In a TikTok world it’s rare that three big foreign policy speeches come along all at once, all trying to chart a new course for the UK in a more perilous world, and all written by someone christened David.
But it says something for how foreign affairs dominates so much political thinking currently that speeches this week by David Cameron, the foreign secretary, David Lammy, his shadow, and David Miliband, Labour’s non-resident foreign policy guru, all required attention.
Security, Cameron even predicted, will be on the ballot paper this election.
Each speech may have had a personal, self-serving purpose. Cameron is halfway through his redemptive one-year community service as foreign secretary and is trying to show how to make the best of the mess he bequeathed Britain through his Brexit referendum. Lammy, at the rightwing Hudson Institute in the US and buttressed by an article in the prestigious Foreign Affairs journal, was taking out an insurance policy, seeking to reassure Republicans of his Atlantacist credentials and that the special relationship would survive a Trump-Starmer partnership. Miliband was seeking to inject some urgency into Labour’s somewhat fuzzy plan for post-Brexit cooperation on foreign and security policy. The speech may also have served as a reminder to Keir Starmer of the virtue of a big foreign policy player operating out of the House of Lords.
As a triad, the speeches cohered in at last throwing off the past bluster of Global Britain in favour of a more modest assessment of where UK influence lies. “Realism is not defeatism – having less influence than the global superpower does not mean having no influence at all,” Cameron said. Miliband argued that Brexit’s illusion “was that there is a world where are our destiny depends only on our own decisions”.
They accepted that isolationism and populism were on the rise and had domestic causes that needed addressing if foreign policy was to function. Failing to control borders properly and leaving too many people in too many places behind, cut off from the uneven benefits of globalisation, lay at the roots of isolationism, Cameron argued. Lammy said he got America First and the disaffection of the working class. Miliband warned that “divisions about international engagement that have marked US history are to the fore again”.
They all saw a darkening world. Miliband described a flammable, runaway world in which a lot more players compete transactionally for wealth, power and influence. Cameron said: “This is a world more dangerous, more volatile, more confrontational, than most of us have ever known.”
All three identified the risks of this multi-aligned world being confronted by a hard-edged axis of authoritarianism, even if they might disagree whether China is already irredeemably a member of that axis, something Cameron claimed was so. Miliband warned of a “brewing confrontation of a fundamental kind between China and America”. Lammy was more cautious, saying only that there was a risk that China might be joining an anti-hegemonic coalition “with Russia and perhaps Iran”. But he acknowledged that China was where America’s resources and energies would be devoted, and that this was a legitimate demand of any Donald Trump presidency.
All three gave a version of a wake-up call about Britain responding to this unforgiving age, with Cameron from back inside the machine the most exasperated. Cameron, already suffering the frustrations of office, bemoaned the west’s collective “defensive crouch”.
“Returning to frontline politics, what stands out to me is how many reasons are found for us not to act,” he said. “It too often feels as if the fundamental change in the world has not yet been met with a fundamental change in how many in the free world are thinking and acting. Pursuing our interests effectively means revisiting approaches to foreign policy born of good intentions and ask if they are truly fitting for the world of today. Prizing consensus over action. Not speaking out if it might upset others. Avoiding risks.”
But the consensus fell away on two points: where to find allies and how to treat allies.
Cameron offered a smorgasbord of alliances, old and new, saying the UK needed to lead in the competition to cooperate. As for the EU, he offered only “the best possible relationship, not as members but as friends, neighbours and partners”. In the modern Conservative party, this is about as far as any politician can go.
Miliband, by contrast, suggested that “the shared future of the people of Europe, in and out of the EU is being written now”, and proposed a full-on security partnership with Europe, one that is expansively defined, covering defence, climate, terrorism, pandemics and even clean technology. The immediate step would be a high-level non-binding political declaration between EU leaders and a UK PM, setting objectives for a fully fledged set of mutual commitments.
Anton Spisak, a former UK government official credited with helping Miliband draft his speech, says there are genuine forces driving such a relationship, “most evidently the need to maintain/step up support to Ukraine in the face of uncertainty in the US, and the associated need to achieve scale in defence with constrained fiscal resources.”
Some ask if Miliband is acting as a licensed outrider for Lammy or a semi-detached agitator frustrated by Labour caution.
Speaking to a US Republican audience, Lammy unsurprisingly advertised his love of America, and not Europe, though he also said Europe’s security would be Labour’s number one foreign policy priority. But his Foreign Affairs piece is crystal clear that he is broadly on the same page as Miliband, saying he backs a security pact with the EU “that drives closer coordination across a wide variety of military, economic, climate, health, cyber and energy security issues – and that complements both parties’ unshakable commitment to Nato, which will remain the foremost vehicle for European security.” Miliband out of office has the liberty to sketch in detail.
And finally there is the issue of wayward allies. For all Cameron’s talk of boldness, when asked if the UK would follow Joe Biden’s example and withhold arms licences from Israel the foreign secretary largely excused himself. He argued that the UK, unlike the US, does not provide large-scale state-to-state weaponry to Israel. He also said the humanitarian aid position was improving, something aid agencies contest. Lammy equally refuses to say if weapon supplies should be halted. Although both men insisted human rights and the national interest could be happy bedfellows, this example suggests otherwise.
It took Miliband to make the point that the world is in a battle between accountability and impunity, and that those who advocate the upholding of rules should abide by them. Put more simply, he said: “There is no need for more 1,000lb American bombs in Gaza.”
