Is this Labour’s foreign office future?
Obviously, if you are University College London’s “Policy Lab” and your latest publication is called The World in 2040: Renewing the UK’S Approach to International Affairs, you must find ways of making it sound more interesting.
Hence, perhaps, several prepublication news stories yesterday on the BBC and in the Left-of-centre press about how the report wants to take down “colonial era” pictures from the Foreign Office.
Interviewed on the Today programme, its co-author, Moazzam Malik, told of a senior Irish official who attended a Food and Nutrition Summit gathering in the Foreign Office and found that “towering over the meeting was a portrait of Lord Trevelyan”. This had disturbed the Irishman because Trevelyan had “tried to limit the UK’S financial exposure to the Irish potato famine”.
This story did not sound quite right to me. First of all, there never was anyone called Lord Trevelyan. I think Mr Malik meant Sir Charles Trevelyan. Second, I don’t see why a portrait of Trevelyan would have been in the Foreign Office, since he was a Treasury official. I checked with the FCDO, but they did not get back to me.
More important, I question the story’s premise. A reminder of our past is rarely offensive, even if it touches on a controversial subject. I am sure British officials visiting Dublin are confronted with representations of Eamon de Valera, Wolfe Tone and other Irish heroes violently hostile to British rule. Why object? This is history. History helps one understand other countries as well as one’s own We need more of it, not less.
(By the way, the history of Trevelyan himself is well worth studying because of the ambiguities it brings out. The truth has more nuance that the myth that he was an anti-irish racist. Besides, he was also the co-begetter of the modern, impartial civil service, through the “Northcote/trevelyan reforms”.)
Anyway, the report wants to replace the Foreign Office with something less “anchored in the past”. The “future-oriented” name it suggests is the Department for International Affairs or possibly Global Affairs UK.
Instead of serving the Foreign Secretary of the day, this new body would have “core objectives and long-term mandates” with which no here-today/gone-tomorrow ministers could interfere. The report thinks the traditional idea of diplomats working in Britain’s interests is much too “malleable”. Instead, the department should concentrate on things like international institutions and climate change.
The authors admire our National Security Council because it works across departments, but complain that “it looks at the world through a security lens”, as if this were a fault in a body devoted to security. It wants an NSC expanded to include almost anything you can think of. “We will need to help build up thematic and regional expertise to help the UK navigate wicked [is that word a misprint?], complex challenges in a shifting geopolitical landscape,” it proposes, vaguely.
The report is thin, occasionally even witless. One might ask why it is getting media attention. The answer is that it is being briefed as the blueprint of a Starmer government.
Mr Malik’s co-author, Tom Fletcher, is a former ambassador in the Middle East, who is much used by the BBC to say rude things about Israel. He is being touted as Labour’s national security adviser.
The former cabinet secretary, Lord Sedwill, happy to blow with the wind after his time under Boris Johnson, has written the foreword.
If this document really represents the future, then we shall see an administration even more in hock to officials, lawyers, devolved administrations and what it calls “delivery” from “semi-autonomous agencies” than our present mess. These people will be working hard to “face our historical legacy head-on” and consider “reparations for colonialism” and for “historical industrial emissions”, not wasting their time working for British interests.
Our grandson, who is four, is
very interested in wildlife. His parents show him clips of Sir David Attenborough describing predatory animals. When he plays with his plastic toys in the bath, he imitates Attenborough, right down to the dramatic pauses, but making up his own scenario, for example. “The crab makes a fearful pinch [pause] but the dolphin makes it through,” or “The seahorse approaches [pause] but the lobster has no idea.”
It is a tremendous compliment to Attenborough’s broadcasting skills that he can so impress such a young mind; but it does also prompt the thought that the great man is so distinctive and his style so predictable that AI could now take over all Attenborough functions, thus allowing him to retire and saving the BBC a great deal of money.
History helps one understand other countries as well as one’s own. We need more of it, not less If this document represents the future then we will see an administration even more in hock to officials