23
Examination of witnesses
Olivia O’Sullivan, Sir Matthew Rycroft and Richard Gowan.
Q72 The Chair: I thank Richard Gowan, Olivia O’Sullivan and Sir Matthew Rycroft for being available to the committee today. This is the seventh evidence session of our inquiry, which seeks to explore the multilateral system and how the United Kingdom might play a better part in that. I have to say to the witnesses that we are being streamed live on Parliament television, and there are apparently people out there watching these proceedings, as I have found out to my cost. At the end you will receive a transcript, and if there are any small technical alterations that you want to make then they will be received.
I ask members of the committee to declare any relevant interests before they ask any questions at all. I declare that I was the lead reviewer for the 2025 strategic defence review, which may well be relevant to the discussion that we are having here. We are grateful to you for taking the time to come along. We will have a dead stop later because we are being briefed at secret level by the Ministry of Defence about the situation in the Middle East, but if there are any questions that are not asked by members of the committee then maybe you might look at them and see whether there is something that you might like to say to each of them, since you have been supplied with the questions in advance.
First, Sir Matthew, could you give us an idea of how the British Government treat multilateral institutions? Are they given sufficient priority, to your mind? What has your experience been in the jobs that you have done about multilateral institutions as a whole, and any in particular?
Sir Matthew Rycroft: Thank you very much for this opportunity. It is a great pleasure to answer that question and the others that will follow. I was the British ambassador to the United Nations for three years from 2015 to 2018. That was probably the peak of my time directly engaging with the multilateral system, but there has been some multilateral aspect to every single job that I have done in the Civil Service.
It is fair to say that the British state did extremely well out of the creation of the multilateral system after the Second World War, which, one way or another, has continued to this present day. It has given us, if anything, an oversized role that we have used responsibly and carefully in pursuit not just of our national interests but of global interests. One example of that is the creation of the sustainable development goals, which I still think are a fantastic example of a long-term, prioritised, joined-up strategy for the whole planet. The popularity of multilateral institutions waxes and wanes, in my experience, depending partly on ministerial preferences and partly on the ability of those different parts of the multilateral system to be effective.
I have never found the British interest to be achievable without multilateral engagement. There is almost nothing worth doing in the world today that can be done by a single country on our own. Almost everything requires either the tacit support or, more likely, the active engagement of our friends, allies and partners around the world. In particular, given that the UK is no longer a member of the European Union, we have to compensate for that with other engagement multilaterally.
At the UN, of course the permanent membership, the veto and so on give us an outsized role there. When I was ambassador there, we were still a global superpower in relation to international development. That, sadly, is no longer the case; that has been deprioritised, for understandable reasons of financial constraint, but I hope that in the future it will be possible for the UK to regain some of that ability to have an impact around the world. All that is not only because it is the right thing to do; it is also because it is a good thing to do for the UK nationally. In my view, there is not a trade-off between national interest and values. We have to pursue our national interests through our values, and our values should include a clear commitment to an effective, functioning and efficient multilateral system—not just the UN but regional bodies such as NATO and the international economic architecture such as the World Bank and the IMF—as well as our ability to create coalitions of the willing, as the current Prime Minister has done very effectively on Ukraine.
The Chair: Thank you. Ms O’Sullivan, do you want to add to that?
Olivia O'Sullivan: Thank you very much for having me. The experience that I bring to this is that I was a civil servant for some time in DfID and the Cabinet Office, and now I direct the “UK in the World” programme at the independent international affairs think tank, Chatham House.
On the UK Government’s approach to the multilateral system, it strikes me, as my colleague has said, that it is a bit of an article of faith for the British Government that the UK is an active multilateral player. If you look at all our foreign policy and defence strategies going back several years, you see that we tend to recite it a bit like a prayer at the beginning of every one: NATO, G7, G20, founding member of the global trade institutions active in the UN, and a permanent member of the UN Security Council. We have used that role, often acting as a pen holder in the UN and corralling other countries, and building up a real level of diplomatic knowledge and skill about how to be effective in those institutions. Other countries that are similar to us—relatively wealthy middle powers like Japan or Germany—would want that. There are countries in the world, particularly China, that seek to develop their levels of staffing, levels of influence and levels of understanding of multilateral institutions, so clearly they see a value in having a role. If we did not have the legacy positions that we have, we would probably want that channel of influence and that asset.
Having said that, there are a few things to consider in our approach to the multilateral system. The first is that we are in a time when the FCDO is undergoing a restructure and the aid budget has been cut. With fewer people and fewer resources, one should think about focus. It takes time and effort to understand how complex institutions work and to make sure we have influence in them.
The second is that the UK has often paired having a strong role in the multilateral system and multilateral institutions with a consistent goal of multilateral reform in various guises. Sometimes that looks like reform so that they are more representative, and sometimes that looks like operational reform so that they are more effective and efficient. My question to the Government now—particularly following the aid cuts and the rebalancing of the aid budget, so there is quite a high proportion going into multilateral institutions—is: whose job is it to push for that reform? That is inherently a geopolitical process. What type of reform are we looking for, and have we adequately dedicated resources to it?
The last thing we should consider is that shifts in power globally mean there are more countries in the world, particularly wealthy, influential regional middle powers—I am thinking of the Gulf and south-east Asia—that sometimes act outside of multilateral institutions and are interested in bilateral transactional diplomacy. We need to understand that for a long time the guardrails of British diplomacy have involved being an effective and influential player in the multilateral system. That is important, as are the skills to do that, but we should recognise that, while the ways of doing that might still be effective, we also need to think about the ways in which we work with other powers.
The example that I am thinking of is the crisis in Sudan, which involves influential Gulf powers. You can see that in the past the UK would have sought to use its convening power to work through multilateral institutions and through the UN in that crisis, but there are other trends and actors at play that maybe 20 to 40 years ago would not have been the same because there was not such a distribution of wealth among the active regional powers that are now playing a role in that conflict and that war. We need to think about the balance between being effective in the multilateral system and the multilateral institutions and understanding the ways in which some other more influential powers are using other processes, systems and forms of diplomacy, and make sure that we understand that well.
My final point is that this is a time when the great powers, the US and China, both have particular attitudes and goals towards the multilateral system. The Trump Administration in particular have been quite adversarial and volatile. They have not rejected it but have sought to engage with it only when it appeals to the Trump Administration’s particular mindset. That makes some of these groupings quite bumpy. The South Africa G20 was quite difficult because a lot of energy was focused on whether or not the US was going to engage. We absolutely have a critical asset here in our position in the multilateral system, but we should consider those four things: fewer resources mean that we need to think about focus; we need to think about the type and form of reform that we are pursuing, and whether we have adequately dedicated time and resource to it; we need to think about the ways in which other countries are shifting and becoming more powerful; and we need to think about the attitude of great powers, particularly the US, toward those institutions.
The Chair: Richard Gowan, I wonder whether you have a view on what has just been said.
Richard Gowan: I agree entirely with Matthew and Olivia. I will preface my remarks by saying that I think the UK is fortunate that it has a deep bench of expertise on multilateral affairs, both in missions in places like New York and Geneva but also in the FCDO. I share Olivia’s concern that potential cuts to the FCDO will have an outsized effect on the sections dealing with multilateral affairs. None the less, London is blessed with a lot of knowledge and insight in this area.
At the strategic level, we have to be honest with ourselves. Successive UK Administrations, for very good reasons, have concluded that there needs to be a greater focus on European security and on the threat from Russia. That is clearly taking attention away from other priorities in both resources and political energy. There is certainly a feeling around the United Nations, the institution that I know best, that London’s focus on regional security means that it has less bandwidth and perhaps less political capital to put into crises in other regions.
Simultaneously, the multilateral landscape is altering very fast. China, which was still a relatively limited player at the UN even 10 to 15 years ago when Matthew was PR, has now become vastly more influential across a wide range of international debates. We see the countries of the so-called global South increasingly assertive and willing to question why countries like the UK have not necessarily come through on pledges on issues like development aid and climate change.
Olivia was very diplomatic, but the US has completely flipped in its attitude to multilateral co-operation and the US is now frequently a spoiler in many parts of the international system, although it is true to say that the Trump Administration have learned some hard lessons over the last year and are beginning to recognise that the UN and other international institutions offer them value in some spaces, like the delivery of humanitarian aid.
None the less, this is a very fast-moving picture. The UK’s sense of its national priorities is changing and the multilateral system is changing, and trying to work out how those fit together is definitely an interesting challenge, both for long-time UN watchers like me and for your committee.
The Chair: Thank you, that is very helpful. We are lucky to have a former member of the Government, Foreign Office Minister Lord Ahmad, who is going to ask the next question.
Q73 Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon: For the record, I declare my involvement with the International Communities Organisation as chair of the advisory board, and I am co-chair of the World Humanitarian Summit, part of the World Humanitarian Forum. It is good to see familiar faces again. I was also involved with the integrated review and the refresh that took place at that time. There was a look at multilateral engagement and our role. It is interesting that there was a shift, as Olivia will remember, towards more transactional bilateral relationships and engagement.
You talked of the Gulf. There were collaborations in areas of development, but do you think our approach to multilateral engagement is effective? Do you think we had a clear vision then and have one now? I think we have to be appreciative, or indeed critical, of both Governments of different colours. Olivia alluded earlier to the cuts in international aid. I know about that from living the experience, and when the final cuts are announced it is all likely to be pretty minuscule. There is a shift to multilateral funding. I would welcome your thoughts on that.
Matthew and I lived through some of that—the realignment of influence that we had, for example, on the ICJ, and we realigned ourselves to prioritise the election. I personally think that has been lost over recent years, and I would welcome some thoughts on that. Of course Richard brings UN expertise, but I will come to Olivia first.
Olivia O'Sullivan: To the question of whether we have a strategy, it would be difficult to have a clear, overarching strategy for the whole multilateral system beyond basic, logical things like, “We want to uphold it, we need to make sure that we have appropriate staffing levels, knowledge and resources, and we need to be clear what our goals are”. That is a logical strategy for almost anything.
It might be worth thinking about our approach to the peace and security institutions, our approach to the trade institutions and our approach to all the agencies involved in humanitarian and development efforts, and then, maybe somewhat separately, our approach to global public goods like health and climate—or some sensible way to divide that up. My fellow witnesses on the panel will know this better than me, but it is not just the FCDO but all kinds of government departments that engage with multilateral institutions on all kinds of niche issues, and I would not want us to seek a sort of totalising strategy and lose the nuance.
Having said that, the distinction I made earlier would be worth focusing on—the degree to which the UK is putting significant geopolitical and diplomatic effort into efforts to reform the representativeness of institutions, which is a desire for lots of countries in the global South, emerging middle powers that we want to have deep strategic relationships with. That is difficult to achieve and has been a long-running issue for some time. It is going to be very difficult to make particularly something like UN Security Council reform happen, with the great-power deadlock that we have.
On the other hand, we can look at operational reform—making things more efficient, reducing duplication and focusing limited resources well. As we all know, it is not just the UK that has cut its aid budget. US aid cuts and other European cuts mean that the UN itself, through the UN80 process, is looking at how to be more efficient and effective, and that seems more pressing. It also seems like an external pressure, which is one of the reasons that institutions actually reform. There needs to be some reason why that will happen. It would be difficult to have a totally coherent, clear strategy for the whole system. It might be worth thinking about grouping the system into the types of groupings that I mentioned and ensuring that there is clarity in the FCDO about what the UK is trying to do in those areas.
In terms of the functioning of the institutions, obviously we have our overarching foreign policy goals. We should use the multilateral system as a channel, just as we would use other diplomatic channels, but then we should be clear about what kind of reform we can realistically pursue, who we need to work with and whose job it is? How can we ensure that what is a very knotty political process is actually likely to happen? Who are our allies within those institutions? Which other countries care about this? The FCDO has gone through a long process of aid budget cuts, and they are relatively settled now. This would be a very good time to say, particularly on humanitarian development and aid, that we have made a logical choice to have a higher proportion of the budget in multilaterals. If you have less money then pooling it with others seems sensible to me, but then you have a real interest in making sure that those institutions are as effective as they can be. So who is driving that and where are we driving it? I hope that answered your question.
Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon: I am sure there are some other questions that could be asked as well. As I said, Matthew and I looked at those elections, our influence there and the partnerships we had. There was a review and it was effective. Over to you.
Sir Matthew Rycroft: Any country that has—what is it?—seven Prime Ministers in 10 years is likely to have seven strategies at least in 10 years, and any strategy that lasts a year and a half on average is not a proper strategy. That gets to a serious point about our democracy: after my 35 years in the Civil Service, I realised that our country does not have an effective capability to do long-term strategy.
The three things that every Government that I have worked in—this is not a party-political point—has struggled with are the long term, joining-up across different silos, and prioritising. Interestingly enough, the sustainable development goals, which I have mentioned, are a framework that meets all three of those difficult challenges on a planetary level. Surely it should be possible for a country like the UK, with the assets that we have, to come up with a national version of that. I co-founded something called the National Strategy Project, which was designed to do that—to create the capability to do long-term strategy. I hope this committee will support that project, because it would give our country the ability, first, to engage with the whole population of this country, and, secondly, to come up with a strategy that has the chance to last beyond the life cycle of any individual Prime Minister or Minister or indeed Parliament—to think further ahead than the electoral cycle.
I hope that the content of such a strategy would prioritise the multilateral system, partly, as Olivia says, as an instrument to achieving our aims but also as an end in itself. The UK should be the sort of country that sticks to our values, and one of our values should be the international rule of law, the ability to create trust between our country and our partners, allies and friends. The best way to do that is through a structure of international organisations, in many of which we would play a leading role. Within that, we could then prioritise, depending on which of those bits of the system work most effectively for us. To do that, you need, first, a co-ordination mechanism, as your question implies—I do not care where it is but I care that there should be one—and it needs to be effective enough, with the right metrics and data to make judgments about which bits are working and which are not.
When the Department for International Development was a separate department, there was an annual, or maybe a five-year, review of the multilateral system in relation to which bits of it were effective channels for the delivery of UK aid—again, not as an end in itself, but to achieve the outcomes that we wanted, whether in security, healthcare or education. Whatever those top priorities are, there is a significant role for the international multilateral system in delivering that. The UK must relearn how to invest in that system with expertise. Just as the FCDO has an emphasis on language learning and so on, we need to redouble that and put alongside it our ability to engage effectively with the UN and other crucial parts of the international system.
Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon: I turn to you, Richard, in the context of the UN. Perhaps I am being deliberately provocative here, but what happens within the UN stays within the UN. I remember—and I have the scars—many a UN resolution within the Security Council, with other ambassadors and Ministers slapping each other on the back, but then seeing the lack of effectiveness of the implementation of such a resolution in stopping a war or providing aid routes. On a general point, the diminishing role of ICAI, speaking to Matthew’s point, acted as a check and balance on Ministers as to how effective we were in a development context when it came to our own programmes.
Richard Gowan: It is important to distinguish between the technocratic strategy for making the UN system work better and the UK’s diplomatic strategy for exercising influence in the UN system. Yes, there is a huge amount of institutional work to be done around the UN and other international institutions to reduce duplication of effort, increase impact and adapt to new technologies that may make aid delivery, for example, easier. That is all interesting and important, and the UK brings a lot of value to those discussions.
That is slightly separate from the strategic question of why we are engaging somewhere like the Security Council, where we sit alongside countries with which we often have difficulties, such as Russia and China. Do we see a space such as that as simply a platform to condemn Russia’s breaches of international law or as a useful space in which to work out some deals and do some deconfliction with two powers with which we are frequently in some form of conflict? That is a really significant diplomatic and strategic question.
Similarly, do we think that we should use multilateral institutions as a space to strengthen bonds with middle powers and countries of the global South? Are we willing to give up some of our influence and some of our voting powers in certain spaces, such as the international financial institutions, in an effort to win good will from developing countries? That is a difficult political choice, too.
Sometimes, we take refuge in the technocratic. Sometimes, we reform a UN process and then, as you say, Lord Ahmad, it turns out that the UN process is not that important anyway. So we should keep an eye on the bigger strategic picture when it comes to our wider global relations.
The Chair: Can I just ask Sir Matthew something? You talked about somebody doing a study of strategy in government. Who is doing it?
Sir Matthew Rycroft: The thing I co-founded—the National Strategy Project—is outside government, but there are lots of strategy hubs in government as well. Within the terms of our electoral cycle, they work as well as they can, but we need something outside that cycle to look significantly longer ahead than the four-year or five-year parliamentary term. So we have created the National Strategy Project, which is its own thing. I am very proud to have co-founded it and would be delighted to brief the committee on it in whatever way would be most useful.
The Chair: I am certainly interested in it.
Q74 Baroness Fraser of Craigmaddie: Sir Matthew, you opened by saying that, for almost everything the UK wants to achieve, it needs to do it multilaterally. We know that the UK is a member of more multilateral organisations than anybody else. You have also highlighted the challenges of not having a long-term strategy, but any strategy requires evidence. I picked up on something you said—that there was a moment when DfID was reviewing whether or not the aims that UK wanted to pursue were being achieve. In your experience, do the Government have in any other area any method at all for assessing and gathering evidence of what is or is not being achieved through any of their multiple memberships? Is there any mechanism, even in the short term, for assessing why we are or are not a member of all these organisations? That would at least give us the roots of a strategy or a focusing exercise. Is there anything else that we can point to?
Sir Matthew Rycroft: I hope that it is happening somewhere, but I have not seen evidence of it. When I was in government, the best evidence of it that I saw was in relation to the spending of official development assistance. I have not seen it in relation to other spending internationally.
It is difficult to do because you have to create measurable factors then get on and measure them—and, ideally, stick to them over a period of time so that you have longitudinal comparisons available. You then need to make decisions on the basis of that evidence. Sticking with the DfID example, even within the UN family, parts of the UN work better than others. Humanitarian co-ordination is one of the good examples, not only because it has been run by a senior British person for a long time—there are other reasons why the humanitarian side of the UN works extremely well—but there are other parts of it where the UK chose to spend less of its money because it was less effective in doing things either bilaterally or through some other part of the multilateral system. There are choices available, but a Government who do not know what their overarching strategy is or do not have the evidence available between those different channels will end up flip-flopping and failing to create a sense of long-term engagement, which the questions so far have demonstrated is a current concern.
Baroness Fraser of Craigmaddie: Olivia, how can a Government collect such evidence? What would you suggest? How can we address the issues that we have been highlighting here across government?
Olivia O'Sullivan: That is a good question. Similarly, when I was preparing for this session, I looked at the DfID multilateral aid reviews, which are a good example of trying to understand this, recognising that all measurements are imperfect. Our strategic position—it is the right strategic position, I think—is that, if you are a middle power in the world, you have an interest in a functioning multilateral order, even if that multilateral order is deadlocked in parts and there are parts that do not work well and are subject to all kinds of geopolitical influence—of course they are; everything is political. This does not mean that it is then incumbent on us to ask, “Given the money, people and time that we are putting into these institutions, what are we getting out of them?” It is very difficult to do this, even in the narrow way in which DfID did it, where it looked at the ODA we are putting into institutions and what we are getting out of it, but you at least have an input and output that you can think about in that regard.
I am sure that this does exist in government but, a few times, this committee has said, “We think that we have the most memberships in multilateral institutions of any country in the world”. Understanding our relative funding, positionality and memberships would be good. A stocktake of that would very sensible, as would dividing up multilateral institutions along the lines I suggested or in other sensible ways. There needs to be some clarity, reflecting on Richard’s point about taking refuge in the technocratic, because you could get very lost in the question of whether this institution is functional on its own terms, which is an important question.
You would also need to ask, “What is our overarching goal for the health and functioning of the multilateral system and our overarching foreign policy goals? Are they being achieved through these routes?” You would want to understand our memberships and funding and how they compare with others; our goals for specific institutions; the way in which specific institutions serve our wider foreign policy strategy; at the highest level, the degree to which the UK is contributing to the health and functioning of the multilateral system; and whether we see that as critical to our strategy in the world. There are countries that clearly and increasingly do not see the functioning of the multilateral system as serving their interests or view it as a tool for different goals. We need to decide on the degree to which we are interested in combating that.
I hope that that is a helpful answer. It is a very good question. Particularly for the parts of the FCDO that are now spending a higher proportion of funding in the multilateral system, it would be a sensible process to undergo learning from what DfID did with the multilateral aid review. We should also ask, “What are other countries doing in and with the multilateral system, and what are they trying to achieve?” We should recognise that any reform goal or efficiency in that system will not be achieved on our own; we should think about other middle powers that have a similar approach to ours.
Baroness Fraser of Craigmaddie: Richard, sometimes it sounds as if the UK is more concerned with being a member rather than what being a member achieves. Do you want to give your thoughts on that?
Richard Gowan: First, I loved the statistic that we are members of more multilateral bodies than anyone else. I had not heard that before. I would say that it may be a little bit of a red herring, because there are hundreds and, by some counts, thousands of multilateral institutions, most of which are very small and do technical work, and we are not really aware of them. One of the joys of the multilateral system is that it is full of little hubs of experts who facilitate international co-operation on technical issues and, to some extent, provide what you could call the wi-fi of international life. We do not know that they are there and we do not know that they are facilitating technical co-operation between states, but they are essential to keeping international trade and international interactions going.
Earlier this year, the US decided to pull out of the International Tin Council. I do not think anyone without a specific interest in tin knew that there was an International Tin Council, but it probably does good work helping the tin industry to co-operate around the world. I do not think that this committee should be focusing on small technical bodies such as that. They will continue to rumble on. They will continue to do good work, regardless of what happens at the higher political level.
When it comes to looking at the really big institutions—the ones that cost money and the ones that take strategically important decisions—again, there is often a tension between what you can measure, what you can show will work and what is politically possible. To take one example that I have worked on, there are a lot of studies that show that blue-helmet UN peacekeeping operations are quite good at saving lives in aggregate, despite many horrible individual failures, but we have not been able to get the Security Council to launch a new blue-helmet peace operation for over a decade, because the P5 are increasingly divided. That is a matter of politics; it is not a matter of the statistics, even though the statistics are quite clear. There is a lot of friction there.
Finally, is the UK sometimes just sitting in a seat for its own sake? Yes, I think that is probably inevitable. Often, pulling out of an institution just for the sake of pulling out, which has been US policy of late, is also tokenistic and not really of great strategic value.
Q75 Lord Houghton of Richmond: The purpose of our questions is to try to elicit some solid recommendations that can beneficially inform the Government at the end of our inquiry. The next question is another one about the panacea of the search for strategy. Can I move it beyond that, because I personally do not believe that we are short of strategies? We are short of a Whitehall culture that operationalises strategies in a pragmatic and dynamic way. In many respects, multilateralism is not going to go away; it is just that the context in which multilateralism exists is changing, because it is now in a chaotic, disordered and more fragmented world. Is there, therefore, in search of a recommendation, a requirement within Whitehall to take what one might call a more operationalised statecraft—rather than diplomacy—to move this? I, as a CDS, was on the National Security Council for three years, and we still had agendas in slightly stovepiped ways, even though we thought it was some form of jointery. Just as, in a military sense, we recognise that we are at war with Russia, but it is just a war below the threshold of conventional kinetic exchange, is there not a sense in which we should be moving towards statecraft, which infuses the National Security Council to bring all this together in proactive ways of pragmatically pursuing our national interest? I am looking at Matthew, so I will come to you first.
Sir Matthew Rycroft: It is a leading question, but it is a very good one. The answer is yes: I think that would be a very good recommendation for this committee to make to the Government. The building blocks are there. Certainly, having the National Security Council itself is a good way of joining up defence, diplomacy, development and beyond.
One of the points that I routinely made on the Permanent Secretaries’ version of the National Security Council was that we were not always that good at joining up the international and domestic. Even the interface between the national security infrastructure, the domestic infrastructure and the international economic infrastructure has not always been as effective as it needs to be for a genuinely operationalised—to use your word—join-up of a of a strategy.
I would support the committee recommending to Government to sharpen up their ability to engage across all the different types of approach that the UK can have—not just defence diplomacy and development, but more broadly. I would seek to prioritise that. We are not trying to do that on everything, but we are trying to do it on the issues that matter most to our country’s future. I would have a very clear hierarchy of interests about what that future depends on. Clearly, the peace of our nation and our ability to withstand attack from an enemy have to be right at the top of that list.
Lord Houghton of Richmond: Perhaps we can hear a quick comment from Olivia and then Richard.
Olivia O'Sullivan: We are good at writing strategies and doing long PDFs—I have worked on that in government myself—but not good at implementing them. That is an absolutely correct diagnosis. Some of that gets to what Matthew said, which is that we have had a lot of churn in leadership. Naturally, leaders want to look again at strategies. The two things that are like sticks of rock as problems to the British Government are what Matthew said about struggling with long-term strategic thinking and struggling with going from writing strategies to implementing them.
It is a good moment now, following the aid cuts and with, potentially, Ministers and a Prime Minister in place for the remainder of this parliamentary term, to start thinking about the difficult nuts and bolts of implementation. Once the FCDO is through its restructure, now that the aid budget has been cut in the way it has, it will be a good moment to start thinking about whether we have any of these issues that we have been pointing out—where we have legacy seats or are part of a multilateral institution but we are not adequately resourcing or are not clear on what we want out of it, and whether we should, therefore, refocus. That would be very sensible. I will stop there, because I am mostly agreeing with you and what others have said.
Lord Houghton of Richmond: Richard, any comment?
Richard Gowan: I am not well-placed to comment on Whitehall process. I would simply make a small point, which is in line with Matthew’s call for us to be focused. I think that the UK sometimes gets a little bogged down in initiatives. Ministers want to come to the UN. They want to sit in the Security Council or the General Assembly and often they come with a personal initiative. I recall that there was one a few years ago about defending faith at some part of the UN system. To be quite honest, those initiatives tend to take up time, take up diplomatic energy and fizzle. I do not think that they contribute to the focused national strategy that everyone here is talking about. So, maybe it is not about having fewer seats but about using those seats in a slightly more parsimonious way around the multilateral system to achieve key national goals and not pursuing “nice to have” initiatives that do not really contribute that much to the big picture.
Q76 Baroness Blackstone: I want to come back to the issue of values and interests. At the beginning, Sir Matthew, you said there was no trade-off between the two. Perhaps I could start with you, Olivia, because you have not commented on that so much, but could you be brief, so that I can ask the other two to come in, too? In this contested world that we now live in, should we spend more time and effort on promoting our values? It could be on human rights, the rule of law or any other area that you want to pick out.
Olivia O'Sullivan: We should but, to pick up on Richard’s point, we should be cautious of the tendency to launch initiatives and to be declaratory about this without adequately considering the power and influence required to back up a defence of those values. That requires an effective multilateral strategy, precisely because of the trends that we have been talking about. The US is currently adversarial towards parts of the system—the US national security strategy referred to lashing its sovereignty to institutions that do not have America’s interests at heart.
We have a greater distribution of power in the world. Some 50 years ago, the G7 represented a significant proportion of global GDP and now it is much lower. There are other countries that are less practised. “Less practised” is perhaps the wrong phrase; they have less of the habit of using the multilateral system and multilateral institutions to deal with problems or regional issues. We need to understand that shift and get good at understanding the ways in which levers and processes are maybe slightly different from what we are used to. We are used to investing a lot in multilateral institutions and systems. Those are very important, but there are probably other things and other forms of diplomacy that we need to understand better in order to adequately stick to and amass the levels of power and influence that we would need to defend our values.
There are different ways to ask this question, because in foreign affairs it also means that you sometimes have to deal with countries that do not completely share your worldview in order to pursue a shared outcome. We always need to consider doing that and, in a world where there is a greater distribution of power and there are more influential regional actors, you need to consider coalitions of folks who are not as like-minded as the people we are traditionally used to working with or who do not as habitually work in the multilateral institutions that we are used to working with. It is just a question of balancing and understanding the ways in which the map of power is changing in order to do precisely what you said, which is to defend those values. Sorry, that was not succinct. I apologise.
Richard Gowan: First, I am afraid that the verb is “defend” rather than “promote”. We are at the end, sadly, of the period where countries like the UK are able to use forums like the United Nations to promote liberal values around things such as gender equality. We are very much on the defensive now and the priority is to hold on to many of the norms that we built up and not allow more conservative powers to eat away at those norms. It is very important for our international profile and just for the principles themselves that we continue to defend the causes that we believe in.
I fully agree with Olivia that there will be times when we have to balance that with working with countries that do not share all those principles. I mean, very frankly, there are now policy areas at the UN on which we are closer to China in our understanding of what is necessary than we are to the US. Although we are clearly not going to agree with China on many issues, especially around human rights, where there is common cause we should think about how we pursue that common cause with Beijing.
Finally, it is also worth remembering that it is not just the liberal principles of the post-Cold War era that are under attack; what is really under attack today is Article 2 of the UN charter, which prohibits aggression, defends sovereignty and defends territorial integrity. For a lot of UN members, after Russia’s aggression against Ukraine and the US operations in the Middle East, the big question is whether we can band together to defend those basic principles of the international system. We are on the defensive on a lot of levels.
Baroness Blackstone: Sir Matthew, last word?
Sir Matthew Rycroft: I agree that we should be careful about how we pursue our values. We should be able to engage with literally every country in the world, even those with which we fundamentally disagree about those values, but we have to know what those values are and be absolutely clear about what they are before deciding tactically how much to talk about them. To use an analogy, if an individual leader says that they are open to challenge and then the first time that they are challenged they demonstrate through their behaviour that they did not like that challenge at all and they are shocked, that is the end of their credibility as a leader. Similarly, a nation that says, for instance, that it supports, as one of its core values, the international rule of law, human rights or whatever, and then demonstrates through its actions that it is not consistent in those values, ends up with no credibility at all. We have to decide for ourselves which core values matter more than anything else to us and then uphold them.
Q77 Lord Bruce of Bennachie: I wonder if I could explore how our bilateral presence can inform our multilateral priorities. This is directed to Sir Matthew. I was there when we achieved 0.7%. I was there when the multilateral reviews were instituted. I saw the United Nations agencies very sharply reacting to the pressure that was put on them, but that was because we were the world leaders, but we are now nowhere in that sphere. That is a tragic shame and I weep for it, but that is where we are. The consequences of that are the merger of DfID and FCDO, which was very disruptive; the continuing cuts in staffing, with a 30% cut on the Foreign Office going through; and the systematic withdrawal of our presence across the world.
My argument is that we were told that the cuts in aid meant that we did not need so many diplomats on the ground, but is not the truth that we need just as many to do a different role—much cheaper—to make sure that the UK both projects our values in countries where we have connections and informs ourselves about their wishes? One of the concerns that I have about what we are doing is that we might be more interested in how our equals want to reform the system, rather than the aspiring countries looking to us as to how we can shape it. If we do not have a presence on the ground, we are not going to be able to be informed. I just wonder whether you feel that that is the case. On the basis of that, would that make it easier for us to say that that will be a factor in helping to shape our multilateral priorities, because we better understand our partners?
We just had a group of New Zealand MPs here and I wanted to ask them about this, but time did not allow. We have several British island realms across the Pacific, but we almost ignore them. We have almost abandoned them. They are very small, but strategically China is all over them, as it is all over Africa and Asia, and we are not there. My question is: do we not need to have a presence in reasonable numbers, cost-effectively, to ensure that the UK both informs its values and feeds back what the aspirations are of these countries? That might give us some degree of leadership in the world. I am going to come to you, Richard, but I wonder if I could go to Sir Matthew first.
Sir Matthew Rycroft: I very much agree with that point, Lord Bruce. In a nutshell, diplomacy is more cost-effective than development, and development is more cost-effective than defence. One of the reasons why the aid cuts are so short-sighted is that they will end up costing us a lot more in the long run, because somewhere or other, where there has been a reduction in not just UK aid but American and other types of aid, there will be consequences at some point. We do not know how or where or when, but at some point something will happen around the world—whether it will be a bit like Covid, 9/11 or something else, we just do not know. With the benefit of hindsight, in the future, we will look back and realise that those cuts to the aid budget were counterproductive to our own national interests, very selfishly, as well as for the countries involved. Among the most powerful voices for reversing those aid cuts have come from the defence world, where they can see that development is more is more cost effective than defence. I would add that diplomacy is even more cost-effective than development. For a very small amount of money, you can have an effective diplomatic service.
The UK still has an effective Diplomatic Service, including in New Zealand, but it is smaller and more stretched than it has been. I would hope that this committee would strongly push the Government to ensure enough investment in the Diplomatic Service, including in things such as language skills, expertise on the United Nations and other things, and the ability for people to really get under the skin of countries, which is what diplomacy is all about, not to promote and tell them what to do—to go to Richard’s earlier point—but to build those relationships and alliances with them so that they choose to do things that we would be comfortable with them doing.
Olivia O'Sullivan: I have a lot of sympathy for the Government in that resources are not limitless. I think we need to invest more in defence and trade-offs need to be made. But we are also at a time when, as a whole range of people have recognised, there are more emerging, active, influential middle powers in the world; our relationship with the US is becoming very difficult; and understanding those increasingly influential powers well, their aspirations and what they want, should be a feature of our diplomatic strategy and a feature of any strategy for multilateral reform, because we will not achieve any of that on our own. We need to understand what other countries which share some, even if not all, of our goals want too, because it is only coalitions of member states or countries sharing a similar outcome that can push for these kinds of reforms or outcomes that we seek—whether that is coalitions outside institutions or within institutions. You need that kind of connective tissue between countries.
It is an interesting feature of the UK strategy that we have sought to build deeper relations in the Indo-Pacific, and one aspect of that has been to seek observer status at ASEAN. My colleagues and I at Chatham House looked at this a bit for some work we did on the UK’s Indo-Pacific strategy. Just joining is step one—step zero. You need to understand an institution, the way countries and member states within it interact with it, what they want and what their aspirations are, to be effective. So I agree that it would be a mistake to just say, “We are a member of lots of multilateral institutions”, almost like an insurance policy against cuts and withdrawals elsewhere. You need to invest in your diplomatic understanding, your knowledge of those institutions and the countries within them to achieve the things that you want.
There has been a lot of talk about middle-power diplomacy and coalitions of middle powers. To do that effectively, you need to understand those middle powers and what they want, and make sure that you actually have shared interests with them. On our own, we are not going to get Brazil, South Africa, India or other countries to join us in serious joint diplomatic efforts unless we have a significant investment in understanding them.
Lord Bruce of Bennachie: The 30% cuts currently going through the FCDO are a drop in the ocean compared with the aid cuts. I mean, to me this looks like a really false economy. It is not a big goal and we are not going to have the people on the ground. I just make that comment. How do we use our bilateral presence to inform our multilateral priorities? Is that a legitimate part of it? How do we determine those multilateral priorities independently of that, as well as alongside that?
Richard Gowan: I would simply make the point that very significant decisions regarding the multilateral system are not always made in the big multilateral centres. China, for example, is very good at using its bilateral relations with Ministers in capitals in Africa or Asia to override what ambassadors are agreeing in New York and Geneva. I am sure Matthew experienced this. You can negotiate something with the African group in a UN centre, but then China will simply go country by country to the Prime Ministers and Foreign Ministers of the states involved and get them to change position. The only way that the UK can push back against that sort of bilateral pressure is if you are on the ground, if you are in those countries as well, and if you have relationships with those Prime Ministers and those Foreign Ministers. It is absolutely essential that we retain strong bilateral relationships, because otherwise a lot of our multilateral work will be pulled apart by China and others going through different routes.
The Chairman: Lord De Mauley has an important question to ask you.
Q78 Lord De Mauley: We have moved into the area of financial realities. Budgetary restrictions within our Diplomatic Service will necessarily entail some hard choices about which institutions, initiatives and programmes the UK can and should prioritise. In your view, what are the three most critical policy areas for the UK when it comes to multilateral engagement? Can I start with Richard Gowan, please?
Richard Gowan: We have to retain focus on peace and security. I think we have to accept that we are going to get less out of bodies such as the Security Council than we once did. But, in a dangerous world, it is important that we retain points of contact, such as the Security Council, with our rivals. That is number one.
Secondly, Matthew referred to the fact that the UK has a long history of investment in humanitarian agencies, and that is one area where there is a proven track record that international bodies can deliver in a way that no one else can. So we should definitely continue to invest politically and with resources in humanitarian assistance.
Thirdly, climate change has gone down the agenda politically in multilateral forums over the last few years since the Glasgow summit, but as we are all experiencing these horrible heatwaves, I think that we know that climate change is going to go back up the agenda. There is actually quite a lot of work to be done reforming the international architecture for addressing climate change, and we should be investing in that now. So the three things are peace and security, humanitarian aid, and climate change.
Where I think we should be very cautious and possibly ask whether we can disengage a bit is some parts of the development architecture, because some parts of the existing multilateral development architecture are effective; there are others which are probably no longer fit for purpose. That may be an area where some economies really are possible.
Olivia O'Sullivan: The question is about which groupings of institutions we should prioritise. I would say a word about trade and economic governance, not least because it is such an area of contestation and volatility. China’s role in the global economy, China’s use of subsidy, the US really shifting from what previously was consistent support for broadly open and free trade, I think that is a shift on both sides of the aisle in the US, and it has made parts of the WTO deadlocked and a real space of contestation.
The second question we should ask is: what can we do about that? It is good that the UK has signed up to the alternative dispute settlement mechanism in the WTO. There are also things we could be thinking about with groupings that we are either close to or members of, such as the EU and CPTPP, about the future of global economic governance. It requires a nuanced take on what we can actually achieve within the institutions, but on the issue, it is an area where there are a lot of countries outside of the US and China who really need a clear direction of travel and way forward. I am slightly drawing on some work by my Chatham House colleague, Creon Butler, who has written about the future of trade and economic governance in these terms.
I agree that the humanitarian and development agencies is an area. Trade and economic governance, I think, is critical because the UK is very exposed to open trade, it is this space of contestation and volatility and great power competition, and it is likely to really expose us to shocks if we cannot get it right. On humanitarian and development, there is a slightly different logic. To pick up on what Richard says, we have a lot of expertise. It is critical: we are likely to see more shocks from climate and more conflicts in the world, and there are things we could do that would be very effective as a leader of reform and pushing for effectiveness.
There should be some priority around global public goods that we are concerned are being neglected. Climate is one, global health may be another, given the way that the US is increasingly withdrawing from its hegemonic role in underpinning those things. I would tentatively pick those areas. I would not envy the task in government of thinking about what we then do not do, because inevitably there is an interest in everything, but we should also try to think about what we do not do. That is where I would start in terms of priorities.
Sir Matthew Rycroft: All the priorities mentioned so far find their place within the sustainable development goals framework, which is unsurprising because everything is connected to everything else. That is a framework for a holistic approach to all international action. The problem is that there are 17 of them, not three, and underneath the 17 there are 169 targets. Fortunately, they are summarised by five, and they all begin with P. Within the five, to answer your question, I would pick out the following three: the first is peace, which was Richard’s first point; the second is planet, which was Richard’s second point; and the third is prosperity, which was Olivia’s first point about the international economic architecture. The fourth and fifth pieces are people and partnerships, which you could argue underpin all of that. I would go with those three Ps as my answer to your question.
The Chair: Are there any areas that need new organisations?
Sir Matthew Rycroft: Technology moving so fast is a good example of how the whole world has to come together. We have to use some form of UN framework to regulate artificial intelligence and other things that will come next. On the whole, our ability to get our multilateral act together is slower than the tech revolution, so, if there were one additional area that this committee could push for focus on, in my view it would be technology, specifically the architecture to bring together competing worldviews on governance of AI and so on, so that there was a way for the whole world to choose between the US, Chinese and other approaches. That is much easier said than done but I hope that, with a bold initiative, our next Prime Minister could build on the success of our current Prime Minister in that area.
Q79 Baroness Prashar: My question is about the machinery of government. As you know, several departments engage with the multilateral organisations, and our previous witnesses have said that the approach of government departments is rather fragmented and there is no strategic direction. You have served in three different departments, Matthew—is that your experience? How can we get co-ordination up to speed to meet the new challenges?
Sir Matthew Rycroft: That is an ongoing challenge, and I very much agree with the thrust of the question. I mentioned earlier that I did not mind where the co-ordination hub was, provided that we had one and it was effective. As a general rule, the role of the Cabinet Office is to co-ordinate, so that is the obvious place. The problem is there are different parts of the Cabinet Office. Even within the secretariat part, normally one bit does national security-type things, another bit does domestic and quite often a third bit does international, economic and/or European issues. All three of those have to come together because everything is connected with everything else. People in this country feel the real impact of international issues through what we would call domestic issues, in our economy in particular, or through other pressures on society in the UK. It is an important job for civil servants to do all that joining up. I see that the Foreign Secretary has an initiative to explain foreign policy in terms of how it impacts British people, which is commendable, and I would encourage more of that. The short answer to your question is: Cabinet Office for co-ordination and the Foreign Office for leading on the international aspects, the diplomacy and the development, but bound in with the whole of the Civil Service, not just the national security-facing parts.
Baroness Prashar: Olivia, you were in the Cabinet Office. Do you have some views on this?
Olivia O'Sullivan: I broadly agree. It has been a positive trend that the Government have built more of a hub for trying to think coherently about national security at the centre in the Cabinet Office. Since the creation of the National Security Council back in 2010, it has been staffed up more, with a bigger national security secretariat in the Cabinet Office. That is helpful because you need a brain in the middle to bring in all these touchpoints, not just from the FCDO but from the trade department, energy security and net zero and the Home Office. As we mentioned earlier, many of these departments deal with and touch on the multilateral system. If there were to be a co-ordinating brain, and that is a good and important thing, then that growing hub in the Cabinet Office is a good place to for it to be.
Baroness Prashar: Richard, do you have anything to say as an observer?
Richard Gowan: No, I defer to those who have been on the inside. I do not have anything to add.
Q80 Lord Lamont of Lerwick: We have heard very little criticism on the whole of multilateral institutions. One can be a believer in multilateral institutions but at the same time believe that they should be subject to examination and criticism. I wonder whether Matthew would tell us what view he takes, for example, of UNESCO. One witness told us it is not worth pulling out for the sake of pulling out, but the United States has twice withdrawn from UNESCO—not just once but twice—and there have been arguments about the cost effectiveness. Which institutions do you think could be subject to some pruning or criticism? Surely this is something that should get our attention, not be swept under the carpet.
Sir Matthew Rycroft: It absolutely should. I very much agree, Lord Lamont, and I think the UK should position ourselves as the permanent member of the Security Council most in favour of reform, not just of the Security Council but of the whole UN family. That is a relatively low bar, because most of the other permanent members are not at all interested in reform. The UK should make a virtue of that and, from a position of broadly supporting the international structure, should absolutely demand radical reform. The parts that are least effective in terms of cost effectiveness include UNESCO, UN Women, UNFPA—some of these things may no longer exist but they did when I was ambassador to the UN, and they generally scored at the bottom of that DfID review that we have already discussed for their ability to deliver the outcomes that matter most for the UK. That should be our lens: we should be insisting on reform. If the institution is unable or unwilling to reform quickly enough then we should leave, not in a fit of pique but because we have finite amounts of resource and we should spend them in areas that we think will do the best collective good, including for our national outcomes.
Lord Lamont of Lerwick: Some of the American critics have referred to some parts of the UN machinery becoming politicised, particularly on human rights. One does not have to agree with all they say, but is there not some point in this and some merit in their criticism of human rights organisations within the UN?
Sir Matthew Rycroft: Every part of the UN is politicised in some way or another. One of the challenges for the current Secretary-General, whose term is about to end, is that 10 years ago, when we selected him, and that was at the time that I was there, there were great hopes that he would be the reforming Secretary-General, but he had to be the Secretary-General for all 193 countries, and a good number of them, including the two most important countries, did not want the same sort of reform that we wanted. As a result, sadly, he has a poor track record of reform in his time there. He has done wonderfully on lots of other things, but he has not reformed the UN family as a whole quickly enough or radically enough to keep up with the demands.
The Chair: As someone who once ran an international organisation, I know that it required 9/11 to get any form of reform into my organisation. We hope that we do not have to do that again.
Q81 Lord Alderdice: Olivia, do you think that the British public see multilateral organisations as connected to the UK’s national interest in their lives? If not, is that a problem? Is there a need to raise greater public awareness of multilateral organisations?
Olivia O'Sullivan: That is a good question. I would not want to get out beyond my expertise in terms of polling data or focus groups on what the public think. My instinctive answer to that question is that it is probably not at the forefront of people’s minds. Any work that we do on foreign affairs in general suggests that, in and of itself, people do not tend to prioritise it, but when things go wrong they do.
There are a lot of reform priorities that we have named in this discussion today. To the previous question, there are plenty of criticisms to be made about duplication, inefficiency and poor performance in the multilateral system. The top focus of the UK Government should probably be to improve that and to improve our strategic focus to make sure that multilateral institutions are enabling us to achieve our diplomatic goals. In a way, the proof of the pudding should be in the eating in terms of the public’s engagement. To me, getting the public interested or excited about the UN particularly is perhaps less material than being really clear about the things that we want to achieve in the world, and that these institutions are a channel for that. That is my personal view of that kind of thing.
Q82 Lord Darroch of Kew: I hope that Matthew will be allowed to answer the previous question too, as it is quite relevant to his time in New York.
Next year, 2027, sees the appointment of a new UN Secretary-General and, as it happens, the UK’s chairmanship of the G20, so this is a two-part question. First, how much influence can we exert over the choice of UN Secretary-General, and how exactly do we exert that influence? Secondly, on the G20, what is your assessment of the value of that grouping? In a broad sense, if you were advising the British Government, how would you say they should use the presidency of the G20 next year?
Richard Gowan: I say to Lord Alderdice that, as someone who was young once, I am glad that I spent none of my youth thinking about the UN, and I would not want to inflict it on today’s young people.
As we understand it, the race for the Secretary-General remains very open. The US does not have a preferred candidate, nor does China. The UK should engage quite actively in vetting the current candidates and, if necessary, looking for alternatives. The UK can then get very close to whoever is chosen and essentially hold that person’s hand, offering political advice and ideas on reform through their first 100 days in office and beyond. The next Secretary-General will need precisely the expertise and the ideas on reform that have been somewhat lacking, frankly, inside the UN system of late. The UK, if it can get close to the successful candidate, can probably whisper good ideas in their ear. There is a real demand for change in the system, and accessing the next Secretary-General is a good opportunity to drive that change.
The G20 is not what it was back in the late years of the first decade of this century, but it matters a lot to many of the middle powers that Olivia has referred to, as a space where they can have a voice on international trade, climate, and other issues. From talking to colleagues from Brazil, South Africa and elsewhere, I know that they really hope the UK will organise a G20 that listens to their priorities—after this year’s US presidency, which is clearly not going to be particularly sympathetic to the concerns of the middle powers. There are already quite good contacts beneath the surface between the UK and some of those middle powers about what the G20 should be about in the UK. Looking at questions of sustainability, fairer financing and addressing the concerns of the global majority is a good opportunity for the UK to show both leadership and respect for other countries in the multilateral system.
Lord Darroch of Kew: Chairman, is there a minute for Matthew, just because he was part of the UN that chose Guterres last time round?
Sir Matthew Rycroft: Selection of the UN Secretary-General is my “Mastermind” specialist subject, but I will do a very short version. It happened in 2016 and will be happening again this year in order for the new person to start in January next year, 2027. The UK is well placed as a permanent member of the Security Council to ensure that the Security Council recommends to the General Assembly the best possible candidate to reform the UN, and to influence the process that increases the chances of us finding that person.
I would be strongly against any regional rotation. Lots of countries think it is the turn of one particular continent or another, but that narrows down the pool of brilliant candidates. I would actively encourage female candidates, as we did 10 years ago, because otherwise you are discouraging half the world’s population from putting themselves forward—there has never been a female UN Secretary-General before. I would ensure as much transparency as possible so that the candidates were really tested, not just on their manifesto but on how they would deal with the real challenges ahead. We did a bit of each of those things 10 years ago, and I hope the UK can lead the way in doing even more of them this year.
The Chair: Sounds good. In fact, the committee has been invited tomorrow to meet one of the candidates—the ambassador of Guyana, Carolyn Rodrigues-Birkett—who is in London. The committee has been asked to meet her at very short notice.
I say to Richard that I am the same age as the United Nations: it was born in 1946 and so was I, and so was Donald J Trump. You will have to draw your own conclusions from that. Anyway, we are deeply grateful to all three of you, because you have imparted a lot of new and good information to us in our search for what to recommend to the British Government that they should do about multilateral institutions. Thank you so much for attending.
