Queen's Speech

My Lords, it is a privilege to open the days of debate ahead on the humble Address. I want to begin with some of my own tributes. My first tribute, echoing that of the Leader of the House yesterday, is to the outgoing Leader of the House, now the acting Leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition, the noble Baroness, Lady Royall of Blaisdon. I am thinking of my time on the Front Bench opposite, when she led your Lordships’ House through some intensely difficult moments with the greatest skill. We all owe her our thanks. We also extend our deep sympathies to her for her tragic loss. I also salute the work of my predecessors in the role I am now fulfilling over the past years—it is been about nine years now—including the noble Baroness, Lady Kinnock, who I am happy to see in her place and who was doing my job before; the noble Lord, Lord Malloch-Brown; and, particularly, the noble Baroness, Lady Symons of Vernham Dean. They all set very high standards which I shall be hard pressed to follow, but I will do my best. For the sake of my own career prospects—which, I admit, are extremely limited—I should also pay tribute to the two ex-leaders of the opposition parties, now the Leader and the Deputy Leader of the House, who have come together with such grace and speed, sacrificing the joys of opposition for the chill exposure of government. I acutely realise that from now on I shall have to pick my words with exceptional care, otherwise I may attract some distinctly uncoalition-like rebukes from my noble friend Lord McNally about my general abilities, qualifications and grasp of events, if not more. I am pleased to be dealing with foreign affairs alongside my new noble friend Lord Wallace of Saltaire. To claim that we have always seen eye to eye on such matters as the future development of the EU and the Lisbon treaty would be stretching credulity beyond limits, but he is a towering authority on international issues and it is a privilege for me to be working with him. Finally, I am glad that my long-standing colleague, my noble friend Lord Astor, has been appointed Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at the Ministry of Defence and will, of course, be winding up at the end of today’s proceedings. We are witnessing a huge change in the way states and Governments face and interact with each other, and it is desirable now that Britain should be at its most agile, innovative, ingenious and constructive at operating within this quite new international milieu. First, while the Cold War is obviously decades behind us, with its grim threat of mutual nuclear annihilation, which some of us grew up with, the post-Cold War phase has brought new dangers of nuclear proliferation. That is why my right honourable friend the Secretary of State, Mr Hague, announced this morning, after only a few days in office, a highly significant departure in the UK’s strategic weapons policy—namely, by publishing for the first time the full number of nuclear warheads in the UK stockpile. In future, our stockpile will not exceed 225 warheads. The Government will also launch a review of the UK’s nuclear posture; that is, its so-called "declaratory policy". None of this will affect our national security, but it should all help considerably to boost the climate of trust between nuclear and non-nuclear weapon states which has been so signally lacking. All of this further affirms the full commitment of the coalition Government to the current Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty review going on in New York while we speak, where we are playing a strong role and which my honourable friend the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State is attending. A second major factor that we must now recognise is that the axis of international power and influence is shifting, not merely to the so-called "emerging powers" such as the BRICs—that is, Brazil, Russia, India and China—about which I shall say more in a moment, but also to increasingly significant players such as Turkey, Egypt and Saudi Arabia and to groupings such as the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation. The growing significance of the G20, alongside the G8, also clearly reflects this trend. Thirdly, when it comes to our military strength—our hard-power capability—the shield of Achilles has today to be raised not only against visible enemies but also against the cowardly viciousness of the roadside bomb and other murderous methods. At the same time, the work of the military is increasingly and inevitably intertwined with reconstruction and civil repair. The Taliban and its Pashtun backers are one vivid and present example of these challenges. The wind-up speech of my noble friend Lord Astor will focus on the many specific questions and issues related to the Afghanistan war which I know are on your Lordships’ minds and on which we intend to give regular and comprehensive reports to Parliament on a quarterly basis. Successful power deployment today—that is, power to protect and promote our people, national commercial interest and prosperity and yet at the same time uphold our values and maximise our contribution to global peace in a heavily interdependent age—therefore rests overwhelmingly on diplomacy in all its forms. That means operating not just through government-to-government relations but also, increasingly, through every kind of sub-governmental, non-governmental, professional, informational and commercial linkage. It demands a continuous spread of cultural diplomacy and soft-power deployment throughout the globe and the international institutional network. This dense mass of connections is the new global network in which we have to operate. What people call our enlightened self-interest in this new context is no narrow affair. It involves being an effective force for good in the world, fighting poverty, meeting or adjusting environmental and climatic threats as well as seeking the very best for our own nation and society. At government level, it requires an intricate web of diplomatic relations with nations large and small, conducted with the maximum mutual respect and underpinned by a highly active, informal latticework of connections. Of course, we want a strong, close and frank relationship with the United States of America—to use the words of my right honourable friend the Secretary of State—and, within our own region, with our fellow European Union states. We want to use and strengthen the combined weight of the EU wherever we can. However, in the international landscape, the channels for power and influence will lie also in our bilateral network links with a whole variety of new players and not only with and through the main transatlantic duo.