19
Examination of witnesses
Sir Mark Lyall Grant and Sir John Sawers.
Q12 The Chair: Thank you very much for coming along. We normally start off with any declaration of interest. Online we have Lord Darroch, who is somewhere other than the parliamentary estate, and Lord Bruce, who is trying to save us all from whatever he is suffering from at the present moment. You are going to be live on Parliament television and I believe there are people out there who watch these things. I met somebody in Bowmore last week who told me that he watched every session. It is an amazing thing.
It is the second evidence session of our new inquiry into multilateral institutions. A transcript will be taken of this and you will be shown a copy. If you want to make any small changes to that, you are more than entitled to.
I would like to ask a number of questions. Maybe you might want to introduce yourself when you answer the first question. I will start off with the basic essential question. The United Kingdom helped to establish the existing level of multilateral institutions. Are they still working? If they are still working, are they working in the United Kingdom’s interest?
Sir Mark Lyall Grant: I was the British ambassador at the United Nations from 2009 to 2015 and then National Security Adviser to David Cameron and Theresa May. Parts of the system clearly are not working as well as they should and parts still are working. It is very much in Britain’s interests that it should work, not least because we were part of the team that set up the rules in the first place. The rules, institutions and norms were set up in our image in consonance with our values, so on the basis of democracy and the rule of law, human rights and open trade. That is the basis underpinning the post-Second World War order.
Parts of that are still working. You have some of the security organisations such as NATO. Obviously, it is still functioning, although under some pressure. You have the World Bank, the IMF and parts of the UN family. I would point to the World Food Programme, for instance. OCHA, humanitarian affairs, is working pretty well. UNICEF is working pretty well. Gavi, the vaccinations part, is doing well. I would even include the World Health Organization.
There are clearly parts of the UN system in particular that are not working, such as the UN Security Council. Also, the World Trade Organization is not working as it might. As a large medium-sized country outside the European Union, which is dependent for our security on treaties and alliance, and dependent for our prosperity on a rules-based order in order that we can trade in an open forum, it is absolutely in our interest that some sort of international order exists.
The Chair: Is it working in our interest at the moment?
Sir Mark Lyall Grant: Parts of it are working in our interest. The bits that are working are in our interest. Parts of it are clearly not working, as I mentioned.
Sir John Sawers: I was Mark’s predecessor as ambassador to New York for two and a half years. Before that, I was a political director in the Foreign Office, overseeing policy on all these issues around the world. I cut short New York because I was asked to come back to be chief of MI6, which I did for my last five years in public service.
Mark spent twice as long as I did at the UN and knows it very well, and I echo all the points that he makes. I would draw a distinction in my mind between the political UN and the operational UN. The political UN, which is focused on the Security Council, never worked during the Cold War. There were a few brief flashes of effectiveness, for example Resolution 242 on the Middle East situation in 1967. It only really came to be an effective body after the collapse of communism and the Soviet Union. We then had 25 years, up to about 2013 or 2014, when the UN Security Council was operating reasonably well.
It is now stuck. It is stuck because the great powers that are now dominating the international system do not want it to work. Two of them at the moment are involved in hot wars, in Ukraine and Iran, so the most urgent international security issues are frozen on the Security Council agenda. There is the geopolitical rivalry between China and the United States, which makes it very difficult to make progress in the Security Council. In a sense, the Security Council has gone back to how it was for much of the Cold War.
The operational UN is, as Mark says, variable. Some parts of the operational UN, through its specialist agencies, are doing quite good work. The World Health Organization is one of the most important. It had a bad blip at the beginning of the Covid crisis, because it was too close to China and too willing to be persuaded and influenced by China on the handling of the Covid outbreak and, indeed, how it emerged in the first place.
When you look the current outbreak of Ebola in central Africa, the World Health Organization is playing an important leading role. Where it is not helped is that, the last time there was an Ebola outbreak in west Africa, about 20 years ago, the key countries were Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia. Britain, France and the United States operated in very close harmony with one another, co-operating with one another and with the World Health Organization to bring an end to that Ebola outbreak. At the moment we are seeing no real international effort to get to grips with this Ebola outbreak. The World Health Organization is underresourced and stretched, and having difficulty doing so. That is a live example, if that is not a bad word to use. It is a current example of the international system struggling to deal with an issue that 20 years ago it dealt with quite effectively.
Q13 Baroness Blackstone: We had one session of evidence from experts and in that session, we were told about widespread problems in the multilateral system. They touched on things that you have both just mentioned. First, there is the ambivalence of the US. Secondly, there is the growing influence of China, including conflict between them. Thirdly, there is a lack of legitimacy for the third-world countries in the global South. I wondered whether you could elaborate further on some of those issues, which you have just touched on, particularly with respect to the impact of these challenges on the UK.
Sir Mark Lyall Grant: As John said, at the end of the Cold War we entered what I call the golden age of the United Nations. It lasted only about 25 years. Suddenly, the UN Security Council was released and was able to mandate a number of missions in the Middle East and in Africa. There were a huge number of initiatives and norms put forward. The Human Rights Council was set up. The International Criminal Court was set up. You had the conventional weapons treaty, the Arms Trade Treaty and the Open Skies Treaty. Women’s rights and LGBT rights were put forward. Responsibility to protect and humanitarian intervention were put forward.
What is striking for me—and I was lucky enough to be in New York for this period—is that every single one of those initiatives, new regulations or institutions was set up by the West, in effect. Although there was still some resistance from Russia, China and some of the Islamic countries, the conservative Islamic countries in particular, none the less, there was an overwhelming move in that direction. Every single one went in a rights-based direction, and every single one was initiated by the West.
I was also in New York at that period that John mentioned, around 2013 and 2014, when there was a more systematic pushback against that order. There were three main reasons for that. One is, as you suggested, that there was a feeling among some countries that the West had overreached, particularly in terms of the responsibility to protect and humanitarian intervention. Developing countries felt that the West had tried to impose democracy, and even regime change, on them unwillingly, and this led to something of a pushback. We then had the perceived failure of the elite to manage global capitalism and globalisation, with the financial crash of 2008 and 2009. Underpinning all that, you had the geopolitical shifts, such as the rise of China.
Put all that together and we saw quite a systematic pushback, rather than individual pushback. There have always been countries that opposed internationalism. When I was at the UN, we talked about the A and B teams. You had the activists, who wanted to use the international system to do things, and the B team, the blockers, who basically wanted to preserve the status quo. During that golden age, it was the activists who were very much in the lead.
For me, a rather dramatic example of how far this pushback had got came in 2015, when we wanted to celebrate the 20th anniversary of something called the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, which was a basic document of women’s rights that had been agreed by consensus in China in 1995. Not only was it clear that we could not effectively celebrate the 20th anniversary of that document, but it would not have been possible to agree that document 20 years after it had been agreed in China by consensus. That was the extent of the pushback we had by then.
If you add to that the fact that the traditional champion of the international order, as you were saying, John, the President of the United States, does not himself believe in it, that has accelerated this pushback, but it started well before President Trump came to office.
Sir John Sawers: The core issues that the UN has faced, of dealing with conflict, violence, development and so on, are not the highest priority of the current US system. We have learned over the last 20 years that a rules-based order, even if it is honoured in the breach from time to time, requires a great power to underpin it. That great power, for better or worse, for the last 75 years has been the United States. The United States is no longer prepared to underpin it. It is no longer prepared to be the enforcer of global rules or to underpin global stability. That is the fundamental change we are facing.
There are a whole series of reasons for it. I do not personalise it around the President. As Mark says, or as I would say, the current President is a symptom of the changes in America rather than a cause of them. I think we are facing a period ahead when, as Mark Carney said in his speech in Davos, we cannot rely on the United States to be the guarantor of international stability as we did in the past. We have to find another way to do that.
There is a very good piece in the current edition of Foreign Affairs by Thant Myint-U, who is the grandson of U Thant, the third Secretary-General of the United Nations. He sets out in that article just how effective the United Nations had been in mediation efforts as a semi-independent actor during conflicts, even during the Cold War. That capacity of the UN leadership to intercede and contribute is much reduced as well.
There are a whole series of factors as to why the UN is less impactful than it was in the past. You asked what the effect on the UK is. People have different views on this, but the UK has weakened itself over the last 10 years by a loss of the closeness of the transatlantic relationship and by separating ourselves from the European Union. We are not the force in the world that we used to be. We used to have influence in Brussels and that gave us influence in Washington. We had influence in Washington that gave us influence in Brussels. We have neither now, so we have to work from a much lower starting point than was the case in the previous era.
It is tough work representing the UK internationally now, whereas previously British views were sought out and eagerly listened to. It is nothing to do with me, Mark and others who speak at international conferences, but people are just less interested in the British view these days.
The Chair: That is a very good time to bring in Lord Lamont, who has the next question.
Q14 Lord Lamont of Lerwick: I could divert, Lord Chairman. Do you believe that the core architecture of the post-war order, which is the main institutions, such as the World Bank, the WTO and the UN, will retain its centrality going forward? In a way, Sir Mark, you partially answered this question by saying that, up to a point, and even without America, some institutions could continue to function.
Slightly to my surprise you mentioned the WTO. I thought that, although America has refused to make its nomination to the Appellate Committee, ways had been found procedurally and most trade has continued on an MFN basis. I wondered whether you would comment further about that.
When you talked about the golden age, was the golden age post the fall of communism not really the exception rather than the norm? We should not really expect things to have continued as they were in that short interval.
Sir Mark Lyall Grant: Certainly, on that last point I agree with you. As John pointed out at the beginning, the first half of the UN’s 80 years was during the Cold War and a lot of the institutions, particularly the Security Council, were pretty paralysed then. You only have to look at the number of resolutions that were adopted. I think it is something like 600 in those first 40 years, compared to more than three times that in the next 40 years. Yes, we should not exaggerate that, but it was a golden period and an exception. We have to recognise that. We are not going to get back to that situation, at least not for a very long time, in my view.
I put the WTO on the negative side mainly because the dispute mechanisms have broken down, because the Americans did not appoint any judges and very few cases actually get adjudicated now at the World Trade Organization, even though some of its fundamentals, such as the MFN, are still adhered to by most countries. I think the answer to your first question is that some of the institutions will certainly survive. The World Bank and the IMF are not going away. NATO is certainly not going away either. There is the G20. There will be lots of international organisations, but some of them, I think, will become a little less central than they were.
We are in a transitional phase now, undoubtedly. How long that lasts depends on a number of factors, including what happens after President Trump. I see us drifting towards a three-tier international order, where at the top you have the G2: the United States and China. It is bound to be there and is probably going to be more solid than we perhaps think at the moment. In the second tier, you have the shifting coalitions and variable geometry, if you like, where people such as the UK and others can play quite a big role, potentially. Your residual third layer will be the United Nations, which will still exist. It will still be the indispensable and only universal forum where all 193 independent countries are represented.
I think that that is the sort of three-tier system that we are going to move into. The question for this country is how much we can manoeuvre. We can influence the G2 as best we can, but how much can we manoeuvre, build alliances, build coalitions and drive an agenda in that big central tier?
Sir John Sawers: Lord Lamont’s reference to the WTO is a very interesting one, because some of the spirit of the World Trade Organization continues, but outside the institution. As you rightly say, the Americans have undermined it, and not just the Trump Administration. The Biden Administration also undermined the dispute settlement procedure within the WTO. What has happened is that the European Union, Japan, the UK, Canada, Korea and various other countries have come together to produce, through consenting partners, a new mechanism that is outside the WTO but represents some of the same methods, techniques and disciplines of the old dispute settlement procedure of the WTO.
This is interesting, because it represents something that Mark Carney was alluding to about middle powers coming together. It is about consenting adults taking part in a set of rules that they agree with one another, but it lacks the underpinning of the United States. China actually is quite interested in taking part in this structure. I am not an expert in trade, so I do not know the exact standing of that now.
It is interesting as an example of how the failure of the formal institutions is being got round in a partial way by consenting members of the international community, not just OECD members but also countries from the global South. Countries such as Brazil, Indonesia, India and so on are also interested in this sort of mechanism, but it does not have the legal framework or formal disciplines of an international institution underpinned by treaty, such as the WTO.
Q15 Lord Lamont of Lerwick: Sir John, in your first remarks I think you mentioned that the UN Security Council had drawbacks and was not functioning as you thought it might, or perhaps it was Sir Mark referring to its powers to mandate. Is it not only realistic to think that the Security Council cannot intervene in great power confrontations? Acting as a sounding board or forum, as you said, is valuable, but it has never been able to act or defuse directly between America and the Soviet Union or America and China.
Sir John Sawers: I agree entirely. The UN played a role in the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. It is underplayed by historians these days, but there was a role played there. By and large, great power business is sorted out by the great powers.
One of the reasons why the UN has been undermined is that, while I was ambassador at the UN, we had the Georgia crisis, when Russian forces effectively invaded parts of Georgia. That was the first incident that marked the end of what Mark calls the golden era of the UN. Then, of course, in 2014, we had the Ukraine crisis, which meant that the co-operation that had existed for 25 years between Russia and the United States and Europe was broken.
Also, China previously played a supportive role on the Security Council. It would intervene occasionally, but it was not fundamentally difficult and combative on the Security Council. When I was there, I could always work with my Chinese counterpart. I think that, by the end of Mark’s period, the Chinese had become much more assertive and difficult, and less willing to go along with what they see as a western-led institution.
Sir Mark Lyall Grant: I agree with that, but I would add that, even in some of the big conflicts that are managed or resolved outside the UN framework, they come back to the UN for final endorsement. I am thinking of the Minsk agreements between Russia and Ukraine, which came back to the UN Security Council and were endorsed by the UN Security Council. Both John and I, as political directors, were lead negotiators for the UK on the E3+3 process on the Iran nuclear file. When the deal was finally done in 2015, it came to the UN to be endorsed, blessed and put into a legal framework. The UN can still play a role, even in those very big issues.
Q16 Lord Grocott: Picking up on what Sir John said about Britain having less influence now, both in the USA and in Europe, I would love to have some what concrete examples of that. I understand that it is received wisdom pretty well now that we must have less influence. In what respect does that work to our disadvantage in terms of concrete policies?
Perhaps more broadly, is it not important to put the context of this, which is of an organisation, particularly the United Nations, where there has been disproportionate influence from western Europe, where two of the five are from? Whatever Britain was or was not doing—and we see further evidence of this with the global South—that would be changing and will change. There are no representatives on the Security Council from Africa or Latin America. It is a lopsided fix that has remained frozen. Of course we have less influence, but so do most of the other countries involved in the group that has been favoured up until now.
Sir John Sawers: You make some very good points, Lord Grocott. There are examples of where the UK has less influence than in the past. When we last had a crisis in Europe—Lord Houghton will remember this very well—in the Balkans, the politics and diplomacy were led by a contact group involving the UK, France and Germany, Russia and the United States. We have a crisis in Europe now in Ukraine and the UK is not part of the diplomatic efforts.
In fact, nobody in Europe is part of the diplomatic efforts. Indeed, there are no diplomatic efforts at the moment. When it comes to considering whether the more balanced position that is emerging in Ukraine is something that might form the basis of a discussion and negotiation with Russia, it is the French and Germans who are taking the lead on this, as they did in the Minsk process 12 years ago, when Prime Minister Cameron, in my view unwisely, opted not to be part of the political process on Ukraine. That is one example.
Another example is on Iran at the moment. We are not part of the conflict. We are right not to be part of the conflict. This is a mistake that President Trump made, to launch this war of choice in the Middle East. We are playing a helpful role on the margins, in thinking about what a post-settlement, post-ceasefire arrangement might look like, but we are not part of the fundamental discussions. It is Pakistan, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the United States that are doing this, and to some extent Israel playing a less than helpful role. Where are the European countries? We are not there. Where is the UK? We are not there. Those are examples of how things have changed over the last 20 years. People are not looking for British contributions and British influence on these things in the way that they used to.
On the second part of it, about the Security Council, I agree with you entirely. It is a construct that reflects the world of 1945. Britain was rightly one of the five Security Council members. We have actually been cautious about using the powers of a permanent member. We have not used our veto as the UK solely for almost 50 years. I think that 1977 was the last time we used our veto in the Security Council on our own, and nineteen-eighty-something was when we last used it alongside the Americans, so it is not as if we have been overexerting our power. We have both chaired the Security Council and led discussions in the Security Council. The reality is that Britain and France are the crucial glue that keeps the business of the Security Council on track.
It is true there are no permanent members from Africa, Latin America and so on, but there are regular members there and they play a very active role. The number of non-permanent members has increased over the years.
I do not think myself that seeking to reform the Security Council will be very productive at a time when we have the present leadership of the great powers in place. Maybe there will be a different time. These institutions tend to emerge after some global calamity or conflict, and we do not wish that on anyone. It means that the institutions have to adapt both their working methods and the issues that they are dealing with to reflect, as Lord Lamont was saying, the reality that, if a great power is involved in a conflict, it is not going to get sorted out at the Security Council. It will be sorted out, if at all, in the margins of other forums and in direct negotiation between the main players.
Sir Mark Lyall Grant: Let me disagree slightly with John, because I do not think you would want us to agree on everything, in answer to Lord Grocott’s question. Brexit was a strategic mistake for this country, largely for economic reasons, but it is easy to overestimate the damage that has been done to our security interests or our influence around the world. I was in New York in 2014 for the Scottish referendum on independence. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that Scottish independence would be much more damaging to Britain’s influence around the world than Brexit ever could be.
If you lose part of your country, you lose part of your population and part of your economy. You have to change the name of the country, for heaven’s sake. Your seat at the Security Council would come into question. None of those things happened with Brexit. Membership of the European Union cuts virtually no ice in the UN. People outside Europe do not look at the UK as a member of the European Union. They look at us as the UK. The fact that we could speak independently from other European members was a great advantage when I was there. I do not think we should overestimate the damage to our influence overseas. There are other reasons that it has declined, as well as Brexit.
Sir John Sawers: To keep the contest going, I understand what Mark is saying, but it is not just the immediate security consequences. It is the political turmoil in this country that we have witnessed over the last 10 years, which has also weakened us around the world. I was fortunate to serve in government under Margaret Thatcher, John Major, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and David Cameron. You may disagree with them politically or individually, but they all had the qualities of a Prime Minister. Unfortunately, since then we have not had the same quality of leadership.
Q17 Baroness Fraser of Craigmaddie: The 2014 referendum is etched in my memory and bringing back post-traumatic stress thinking about it. It has made me very nervous of referendums. Could I bring you both back to what, in this world where people are taking less interest in what the UK has to say, the UK should do? How should it adapt? I was struck by the fact in our briefing notes that we are the state with the highest number of memberships across multilateral organisations. Should we be working from within? Are we an activist or a blocker? Should we, in this new world, think of your three-tier system? Should we be investing in that? What should the UK be doing?
Sir Mark Lyall Grant: We must not flagellate ourselves too much. We still have a lot of hard power and a lot of soft power. We need to exploit that, particularly in that second tier that I was referring to. You are right that we are a member of more international organisations than any other country in the world, even after Brexit, and that is important. Some are more important organisations, obviously, than others. We need to seek to preserve the global fundamentals as best we can, but build more coalitions on specific issues that are of vital interest to us.
That is where this multiple variable geometry comes in, whether that is doing trade deals with other important trading partners or trying to build relationships, such as within NATO, or in terms of AUKUS with the Australians or the JEF—the Joint Expeditionary Force—with some of the Scandinavian countries. We can do a lot within those organisations and I am mentioning only two. You have the whole Commonwealth, which successive Governments have underplayed for fear of colonialism taunts, which in my view is ridiculous. The French have shown us how it should be done, for instance, with the Francophonie.
There is a lot that we can do post Brexit in terms of bilateral arrangements with various countries. In order to take advantage, we have to be a little more imaginative and flexible, perhaps, than we have been in the past. I was very struck, when I worked for David Miliband and he was the Foreign Secretary, and there was a survey done about the most effective diplomatic services. France came number one, and we were number two. David Miliband was upset and said, “What is it? Why the French?” It turned out that the French were more hard-nosed on economic trade issues and more imaginative.
I had to write a paper for David asking, “Should we be more French?” The conclusion of the paper was that, yes, we should be, but our political system would not allow it, for various reasons I do not need to go into here. We need to adopt some of that initiative-taking. Why do the French hold twice as many international conferences as we do? Why do they have twice as many diplomats overseas and half the number we have at home? Why are they not paranoid about U-turns as we are? There are lots of reasons why we are in that situation. As I say, I do not think it is easy to change, but adopting a little more of the French approach would be valuable.
Sir John Sawers: When I saw that survey, my view was that the most effective diplomatic service in the world was the Chinese. We may not like it. We may not like the things they do or their techniques, but they were actually more effective, in my view and experience, than either the French or the British diplomatic services. That is because they are very hard-nosed about their own interests. They are willing to use their power and convert their power into diplomacy. Also, their offering was different from that of the western countries and was very appealing to countries of the global South that Lord Grocott mentioned, because it was not interfering in their business. It was accepting them as they are and not making things conditional upon their human rights or governance performance.
It is quite right that we should try to exert some form of influence on the way the global South countries are run, but the reality is that they do not like it, so we have to be more selective. Mark mentioned LGBT rights earlier as something that has moved forward over the last 30 years, but there are still a lot of countries in the world that resist efforts by western liberal countries to impose those values on them. We have to remember that we have had those values ourselves only for 30-odd years, so it is not as if this is a long-standing difference.
The other issue is that we can take more initiatives. There was a time when countries such as Norway would pick up an issue such as Sri Lanka or Sudan and become the peacemaker in those countries. We have done those sorts of things in the past as well. We could do more of identifying issues, appointing special envoys and taking a grip of the diplomacy and the politics of perhaps a second-order issue, but one where we can make a difference, where we have a historical connection. We can put other resources behind it as well—military training, aid, development efforts and so on—so that we have a package of things that the UK can provide that can help bring about stability and peace in third countries. There is greater scope for initiative there. Sudan is one example, where we were instrumental in the division of Sudan into two countries and resolving some of the problems of that nation, but we are nowhere now in the current diplomacy.
Baroness Fraser of Craigmaddie: We are a penholder at the UN for Sudan, but what do we do with it?
Sir John Sawers: When people are killing, raping and occupying territory on the ground, holding the pen in the Security Council does not make a huge difference. You have to be involved on the ground in trying to address these many issues.
Sir Mark Lyall Grant: That point is absolutely right. It is the second-order issues that, in many ways, the Americans value us most for dealing with, because they do not want to deal with them. I would add Somalia and Yemen: we could be involved because we have historical connections with those countries and some influence on the ground, but we do not really exert much of it at the moment.
The Chair: Lord Bruce wants to add a quick follow-up here.
Q18 Lord Bruce of Bennachie: It is exactly on the issues that you raised. When these arrangements were set up in 1945, the UK was an imperial power. Now, we are a long way from that. It is about what the UK Government should do specifically, rather than what the international organisations could do. What should we do to engage more constructively, as you have just hinted at, with third-world countries or global South countries with which we have connections? We have slashed our aid budget and we are in the process of cutting our diplomatic corps. One of our witnesses last week said that that is all right because we have reduced the two departments to one and we need to get rid of them.
If you are in an African country where you had a high visible presence of the UK through aid and development, and now it is no longer there—it is all going to the multinationals and bilateral aid is cut—what is the offer of the UK? What can we do? In my experience, we have influence and people look to us, but most of the time we are missing. What is the recommendation to the British Government of how we should engage? Very specifically, as a committee, should we be listening to people from the African Union or some of the key African countries that will be bigger players in the next 10 or 15 years and with which it would be helpful possibly now for us to make good connections?
Sir Mark Lyall Grant: I mentioned the Commonwealth. That is one of the areas where we could be more proactive. Given the resource constraints, which of course I would not be in favour of, but none the less they are constraints, we have to be a little bit more imaginative in how we use those resources. I mentioned that we do not have as many people overseas as France has and have many more in the UK. We have more Ministers than any other country in the world, yet we do not make the best use of them. They ought to be on the road the whole time, not rushing back to vote in Parliament. It is very striking. You look at the continent of Africa. President Macron has made eight visits, I think, to Africa in between two prime ministerial visits from the UK.
We can use other resources to engage with these people, because, for a vast number of countries around the world, in my experience, personalities make a difference. Personal contact makes as much difference as aid or military support. You have to have a certain amount of that. I was very struck when I was ambassador in Pakistan that, on a day when I handed over a cheque to the Punjab Government for £30 million in budgetary support, the Danish ambassador handed over £10,000 to a local school and he was on the front page of the newspapers, not me. That was Clare Short’s time and there were reasons why we were not making more of our aid when we had money to spend. That is a small example of how we are not making the best use of the assets that we have, in my view.
Sir John Sawers: This goes back to some of the difficulties our country has been going through. In my time, we had two Prime Ministers, Mrs Thatcher and Mr Blair, who made the weather internationally and were recognised as doing so. You may not agree with what they were doing, but they were certainly the dominant political figures of their era, internationally. We also enjoyed sustained economic growth, thanks to the reforms that were introduced in those periods.
In the world, political and economic performance is what is recognised and admired. If we are going to restore the throw weight that we had in the times when I was an active public servant, we need to restore economic growth to this country. We need to strengthen our hard power and preserve and rebuild all the soft power, which we are known for around the world through the BBC, the British Council and other means, including the British media generally.
Q19 Baroness Crawley: Staying on the topic of prioritising the resources that we have, money is very tight. We live in a completely different economic environment to that of either Mrs Thatcher’s later years or Tony Blair’s years. According to our briefing, the FCDO’s most recent annual accounts quotes that the multilateral and human rights directorate of the FCDO will see a 65% cut in its programme budget, so we have to prioritise. You talked about using our soft power and our hard power more efficiently. Can you put a little more detail into that about how we prioritise in favour of the UK’s interests with a very tight budget?
Sir John Sawers: Things are very tight and no one can wave a magic wand and change that easily. There are things that are under way at the moment—the review of the BBC’s Charter, for example, and the future of the BBC World Service—which will have a direct impact on the soft power projection of the UK. If we can establish the BBC on a permanent charter rather than a 10-year one, which could be cancelled at any moment after the 10 years, or establish a firm footing for the BBC World Service and its television services around the world, that would be a good step forward.
The current Government and their predecessors have wrestled with the problem of restructuring and rebalancing public spending in this country, and they have not succeeded. The sad truth is that, after the expenses of the global financial crash and Covid, we are too heavily overstretched. We are now more like Italy and France than we are Germany or the United States in terms of our ability to direct resources into international priorities. The reforms begin at home to free up the resources available for our projection in the world.
There are structural things that we can do. Lord Houghton knows a lot about the military training that we do overseas. In my experience, you cannot have economic development without security at home, and you cannot have security in countries such as Nigeria, Uganda or the DRC without effective security forces, institutions and agencies. We can help develop those security agencies, which then provide a bedrock for economic growth. The economic growth then provides a means of establishing human rights and good governance, which, in turn, feeds back into better security, because you have mechanisms for addressing those grievances.
The three pillars of the UN—security, economic prosperity and human rights—all fit together in a circular fashion, but the bedrock of it all is security. We can leverage some of the capacities we have. As you know, I was chief of MI6 and we did some of this with security agencies in developing and global South countries to help them develop effective ways, but ways compliant with the law and international values, to preserve security in their countries. This is an area where the UK can do more.
Sir Mark Lyall Grant: I agree with John that influence abroad depends on strength and stability at home, and currently we do not have a great deal of that. For me, the two overwhelming international priorities are, for that reason, security and trade and investment. That is where a lot of our focus needs to go.
Once you go beyond those critical factors that impact directly on our strength, stability and economic prosperity at home, I would point to two myself. The first is migration: we can play an important role in tackling the international aspects of migration. There is a lot that needs to be done in all aspects of the pipeline, but the bit of the pipeline where nothing is really happening is the refugee convention, looking at some of the international instruments that have become outdated. That is a big national interest for us.
The second one would be in artificial intelligence regulation, where we are not the lead player but are a big player. It is going to impact on us massively in the future and we need to get some of the thought leadership into that. Those, for me, would be the four big international priorities for this country.
Q20 Lord Alderdice: One of the ways that HMG have functioned in foreign affairs quite effectively for a number of years is through international NGOs and other NGOs. It seems to me that, with the financial stringency, it is increasingly difficult to provide funding for these organisations. Many of them will at least not be able to continue to function as before, and some will simply disappear. Many of the international NGOs are based in London and are very helpful to us. Do you have any thoughts about the role of NGOs, both individual and international NGOs, and their value to this country in its foreign policy?
Sir John Sawers: I would not want to camp on the position that international NGOs are part of our soft power. I do not think that it is as central as that, but they are playing an important role, especially in the humanitarian area and to some extent in the development area. They used to benefit substantially from support from the overseas aid budget, which used to be 0.7% of GDP. It is now less than half that and much of that money is pre-committed to international organisations, rather than through NGOs or our direct British bilateral aid.
What we might see in this country, and I would like to see, is a greater emphasis on private philanthropy to international efforts. In the United States, they are the largest donors internationally. Even before Donald Trump dismantled USAID, the United States was already the largest donor internationally because of private philanthropy. That is not necessarily as well-structured as government efforts. In some ways, if you can be like the Norwegians or the Danes and put 1% of your GDP into international aid, you can target it more effectively than you can through private philanthropy, but in the absence of that scale of development effort, private donations is a good way to go. We could do more of that in this country and encourage more of that. That is just one thought on it.
The work that the big NGOs, such as Save the Children and Oxfam, do internationally is important and welcome, and reflects well on Britain, but it is not as big a vehicle for British projection of influence as, say, the BBC.
Sir Mark Lyall Grant: I would not be quite as negative as that. There are more than 6,000 NGOs affiliated to the UN and some of them have been extremely influential in, for instance, lobbying for things such as the conventional Arms Trade Treaty. I do not think that we would have got it without the NGO support. For the SDGs to eliminate absolute poverty, those NGOs were extremely effective, as were a number of individual Britons, whether it was Daniel Craig doing the anti-mine stuff or Emma Watson for UN Women. Then you have Greta Thunberg on climate. There are quite a lot of individual activists who, as part of the NGO community, are playing an increasing role and have quite a lot of influence with some of the smaller countries at the United Nations.
A number of the big NGOs are based in this country and that is a small part of our soft power. It is probably not as important in soft power as the Premier League, but it still, none the less, has quite a lot of soft power attached to it.
Q21 The Chair: Does the United States, since it has reduced USAID very substantially, not aggregate the work that is being done by the Gates Foundation and others in order to produce a sort of whole-of-nation approach to the aid picture?
Sir John Sawers: This is what I mean, Lord Chairman. There is no doubt that the United States remains the biggest source of international spending, but through institutions such as the Gates Foundation. These wealthy multi-billionaires who are allocating their funds to Gavi, as well as the Gates Foundation and other organisations, are doing a tremendous service to development, with government stepping aside. That is why I say that there is a role that we can play here in encouraging more of this private philanthropy as we go forward.
Sir Mark Lyall Grant: We must not pretend that the American spending cuts are not having a big impact, and I speak from personal experience. My son works for UNICEF in New York and people are being laid off left, right and centre. The US is something like $3 billion or $4 billion in arrears on its budgetary payments to the UN, and that is having a direct impact on the UN’s ability to do some of the work that it does through the non-Security Council functions that I mentioned right at the beginning.
The Chair: On HIV/AIDS, the antiretrovirals that basically prevented Africa from going into that spiral were largely done on the basis of private philanthropy plus the United States Government distributing the goods.
Sir Mark Lyall Grant: Through the Gates Foundation, yes.
Q22 Baroness Prashar: You already touched on the question of promoting liberal values, such as human rights and the rule of law. Do you think that should be part of our national strategy, or do you think we should be a bit more realistic in terms of what can be achieved? Or, as you were hinting, should we be a bit more creative in how we actually do that?
Sir John Sawers: We cannot ignore the trends in international politics at the moment. The United States is much less interested in projecting values, or even projecting democracy, around the world. China is certainly not interested in projecting the sorts of values that we would share. It is best if we uphold our values at home and let others see them for what they are worth, rather than trying to tell other people that they should adopt our values. They will develop their own values over the years without being told by western powers, especially former colonial powers, how to do it.
Sir Mark Lyall Grant: I agree with that. I do not think that we should abandon our values, but we need to be careful in proselytising them too much. I give the example John already mentioned. LGBT was very much the pointy bit of the spear of the systematic pushback that I referred to earlier in the evidence session around 2013 and 2014. Every year, the European Union, including obviously the UK at that time, pushed forward language on LGBT. Unfortunately, we started to lose the Caribbean countries and a lot of the African countries that support us on a lot of issues, including democracy and women’s rights, but did not support us on LGBT, for obvious different reasons.
We need to be careful, if we are going to build coalitions that have to include some of these middle powers and developing countries, that we do not ram values down their throats. You can argue that, as John was saying, they are not ready for them yet. I would rather say this: for a lot of them, there are religious, conservative social or other reasons why they do not support that. We need to be a bit careful.
If I could draw on the experience of being National Security Adviser for a second, in the National Security Council all the difficult discussions on foreign policy and security come down to a balance between three pillars: security, prosperity and values. Whether you are talking about what sort of relationship we should have with China or whether we should sell arms to Saudi Arabia, it comes down to a balance between those three pillars. They are almost always in tension with each other, and often in direct contradiction with each other. We need to bear that in mind. If we are going to compromise, some of the values pillar will need to be compromised on in order to reach the sorts of agreements we want with other partners.
Q23 Lord Houghton of Richmond: This is only the second session we have had and this might already seem like a bit of a cry for help, because this second session is also a diagnostic session. We do not expect you to give us all the answers to things. In many respects, you have given us all sorts of hugely insightful titbits. As we go through, taking all sorts of evidence from all sorts of people, and then present a report, which will have recommendations for government, we want to know what format such a report and its contents might take.
Is the multilateral system submissive to a strategic approach? We can do lots of description about the fact that it is under geopolitical destabilisation, America is moving away from it and China is ascending. There is lots of spoiling and spoilers at the moment. Can you offer us, in a diagnostic sense, anything about the multilateral system and our weakened position within it, which you have both admitted to, that we are missing, or you need to tell us, about what structure that report might take?
At the moment, I worry that we run the risk of a shopping list of good ideas about things. I was on the NSC for three years and bore witness to a time where multilateralism was discussed as an entity. It hits you when it needs to, because there is something relevant to it. I might be rambling a bit, but there is an element of a cry for help.
We thought that doing the special relationship was going to be difficult, because it was going to be a moving target. This is going to be quite difficult in terms of the selection of what will be useful to a Government about the UK’s optimisation of its approach to multilateralism in the condition of the moment and the foreseeable future. Can you try to crystallise something, both of you, that we will applaud and be thankful for?
Sir John Sawers: That is intellectually challenging. I agree that just describing the problem, admiring the problem and then producing a shopping list of things we can do is probably not the right way forward. We are living in a very different world. We are living in a great power world. We are not living in a rules-based world. We need to start with recognising the reality of how much the world has changed over the last 20 years and how Britain’s role has changed in it as well.
I well remember that, back in the 1990s, the UK contributed 6% of global GDP. It is now about 2.5%. That is a reflection of both the rise of China, India and other countries and the fact that we have not had any real effective economic growth in this country for the last 20 years. We need to recognise the scale at which the world has changed, and Britain’s reduced position in that world, and then think, “What do we need to do in order to protect and promote our interests around the world?”
Lord Robertson chaired the review on defence, which we are waiting for the Government’s response to, but that is one dimension of it. It is a question of—how can I put it?—how we reposition ourselves internationally, not so much within the multilateral system. The change in status and influence and the diminished role of the multilateral system is part of this new global picture. We cannot get a bicycle pump and pump it back up again.
We are going to have to operate within this new world and, as Mark was saying, identify the three or four things that are really important for us, maybe in a conceptual way. We need to identify a number of second-tier issues where we, the UK, can make the difference and focus our resources on that, instead of trying to pretend that we can rebuild the United Nations and recreate or reform the Security Council. These things are beyond us. It is important that we adopt the right language and the right position, but that we are very realistic.
The word “realistic” has been a recurrent theme in the questions of the committee today. We have to be very realistic about the world in which we are operating and that it is not as if President Trump is a nightmare that will be over in two and a half years’ time. It is a permanent change in the United States’ role in the world, which we have to adapt and adjust to. It is that concept of adjusting to a new and very different world from the one that most of us operated in when we were practising public servants, politicians or Ministers that we need to recognise and address.
It is something that the last Conservative Government made an effort to do, with Rishi Sunak’s AI safety initiative, which is a really important recognition of a vital international issue where we, the UK, could play an additional role. It does not seem to have had any legs, unfortunately, but it is the sort of area where we can make a difference, and where Mr Sunak made a difference in his time as Prime Minister. Identifying those sorts of areas where we can contribute more will be part of this effort, but it is not a shopping list. The title is about multilateralism, but actually it is about the new world that we are operating in, which is very different from the one of which the multilateral system was a central element.
Sir Mark Lyall Grant: Clearly things have changed and I am not going to go back to the golden age of the UN. We are in a different era, but that does not mean that there are not aspects of multilateralism and international institutions that will survive and that are of great benefit to us.
What strikes me very much is that everyone talks about all these rising powers. In this new world—if you like, my second tier—it is not the Brazils, the Indias or the South Africas, which have virtually no impact on multilateral work. It is other niche players, such as Turkey, Qatar and UAE that are actually spreading their wings as this new era unfolds.
Sir John Sawers: Not always helpfully.
Sir Mark Lyall Grant: Not, not always helpfully, but they are wanting to be players. Every Government I served wanted the UK to remain a global player, and I am sure future Governments will probably be in the same place, but that does not mean that you cannot focus. We do not want to become Norway and have a very limited global perspective, but we need to focus, as John said. I mentioned a few areas where I think we could certainly focus. For me, it is focus, flexibility and imagination in terms of how we pursue those areas of focus.
I do not think we should pretend that we cannot be leaders in some of these fields. We can, but it needs a certain amount of continuity between different Governments if we are going to be changing our Government quite so often. I cannot tell you how frustrating it was that, when Theresa May was Prime Minister, it was about people smuggling and modern slavery, and that was a huge issue, but then that got dropped. When William Hague was there, it was about violence in conflict. These things chop and change. We build up a little bit of momentum and a bit of global leadership, and then it changes. As John says, Rishi Sunak was very focused on AI, which is one of my four priority areas that I think we should be focusing on. Have we seen anything since the election? No, absolutely not, as far as I know.
Q24 The Chair: There are two or three of these areas that you mentioned, Sir John. What are they? You said that we should focus on two or three things as second-order issues.
Sir John Sawers: I am not active in the Foreign Office now, but, if I was there, I would look for areas where we could make a difference. Ukraine is one. Mainly through the efforts of our armed forces and the intelligence services, we have made a big contribution on Ukraine, but we have not done so through Foreign Office diplomacy and political effort. Ukraine is a very high priority for us and we should be exerting ourselves much more.
Beyond Europe, the outcome in Iran is going to be important. Where we can add value there is not clear. Not being part of the conflict was the right decision, but that does not mean that we just wash our hands and stand back from it. I do not think that we are on the cusp of a breakthrough there. I think that we are going to be managing the fallout of this war for the next decade and we need to be part of the work there.
I mentioned Sudan. Mark has mentioned Somalia and Yemen as well. These are second-order issues. I would put Ukraine and Iran as first-order issues. It is important that we have examples where we can show real effort, bringing together all the tools of government, whether it is diplomacy, defence, development or intelligence, to make a difference in a difficult subject, in a difficult part of the world that is under stress and strain. Those are the sorts of areas that we need to focus on.
The Chair: Thank you very much. That has been really useful. Thank you very much for sharing your thoughts, as well as your prescriptions for us. Lord Houghton was trying to get you to write our report right at the end. We will try that with every witness who comes before us. Who knows? We might get the answer. Thank you very much for your help as well.
Sir John Sawers: Thanks very much indeed, and thank you to all members of the committee. You have an amazing amount of experience around this table. If we can contribute some thoughts and ideas for you to reflect and pull together, I think your report will deserve to be influential and will stand the intellectual merit that will no doubt underpin it.
The Chair: We will keep our fingers crossed. Thank you very much.
