Jonathan Powell's view of the world to come
Tony Blair's chief of staff wrote a column in the New Statesman on how a future Labour government could rebuild Britain's place in the world; I have a few issues
I don’t in general share my politics with The New Statesman, that creation of the Webbs which emerged from the Fabian milieu. Since the late 19th century, the Fabian Society had been associated with The New Age, a radical weekly newspaper begun by Christian socialists, but dividing lines had begun to appear on issues like female entitled. By 1912, a leading group of radical leftist thinkers and authors had formed—ironically enough—a private company, The New Statesman and Co., the directors including Sidney and Beatrice Webb, George Bernard Shaw, Edward Whitley and Henry Harben. The sixpenny weekly review of politics and literature was launched on 12 April 1913 with Clifford Sharp as editor, its purpose to promote progressive and socialist ideas and possessing a “tone of didactic and brisk common sense” in the words of its own history.
The Staggers, as it became affectionately known because of its crises of funding, ownership and circulation, has nonetheless survived for 110 years now, and some of the Left’s most impressive intellectuals have sat in the editor’s chair: Paul Johnson, Richard Crossman, Anthony Howard and Ian Hargreaves. Jason Cowley has held the position since 2008, and although his own politics lean leftwards, he stated that he wanted to use the magazine to explore ideas from across the spectrum.
That broad-mindedness, as well as a certain earnest purpose, is one of the reasons I read the Statesman. So open is the publication that even I have written for it in the past. And I know, and like, some of the staff: Rachel Cunliffe, the associate political editor, used to supervise my weekly column at City AM, and Pravina Rudra, comment editor and columnist, performed a similar task for my articles in The Daily Telegraph for a while. Policy and politics correspondent Zoë Grünewald was a clerk in the House of Commons for a time, which deserves some professional solidarity on my part, and, while our instincts are poles apart, I am enjoying Andrew Marr’s rebirth as an opinionated political editor after his Babylonian, if lucrative, captivity at the BBC.
The current edition of The New Statesman is a look forward to the world in which Labour is in government. There are some really good articles—go out, buy it, or subscribe and read online—and one which especially caught my eye was “The challenges and threats of the world to come”, by Jonathan Powell. Very much my bailwick, I thought; and Powell is a serious, heavyweight figure. The first Downing Street chief of staff (1997-2007), he created and defined the role, and was superb in it, but perhaps did so in a way so completely suited to his relationship with Tony Blair that no-one has really managed to make such a success of it since, as I explained in The i Paper a few weeks ago. Powell spent a few years as a journalist before joining the Diplomatic Service, and was a Foreign Office man of 15 years’ standing when Blair, newly elected leader of the Labour Party, asked him to become his chief of staff.
Powell spent 12 years with Blair, successful in part because of his brain and his experience, but also because of the close and trusting relationship he had with the prime minister. The former diplomat proved calm, discreet, dedicated and punctilious, and a party which had been in opposition for 18 years welcomed all of those qualities as well as his tribal and cultural understanding of Whitehall. It is no accident that he was the only aide to stay the course with Blair, from the dawning of the “new day” in May 1997 to Blair’s departure in June 2007, and he was involved in everything, though particularly distinguished for his work on the Northern Ireland Peace Process.
None of this is damning with faint praise. Powell is a wise and experienced elder statesman now, recently turned 67, and has written three books on various aspects of modern statecraft and governance. His article on the future world he hopes Sir Keir Starmer will inherit is well written and (of course) thoughtful and informed; nevertheless there are some parts I disagree with or where I felt he couched his thoughts in partisan terms and let the reins of reality go a little loose in his hands. That’s understandable in a journal of the Left and an issue dedicated to looking ahead to a potential labour government of 2024, but it can’t also expect to be uncontestable. So I want to look at those in some detail, which may inspire others to look at foreign policy, an area at which, with the exception of Brexit, few have paid a great deal of attention.
Powell identifies the dominant factor in post-Brexit foreign policy as the spirit of the Little Englander, which, he believes, is the hallmark of the “extreme Brexiteers”. For these people, Powell has no scorn fierce enough.
They do not want Britain entangled in foreign alliances that might reduce our sovereignty, nor can they bring themselves to accept the reality that pooled sovereignty is a strength in confronting global challenges. In their view, Britain should go it alone.
This is, I’m sure, true of some members of the parliamentary Conservative Party—we can each suggest some names—but I don’t think it can seriously be maintained that the broad sweep of Brexit opinion rejects all foreign alliances: to the right of the political centre there is barely any opposition to our NATO membership, or to the Commonwealth, or to our (forgive me for using the phrase so early on) “special relationship” with the United States. On the last point, Boris Johnson concluded an agreement with President Biden known as the “New Atlantic Charter” in June 2021, one of the purposes of which was to reorientate the UK after our departure from the European Union. This was reinforced in June this year when Rishi Sunak agreed a UK-US economic partnership dubbed the “Atlantic Declaration”.
But Powell, old buzzard that he is, also raises the idea of “pooled sovereignty” and its indispensibility in creating alliances. It is hardly for me to tell Jonathan Powell that he is wrong; but I think I can say that the idea of pooled sovereignty is at least contentious, and has been since at least the early 1970s when Edward Heath was pressing the UK’s application to join the European Economic Community. Powell is no doubt sincere in his belief in pooled or shared sovereignty, but many, and I am one, would strongly refute the idea that such a thing is possible. National sovereignty is, surely, the right to govern oneself as a political unit, and that right must be subordinated to no other, otherwise it is not sovereignty.
Before Brexit, the Eurosceptic Conservative MP for Billericay, John Baron, attempted to explain this to the House of Commons. Rejecting the idea that we pooled our sovereignty in the EU as in many international organisations, he observed caustically:
Only the EU can force us to take in economic migrants despite the strain on our infrastructure, override our laws, and foist burdensome regulation on our companies, despite the vast majority not even trading with the EU.
This was self-evidently correct. When we acceded to the EEC on 1 January 1973, Parliament ceased to be the supreme law-making body for the UK, since the principle of primacy of European legislation applied in certain areas: that is, if there was a conflict between national law and that made at an EEC (later EU) level, it would be the supranational European law would take priority. This practice was developed over time by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), and was a logical and straightforward aspect of membership of the bloc.
But there was no doubt that national sovereignty had been not “pooled” or “shared”, but diminished, lessened, compromised. Indeed, the union’s website talks plainly of areas “where Member States have ceded sovereignty to the EU”. For most members, this was not controversial, not was it the subject of much unhappiness. It was only in the UK that proponents of membership, knowing full well the compromises it involved but also fully aware of the widespread sense of unease at giving away sovereignty, tried to develop this impossible idea of pooled sovereignty.
This was not perceived as an issue to be hidden away at the time of the original negotiations in 1972. Dr David Owen, then still a Labour MP, said in the Commons:
Of course that means that one gives up sovereignty… it involves compromise. It involves not always getting one's own way. It is, however, foolish to try to sell the concept of the EEC, and not admit that this means giving up some sovereignty. Of course it does, and I believe it rightly does. I believe this is one of the central appeals of it.
Here the young Owen was not talking of “pooling” or “sharing” sovereignty, but “giving it up”. That was inherent in EEC membership.
Not everyone will agree with this, though I have still to understand the notion of sharing sovereignty which does not demand a wholesale redefinition of what sovereignty means, but my point is that it is a little cheeky, to say the least, of Powell to assert this as if it were settled fact or agreed constitutional truth.
Powell goes on, rightly, to enumerate some of the very grave challenges facing both the UK as a nation and the global community more generally at the current time: globalisation, which has done so much to raise the standards of living of the poorest in the world and encourage economic prosperity, is in retreat, and instead we are inclining again towards protectionism. Powell remarks dismissively that “the UK risks being crushed in the dance of the elephants as China and the EU respond” to protectionism. But he is surely right when he points to the threat from “a revanchist Russia on the borders of Europe and a rising China”.
He goes on to say that isolationism, with which he unfairly identifies Brexit, provides no answers to these challenges, and I would agree. It is, however, a little misleading to go on to assert that “Labour has always been internationalist”. It is true that it was Clement Attlee’s post-war Labour government which was a founding signatory to the North Atlantic Treaty, creating NATO, in April 1949: our representatives were the legendary foreign secretary Ernest Bevin, and our ambassador to the United States, the former professor of moral philosophy at the University of Glasgow and wartime mandarin Sir Oliver Franks. Bevin, a staunch anti-Communist and steeped in the socialism of the British trades union movement, was a prime mover in the creation of the alliance, seeing it as essential to keep the US engaged in the preservation of European security and defence against the menace of expansionist Soviet ambitions.
But Labour has not “always” been internationalist. When Michael Foot narrowly beat Denis Healey to the Labour Party leadership in 1980, he ushered in a short period of radical left-wing policies which culminated in the famous 1983 general election manifesto, The New Hope for Britain, memorably described by Gerald Kaufman as “the longest suicide note in history”. (In fact it was only 39 pages, not so very long, but suicidal it very nearly was.) This policy platform included unilateral nuclear disarmament: Polaris, at that time the UK’s submarine-based strategic nuclear deterrent which had operated around the clock since 1969, would be decommissioned (although the timescale was not wholly explicit), and a Labour government would not proceed with its replacement by the Trident system, which the Conservatives had announced in 1980. Nor was that all: Foot was committed to requiring the United States to remove its nuclear-armed cruise missiles from RAF Greenham Common and RAF Molesworth, which had become operational in 1982, and would not allow any further nuclear weapons to be based in the UK.
The manifesto went further still. At that point, the Left still regarded the EEC as essentially a cartel for bosses, and the manifesto promised that a Labour government would withdraw within the lifetime of that parliament. It proclaimed:
The European Economic Community, which does not even include the whole of Western Europe, was never devised to suit us, and our experience as a member of it has made it more difficult for us to deal with our economic and industrial problems. It has sometimes weakened our ability to achieve the objectives of Labour’s international policy.
Particularly incompatible with membership were Labour’s policies on economic growth, full employment, exchange controls and the regulation of overseas investment. The manifesto did add that “our decision to bring about withdrawal in no sense represents any weakening of our commitment to internationalism and international co-operation”, but it is hard to say that a government which would have scrapped its nuclear weapons, with the disputes that would cause within NATO, required its closest ally to withdraw some of its arsenal from the UK and left the Common Market was really committed to “internationalism” when compared with the status quo.
Powell suggests that an incoming Labour government in 2024 will need to explain why its foreign policy matters, “and the party has already begun to draw the connection between re-engaging internationally and delivering security and prosperity in the UK”. We will need “influence” to achieve the objectives which Sir Keir Starmer has set out, and I’m in lock-step with him when he says that “Foreign policy is not some add-on; it is fundamental to meeting the domestic challenges Britain faces.”
However, again, Powell sets up the straw man of Brexit being the same as isolationism, which it manifestly is not. This summer, the government signed the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), and will become a formal member when all parties have ratified the move. This trade agreement of (so far) 11 members, including Australia, Mexico, Malaysia, Japan and Canada, is one of the largest free-tradec areas in the world and accounts for 13.4 per cent of global GDP. China has lodged a formal application to join, but current political circumstances make that an unlikely outcome, but membership is also being sought by Taiwan, Ecuador, Costa Rica, Uruguay and Ukraine, while South Korea, Thailand and the Philippines are touted as potential applicants.
The UK has also joined the AUKUS Indo-Pacific security pact with the US and Australia. Formed in September 2021, it includes cooperation on advanced cyber mechanisms, artificial intelligence and autonomy, quantum technologies, undersea capabilities, hypersonic and counter-hypersonic, electronic warfare, innovation and information sharing. It also makes provision for Australia to acquire nuclear-powered (though not nuclear-armed) submarines.
There is no question that one of the transformational issues for post-Brexit Britain would be a free trade agreement with the United States, and it is equally undeniable that progress on such an arrangement has been disappointingly slow, for many reasons. When Biden and Sunak met in Northern Ireland in April this year, it was made clear that negotiations would not begin until at least late 2025. However, work has very recently begun on a “foundational” trade agreement; it is not a full FTA and will not be recognised by the World Trade Organization, but it is hoped that it will apply to digital trade, labour protections and agriculture, and is a step in the right direction. So too have been the memorandums of understanding negotiated with six individual US states by Penny Mordaunt when she was minister for trade policy in 2021-22; these aim to remove market access barriers and increase trade and investment opportunities for UK and US companies, and negotiations continue with another five states, including the major economies of California, Texas and Florida.
My argument here is not that everything is rosy. We remain in transition after Brexit and will be so for some years yet, which I, certainly, regarded as inevitable, a feature rather than a bug of our departure from the European Union. But I do think it is possible to argue persuasively that the UK has not pursued an isolationist course nor has it ignored the possibility of international agreements in the wake of Brexit. Powell can absolutely propose that as a political debating point, but it is not especially potent, and it is certainly not revealed truth.
It is fair for Powell to say that our relationship with the EU remains one which is in flux, and that the Integrated Review of 2021, Global Britain in a competitive age, as well as its 2023 “refresh”, Responding to a more contested and volatile world, do not capture a mature and multifaceted approach to the 27 EU Member States who remain on may different levels close allies and partners. Of course there are still strains in our relationship with the EU. I examined one of these disputes, over tariffs on electric vehicles, in CapX recently, and I think there is more surprise, disppointment or perhaps performative horror than there should be when we clash with the EU. In political terms—because the European Union is, and its predecessors have always been, political structures—I openly and without rancour accept that the European Commission must try to make every accommodation we have with the EU as disadvantageous as possible. It cannot allow us to advertise benefits from leaving the EU, and that is a legitimate political priority.
There is a peculiar tendency in the British media to present EU institutions as if they pursue high-minded and virtuous approaches to relations with other organisations and countries, while the UK is depicted as the most cynical, unprincipled and opportunistic interlocutor. But there is no hierarchy of virtue. We are all fighting our own corners; but we must also keep in mind that, for all the freedoms of the Single Market, the EU is in outward terms a deeply and instinctively protectionist institution. It does not regard as the ultimate goal a world without barriers or obstacles to trade and enterprise. I may—I do—regret that, but I absolutely acknowledge the reality of the situation.
The last point proposed by Powell which I want to examine is the absorption of the Department for International Development, a creation of the Blair landslide of 1997, by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in September 2020. Powell describes the “forced merger” as a “chaotic mess” and argues that it:
Has undermined the leading role Britain has played in development around the world and, as elsewhere in the government in the past few years, led departments to focus on their internal plumbing rather than on how we can support the Global South.
Powell is by no means the only person to have opposed the merger. The junior ministers in both departments had all had double-hatted briefs since February 2020, so the decision to merge them was inevitable. But in fact it was a re-merger: DfID’s predecessor, the Overseas Development Administration, had been created in 1970 and was a self-contained fiefdom within the FCO, with the exception of a period of independence between 1974 and 1979; but the ODA too was the successor one of Harold Wilson’s 1964 creations, the Ministry of Overseas Development (ODM), initially under Barbara Castle. ODM was an institution forged from the Department of Technical Co-operation and the overseas aid functions of the Foreign Office, the Colonial Office and the Commonwealth Relations Office, which between them dealt with relations with foreign countries, Commonwealth member states and the remnants of the UK’s colonial possessions.
This complicated and inconsistent tale proves one thing, which is that there is no inherent virtue or advantage to international development policy being integrated into or separate from the foreign ministry. In the United States, aid has been the responsibility of the US Agency for International Development (USAID), separate from the State Department, since 1961, although it is an agency headed by an administrator rather than a federal department with a cabinet secretary (although the current USAID administrator, Dr Samantha Power, has been made a member of the National Security Council). Germany also has a cabinet-level department; France has an independent agency overseen by a ministerial committee; Australia delivers overseas assistance through its Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade; as does Canada through its Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development, known as Global Affairs Canada, though the minister of international development sits in cabinet; India’s aid programme is controlled by units within the Ministry of External Affairs; the Japan International Cooperation Agency is an independent administrative institution under the aegis of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
If there is no one predominant organisational basis for delivering international aid and assistance, why was there such fierce resistance to DfID being moved back into the FCO? After all, DfID’s functions are overseen by a dedicated minister in the FCDO, the minister of state for international development and Africa, and that minister attends (but is not a formal member of) the cabinet; the incumbent, Andrew Mitchell, a veteran of the Major and Cameron administrations who had even been a parliamentary private sector to ministers in the Thatcher government, is widely respected across the political spectrum for his expertise and experience in development. Nor was the merger undertaken without purpose. The aim was to make policy across government more coherent and joined-up:
An opportunity for the UK to have even greater impact and influence on the world stage as we recover from the coronavirus pandemic and prepare to hold the G7 presidency and host COP26 next year [2021].
The resulting ministry would encompass “all the tools of British influence”.
This apparent organisational efficiency underlay, I think, one of the objections to the unification. Three former prime ministers publicly opposed the notion: Daviod Cameron worried that it would result in “less expertise, less voice for development at the top table and ultimately less respect for the UK overseas”, though why this should ipso facto be so was not immediately clear; Gordon Brown described it in typically doom-laden terms as abolishing “one of the UK’s great international assets”; while Sir Tony Blair, who had separated development from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office after 18 years, called the plan “wrong and regressive” and said that establishing a standalone ministry in 1997 had allowed the UK “to play a strong, important role in projecting British soft power. It has done so to general global acclaim.”
These objections reflected two issues. The first, simply, was that DfID had dwarfed the FCO in budgetary terms, the former having around £15 billion while the latter barely spent more than £1 billion. The UK’s development experts had established (and enjoyed the status of) a very high reputation in their field, which they worried would be lost if they were folded back into a plain foreign ministry. Meanwhile, some of the aid charities and NGOs verged on the histrionic. Christian Aid said the move “threatens a double whammy to people in poverty, and to our standing in the world”, while Save the Children spluttered that it “threatens to reverse hard-won gains in child survival, nutrition and poverty is reckless, irresponsible and a dereliction of UK leadership”.
Each side was saying the same thing, in different words and with different emotions. If the aid sector talked about”dereliction of leadership” and the government referred to granting aid “without any reference to UK interests”, what each side meant, and disagreed on, was the harnessing of aid policy to wider governmental priorities. For hard-nosed practitioners of realpolitik, spending necessarily finite aid and assistance in ways which would advance the UK’s wider foreign and security priorities; while for high-minded charity workers and others, the unification would result in “less respect for the UK overseas” and decisions on aid “shouldn't be contingent on what we as Britain can get out of it—we must have a clear distinction between our aid budget and money spent on British interests”.
I’ve tended to regard this sanctification of aid spending with some suspicion. Of course the crudest examples of using development assistance as a tool of foreign policy left a nasty taste: UK funding for the Pergau Dam project from 1988 had been linked to a £1.3 billion sale of aircraft, warships and other equipment by British Aerospace and GEC to the Malaysian government. This ‘arms for aid’ linkage was regarded as too cynical, too direct a causal link, and, after two parliamenary inquiries, the Queen’s Bench Division of the High Court had found the arrangement unlawful. This was the precedent which the great and the good of international developmeny regarded as unacceptable.
Perhaps I’m too cynical. But I would suggest that UK aid is necessarily finite; even if we return to our target, set in 2013 but temporarily put aside in 2021, to spend 0.7 per cent of our GDP on international aid, there will always be many more worthy recipients of our assistance than we can possibly give, and so we will find ourselves making subjective and finely balanced judgements on what programmes we fund, what requests we fulfil and what areas of the world we prioritise. That leads to an ugly truth that there will always be people to whom we deny aid. All of that being so, I don’t think there is anything terribly wrong with taking a broader, holistic view of where we award aid. Need should be the primary factor, but as well as efficiency, effectiveness and value for money, I would not lose sleep at night if we also considered our own strategic interests and those of our allies, so long as this consideration did not distort grotesquely the final decisions.
I hope this essay does not seem like a modern day version of the Catiline Orations directed towards Jonathan Powell. I think his article in The New Statesman was thought-provoking and bore the signs of his experience and learning. But it was a political piece, and it contained some tropes and accusations about the governments foreign policy which I have encountered on a number of occasions, I felt it was legitimate to push back. It makes this piece necessarily rather negative, as I have highlighted a number of points of dispute, but I prefer where possible to strike a positive note. I would say only that I hope to return to foreign policy issues, and in the future I will no doubt find opportunities to be more constructive and optimistic. But sometimes, for a while, you simply need to run a good defence. I hope I’ve done so here.