going into a recession, you had somebody we didn’t know about. The leadership contest at that time actually really boosted the Conservatives very well, whereas the last two months have been a bit exhausting, I think, for everybody and, you know, maybe they’ve got to, sort of, pick up from here, so it’s really tough. I think therefore, she just wants to introduce herself onto the world stage just to have the stature of being the Prime Minister, to rise above it. And so, in a way, these simple messages that everyone here and at Chatham House said, a bit too simple, you know, a patriotic, democratic sovereign, peace and prosperity, loving people, ready to make friends and deals, in a way she just wants to establish that that’s her offer. And we’ve got to make some friends, haven’t we? And there aren’t many natural allies in the Biden administration or the German Government or the French Government or, you know, the Australians were very close to the Conservatives and they left power, and so on. So, you’ve now got to get into the world of compromise, having been in the, sort of, the binary world of politics, you know, this clash. And China’s quite happy, I think, if the Soviet News Agency that called Margaret Thatcher the, you know, the Iron Lady, are quite happy to have a, sort of, war with newspaper headlines with Beijing. But what’s going to happen beyond that? Where’s that going to go? So, it’s really tough and it’s really short and yet the world can change an awful lot in two years, you know, going past Brexit, going past the pandemic, into Ukraine, so incredibly volatile times. So, you know, not making any big predictions.
We’ll have a new Foreign Secretary as well as a new Prime Minister and everyone thinks it’s James Cleverly. And we haven’t got our first British-Indian Prime Minster, might have had this election happened, so we will have Black and Asian representatives in all of the great Offices of State. And that’s old news for the Chancellor, we’ve had four ethnic minority Chancellors in four years now. People, I don’t think could care where Kwasi Kwarteng went to school or what his ethnicity is. They want to know about the energy policy. And we get our third ethnic minority Home Secretary in a row, and the one person is going to be a bit tougher than Priti Patel on the Rwanda policy and on left-wing loyalists, so you’ll all have your views for or against the value of, you know, putting in a European Convention.
That’s old news as well, ‘cause this extraordinary thing, there’s never been a British-Asian Cabinet Minister before 2010. Never been a British-Asian woman in the House of Commons before 2010. There’s never been a Black Cabinet Minister in the last century, and it’s already old news. But Foreign Secretary, if it’s old news to Britain it might be new news to the world. So I think James Cleverly, the son of a Nurse from Sierra Leone and a White British father, it’s a moving on of the, you know, who is Britain? James Cleverly apologised for the British Empire and its deeds.
Bronwen Maddox
Sunder, do you think he’s got much chance to make a stand as Foreign Secretary, following someone whose previous job, right up to this morning, was Foreign Secretary?
Sunder Katwala
Well, you know, he’s an ally of Liz Truss, he is very much a liberal, global, non-culture warrior kind of the Brexit end. I mean, Kwasi Kwarteng is very much not a culture warrior either. Other people are more up for the cultural. But let me just say this about ethnic minority Britain and the arguments we were having, say, half a century ago or a generation ago. The riposte to “Who let you in and why are you here and when are you going back?” My dad arrived a week after Enoch Powell made that speech, was “We are here because you were there.” But, “We are here because you were there,” is a first generation argument about staking your right to be British. Once James Cleverly represents Britain, the argument is, “We are here because we were there.” Actually, we are into a new era of Britain. I think we believe that in Britain. I don’t know if they know that in the Commonwealth and around the world, so in a way, there’s a symbolic opportunity for a Foreign Secretary to tell a new story about what internationalist Britain might think it’s doing when a lot of our allies wonder what basic Britain is up to.
Bronwen Maddox
Thanks very much indeed for that. A different angle on it. John, and what you do here, and you’ve been speaking this afternoon with me on a Twitter space and writing extensively on this, this is exactly what you are looking at.
John Kampfner
Absolutely, I mean, just coming back on a couple of the points that Sunder made, one that Alicia made, this point about Britain knowing what it shouldn’t do is incredibly important as well. We’re looking also at capacity, which means the politics and the foreign policy of prioritisation. Where should we not be? Where should we not seek to adopt? Which is a real challenge and Civil Servants say this the whole time, particularly in a foreign policy culture which, you know, Blair was responsible for too, which is, sort of, hubris and Britain is always righting the wrongs of the whole world. It’s obviously taken on a different form now. Sunder, there are a couple of things you said. I was surprised by the inadvertent comparison of Liz Truss to John Major. I can’t think of two people more different, but I take your point about 1990 and is she going to do a 1990 too, that means, is Keir Starmer going to be – go the same way as Neil Kinnock? Well, we’ll see on that.
But no, what we’re trying to do here is very much also not just what should – what will and should, and the should is incredibly important, Britain do? But it’s also, what should it be and what should it represent and a really important thing, which Brits are terrible at doing, actually listening to non-Brits saying, “What, sort of, Britain do you want, what, sort of, Britain do you expect?” And that sort of giant listening exercise, along with charting and advocating over the next couple of years, is really central to us.
Just two points, ‘cause you’ve all made some great points up until now. A couple of general points. When you look at a world as disrupted as it is now, you could go through all the many disruptions and future and present crises, climate, pandemic, and migration, water, everything that we know, what do – and massive disruption domestically, where again, I could talk for ten minutes about all the crises facing this Prime Minister, what do most people in this situation do? They seek to reassure. They seek to say, “Softly, softly, calm down everybody, I will be the steady hand at the tiller. Don’t expect any great ructions, you’ve got enough already.” What does Liz Truss do? And it’s fascinating, she does the exact opposite. Because we live in a disrupted world, I will be the disruptor, and I find that endlessly fascinating. And, as a thought experiment this is why she is doing it.
She looks at the 1945 Bretton Woods Settlement, you look at the international institutions and it’s beyond dispute that a lot of them are stuck. They’re broken because of the Russian-Chinese vetoes, whether that’s the G20, whether that’s the P5 at the UN, and other ones have atrophied or are struggling to work. So, therefore, in this broken world, what do you do? Well, let’s do something completely different. Let’s have mini-laterals, let’s have ad-hocs, let’s have coalitions of the willing, let’s ignore the French and the Germans and be friends with the Baltics and the Nordics and others, and let’s replicate this around the world.
I merely throw that out as a, interesting question and it’s also around if you look at the more deliberative politics of countries that do foreign policy more traditionally, countries that we all respect, her thinking would be, “Yes, but how good were they at responding to the immediacy of the crises?” And I simply throw that out there, ‘cause I do think it merits further exploration and further discussion.
The other point, which I think is interesting, so you burn all your European bridges, or your main ones, you know, France and Germany, and you say pretty much ostentatiously, as Boris Johnson did, “We’re going to look elsewhere for our friends.” Where do you look? You look at the Commonwealth. Now, go back to the UN General Assembly vote a week after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Lots of discussion about the five, sort of, Loony Tune countries that voted with Russia, not great company to keep. Lots of crowing about the 100-plus that supported the resolution condemning Russia. Not very much talk about the three dozen countries that abstained. They included three of the chief Commonwealth countries that Britain is throwing huge amounts of effort at. You guys know them all: India, South Africa and Pakistan.
Now, if you are going to basically turn your back on your best friends on whom you rely for pretty much everything and you think, there may be differences and there may be arguments, of course there are among friends and family, but fundamentally, you think similarly and you throw in your lot with countries that have, whether it’s a different interpretation on colonisation, on empire, whether it’s a different view about hedging American-Chinese power, whatever it might be, they don’t necessarily assume that they’re going to think the same way as you. That is a massive peril to your foreign policy. So, I’ll leave it there, just to say, we are in for a extraordinary rollercoaster ride the next two years, and that’s just foreign policy alone.
Bronwen Maddox
John, thanks very much indeed. I want to come back to some of these policies and the consequences of these. But, just to pick up, not in too much depth, this personality question, ‘cause you talked about her being a disruptor in a disrupted world and it has featured in quite a lot of the commentary, partly because Liz Truss appears to go out of her way to define herself like that. I’d love quick thoughts from any of you about the implications of this? Who wants to go first?
Chris Bryant MP
Can I do one?
Bronwen Maddox
Yes, you can.
Chris Bryant MP
So, I thought she was profoundly ill-advised to go to Moscow and indeed, she was advised not to go to Moscow by everybody and she made a complete mess of it. I mean, to be fair, so did Boris Johnson when he went and he was also advised not to go. Lavrov is, you know, a crafty player, but it was completely ill-conceived and it did immeasurable damage and, I think, sometimes it’s a deliberate disruptor…
Bronwen Maddox
Lavrov, I mean, clearly can say, as he has done about many, no, right, you know, that he was a lightweight opposite, “me on a table, I have no time for this” and humiliate in public pronouncement.
Chris Bryant MP
What could he hope to obtain – achieved?
Bronwen Maddox
That is the proper point.
Chris Bryant MP
Yeah, I mean, that’s the point, and of course, Lavrov would play, you know, I mean, he would play everybody, but my problem is, so I understand the point that sometimes she is a deliberate disruptor and she wants to say, “Oh, all this conventional wisdom, I’m going to chuck that in the bin.” There’s a danger with that. There’s an element of, “Oh, experts, why do we need experts?” kind of thing, which I’m very suspicious of, but also, sometimes I think it is just completely accidental. I don’t think she meant to say, “Oh, Macron, I don’t know whether he’s a friend or a foe.” That was a mistake. It was an unforced error, and that’s my problem with her.
Bronwen Maddox
Are there any opportunities any of you can see from this disruptor approach?
Catherine Philp
I can think of one, which was that – which was something that Richard Ratcliffe, the husband of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe said to me, was that he credited her actually with getting Nazanin back because she was offered the same deal, essentially, that Dominic Raab had been offered and wouldn’t take because he was trying to keep the US sweet. And actually, in that instance, her willingness to go up against the Americans helped unlock that deal, so that’s just one example I can think of.
Bronwen Maddox
Sunder, you’re nodding at me or at Catherine?
Sunder Katwala
There are two features of her record so far, which sound like a contradiction. She’s strongly ideological, small state is more freedom and, you know, the values, and in the long-term democracy and prosperity, you know. And in her other main feature is that she’s extremely flexible and extremely pragmatic because she has managed to survive this Game of Thrones for Prime Minister, Conservative, sort of, seven or eight years and be in each of the projects, probably always feeling she was underestimated in them and she has, you know, she’s known most for her optimism and confidence about the opportunities of Brexit, which she felt were risks we should not take, but she respected the result. So, what do you do? I mean, in a way this more – less state is more freedom, we don’t live in times like that and so she will – you know, she’s a think tanker where Boris Johnson was a Journalist and so, she’s going to do things she wasn’t expecting.
Chris Bryant MP
Is that better or worse?
Sunder Katwala
Is that better or worse? She’s going to do things she wasn’t expecting to do, but the willingness to change her mind is actually her dominant feature.
Alicia Kearns MP
I’m not sure that she actively seeks to be a disruptor, though. I think I agree that she is. I also do think that there is room for manoeuvre in that I remember when I was a Foreign Office Civil Servant, the way in which the UK Government said it was unhappy would say, “We’re very concerned. We’re very aware. We’re gravely concerned,” essentially meant there’s a genocide taking place, but we’re not going to call it a genocide. And I do think there’s a place for Britain actually, we are the foremost guarantor of security in Europe at the moment.
There is a place actually sometimes to flex our language and be something more flexible, and that will bring criticism and it won’t always be right, but I think, if we look at the last 12 years and actually, I’d say before that, of diplomacy, it has been very set in the same language, the same approach and Britain being told that this is our role and we’re a convenor and that’s what we do exception – we should do what we do exceptionally. But I do think there’s some role for flex and some disruption beyond the box that we have put ourselves in when it comes to foreign policy. So, I would – I am going to be interested to watch how that goes and how it moves forward.
Bronwen Maddox
So, let me ask you one thing, where do you think that that flex is going to take her on Northern Ireland?
Alicia Kearns MP
I don’t think we’re going to see a change. I mean, she’s been leading the Northern Ireland Protocol. I don’t think she sees any reason to change what she’s been doing. You know, Chris and I have sat in briefings with the EU where they say, “We’ve tried, we’ve offered diplomacy,” Liz says, “We’ve offered, we’ve tried diplomacy.” It is an incredible challenge and people are very stuck. She will commit wholeheartedly to it and we need to see someone come forward as Northern Ireland Secretary who is going to lead that forward in what she wants to see happen. I don’t think there’s any reason to expect any change at all in policy on Northern Ireland. She’s decided what she wants to do and she’s not someone who I think is easily moved off path.
John Kampfner
But she has to respond to the EU within a week and is she going to invoke Article 16? And that’s – she can’t sit back, she’s got to…
Alicia Kearns MP
And maybe as a disruptor it’s positive that I can’t say what she’s going to do because for a very long time, you knew exactly what the UK was going to do and that does weaken your hand when you’re trying to debate and you’re trying to negotiate. So, in some ways, that uncertainty is a positive, in terms of the negotiating table, doesn’t mean it’s necessarily a positive in the longer-term or in terms of stability or of people being concerned in the immediate, so it’s a really difficult one. But she’s not going to change course, I don’t think.
Sunder Katwala
I’d go back to my half term in power because the election is already looming and while there are many decisions to make, often actually, it will be about maintaining the political position of the argument we wish to have about Northern Ireland and the ECHR and the courts etc., and maybe not make decisions and then have you closed everything else off? 50/50 chance we’ve got a Prime Minister for two years and 50/50 chance she’s still there for a decade, ‘cause she somehow survives through it all or something, who knows? But just, what do or don’t you close off the other side of the General Election I think is much more likely. So we might see a lot of sabre-rattling about ECHR, etc., we’re not going to scrap it before 2024, and so I think trying to just keep things more open rather than more closed might be a good thing.
Bronwen Maddox
To me, this afternoon when she just walked into Downing Street 2024 feels quite a long way off. Where might this Northern Ireland dispute take us with Europe?
Chris Bryant MP
My concern is that I think that she, for partisan reasons, as Sunder has basically just said, will want to keep on rowing about Brexit with the Labour Party all the way through to the General Election, ‘cause I think they think that that’s a way of winning a General Election, and I think we’re aware of this issue in the Labour Party. I passionately disagree now. I wish I hadn’t signed up to the Foreign Affairs Select Committee Report on this, with the Indo-Pacific tilt. I think it’s a nonsense.
I think it’s vainglorious empire building all over again in a kind of very different era. The idea that the Commonwealth shares our values has already been dismantled by the fact that as has just been said, they don’t on Ukraine and actually, as a gay man, 34 out of 54 countries, it was 35 until last week, 34 out of 35 – 54 countries and I think it’s 75% of the population living in the Commonwealth have homosexuality as illegal, so where do we actually share our values with?
We really share them with the people of Europe and I think if there’s – if Ukraine has shown us one thing, it must surely be that we have to be part of that alliance, at the very heart of it, never breaking any single element of the common security and defence and foreign policy in Europe. We should have been fighting for a seat at that table. I think that – she can abandon everything else about Brexit, I don’t care – well, I do, but I mean, I’ll pretend I don’t for a minute, but that bit we have to secure and my worry is that it’ll be surrendered on the altar of partisan general electioneering.
Alicia Kearns MP
We are the foremost guarantor of European security, as I said earlier, but when you meet – you know, when I speak to European Ambassadors, they talk to me about how they thought that because of Brexit, we would step back in terms of security within Europe. And I was surprised, because when I voted for Brexit, that was never something that I foresaw at all. And now, when you talk to any European Ambassador they will say to you, the UK has led from the front, it is the UK that is doing that. Talk to the Ukrainians, talk to the…
Catherine Philp
Can I just say…
Bronwen Maddox
Some of the Baltic countries, but Catherine, I’d love your view on this.
Catherine Philp
Yes, sorry. I have spent most of the time since the invasion of Ukraine started in Ukraine. I can confirm that Boris Johnson is very popular there. I shamelessly showed a pic – a photograph of my Photographer with him to gain access to a military unit and it worked a treat. I think that the idea that Britain led completely from the front alone on Ukraine is a ruse that’s being constructed in this country. I used to just be absolutely baffled by what I would see come out in the newspapers because of the lines that Downing Street were putting out. And I think Liz Truss caused quite some consternation, didn’t she, when she collared Blinken and said that she was unsatisfied with the special relationship and furthermore, said that “Britain and the US should come up with a martial plan for Ukraine.” I think the Americans were rightly quite surprised about this because it is them that is ploughing the most money by far into Ukraine.
I mean, it’s actually curiously enough the thing that Biden has really got very little credit for, is what he’s done on Ukraine and the amount of money that’s going into it, far more than Boris Johnson deserves. But President Zelensky has got very, very interesting foreign relationships with, so it will be interesting to see what he forges with Liz Truss, because his relationship with Boris is actually, I think, it was based on a personal warmth that they – that grew up between them when they had phone calls with each other, and someone like Biden hasn’t had that.
Zelensky has been ruder about Olaf Scholz than he has about President Erdoğan, the Turkish President who’s – you know, the fact the Germans have done rather more for Ukraine than Turkey. So, I wouldn’t say that, you know, the view from Kyiv is very nuanced and convenient at certain times.
Bronwen Maddox
May I say, that none of you have quite reached for the apocalyptic answer that I thought would come or at least the one, you know, describing some, kind of, real problem for us where a fight with the European Union becomes almost a trade war, or even a trade war and that’s – enormously complicates, worsens what Liz Truss, the argument that Liz Truss has to make to the currency and bond markets, which is that she and Britain can borrow vast amounts of money. Bloomberg was trading this afternoon $130 billion on energy support, you could see the markets countenancing that, but you have a trade war with our closest friends on top of that. I would just love a quick flick of whether you think that these things are closely interconnected, John?
John Kampfner
Yeah, I mean, there’s a couple of things on Russia and China. So, correct me anybody if I’m wrong, but I cannot think of any other major world leader who defines war aims in Ukraine as the full and unequivocal withdrawal of all Russian forces to the pre-2014 boundaries. Biden hasn’t gone that far, the European Union and member states haven’t gone that far. That has a great merit of, it sounds good, it is – you know, I’m an incredible Russia hawk and it – you know, I would love it to be true. But how realistic will it be and to, I think it was Catherine’s point about, you know, what does beating Putin mean? If we go down the regime change role with the nuclear power, that’s moderately problematic, to say the least. And also, all wars end with peace treaties and the peace treaty may not, no matter how much we might want it to be, encapsulate that full withdrawal. So, to what degree will Britain then be exposed?
Now, on China, if the new update on the Integrated Review moves China from systemic competitor, and by the way, our current version is milder than the European systemic rival, to acute threat, which basically means “enemy,” well, a) what does that mean, you know, the Americans are nowhere near – even the Americans are nowhere near that? So small or medium-sized, whatever we want to call it, island Britain is – and it may be wonderfully ethical and it may be wonderfully ideological, but we are knowingly putting ourselves in a very special place.
Bronwen Maddox
Great point. I can’t entirely let go by “all wars end in peace treaties.” The Korean War is not even over. But we can – this is the stuff for the Chatham House bunch. I want to ask people, really briefly before I go to questions and we will have a lot of questions and there’s some great ones online as well, thank you. Just quickly, one of the things that happens in this half term where Sunder has described is that the American parties will pick their candidates and we may have a new President there, I guess a new President from either party. How should our new Prime Minister handle the degree of change going on in America and the greater degree of change that may follow? Who wants to start? Sunder.
Sunder Katwala
We’ll find out later, in a way, I mean, we can hold our election in January 2025, but I think we’ll have held it by October 24. So you still don’t know, but actually what Britain thinks of the transatlantic and what Britain thinks of Europe does very much depend on what’s going on with Donald Trump and his party and so on. You know, it’s quite – I mean, I find it quite surprising in a way, that the last Conservative Party Chairman was, you know, out there talking about our joint, sort of, positions on culture and identity, when you’ve got a party where it’s just very vulnerable now, in terms of, do you accept election results and are you allowed to take guns to Parliament and overthrow it? So, I think we’ll find out afterwards what that…
Bronwen Maddox
No, fair point and the elections.
Sunder Katwala
…instruction – what that level of instruction. In the meantime, I think it’s another stalling point, you see, you know, the markets are connected to what you can do about Europe, but if you want a kind of visible, you stand next to the President of America because you’re the Prime Minister of Britain, then you’ve got to watch out what you do on Ireland and Northern Ireland with President Biden, haven’t you? And so, you’re really raising the stakes there, so I think that is a real incentive to, kind of, keep squabbling, trigger things, talk about things but never actually really have the trade war.
Bronwen Maddox
Anyone else?
Chris Bryant MP
I think we need to be very careful about our relationship with the United States of America. I mean, you know, I was delighted when Biden won. He’s not entirely a reliable friend all the time. You know, the biggest overturn of British foreign policy in the last – well, in my lifetime, was Afghanistan and that was a decision, originally made by Trump, but then followed up by Biden and very badly executed by the British Government, so…
Bronwen Maddox
And against British recommendations.
Chris Bryant MP
Yes, exactly, and we didn’t even prepare them as well, and all the rest of it. I think, I do worry about whether we’re being clear-sighted enough or, we’ve got a bit addicted in the House of Commons, I think, to a lot of sabre-rattling around Russia. So, for instance, we, you know – I’ve probably been the biggest hawk in Parliament for 20 years about Russia, you know, for a long time, but Putin’s only going to appear in a War Crimes Tribunal if Putin surrenders himself to a War Crimes Tribunal, so let’s get real about all of this.
I think it’s terribly difficult, John, for us to say to Ukraine, “Yeah, you’ve got to sign up to a peace treaty and you’ve got to let go of Crimea and the Donbass.” I mean, that isn’t going to happen. So, we’ve got to start getting real about all those issues.
There’s just one bit of the world that we very rarely talk about, and I think it’s a mistake for the UK, which is Latin America. It’s potentially a very big source – it shares, in the main, our values, in terms of democracy and human rights and things like that. Bolsonaro’s a bit odd, but much loved of course by Liz Truss, and I think we should make far more of that. But that – all of this requires a re-jig…
Bronwen Maddox
You said “Indo-Pacific vainglorious.” Latin America, bring it on.
Chris Bryant MP
Yes, ‘cause I speak Spanish.
Alicia Kearns MP
Anything about Latin America and Chris comes alive, but just going back to the question, I think…
Bronwen Maddox
Catherine, I’m going to come to you and then we’re going to questions.
Alicia Kearns MP
We have to be very careful when we talk about relationships because we talk about relationships with other countries as just between the two leaders, but actually, realistically, it’s about the infrastructure and the frameworks that have been beneath them and the operationalised relationships we have, whether it’s Law Enforcement or Civil Service. So, I remember when certain people come to power and certain countries and we say, “It’s all going to fall apart because they’re not best friends.” Angela Merkel wasn’t best friends with any of the previous leaders of our country and yet we worked incredibly well together. Through Donald Trump, which was a heinous period of time for many of us, the relationship didn’t fall apart entirely because the substructures are so strong and so I think we have to be very careful about going, it’s just down to these two leaders and whether they get on or whether they don’t.
There is so much more that actually divides it, and as we’ve seen between elections, the Civil Service keeps chugging away. Foreign policy just doesn’t suddenly fall apart when you have a vacuum sometimes. So, I think we just have to again, with diplomatic relations, there’s no such thing as black and white. You know, Turkey has played an incredibly important role with Ukraine, you know, that’s who António Guterres was negotiating with to get grain out. It wasn’t Germany, it wasn’t anyone else. We’ve a lot of beef with Turkey, a lot of problems with them, but they have played an enormous role in Ukraine, even if it hasn’t always been what we wanted. We have to look between the black and white and the facile, in terms of some of these relationships.
Bronwen Maddox
I want to go to questions in a second and John, I will come to you on that. Just Catherine, Trump?
Catherine Philp
Trump?
Bronwen Maddox
Yeah, from the US. Trump?
Catherine Philp
With the comeback.
Bronwen Maddox
Yes, the comeback, yeah, your thoughts? What are you thinking?
Catherine Philp
Trump?
Bronwen Maddox
I mean, how can I do this, yeah?
Catherine Philp
Trump?
Bronwen Maddox
Truss and then Trump.
Catherine Philp
Truss and Trump? I think she’ll make it work. I mean, she was nicer about him than she was about Macron, so…
Bronwen Maddox
John, I will come back to you on these points, but I want to get in the questions, and here is one right away. Can we have the lights as well as the questions? That’s terrific, and if you could say who you are as well and I will stir in the excellent online questions that are coming as well, thank you.
Euan Grant
Yeah, thank you very much. The name’s Euan Grant. I was a Law Enforcement Intelligence Analysist covering the ex-Soviet state and more recently, I’ve been broadcasting on the war. I would urge Mr Bryant to read the last Tom Clancy book written in his lifetime, Command Authority. Yes, dirty money was a huge green light going back a very long time, but it certainly was not just the UK, it’s rather more complex. My question for you all is, do you think British material and quality to support to Ukraine’s military struggle will lead to something of a change of attitude among the EU member states towards the UK, if not necessarily within the Commission and that therefore, Fintan O’Toole of Ireland’s description of Britain as a rogue nation is somewhat one-sided? I don’t think the Ukrainians would agree with Mr O’Toole.
Bronwen Maddox
Okay, thank you very much. Interesting one about whether this will change EU attitudes. Can I take another one as well, please? Let’s have, right here in the front and then I’m going to come over there.
Member
Hi, I’m working for another think tank and just sent in from the Japanese Government. It is clear that [inaudible – 45:13] internal economic problems and in relation to the European economic issues about the Ukraine. However, what do you think about the improvement in the prospect regions of former Prime Minister said that, what can we – regards to the new PM’s diplomatic stance towards Taiwan or other Asian countries, more especially with the honeymoon, known answer Anglo-Japanese relationship with 2.0, mainly about security area, would be continued or as I said, it’s also going to be disrupted?
Bronwen Maddox
Okay, a really interesting point, thanks very much, and let me take the one middle, back, yes, you.
Member
I was going to ask…
Bronwen Maddox
Would you like to say your name?
Phyllis
Oh, yeah, Phyllis. So, we talk a lot about, you know, how we have to get close to the Commonwealth, get away from Europe, but it seems like, at the moment, nobody’s really talking about the fact that a third of Pakistan is flooded and there’s a number of pacific states that are facing, you know, their entire, kind of island being flooded, as sea levels continue to rise. And a number of Scientists have, kind of, said that “the climate refugee problem is going to only get worse and accelerate from here.” So, I want to kind of ask, you know, what is Liz Truss’s Government really going to do about that? Are they just going to ignore it or do you think that they’ll actually, kind of, react to it in some way?
Bronwen Maddox
Really interesting three questions, spanning all kinds of things, whether what we’re doing in our defence in Europe will change European attitudes, Taiwan and the Japanese, the honeymoon in Japanese relations and our – the last one on climate change. Who’d like to start? John.
John Kampfner
Well, I was – on climate change, we were discussing that in our Twitter space earlier and I think, to coin a Trussian phrase, the jury is out on how she will respond. Alicia will know more about internal discussions, within the Conservative Party, but it does seem to be genuinely split on it, and Carrie Johnson was very much an influence on Boris Johnson, in terms of moving him more to that position and Truss’s initial instinct was, green levies are a bad thing and let’s frack, and it’s a very interesting question. I mean, the Germans have albeit very briefly and temporarily, frozen the dismantling of nuclear, are slowing down on coal, there is very much a question of energy resilience and provision and price as being seen as more important at the moment than climate, which of course is storing up long-term further disaster for short-term safety.
I just wanted – on the first question, which was about Britain, rogue and yet being very strong on Ukraine, it’s a very good point. So far, the Europeans, from everything that I can see, have been very – and the Brits, have been very good at compartmentalising. We collaborate – we co-operate on this, but we’re having a stonking great row on that. Will that hold, particularly if this row gets yet even worse is moot? Which brought me to the point I wanted to make, which was actually a question to Catherine. And it’s something I genuinely do not understand, which is, given how important the Biden administration has regarded Britain and the EU making up and Britain not causing trouble at every step, even prior to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, from everything I could see, the Biden administration was incredibly quiet, both behind the scenes and certainly public. And it could have kicked up enormous rough with the Brits and said, “You come into line, you stop fighting with the Europeans, we need to be as one and why are you having this little local difficulty when we’ve got all these world problems?,” basically, and yet it’s been incredibly bashful, and I don’t understand why or am I not seeing things?
Catherine Philp
No, I think that’s true. I think that’s an excellent point and I don’t especially have an answer. I mean, it worked out, so – but you’re right that the – instead of knocking heads together it was just, sort of, sporadic remarks about the Northern Ireland Protocol rather than actually a diplomatic effort to try and get Britain and the EU to play nicely with each other, yeah.
Alicia Kearns MP
The thing with that though is that, of course, America can have its say on anything, but it doesn’t actually have a right to intervene necessarily in the ongoing relationship between the EU and the UK, on all sorts of issues, and the fact is again, we’re coming down to talking to diplomacy with that compartmentalisation, is how diplomacy works. Diplomacy doesn’t work without compartmentalisation and without hope.
There is no relationship where two nations agree on every single thing, where their values are entirely aligned, where we can say an entire continent has more values aligned with us or not. We – this is how it works. There are things where we will have friction. There are things where we will work together. There are things where we will push each other to do better. There are things behind the scenes where we’ve had – when we were working on the counter-Daesh operation, we had certain European countries who said, “Do you know what? We think we’re going to pull out now, we’re done.” And we had to say to them, “No, no you will not.” We had to have a really tough conversation. That is how it works. We shouldn’t be looking for these, kind of, halo relationships where everything is glorious and, you know, we ring around singing songs together.
But on the climate diplomacy point, the argument isn’t whether or not we need to have climate focused policies. It’s about how you get there and there is a very small group that don’t want to hear about climate at all, but the majority is about the cost it puts on the population, and those arguments will have more and more credence with the population as we go forward.
For the last, kind of, eight to ten years, the population have wanted to hear about us going green and being more climate friendly, but as the cost of living crisis bites, you will get pushback. I have constituents, Chris will have them as well, already emailing us saying, “Stop giving all this money to Ukraine and look after my energy bills. I’m tired of this, I don’t want you doing it.” The Global South, or we’re talking about these sort of things…
Chris Bryant MP
I haven’t had anybody say that to me in my constituency.
Alicia Kearns MP
You’ve not had a single one?
Chris Bryant MP
Not a single one.
Alicia Kearns MP
Maybe Chris doesn’t read all his emails that he gets.
Chris Bryant MP
No, alright, you can withdraw that now. I do read all my emails. Maybe the people of the Rhondda are nicer than the people from Rutland.
Alicia Kearns MP
Oh, please don’t. I’m not going to play that game, but the point is…
Bronwen Maddox
[Inaudible – 51:50] at this rate.
Alicia Kearns MP
But on climate change, just wait, in the Pacific, we currently have a ship in the Pacific that’s been helping countries like Tonga, when they see the worst effects of climate. You know, in the overseas territories, we have lots of ships, they’re pre-positioned, pre-forwarded to be able to help people. There is a recognition we should do that, but also, it goes back to the point I think you made earlier about, what do these countries want from us? And they want us focused on their survival, they’re not interested in macro-politics and that’s what we have to recognise, as what do you want from us and give them that support rather than imposing what we need from them in the bigger geostrategic fight that goes on.
Bronwen Maddox
You can both come in, but I just want to remind us of the middle question, which is about Taiwan, Indo-China and Japan, and I would love comments on that, Catherine.
Catherine Philp
I just wanted to throw out something about the Commonwealth because a lot of people talk about, you know, building our relationships with the Commonwealth, making them stronger and stuff. I’ve never heard – had an adequate response to the question, “What is the Commonwealth for?” I always ask Editors that when they ask me to write something about the Commonwealth. I go, “What do you think it’s for? Will it survive when the Queen is gone?”
Bronwen Maddox
Do you think it should survive and this is something we were actually debating on email here today?
Catherine Philp
I don’t know what it’s for, I genuinely don’t. It’s a club for people who used to be ruled by Britain.
Bronwen Maddox
And we’ll come back to Chris on that as well, given what you’ve said, but this man there?
Sunder Katwala
You came across with a powerful message, in terms of our story of why we’re us, which is to what the Commonwealth Games in Birmingham and so on, and those sorts of people-to-people links that, you know, explains why Birmingham is Birmingham, and explains why Britain is Britain, is a different point from “What is it for?” And once you’ve let Rwanda in with no link and then you’ve let Togo in with no – so, you know, the things that were in the Harare Declaration that were always rather, you know, not exactly upheld to the letter don’t matter at all anymore. So, at that level, it hasn’t got anything left in it, so….
Alicia Kearns MP
Essentially, it is the Queen’s project and invention. I think there is a legitimate question of whether it will survive when she’s no longer there.
Bronwen Maddox
And finally, agree, Chris, you had a lot to say on that.
Chris Bryant MP
Yeah, I agree with that point, but I…
Bronwen Maddox
Would you want it to survive?
Chris Bryant MP
For the Commonwealth Games maybe, but I don’t see it is a major strategic aim of the United Kingdom. I think it – partly because quite a few of the countries speak English, and I think it, kind of, misleads us a bit. It’s lazy politics and it’s lazy history, I think, quite often, when it’s talked about in terms – in political terms. My biggest fear is that I think we’ve made ourselves rather more irrelevant in the world when it comes to nearly every issue that we’re talking about.
The one where we’ve made ourselves – the gentleman is absolutely right, we’ve made ourselves very relevant in relation to Ukraine, because I think we stepped in very, very quickly and that is good, but it was a reverse of what we were doing from 2014. We made a terrible mis-step in 2014. We didn’t take that moment seriously enough. Climate change – and incidentally, just in relation to providing equipment for Ukraine, we’re going to have to do this for a long time, I think, and at the moment, each different country in Europe provides a different piece of kit and people in Ukraine, soldiers, have to learn a different piece of kit every three months. We should have a Europe-wide, coalition-wide strategy, industrial strategy for making stuff to give to Ukraine, and it should be a single, united policy, I think. That would be far more effective than what we’re doing now, which is very piecemeal.
Climate change is the single biggest challenge facing humanity, and I just don’t – and I worry that – I mean, let’s hope that Liz Truss will come sensible on this, but when she said, you know, “Why are we having solar panels, you know, using up agricultural fields?” And I was thinking, well, actually, I’ve been to lots of countries where they manage to do the two on the same fields and incidentally, we haven’t got – at the moment we’re ploughing half our crops back into the field ‘cause we haven’t got anybody to pick them. So, I mean, if we’re talking about security, what’s happening to food security in the UK?
And just then, finally – oh, and I worry about environmental migration, if we don’t get this policy right. You’ve just got to go to Papua New Guinea and see what’s happened in Papua New Guinea. It’s absolutely terrifying what is happening to people losing their homes, often the poorest people in the world and where are they going to go? People are going to be fighting for clean drinking water, if we don’t get this right.
And just in relation to Taiwan. You know, we, I think, on the Foreign Affairs Committee are remarkably united on this issue. On all the various different issues in relation to China, I think we need to be very careful. We don’t want to, sort of, scratch the dragon’s eyes out, which is sometimes what it feels as if we’re doing completely unnecessarily, but we do need to be strong, robust and consistent in our support for the people of Taiwan to be able to determine their own future.
You know, the law on the sea needs to be fully upheld. China’s done remarkably well out of the rule of law over the years and we should be making that point to them. The trouble is, I don’t think most people, when they’re looking at the UK, will worry about James Cleverly’s ethnicity. What they will worry about is that we’ve had, I don’t know how many Foreign Secretaries in the last few years, we’ve had four Prime Ministers in four year – in six years and frankly, we’re beginning to look a bit like Italy, without the nice weather or food.
Bronwen Maddox
We could do a whole session just on Britain’s relations with China and it’s ambivalent, so I’m sorry, we’ve treated this briefly. We’re due to stop around half past, we may go a bit over, there are a lot of questions, but I want to take two online and let’s see if we get the people themselves speaking, otherwise I will do it.
Saleh Kamil, Saleh, they’re both on immigration and refugees. Can we see if we can have Saleh’s voice? That may not work. Let me read the core of the question, which is, “What do the panellists think of the new Prime Minister’s commitment to the multilateral rules-based system, in light of legal challenges to the Rwanda deportation policy?” And then we have a second one from Ishaka Shitu saying, “Will the new Prime Minister reverse key policies of her predecessor in relation to refugee issues and some immigration policies, such as allowing nearly free movement for EU members in the UK?” I’d like to take those two together. Sunder.
Sunder Katwala
Immigration legacy of Boris Johnson is really very complicated, really. His policy was to control immigration after Brexit and not to reduce it, and he was – he’s increased it because he’s had the Hong Kong visa, he’s had more liberal student policies, he’s had a more open policy and there’s a lot of consensus now between the two parties. The Labour Party isn’t proposing free movement, it’s a point system and Boris Johnson was very liberal, so there’s quiet a consensus on how you get a visa to come to Britain.
There are lots of commentators on the right who say “everyone will go mad when they notice,” but the attitudes are getting softer. I have noticed, we’ve got this enormous clash about asylum and refugee issues where again, attitudes are extremely warm towards refugee protection and wanting more Ukrainians to come, and that isn’t, in my view, racialised because there were very warm attitudes towards Syrians after – and Kurdi and the Afghans that had served for Britain. And so again, there’s an overall softening and yet we have this enormous clash and, you know, I am – I think the Rwanda policy is wrong, in principle, because we are deporting people without even assessing their claim and, you know, it’s not part of our international obligations.
The government has a good, political position on it actually. A third of people like it because it’s tough and it’s doing something. A third of people think it’s unconscionable. If you say, “Are you control or are you compassion?” Most people think a competent government would have an orderly, compassionate, humane and organised asylum system. We don’t seem to be able to get there.
If they’re losing in court, they get to say, “We had this solution, but look at these Lawyers and United Nations,” and so on. If you get to do it, you then – if we’re £120 million or £200 million you send 200 people to Rwanda and you see if you can send another 100 to Zambia or something, and nothing changes. And you, you know, we need to make asylum boring again. Make it orderly. Talk to the French. I mean, it wasn’t – you know, make decisions in six months, if you’ve got a case, have community engagement here. If there’s a refusal, let’s talk about safe returns by having deals with countries you can have deals with, and this – I think we’re just going to have more, louder and louder politics about asylum, which we might end up ruining 150 peoples’ lives by deporting them to Rwanda, and make no difference at all to what’s happening in the channel.
Bronwen Maddox
Alicia.
Alicia Kearns MP
To vote for the Rwanda plan ‘cause I don’t support it and I don’t think it’ll work, but she’s not going to change course. You know, it’s done now. They’ve made the hard point, and it is incredibly popular across vast swathes of the country. Now, does that mean you should do it just because it’s popular? No, I didn’t vote for it, despite the fact that almost lost me the Whip, which wasn’t a great plan, but the fact is, she’s not going to reverse it. She will stick with it and you will see a continuation of it.
Bronwen Maddox
I’m going to take three more and use them as a prompt for the panellists’ last thought. May I start here right in the front, please. Yeah, just wait for the microphone.
Hilde Rapp
I’m Hilde Rapp, Centre for International Peace-Building. I just wanted to link the immigration issue, which I thought was going to be happening, to the climate change issue, because Chatham House has been very vocal on looking at Africa particularly and the threat of massive migration issues, arising due to climate change degradation of living spaces. And I think it would be very foolish if foreign policy didn’t think more systemically about the big issues that are facing us. I mean, you all see climate changes.
Bronwen Maddox
Forgive me asking you to put it as a question.
Hilde Rapp
Sorry, it was meant to be a question. Apologies.
Bronwen Maddox
Okay, we will project in a question mark.
Hilde Rapp
The question was, should we not be linking this to issues? And apologise for having not…
Bronwen Maddox
It’s a rhetorical question, but still, we get it, and thank you very much indeed. Straight behind you.
Samuel Gersema
Want to come back to the new Prime Minister.
Bronwen Maddox
Would you like to say your name?
Samuel Gersema
Samuel Gersema, Chatham House. The question in relation to the new Prime Minister. Is she going to be competent enough to manage one of the biggest countries, as far as power is concerned, in the world and if so, how is she going to do it? If not, how will she be able to confront Putin and then potentially Jinping?
Bronwen Maddox
By one of the biggest countries in the world…
Chris Bryant MP
We are.
Bronwen Maddox
…you mean, in some terms and in others not. And over here, please. Thank you.
Jonathan
Hi, good evening. My name’s Jonathan. I’m a Chatham House member. My ques – we talked a bit about who we would be friends or allies with and different regions. But my question is, how do we become friends? We’ve merged DFID and FCDO, we’ve cut our international aid commitment, we’re seen as inconsistent on international law, our military is stretched and we have very little economic headroom in the next two years. So, regardless of whether it’s Latin America or the Pacific or elsewhere, how do we build friends and alliances?
Bronwen Maddox
Great, yeah, and very well put. Okay, we have climate change and migration, is she up to it? And this last question about, how we make friends, Chris? And we’ll go in this order down the panel.
Chris Bryant MP
First of all, I’ll go in reverse order. First of all, we have to make it clear to everybody that we do stand by our treaties. When we’ve signed something, that’s the end of it. That will obviously require a reversal of present direction of travel for the government. In terms of, is Liz Truss competent? Well, look, I want her to be, to be honest, because I think we’re facing a really, really difficult time in the country, economically. I mean, we’ve not even mentioned the NHS obviously, ‘cause it’s not a foreign policy issue, though it is, in some degree, in relation to migration, but we – these are massive challenges and I want her to succeed, though obviously, I’d prefer Keir Starmer to be Prime Minister.
The – just on migration, I’ve always thought, and I’ve said this a while ago and I got robustly attacked by every newspaper in the land for it, I’ve always thought that the real issue with migration is normally the push factors, not the pull factors. The pull factors of the UK are minor. Well, I mean, they’re the fact that we speak English, and that we are thought to be a place where, you know, we’re safe and you can make a living. I don’t think we should change any of those things, though we’ve done a bit of that over the last few years. But the big issues that force people to leave their homes are environmental degradation, war, famine, inability to, you know, make your way in life, [inaudible – 64:59] strife, all of those kind of things, and that’s what our international aid budget and our foreign policy should be designed to try and prevent. And that’s why I got – I have felt so angry when Priti Patel says that she knows that 85% of the people coming on boats are Albanian economic migrants, which turns out to be completely and utterly false. That makes me really angry because I think the guy instincts of most people, certainly in my constituency, I’ve not had a single person again, sorry, Alicia, and I do read my own emails, I haven’t had a single person write to me in my constituency saying that they support the Rwanda policy. I’ve had lots of people saying, “Why are we not showing the generosity that we’ve wanted to show and we have shown to Ukrainians to others?”
Bronwen Maddox
Thank you.
Catherine Philp
Climate change and migration absolutely, we should link them. I – during my career at The Times, I’ve covered quite a lot of wars and almost all of them are caused in some way by climate change or – and it’s an untold story and we do a very bad job of doing it. I think Ukraine’s possibly the only one I can think of, in recent times, that doesn’t have a real climate issue underlying it. Will Truss succeed? Again, I hope so. I worry about how much she’s actually going to deal with foreign policy at all.
If Rory Stewart is to be believed, she always thought it was the most boring thing ever and never wanted to be Foreign Secretary. So – and I think that the domestic problems in Britain are so – of such a magnitude that that’s going to absorb all the attention and – of any incoming Prime Minister. But I would like to see her do things like go to the EU Summit in Prague on Ukraine and, you know, work with our allies in ways that can be constructive to achieve the, kind of, goals that she might want to go it alone on anyway, and I can’t remember what the last one was?
Bronwen Maddox
How do we make friends?
Catherine Philp
How do we make friends? Not by slashing the Foreign Office budget and reeling aid into – DFID into it, no. And ditto the British Council. Reversal of that. That would help.
Alicia Kearns MP
So, I think on Truss and competency, although publicly she’s quite strong, she really listens when you do sit down with her on an individual issue. So, I went to her about the Balkans last September. No-one else was talking about the Balkans last September except for British Parliament, and we gave her a list of 13 things we wanted her to deliver at the All-Party Parliamentary Group. It was things like, increasing the NATO footprint in the country, putting a disinformation unit into the country, increase the number of military in the Brčko district, raising it at the NATO members’ meetings. She did – so far she’s done ten of the 13 things we asked for, which are not small things. So, she does listen, she does act. And quite quietly, most people probably won’t know about the work we’ve been doing in Bosnia that’s really significant, so that gives me real hope that she will listen to the issue, she will listen to solutions, and she will act on them, because she is very definitive and she does try to get things done and actioned.
In terms of friendship, I don’t think actually, we have a massive issue making friends around the world, that’s not my experience at all. I think Ukraine, we have proven ourselves to be dependable, we have proven ourselves to be there, someone who delivers. The DFID-FCO merger, I’m sorry, but having worked in there, is absolutely the right thing to merge. We used to have situations where DFID Officers would say that they did not report to Ambassadors because the Foreign Office was dirty and political and they didn’t want to have to sit there and discuss their pure aid with things. We have to have it all working together as one system.
Now, has the merger gone perfectly? No. Are there improvements to it? But, literally, the amount of Ambassadors who are desperate to bring the two together, when I worked at the Foreign Office, from my experience, it’s absolutely the right thing to bring it together. Another thing about aid is, there’s also a lot of other pots of funding that we are delivering, so whether it is heling in certain countries, dig up bones and help people find the bones of their loved ones, so that they can give them funerals, or whether it’s training Prison Officers how to be better at doing what they do and doing it properly, whether it’s tackling femicide in certain countries, there are so many projects around the world outside of the aid budget that we are delivering where those countries individually say, “That is what friendship looks like because we have come to you with a capability issue and you are helping us solve that capability issue.”
Back in 2016 I was in Ukraine, teaching Ukrainians how to cancel Russian disinformation. That was a specific ask of theirs. There is so much work the world does not see that builds the friendships, those specific asks they actually want to see from us and we deliver on them ‘cause we’re seen as capable as conveners around the world.
Bronwen Maddox
Thank you very much indeed for that. Sunder.
Sunder Katwala
I feel that there’s a linking theme among all these questions and it’s a really big challenge, I think, not just to our experts here, but actually, to everybody who’s internationally minded who comes to events at Chatham House in times like these, ‘cause you can all spot the connections between all of these issues: climate and the economy and the international crisis and the domestic crisis. And that’s a really hard argument to get across in times like these.
So, if you look at the public polling in August 2001 just in Afghanistan was about to fall, the salience of foreign policy at 2% was the lowest it had been until the month before the Twin Towers fell, when it was also 2% and it was, you know, at a very much higher [inaudible – 70:28] and it really surged then and everyone was involved in foreign policy. If you look at what’s happened now, actually, Conservative voters, middleclass voters and older voters are still very interested in polls.
Chris’s voters are actually much less interested in polls, they’re interested in climate change, they’re interested in the NHS, they’re interested in jobs and employment, essentially. So, it’s fallen down as a priority issue and yet these issues are incredibly linked up, and so the fusion of the domestic and the international is why you’ve got the domestic crisis. If you can’t get this across, in a useful way, then people will say, “Concentrate at home, forget about the world,” and you don’t get over that, I think, and I thought Boris Johnson risked sounding like he was saying this. It’s just, you know, “Sacrifice for Ukrainian and sorry, your energy bills will be completely unaffordable,” you’ve got to help peo – if our interests and rounds are getting through this crisis, then you’ve got to talk about it.
It’s actually really, really hard, I think, maybe to say, the non-graduate audience as well as the think tank audience really, and the most important thing, I think, is to try and make this case about how these things are linked, but not in a way that says, choose the global, in a way that actually says, prosperity, you know, liberty, do I – you know, and here’s what we need to do as a country and here’s how we help you play your part. I know that’s a really hard argument to make and I think it’s important that people like Chatham House speaks to that broad audience, as well as to your specialist audience.
Sunder Katwala
Sunder, thank you for that, you put it beautifully. John.
John Kampfner
First of all, just Alicia, I was fascinated by the Balkans stuff, I’d be interested in hearing more on that. Whenever you talk about foreign policy or international relations and, you know, whether Chatham House does foreign policy, international relations, necessarily public opinion’s always like, “Oh well, that’s sort of not quite for me.” If you explain, actually, everything that happens is global, everything that affects you is global, then it brings it home, and there isn’t anything that happens to anybody’s life on this island that isn’t affected by the world. And I think that’s a challenge to us and to the wider international relations community, to convey that better, to bring people into the tent rather than, sort of, foreign policy types.
On the – two of the questions, on migration, just in a sentence, we ain’t seen nothing yet. I mean, it’s just beginning and on this – in Europe, and Britain is still in Europe, policymakers haven’t even begun to grapple with this. Everything now is just the overture to what is going to happen with climate. We haven’t talked about the pandemic, public health, water, energy, and, you know, we’re scrabbling around with, sort of, you know, a few boats here and there. It hasn’t even begun.
On the final question about how can Britain behave? I’m reminded of something, we had our first – our UK in the World, we had our first Advisory Council and David Miliband said something really interesting, but I mean, in some ways, obvious, but it was good, saying “Britain needs to find the middle ground between hubris and boosterism on the one side, world-beating, global this, best ever that, superpower the other, and miserable-ism and decline-ism” ‘cause we do have a role and I think that’s the sweet spot that we need to find. And that’s just basically a greater sense of self-awareness, and I think one of the things that we as a country struggle with is a failure to be self-aware. We’re always still Rule Britannia-ing and flag-waving and that’s not to disparage what we can do, but I think we will be treated better and more seriously by partners if we, in the best sense of the term, and it’s a good sense, we know our place.
Chris Bryant MP
We don’t even know the name of our country. What is it? Is it Great Britain? Is it the United Kingdom?
Bronwen Maddox
There is a whole other session just in there. No, no, no, no, it’s an excellent question and an excellent final thing. Thank you all very much for coming. Thank you, I know we haven’t quite finished, but thank you all, those who struggled here through the rain. Thank you for the terrific questions, which are online and thank you for watching. I’m sorry I couldn’t get in more of them, the same here. I’d like to thank our panellists, this last burst of eloquence, as well as all they said. Before I just wrap up finally, those in the room have a sheet of paper on their seats about feedback, which we would love you to fill in before you come and join us for a drink next door. Those of you online, I sadly can’t invite you for a drink, but do let us know what you thought of it and all you, if you could join me in thanking our excellent panellists. Thank you.
