We gather here today on the eve of a vote in Scotland that could tear the United Kingdom apart after 300 years together, and the question for us—whether in Scotland or in foreign policy—is: are we proud of ourselves? Are we serious?
We look around the world, from Kabul to Tripoli, from Damascus to Baghdad to Kiev, and we see the wreck of international foreign policy over the last 20 years. So lamentable is that wreck that it is hardly worth holding the House’s attention to list the fiascos that we see today. The Afghan economy has gone into a 40% contraction since January this year, and the two Presidents are in a stand-off on the basis of ethnic divisions, and it has not even been raised seriously in this House. In Tripoli, the Misrata militia have been dabbling their toes in the American embassy swimming pool three years after our intervention. In Iraq, following a surge on which the US Government spent $420 billion and deployed over 100,000 troops a year, we are now confronted with the re-emergence of something even worse than General Petraeus confronted in 2007. And people have spoken much more eloquently than myself about the fiasco we currently face in Ukraine.
So lamentable is this problem that we should not do what it would be tempting to do, which is to learn the lessons of this and talk about our mistakes, look at the limits of our knowledge, our power and our legitimacy, and confront the fact that we are not good enough in this country at seeing what we cannot do, what we do not know and what, frankly, people do not want us to do. So lamentable is the situation that instead of emphasising humility, we in fact need to rediscover our confidence and our energy. A time has come, in fact, to rebuild, and rebuilding the seriousness of this country means acknowledging failure and regaining public trust by showing people that we have learned the lessons of where we went wrong, and then investing in our institutions.
My right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Rushcliffe (Mr Clarke) pointed out that on the National Security Council it is quite difficult to know what is happening in the world, and that is not very surprising because, despite our grand protestations about how we are going to remodel the world from Mali to central Africa, in fact our capacity—the number of people in defence intelligence within the Foreign Office—is pathetically poor. The entire extra capacity committed to Syria was a single SMS1 officer, a D7 and a D6. When the crisis broke out in Russia and Ukraine, we discovered that the United Kingdom had cancelled its Russian analysis section in the defence intelligence service and we had to move the South Caucasus officer over to Crimea. When I and my hon. Friend the Member for Stratford-on-Avon (Nadhim Zahawi) turned up in Kurdistan two weeks ago, we discovered a single consul general who did not have the staff or the resources to visit any of the refugee camps or make it to the front line.
We need to get out of a situation in which only three of our 15 ambassadors in the middle east speak Arabic. We need to understand that our Foreign Office has a budget half that of the French Foreign Office and considerably smaller than the amount we commit to the winter fuel allowance. Before any of us go around talking about our brilliant strategy for Ukraine or Iraq, we should begin rebuilding those basic institutions: we should challenge the Government, and challenge the Opposition, to commit immediately more resources towards policy and analysis and understanding of what is going on on the ground, because there are no options for Ministers and there are no scenarios we can discuss in this House unless we understand the situation on the ground.