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Lord Ricketts: Lord Speaker's Corner

16 February 2024

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Former top diplomat Lord Ricketts speaks to Lord McFall of Alcluith about the conflicts in Israel/Gaza and Ukraine, the impact of Brexit and more in this episode of Lord Speaker’s Corner.

In this episode

Peter Ricketts, an expert in international relations and now a crossbench member of the House of Lords, has previously served as the UK’s ambassador to France and representative to Nato. He has been chair of the Joint Intelligence Committee, was the UK’s first national security adviser and the most senior civil servant in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, where he was a diplomat for 40 years.

‘I think the lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan are rather that you have to think about the longer term consequences. What is the political settlement you want to get to by your military intervention? And it's proved elusive in both Iraq and Afghanistan.’

In this new interview, Lord Ricketts shares his expertise on a wide range of developments around the world. He explains how the change in international approach by countries such as the UK and USA have resulted in a more aggressive stance by Russia, Iran and China on the world stage. He also reflects on the likely outcomes of the war in Ukraine and the conflict in Gaza.

‘You begin to lose the challenge that the civil service ought to represent.’

Lord Ricketts also offers his thoughts on politicisation of the civil service, what inspired him to work in the Foreign Office and the impact of frequent turnover of ministers in government departments.

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Lord Speaker:

Lord Ricketts, it's a real pleasure to have you here at Lord Speaker's Corner. If I'm correct, you did a BA at Oxford. And then since then, man and boy, you have been a Foreign Office servant. So could you tell me what inspired you to go into the foreign service and what has kept you there? I mean, you're a real diplomatic individual.

Lord Ricketts:

Well, thank you very much for having me on Lord Speaker's Corner, and I'm very relieved I don't have to stand on a soapbox. Yes. In my university years I didn't think very much about my career. I had already started to love going abroad. I went to France with a pen-friend at the age of 16 and I just loved it. The difference, the exotic sense of being in another country. And so I was always clear I wanted to do something linked to international affairs.

And my third year at university, my friends started all to do serious sounding things like join banks or join accountancy firms and so on. I began to think I better think a bit about what I want to do.

So I actually applied to the Foreign Office through the civil service exam and the BBC for their news traineeship, and I got offers from both. Such was life in those days where people got job offers more easily than they do now.

And I think I went to my tutor and I said, "I've got these two offers, which shall I choose?" He said, "Young man, I think the Foreign Office would be a more structured career." And so I went into the Foreign Office without a great deal of thought, and I was 42 years there, and I loved every minute of it.

Lord Speaker:

Good. And what is it that makes diplomacy exciting and a rewarding career?

Lord Ricketts:

Well, the world is such an interesting place, and there are constantly differences between countries, tensions between countries. But understanding how other countries work... Speaking a language is an enormously rewarding thing because you can't really understand a country unless you can speak the language, which means also understanding the culture behind the words in the language.

Now my only foreign language is French. I don't think there are such things as hard languages and soft languages. All languages are hard to learn. But I think the connection with other people, building bridges, and opening up opportunities, trying to damp down tensions, it's constantly fascinating. Whether you are serving in an embassy abroad or in the Foreign Office at a desk in London, I found the substance of the work always fascinating.

Lord Speaker:

How does the balance between civil servants and ministers work, particularly the churn that there is in ministers?

Lord Ricketts:

If you are going to be a civil servant, you have to accept the deal, which is that you will carry out the policies of the elected government. If you're somebody with extremely strong personal convictions, you're probably not the right person to be a civil servant, because in the end you carry out what the government of the day decides to do. Occasionally that can be challenging, but very few civil servants in the end take the other alternative, which is to resign rather than carry out a policy. But it's become more and more a problem, the rapid churn of ministers.

If I think back to 40 years ago, many ministers did years and years in the same department. Cabinet ministers might be there pretty much through a full parliament. I worked closely with Geoffrey Howe when he was Foreign Secretary, and he did a long stint as Foreign Secretary, and we've had ministers in the Foreign Office like David Lidington who did many years as minister for Europe.

It's got much, much shorter now. And the problem is you are constantly going back to square one, briefing a new minister, introducing them to contacts around the world, and then they change. So the friction, the cost in terms of resource and effort in the civil service of constant ministerial changes is very high.

Lord Speaker:

I remember Chris Mullin telling me when he was a junior minister in the Foreign Office, and he was responsible for Africa, the African leaders complained that every year there was ministerial change, so it didn't allow the ministers here to build up a knowledge of the country enough, and the African leaders felt that they were being short-changed in that.

Lord Ricketts:

I think that's absolutely right and it applies all around the world. Human contacts take time to build. Trust and confidence has to be created, and if it's a new face walking through the door every time, you essentially go back to square one.

So it is much better if, especially in the jobs that require you to understand Africa or the Middle East where the human relationships are so important, I think it's much better if ministers can stay two or three or four years and really get to know people.

That's what we do with ambassadors. When we send ambassadors to countries, normally it's now four years, three years if the country is more difficult, perhaps a year if it's really tough like Afghanistan or Iraq. But the norm is four years, and that's the time where you make the connections and then you can use them and benefit from them.

Lord Speaker:

Do you think it's important that civil servants speak truth to power with their ministers, and has that changed over the years?

Lord Ricketts:

It's absolutely essential that ministers get frank and honest advice, otherwise they'll make bad decisions. And that's what civil servants want to do. But it does require the ministers to create the environment where people feel safe in saying unwelcome things, bringing messages that the minister may not want to hear, that the proposed policy won't work. So we are suggesting you do something else.

And it's up to ministers to set the tone, and it has got more toxic in recent years. I mean there's been a bit of a culture of people finding that their advice is leaked into the newspapers if it's not welcomed from somewhere in the political echelon, whether special advisors or ministers. That's incredibly damaging to trust and confidence. And if ministers reject advice because it doesn't fit with their preconceptions, also people then go back into self-preservation mode and will only tell ministers what they think they want to hear.

So it's in ministers' own interest to create the climate where frank advice can come, it can be challenged, but people will never feel inhibited from saying what they honestly think.

Lord Speaker:

Has there been over time, politicisation of the civil service?

Lord Ricketts:

I think to some extent there has. The civil service is a very strong and deeply rooted institution, and the ethos is neutral. People will adapt to the government of the day and follow their instructions. But the trend by ministers to want to choose their own senior officials, the permanent secretary who runs the department and perhaps the people immediately in the private office around the minister, the more that happens, the more ministers want to pick and choose someone who they think will work well with them, the more political things become.

And at the extreme end of that spectrum, there's the US example where when a US administration changes, 3,000 or 4,000 officials change because they are political appointments. We are light years away from that here, but any trend towards ministers wanting to pick the official that they think will be most comfortable for them is in my view a dangerous trend, because then you tend to get people picking those with the same kind of outlook and view. You begin to lose the challenge that the civil service ought to represent.

Lord Speaker:

The essence of the House of Lords is to scrutinise and ensure good law. What do senior civil servants and diplomats add to that?

Lord Ricketts:

It was a new experience. And to be absolutely honest, I didn't realise how much sheer hard work goes on in this place to scrutinising draft legislation. A lot of it comes from the House of Commons in a pretty, let's say, unfinished state and requires a great deal of hard work.

And I fully admire the talent available on all the benches in this House. For example, on the crossbenches, the non-political Lords of which I'm one. We have judges, we have barristers, we have extremely experienced people who've worked with legislation in their previous life, who know what works and can see the risks of what could not work. And therefore, they propose amendments, and they spend hours, and evenings, and nights discussing it, advocating for it, and from time to time getting support for it, sending back to the Commons.

That's a new world for me. I watch it carefully. I try to study some of the bills that I'm particularly interested in and vote when I get the chance. I have not actually got involved in proposing amendments, partly because my life is a part-time peer. I have other activities outside the house. I'd started them before I was given the privilege of coming here. And so I can never be absolutely sure that I can be there on a Tuesday evening when some important stage of legislation is reached.

So in fact, I've found my mark more in the work of committees than in the process of legislation, which does require members of the House of Lords to be pretty available to adapt to the calendar in which legislation goes through. So I've been rather more observer than an active participant. But I've been very, very impressed by the quality of scrutiny that goes on because of the range of experience we have in this house.

Again, it's been a surprise to me, a very welcome surprise to find that you have leaders here in all different walks of life who have had fascinating lives outside this place and bring that to looking at legislation. I think it's an irreplaceable role actually.

Lord Speaker:

We have very serious situations in the world now geopolitically, whether we're talking about Ukraine, whether we're talking about Gaza, or whether we're talking about Rwanda, which has been through our House this week. Some would say that the unelected House of Lords really shouldn't be involving themselves in this. What's your answer to that?

Lord Ricketts:

I think we need in this country all the expertise we can bring to bear in helping the government of the day navigate this very dangerous world. As you say, we've got multiple crises going on simultaneously at the moment. The government have to cope in all sorts of areas. Rwanda is a rather special case, because they've chosen that as the place where they want to remove asylum seekers as part of their plan to reduce small boats. There are many strongly held views on that around the House. I personally doubt that that will act as much of a deterrent.

But where it comes to the war in Gaza, or the war in Ukraine, or the strikes against the Houthis in Yemen, I mean we have in our House many former Chiefs of Defence Staff, other distinguished military leaders. We have people, of my own background, National Security Adviser, Foreign Office, Cabinet Secretaries.

These are people, we've all of us lived through multiple crises in our lives, and I hope that we can help to bring to bear some of that expertise both in the debates and in the committee work that we do. And my own committee, the European Affairs Committee, which I'm now really fortunate to be chair of. We are just completing a report on the implications of the war in Ukraine for how the UK and the EU work together. And we've got a lot of fascinating evidence that we'll be producing in a report shortly.

That's the kind of thing where we've got the time perhaps to look at different angles that busy ministers and senior civil servants won't have that time. So I hope that is at least some help.

Lord Speaker:

You were chair of the Joint Intelligence Committee just before 9/11. You stood down and then you went to Nato during the Iraq War. How have these issues affected Britain's standing in the world?

Lord Ricketts:

Yes, I chaired the Joint Intelligence Committee for a year. That's the place where the intelligence agencies bring their assessment, their raw intelligence, their reports, and then we put them together into an assessment. We balance out all the various bits of information coming in, intelligence, news reports, reports from ambassadors around the world, into one assessment that goes to ministers. And that's always been a very respected process.

Actually I jumped from that across to the Foreign Office for two years, and I worked very closely with Jack Straw through the run-up to the Iraq war and actually the outbreak of the Iraq war, which is a period of high emotion and some difficulty in terms of squaring one's loyalty as a civil servant to the huge moral pressures that were around in the run-up to the Iraq war.

And I think in those periods, Britain was seen as a major country in terms of trying to deal with international crisis with the Americans as well. Much criticism of the decision to follow America into the invasion of Iraq, and there were many hesitations around it at the time, but Tony Blair decided he would do that. He had parliamentary support to do it. In the end, it turned out badly.

And that and the bad experience in Afghanistan I think has really knocked confidence in the US and in the UK about the idea of intervention in other people's wars in the sense of sending ground forces and potentially long-term commitments there.

And ever since Iraq and Afghanistan, ministers here have held back from that. There's been no great public or parliamentary support for it, which tends to mean that the authoritarian states and the more reckless states push forward, if they sense that the West has pulled back from that.

So one of the reasons I think we have such an unstable world is that the US, Britain, and others have stepped back from the very direct and interventionist approach which they took in the period of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Lord Speaker:

Was it a signal to the rest of the world regarding Iraq, and Britain, and America's position, that the ethics and immorality of diplomacy was lessened?

Lord Ricketts:

Yeah, I think it was certainly a lesson that the decision was taken in the short term after 9/11. First, certainly Tony Blair had a burning conviction that there was too much of a risk in letting Saddam Hussein have what he thought were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Turned out they weren't there. Not enough thought was given to the longer term.

And I think this is always a problem, particularly in democratic countries where all the impulse, all the pressure is for short-term decisions, immediate responses, and that crowds out time for thinking about the longer term. And I think the lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan are rather that you have to think about the longer term consequences. What is the political settlement you want to get to by your military intervention? And it's proved elusive in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

And in subsequent conflicts, I think western countries been much more cautious about intervening. And they've tended, if at all, to use airstrikes as they did in Syria and now against the Houthis in Yemen, but not commit ground forces.

But that does leave the world without the international arbiter role that the Americans played for half a century after 1945. And there, you see the authoritarian countries pushing forward. Russia in particular in Ukraine now, China flexing its muscles, countries in the Middle East more willing to go their own way. Iran feeling, I think unconstrained. And that's part of the reason we are facing such a world of disorder at the moment.

Lord Speaker:

And the Iraq war, the link between Iraq and Al-Qaeda, do you think that there was something to that by the US and the UK going ahead with that war?

Lord Ricketts:

I personally don't think there was ever any evidence of a link to Al-Qaeda. That was part of the case that the so-called ‘neocons’ made in Washington. I don't think we ever found any evidence for it.

I think Tony Blair's feeling was that after 9/11, he couldn't afford to leave a leader like Saddam Hussein in control of what he thought were weapons of mass destruction. And therefore, the risk of going into Iraq and dealing with these weapons was less than the risk of leaving Saddam Hussein alone.

That was a historically wrong decision. I think it was made for good motives. I don't think the intelligence was accurate. I don't think it was really tested enough with the rigor it should have been.

And for civil servants, that was a difficult time. I was then the job of political director in the Foreign Office with Jack Straw. I remember coming to work on a Saturday morning. There were a million people demonstrating against the war, and we all knew war was coming very closely. Jack Straw and I had spent six months trying to get UN resolutions, which would either have given Saddam Hussein pause or at least given us the legal base to act. And we didn't get them.

I decided I wasn't going to resign in terms of conscience. I thought that in the end, the government had parliamentary approval for what it was doing. But there were people who were concerned. I remember hosting a meeting for staff in the Foreign Office where people could air their problems, discuss things, test whether senior officials like me had thought about the consequence. It was the only time in my career where I've seen people really actively struggling with their duty to support the government as civil servants and their moral uneasiness about what was going on.

Anyway, that is now history, but I think it'll be a long time before the US or the UK launch a major war of that kind without the most careful scrutiny.

Lord Speaker:

Simon McDonald has been in this room, and he mentioned about Brexit, and his views on Brexit are known now that he was opposed to that. But he informed me that he had a meeting with his staff in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, a whole range of views on it. But it helped gel them together and helped them understand even more the distinction between civil servants with their views and a neutral civil service. Does that still prevail?

Lord Ricketts:

I think it was a testing time, but yes it has. And I think in my own department, I know so well the Foreign Office, I think genuinely, people would've had views as citizens. It doesn't mean that because you've spent a lot of time working in Europe, you're necessarily hugely pro-European. But people accepted that this was the decision taken in the referendum, whether the referendum, it was right to call it or not is another matter. And it was their job to do the best they could to implement it in a way that promoted Britain's interests effectively. So I think people were professional in their approach.

I think it was difficult. I think to be an ambassador in a European Union country after the Brexit vote would've been very tough. I retired in early 2016, so I missed it by six months. But to have had to explain to all my French contacts and friends what Britain was doing would've been difficult.

But that's what a civil servant diplomat is paid to do. Now I think, we're in much better territory where everybody is focused on moving on from where we are and trying to do the best job we can for the UK in the circumstances seven years after leaving the EU where we need to be minimising all the barriers and the obstacles.

But I think in the months after 2016, the civil service was under real pressure. Yes, people must have had questions. In the end, I think everybody decided the right thing was to try and work with the government to pull it through.

Lord Speaker:

The rules based international order would seem to have been damaged, particularly after the Iraq war. What advice do you have for governments, for ministers, to try and ensure the revival of that?

Lord Ricketts:

You're quite right. The international order, which was never perfect, came into being in 1945 with the UN after the Second World War has been unravelling, partly because of the failures in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the pullback that we've seen from America.

But if the authoritarians thought that they could now exploit a vacuum with Putin launching the war in Ukraine, with Xi Jinping flexing his muscles in the South China Sea, with terrorists launching attacks in Israel, well actually they've been shown to be wrong, because what the Ukraine invasion has done is bring America back to leadership of European security. They've done more than anyone in terms of arming Ukraine, of supporting them economically. They've moved forces back to Europe. Nato is stronger and larger than it was before, more focused on keeping the peace.

So I think the Western institutions, US and its allies have performed effectively on Ukraine. And the crisis in the Middle East is extremely worrying. It's gone on very long. The toll of civilian casualties is very high, but which country is doing most to try to broker a solution? It's America.

And so the Americans are back in that role, which they in the end are the only ones, the indispensable nation to try and bring Israel together with the Palestinians, and see there has to be a better way than simply a security response to the Palestinian issue.

No other country can do that. China's not doing anything. Russia's certainly not. And all the many non-aligned countries who sat on the fence in the Ukraine war chose not to condemn Russia, certainly not support sanctions. They're not doing very much either to try to bring tension down, reduce the violence.

I think we do have a real lesson to learn though, that those non-aligned countries when we went to them to ask for support, tended to say, "Well actually, you invaded Iraq, so why are you now saying we should condemn Russia for invading Ukraine? You haven't been very interested in our issues." In Africa, you mentioned earlier, on climate change, you haven't been funding that. You haven't been spending the development assistance we need or worrying so much about the crises on our doorstep. So this is very hypocritical for you to now expect our support.

I think we have to think seriously about that. We have to spend more time talking to these important non-aligned countries, India, South Africa, Brazil, Indonesia. Why have they felt that this international order, which we thought was in the interest of all countries, actually was serving the West's interests? That's a serious issue I think for the years to come. And it means ministers in all our countries spending more time out in these countries listening, understanding their concerns, and giving their priorities more focus than they've had frankly in the 20 years where we've been absorbed in Iraq, Afghanistan, in financial crisis, Brexit, Covid, the rise of populism in many countries in the West. We've been quite inward looking, and I think we've suddenly realised that we need to be more engaged with a wider group of countries, who are cynical frankly about the idea of an international order.

Lord Speaker:

Do you think the Ukraine war and others have helped pull Europe together? And during your time as Ambassador of Nato, you saw on the ground the Americans, and what they did. Could you give your views to a wider audience on that, and why it's so important to have America and Europe?

Lord Ricketts:

Absolutely. My first time I served in Nato was in the Cold War, where Europe absolutely depended on the American military guarantee against the Soviet Union whose declared objective was to overrun the West and establish domination in the world. That didn't end well for them.

But in the period after the Cold War ended, I think people perhaps felt that we no longer needed to invest in the level of defence we had, that there was no real threat from Russia, that we should spend money on our domestic priorities. And America reduced its engagement in Europe, began to focus more on China, confrontation that will be the key one, the structuring ones for the next generation.

And then, Putin reminded us all that war in Europe is not something that's been consigned to the history books. First of all, he went into Georgia in 2008. Then he helped himself to 20% of Ukraine and Crimea in 2014, and then he went for the whole thing with his extraordinary gamble of an all-out invasion two years ago now.

And that has brought America back into full engagement in Europe. For how long that will last, I don't know. But it has reminded people that when we are facing down Russia, the US is absolutely indispensable. The European countries can't alone deter Russia.

But as you say, the effect of Ukraine I think has been to pull European countries, including the UK, closer together. I think it put all the rows between the UK and the EU over Brexit into proportion, when you've suddenly got full scale war two hours flying time away. And the subject of our report that will be coming out shortly from my committee is that relations have improved between the UK and the EU as a result of the Ukraine war. We've been working much more closely on issues like sanctions against Russia, which only makes sense if you do them in the widest possible group. And in other areas, we are coordinating more effectively on defence of Ukraine, supplying arms, a whole series of areas where we're talking more to the EU.

So I think the effect has been both to strengthen Nato and also to focus the EU on its geopolitical role, which it's underplayed up to now. And I would never have imagined that the EU would've funded out of its collective EU budget arms deliveries to Ukraine. That would've been a taboo at any time up to the outbreak of this war.

So a little bit of a sense of the EU discovering that they can play more of a geopolitical role, and I think the need for them to be working closely with the UK reciprocated from London, we'll see how durable that proves to be. The EU has not actually been very effective over the Israel-Gaza war. Countries have been divided on how to deal with that. But on Ukraine, they have been effective, and I hope that we can use that to build some rather deeper rooted cooperation in foreign policy that will last in the years to come.

Lord Speaker:

The historical reality is that for every war, there has to be a peace process eventually. How do you see it working out with both Ukraine and Gaza?

Lord Ricketts:

In Ukraine, I felt from the beginning it's most unlikely that there's going to be an outright victory by either side. I don't see the Ukrainians driving Russia out of every millimetre of Ukrainian territory, unfortunately, including Crimea. Nor do I see the Ukrainians collapsing and Russia overrunning the whole of the country.

So at some point, there is going to be an armistice, a truce, with a dividing line between a US... A Russian occupied zone and independent Ukraine. That is not a good outcome, and it will be for President Zelenskyy to choose when that time comes.

But it's not necessarily a terrible outcome. If you think of the armistice in Korea, which has now lasted over 70 years, what's happened in North Korea, completely dismal. South Korea, spectacular economic success. If you think of the division of Germany in 1945, West Germany hugely successful, East Germany a failure, and eventually unification between the two countries.

So I think if we can get 80% of Ukraine, independent Ukraine on the path to EU membership and Nato membership, imagine the result of that in the 20% still occupied by Russia. They will benighted and rather sad places. And I think the problem for the Russians will then be to stop talent moving from the occupied part of Ukraine towards the west.

So I don't think we should look on a truce or an armistice in Ukraine as necessarily a terrible thing. In Gaza, the war has to come to an end sometime. And in my view, the Israelis have to think that the policy of purely a security response to the Palestinian problem, occupying Palestinian territory, repressing Palestinian opposition, that hasn't worked. The awful terrorist attack of 7 October showed that that has not worked, and however difficult, they need to start thinking about a two-state solution. We'll need the moderate Arab countries to come in and fund the enormous reconstruction program that is going to be needed, with European and American help, probably also provide security. New Palestinian leadership that can be much more focused on working with Israel, not the terrorism we've seen in the past. And frankly, a new Israeli government who can put behind them Prime Minister Netanyahu's policy security only, and look at a political settlement. Because at the end of the day, the security settlement hasn't worked.

But that's asking a lot. But sometimes, crisis can produce opportunity, and I just devoutly hope that in this case that will prove to be the case.

Lord Speaker:

So in many ways, it's a rerun of the Oslo Accords for a two-state solution. But do you see the possibility for a wider conflagration in the Middle East spreading even further?

Lord Ricketts:

Just before coming to that, you're right. And the Oslo Accords were about as close as we got. And the reason people like me support a two-state solution is not because it's easy or ideal, but because I just don't see any alternative. The alternative is a forever war between the Israelis and the Palestinians, which is in nobody's interest. And I think probably an Israel-Palestine settlement can only be reached by widening the scope.

I think it was Eisenhower who said, "If you can't solve a problem, enlarge it." And so peace between Israel, and Saudi Arabia, and the remaining moderate Arab states, that could be part of a solution, which would give Israel more of a sense of belonging in the region and integration into what after all is a very dynamic economy. For as long as this goes on, the risk of a wider war is there. The Houthis wouldn't be firing missiles at Western shipping if it wasn't for this war. Hezbollah are on a knife edge frankly, for wider military action in the north of Israel. The risk of an Israel-Hezbollah conflict is absolutely there. And Iran is enjoying poking the West, provoking the West, encouraging their proxies to make trouble wherever they can without directly involving themselves.

So it is urgent that this is Israel-Gaza conflict is brought to some sort of at least a ceasefire, so we can start to build an outcome that gives Israel security, but also recognises that the Palestinians have rights as well. All that is easy to say and extremely hard to do, but we're at a dangerous moment, John, at the moment.

Lord Speaker:

If I can reflect on Northern Ireland, is that when there was the conflict between ourselves and the IRA, that the conflict led to a recruiting drive for young people to sign up for the IRA. Is it a parallel with Gaza and Israel here?

Lord Ricketts:

Yes, there is. Absolutely. I mean, there must be a generation of young Arabs in Gaza, but perhaps more widely in the Middle East, radicalised by what they've seen going on in Gaza. And the huge challenge for a new Palestinian leadership, rather like in Northern Ireland, is to turn that round and to say, "However we've been provoked, this is not a solution to our problem." And that the right way is to accept the reality of Israel, and to work with Israel, and find a peaceful settlement, find a way of coming together. And it's probably even more difficult than it was in Northern Ireland, but Northern Ireland shows the power of two communities saying, "We've had enough of terrorism and violence, we're going to come together in our mutual interest." That has to be the objective in Gaza and the occupied West Bank as well. Although my goodness, it feels like quite a distant prospect at the moment. It's a case of leadership that's really what's needed in the region.

Lord Speaker:

Yeah, there was that opportunity that the leadership, as you mentioned years ago, but it dissolved.

Lord Ricketts:

Yes, it's been tantalising. It's come close sometimes, and Prime Minister Rabin and other Israeli leaders. For the moment, it feels a long way away. But it feels to me that the Netanyahu policy has failed. And I suspect that Prime Minister Netanyahu won't be Prime Minister very long after this conflict has been at least put into a ceasefire. Equally, Hamas won't be around. We need new leadership on both sides. That's a matter of course in Israel for the Israeli people. But there has to be a better way than just waiting for another terrorist attack on the lines of 7 October and then responding to that. We've got to try and move on from that.

And the Americans are crucial. Britain has been playing, I think a very effective role. Moderate Arab countries are more involved than they were. If you think back to the Yom Kippur War of 1973, Kissinger did most of that shuttle diplomacy himself. Now we've got Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, Egypt, UK, other Europeans involved as well, which is good.

Lord Speaker:

Let me take you back to Brexit. What's your view on Brexit? What have been the consequences on Brexit?

Lord Ricketts:

My own professional view as a former diplomat is that it has left the UK less influential in the world and poorer than we would've been if we'd stayed in the EU.

If you look back, it turned out to be an extraordinarily bad moment for the UK to decide to leave the EU and to try and seek a future as a free trading nation. The world has been in retreat from global free trade for some years now. The Americans have been pulling back, other countries. Barriers are going up rather than coming down. That's a very tough world to go and make your living in a world outside your closest economic block.

So I think there's no question that Britain's role in the world was diminished both by leaving the EU and both by the manner of it as well. The chaotic way in which it was done, the years of British politics being completely preoccupied with that issue, not really engaging with the wider world. And we've got to build back from that. Every time the government has threatened to break international law, it just does rather further damage to our international reputation.

And so I think we need a period now of re-engagement with the world, recognising that Brexit is a fact. We're not going to be re-joining the EU certainly in my lifetime I would say. But there's lots we can do to improve links to reduce obstacles, and frictions, and barriers in the years to come. As long as we convince the European countries that we are serious about it, and that we will carry out the agreements we've signed, that we will be clear about what we need, and then good partners in delivering it. Incremental improvements are possible and they are needed. I do not think we are going to see a night and day change in our relationship with the EU anytime soon. Remember, the EU has massive issues of its own to cope with now, like the proposal to bring Ukraine and six or eight other countries in. I mean, that's an agenda for 10 or 20 years.

And so Britain needs to be working bit by bit to rebuild good links with our European neighbours. Having found that the idea of pure independence, pure sovereignty in a world as troubled as this one with as many barriers, hasn't been a good solution.

Lord Speaker:

Is there such a thing as sovereignty in the modern world?

Lord Ricketts:

Nobody has complete sovereignty in the modern world. Not even America. And even the world's biggest superpower cannot simply ignore other countries, has to work with other countries.

I think Britain has always been great when it's worked with allies and partners, when we've provided the ideas. And I'm very interested in the period as the Second World War finished, where Britain was absolutely fundamental in the design of the United Nations, the international financial institutions. British ideas, American clout, hard diplomacy, helped to lay the foundations of the international order.

And we can play that role again, provided we accept we do it with our friends and allies as partners, and not in some kind of British exceptionalist mode, which I don't think has worked.

Lord Speaker:

So what we need is the equivalent of a Marshall Plan after the Second World War. Would you agree?

Lord Ricketts:

I would agree. I would agree, absolutely. And we need the leadership that led to that, the vision that saw that investing in the rest of the world, from America, from Europe, rebuilding Ukraine, putting the resources into the Middle East to try and move beyond that, dealing with the problems of these non-aligned countries who have seen the international order not as serving their interests. All that is going to require major investment. Not just from governments, I think from private investment as well. And there, the City of London is an unsung asset for the UK I think. For example, in dealing with climate change, I think you could say we need a new Marshall Plan to save the planet from the devastation of climate change. But that needs real political leadership.

Lord Speaker:

And I think you've said on climate change, there's not just an environmental program that's required, but there are also security implications with climate change. Can you elaborate on that?

Lord Ricketts:

There certainly are. There's no doubt about it. I mean let's take for an example, the Sahel region bordering the Sahara Desert. It's an area where the French have played a major role for many years. But successively, their position has been knocked back by a series of coups by extremist Islamist regimes taking over in countries like Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger.

And it's happening partly because of desertification, which is depriving rural communities of their living. Young men are migrating to the towns, they're becoming radicalised, and longstanding dynastic rulers have been overthrown. And the French are being kicked out. French bases around the region have closed. This is an area where a great deal of migration come through, from the very populous parts of more southern parts of Africa.

So we have migration, we have trafficking, we have instability, we have Al-Qaeda and its offshoots setting up shop there. And this is partly because of the stresses put on traditional regimes by climate change.

And there are many other examples as well. I think if you look over to Sudan, for example, Eritrea, Somalia, exactly the same sort of phenomena happening. So climate change can produce radicalisation, which can stimulate migration, which is then an immediate issue for our countries as well.

Lord Speaker:

And on immigration, I think what you infer is that we need a long-term strategy for immigration. Not just focusing on this year, the number of immigrants that come, but it's a global issue.

Lord Ricketts:

It's absolutely a global issue, and it can't be stopped, I think by building more walls or preventing desperate people from coming. Really the problem starts at home in the countries where these people are not finding jobs, or are finding that wars, and chaos, and instability are making life impossible, at which point they then all move towards the wealthy countries.

It is just worth a slightly more optimistic note remarking that nobody wants to be a migrant to China or to Russia. They want to come to the West because of the quality of life here, because of what we offer. Of course, many of them bring skills, and we in many cases need the contribution that they can give.

But this is only going to get greater. And the greatest proportion of under 25s is in Africa. And unless we can help African countries improve their economies, create job opportunities, deal with climate change at home, a lot of those people are going to want to migrate towards the wealthy, well off, West European countries. I think that's just inevitable. It's a huge issue for the next generation of diplomats, parliamentarians, and citizens.

Lord Speaker:

And demographics have to come into that. The European countries as a whole, the populations are going down. So it would be suggested that we need more people to come in to service the economy.

Lord Ricketts:

Absolutely. And we've seen, for example, in Germany, Germany accepted over a million migrants from Syria and Iraq in that very fraught period in 2015, and pretty successfully integrated them. There have been tensions. But when far right parties have recently called for mass expulsions of migrants, we've seen millions of people demonstrating against that policy. In other words, in favour of maintaining a generous, welcoming approach towards the migrant communities that have come to Germany, because partly Germany needs their support and they've many of them integrated effectively.

It's the same in all our countries. We are a declining population in terms of age, and the demographic of the workforce is getting smaller. We're all getting older, I'm afraid, John. And we are all going to need in our declining years, more support.

So yes, we need young people coming into our countries, and the politicians have really got a responsibility to get people to see that that can be an advantage, shouldn't be seen as a threat or a risk. Of course, it comes with implications for public services, and housing, and all the rest of it. But I think if the political class could see that as the opportunity it is rather than a threat, and encourage, perhaps the inevitable public worry and anxiety about that, then we are in real trouble.

Lord Speaker:

There is a view of politics and politicians that the population don't have much trust in. Is politics a noble profession, is it a vocation?

Lord Ricketts:

I call myself a parliamentarian rather than a politician, because I don't belong to any political party. But I have worked with politicians throughout my career. And I've seen almost all of them have been decent, hardworking, well-intentioned people who want to make a difference, who want to serve the national interest. I think that's why they went into politics.

And I've seen bosses down the years like Geoffrey Howe, like Jack Straw, like David Miliband, working late into the night every night trying to add value to the problems that were crowding onto their desks.

And so I don't think the politicians have got worse from that point of view. I think the climate in which they work has got more toxic. I think it's become more difficult to be a politician and not to be affected by the abuse that seems to become the currency now in talking to politicians.

But yes, I think politics is a noble profession. I think being a public servant is a noble profession. You commit your life to trying to do better for your country in these different ways, and that deserves some respect. And the cultural abuse, it's extremely unhelpful, because I think it drives away many talented people from wanting to do that.

Lord Speaker:

Lord Ricketts, you're a supreme example of the type of expert voice that's in the House of Lords. And I'm delighted and privileged that you have come along to share that experience today. So thank you very much, and this will go out, and there'll be many people looking at that, and I think will be grateful for your contribution. Thank you.

Lord Ricketts:

Thank you, Lord Speaker, for the privilege of coming and talking to you.

 

Transcript

Lord Speaker:

Lord Ricketts, it's a real pleasure to have you here at Lord Speaker's Corner. If I'm correct, you did a BA at Oxford. And then since then, man and boy, you have been a Foreign Office servant. So could you tell me what inspired you to go into the foreign service and what has kept you there? I mean, you're a real diplomatic individual.

Lord Ricketts:

Well, thank you very much for having me on Lord Speaker's Corner, and I'm very relieved I don't have to stand on a soapbox. Yes. In my university years I didn't think very much about my career. I had already started to love going abroad. I went to France with a pen-friend at the age of 16 and I just loved it. The difference, the exotic sense of being in another country. And so I was always clear I wanted to do something linked to international affairs.

And my third year at university, my friends started all to do serious sounding things like join banks or join accountancy firms and so on. I began to think I better think a bit about what I want to do.

So I actually applied to the Foreign Office through the civil service exam and the BBC for their news traineeship, and I got offers from both. Such was life in those days where people got job offers more easily than they do now.

And I think I went to my tutor and I said, "I've got these two offers, which shall I choose?" He said, "Young man, I think the Foreign Office would be a more structured career." And so I went into the Foreign Office without a great deal of thought, and I was 42 years there, and I loved every minute of it.

Lord Speaker:

Good. And what is it that makes diplomacy exciting and a rewarding career?

Lord Ricketts:

Well, the world is such an interesting place, and there are constantly differences between countries, tensions between countries. But understanding how other countries work... Speaking a language is an enormously rewarding thing because you can't really understand a country unless you can speak the language, which means also understanding the culture behind the words in the language.

Now my only foreign language is French. I don't think there are such things as hard languages and soft languages. All languages are hard to learn. But I think the connection with other people, building bridges, and opening up opportunities, trying to damp down tensions, it's constantly fascinating. Whether you are serving in an embassy abroad or in the Foreign Office at a desk in London, I found the substance of the work always fascinating.

Lord Speaker:

How does the balance between civil servants and ministers work, particularly the churn that there is in ministers?

Lord Ricketts:

If you are going to be a civil servant, you have to accept the deal, which is that you will carry out the policies of the elected government. If you're somebody with extremely strong personal convictions, you're probably not the right person to be a civil servant, because in the end you carry out what the government of the day decides to do. Occasionally that can be challenging, but very few civil servants in the end take the other alternative, which is to resign rather than carry out a policy. But it's become more and more a problem, the rapid churn of ministers.

If I think back to 40 years ago, many ministers did years and years in the same department. Cabinet ministers might be there pretty much through a full parliament. I worked closely with Geoffrey Howe when he was Foreign Secretary, and he did a long stint as Foreign Secretary, and we've had ministers in the Foreign Office like David Lidington who did many years as minister for Europe.

It's got much, much shorter now. And the problem is you are constantly going back to square one, briefing a new minister, introducing them to contacts around the world, and then they change. So the friction, the cost in terms of resource and effort in the civil service of constant ministerial changes is very high.

Lord Speaker:

I remember Chris Mullin telling me when he was a junior minister in the Foreign Office, and he was responsible for Africa, the African leaders complained that every year there was ministerial change, so it didn't allow the ministers here to build up a knowledge of the country enough, and the African leaders felt that they were being short-changed in that.

Lord Ricketts:

I think that's absolutely right and it applies all around the world. Human contacts take time to build. Trust and confidence has to be created, and if it's a new face walking through the door every time, you essentially go back to square one.

So it is much better if, especially in the jobs that require you to understand Africa or the Middle East where the human relationships are so important, I think it's much better if ministers can stay two or three or four years and really get to know people.

That's what we do with ambassadors. When we send ambassadors to countries, normally it's now four years, three years if the country is more difficult, perhaps a year if it's really tough like Afghanistan or Iraq. But the norm is four years, and that's the time where you make the connections and then you can use them and benefit from them.

Lord Speaker:

Do you think it's important that civil servants speak truth to power with their ministers, and has that changed over the years?

Lord Ricketts:

It's absolutely essential that ministers get frank and honest advice, otherwise they'll make bad decisions. And that's what civil servants want to do. But it does require the ministers to create the environment where people feel safe in saying unwelcome things, bringing messages that the minister may not want to hear, that the proposed policy won't work. So we are suggesting you do something else.

And it's up to ministers to set the tone, and it has got more toxic in recent years. I mean there's been a bit of a culture of people finding that their advice is leaked into the newspapers if it's not welcomed from somewhere in the political echelon, whether special advisors or ministers. That's incredibly damaging to trust and confidence. And if ministers reject advice because it doesn't fit with their preconceptions, also people then go back into self-preservation mode and will only tell ministers what they think they want to hear.

So it's in ministers' own interest to create the climate where frank advice can come, it can be challenged, but people will never feel inhibited from saying what they honestly think.

Lord Speaker:

Has there been over time, politicisation of the civil service?

Lord Ricketts:

I think to some extent there has. The civil service is a very strong and deeply rooted institution, and the ethos is neutral. People will adapt to the government of the day and follow their instructions. But the trend by ministers to want to choose their own senior officials, the permanent secretary who runs the department and perhaps the people immediately in the private office around the minister, the more that happens, the more ministers want to pick and choose someone who they think will work well with them, the more political things become.

And at the extreme end of that spectrum, there's the US example where when a US administration changes, 3,000 or 4,000 officials change because they are political appointments. We are light years away from that here, but any trend towards ministers wanting to pick the official that they think will be most comfortable for them is in my view a dangerous trend, because then you tend to get people picking those with the same kind of outlook and view. You begin to lose the challenge that the civil service ought to represent.

Lord Speaker:

The essence of the House of Lords is to scrutinise and ensure good law. What do senior civil servants and diplomats add to that?

Lord Ricketts:

It was a new experience. And to be absolutely honest, I didn't realise how much sheer hard work goes on in this place to scrutinising draft legislation. A lot of it comes from the House of Commons in a pretty, let's say, unfinished state and requires a great deal of hard work.

And I fully admire the talent available on all the benches in this House. For example, on the crossbenches, the non-political Lords of which I'm one. We have judges, we have barristers, we have extremely experienced people who've worked with legislation in their previous life, who know what works and can see the risks of what could not work. And therefore, they propose amendments, and they spend hours, and evenings, and nights discussing it, advocating for it, and from time to time getting support for it, sending back to the Commons.

That's a new world for me. I watch it carefully. I try to study some of the bills that I'm particularly interested in and vote when I get the chance. I have not actually got involved in proposing amendments, partly because my life is a part-time peer. I have other activities outside the house. I'd started them before I was given the privilege of coming here. And so I can never be absolutely sure that I can be there on a Tuesday evening when some important stage of legislation is reached.

So in fact, I've found my mark more in the work of committees than in the process of legislation, which does require members of the House of Lords to be pretty available to adapt to the calendar in which legislation goes through. So I've been rather more observer than an active participant. But I've been very, very impressed by the quality of scrutiny that goes on because of the range of experience we have in this house.

Again, it's been a surprise to me, a very welcome surprise to find that you have leaders here in all different walks of life who have had fascinating lives outside this place and bring that to looking at legislation. I think it's an irreplaceable role actually.

Lord Speaker:

We have very serious situations in the world now geopolitically, whether we're talking about Ukraine, whether we're talking about Gaza, or whether we're talking about Rwanda, which has been through our House this week. Some would say that the unelected House of Lords really shouldn't be involving themselves in this. What's your answer to that?

Lord Ricketts:

I think we need in this country all the expertise we can bring to bear in helping the government of the day navigate this very dangerous world. As you say, we've got multiple crises going on simultaneously at the moment. The government have to cope in all sorts of areas. Rwanda is a rather special case, because they've chosen that as the place where they want to remove asylum seekers as part of their plan to reduce small boats. There are many strongly held views on that around the House. I personally doubt that that will act as much of a deterrent.

But where it comes to the war in Gaza, or the war in Ukraine, or the strikes against the Houthis in Yemen, I mean we have in our House many former Chiefs of Defence Staff, other distinguished military leaders. We have people, of my own background, National Security Adviser, Foreign Office, Cabinet Secretaries.

These are people, we've all of us lived through multiple crises in our lives, and I hope that we can help to bring to bear some of that expertise both in the debates and in the committee work that we do. And my own committee, the European Affairs Committee, which I'm now really fortunate to be chair of. We are just completing a report on the implications of the war in Ukraine for how the UK and the EU work together. And we've got a lot of fascinating evidence that we'll be producing in a report shortly.

That's the kind of thing where we've got the time perhaps to look at different angles that busy ministers and senior civil servants won't have that time. So I hope that is at least some help.

Lord Speaker:

You were chair of the Joint Intelligence Committee just before 9/11. You stood down and then you went to Nato during the Iraq War. How have these issues affected Britain's standing in the world?

Lord Ricketts:

Yes, I chaired the Joint Intelligence Committee for a year. That's the place where the intelligence agencies bring their assessment, their raw intelligence, their reports, and then we put them together into an assessment. We balance out all the various bits of information coming in, intelligence, news reports, reports from ambassadors around the world, into one assessment that goes to ministers. And that's always been a very respected process.

Actually I jumped from that across to the Foreign Office for two years, and I worked very closely with Jack Straw through the run-up to the Iraq war and actually the outbreak of the Iraq war, which is a period of high emotion and some difficulty in terms of squaring one's loyalty as a civil servant to the huge moral pressures that were around in the run-up to the Iraq war.

And I think in those periods, Britain was seen as a major country in terms of trying to deal with international crisis with the Americans as well. Much criticism of the decision to follow America into the invasion of Iraq, and there were many hesitations around it at the time, but Tony Blair decided he would do that. He had parliamentary support to do it. In the end, it turned out badly.

And that and the bad experience in Afghanistan I think has really knocked confidence in the US and in the UK about the idea of intervention in other people's wars in the sense of sending ground forces and potentially long-term commitments there.

And ever since Iraq and Afghanistan, ministers here have held back from that. There's been no great public or parliamentary support for it, which tends to mean that the authoritarian states and the more reckless states push forward, if they sense that the West has pulled back from that.

So one of the reasons I think we have such an unstable world is that the US, Britain, and others have stepped back from the very direct and interventionist approach which they took in the period of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Lord Speaker:

Was it a signal to the rest of the world regarding Iraq, and Britain, and America's position, that the ethics and immorality of diplomacy was lessened?

Lord Ricketts:

Yeah, I think it was certainly a lesson that the decision was taken in the short term after 9/11. First, certainly Tony Blair had a burning conviction that there was too much of a risk in letting Saddam Hussein have what he thought were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Turned out they weren't there. Not enough thought was given to the longer term.

And I think this is always a problem, particularly in democratic countries where all the impulse, all the pressure is for short-term decisions, immediate responses, and that crowds out time for thinking about the longer term. And I think the lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan are rather that you have to think about the longer term consequences. What is the political settlement you want to get to by your military intervention? And it's proved elusive in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

And in subsequent conflicts, I think western countries been much more cautious about intervening. And they've tended, if at all, to use airstrikes as they did in Syria and now against the Houthis in Yemen, but not commit ground forces.

But that does leave the world without the international arbiter role that the Americans played for half a century after 1945. And there, you see the authoritarian countries pushing forward. Russia in particular in Ukraine now, China flexing its muscles, countries in the Middle East more willing to go their own way. Iran feeling, I think unconstrained. And that's part of the reason we are facing such a world of disorder at the moment.

Lord Speaker:

And the Iraq war, the link between Iraq and Al-Qaeda, do you think that there was something to that by the US and the UK going ahead with that war?

Lord Ricketts:

I personally don't think there was ever any evidence of a link to Al-Qaeda. That was part of the case that the so-called ‘neocons’ made in Washington. I don't think we ever found any evidence for it.

I think Tony Blair's feeling was that after 9/11, he couldn't afford to leave a leader like Saddam Hussein in control of what he thought were weapons of mass destruction. And therefore, the risk of going into Iraq and dealing with these weapons was less than the risk of leaving Saddam Hussein alone.

That was a historically wrong decision. I think it was made for good motives. I don't think the intelligence was accurate. I don't think it was really tested enough with the rigor it should have been.

And for civil servants, that was a difficult time. I was then the job of political director in the Foreign Office with Jack Straw. I remember coming to work on a Saturday morning. There were a million people demonstrating against the war, and we all knew war was coming very closely. Jack Straw and I had spent six months trying to get UN resolutions, which would either have given Saddam Hussein pause or at least given us the legal base to act. And we didn't get them.

I decided I wasn't going to resign in terms of conscience. I thought that in the end, the government had parliamentary approval for what it was doing. But there were people who were concerned. I remember hosting a meeting for staff in the Foreign Office where people could air their problems, discuss things, test whether senior officials like me had thought about the consequence. It was the only time in my career where I've seen people really actively struggling with their duty to support the government as civil servants and their moral uneasiness about what was going on.

Anyway, that is now history, but I think it'll be a long time before the US or the UK launch a major war of that kind without the most careful scrutiny.

Lord Speaker:

Simon McDonald has been in this room, and he mentioned about Brexit, and his views on Brexit are known now that he was opposed to that. But he informed me that he had a meeting with his staff in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, a whole range of views on it. But it helped gel them together and helped them understand even more the distinction between civil servants with their views and a neutral civil service. Does that still prevail?

Lord Ricketts:

I think it was a testing time, but yes it has. And I think in my own department, I know so well the Foreign Office, I think genuinely, people would've had views as citizens. It doesn't mean that because you've spent a lot of time working in Europe, you're necessarily hugely pro-European. But people accepted that this was the decision taken in the referendum, whether the referendum, it was right to call it or not is another matter. And it was their job to do the best they could to implement it in a way that promoted Britain's interests effectively. So I think people were professional in their approach.

I think it was difficult. I think to be an ambassador in a European Union country after the Brexit vote would've been very tough. I retired in early 2016, so I missed it by six months. But to have had to explain to all my French contacts and friends what Britain was doing would've been difficult.

But that's what a civil servant diplomat is paid to do. Now I think, we're in much better territory where everybody is focused on moving on from where we are and trying to do the best job we can for the UK in the circumstances seven years after leaving the EU where we need to be minimising all the barriers and the obstacles.

But I think in the months after 2016, the civil service was under real pressure. Yes, people must have had questions. In the end, I think everybody decided the right thing was to try and work with the government to pull it through.

Lord Speaker:

The rules based international order would seem to have been damaged, particularly after the Iraq war. What advice do you have for governments, for ministers, to try and ensure the revival of that?

Lord Ricketts:

You're quite right. The international order, which was never perfect, came into being in 1945 with the UN after the Second World War has been unravelling, partly because of the failures in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the pullback that we've seen from America.

But if the authoritarians thought that they could now exploit a vacuum with Putin launching the war in Ukraine, with Xi Jinping flexing his muscles in the South China Sea, with terrorists launching attacks in Israel, well actually they've been shown to be wrong, because what the Ukraine invasion has done is bring America back to leadership of European security. They've done more than anyone in terms of arming Ukraine, of supporting them economically. They've moved forces back to Europe. Nato is stronger and larger than it was before, more focused on keeping the peace.

So I think the Western institutions, US and its allies have performed effectively on Ukraine. And the crisis in the Middle East is extremely worrying. It's gone on very long. The toll of civilian casualties is very high, but which country is doing most to try to broker a solution? It's America.

And so the Americans are back in that role, which they in the end are the only ones, the indispensable nation to try and bring Israel together with the Palestinians, and see there has to be a better way than simply a security response to the Palestinian issue.

No other country can do that. China's not doing anything. Russia's certainly not. And all the many non-aligned countries who sat on the fence in the Ukraine war chose not to condemn Russia, certainly not support sanctions. They're not doing very much either to try to bring tension down, reduce the violence.

I think we do have a real lesson to learn though, that those non-aligned countries when we went to them to ask for support, tended to say, "Well actually, you invaded Iraq, so why are you now saying we should condemn Russia for invading Ukraine? You haven't been very interested in our issues." In Africa, you mentioned earlier, on climate change, you haven't been funding that. You haven't been spending the development assistance we need or worrying so much about the crises on our doorstep. So this is very hypocritical for you to now expect our support.

I think we have to think seriously about that. We have to spend more time talking to these important non-aligned countries, India, South Africa, Brazil, Indonesia. Why have they felt that this international order, which we thought was in the interest of all countries, actually was serving the West's interests? That's a serious issue I think for the years to come. And it means ministers in all our countries spending more time out in these countries listening, understanding their concerns, and giving their priorities more focus than they've had frankly in the 20 years where we've been absorbed in Iraq, Afghanistan, in financial crisis, Brexit, Covid, the rise of populism in many countries in the West. We've been quite inward looking, and I think we've suddenly realised that we need to be more engaged with a wider group of countries, who are cynical frankly about the idea of an international order.

Lord Speaker:

Do you think the Ukraine war and others have helped pull Europe together? And during your time as Ambassador of Nato, you saw on the ground the Americans, and what they did. Could you give your views to a wider audience on that, and why it's so important to have America and Europe?

Lord Ricketts:

Absolutely. My first time I served in Nato was in the Cold War, where Europe absolutely depended on the American military guarantee against the Soviet Union whose declared objective was to overrun the West and establish domination in the world. That didn't end well for them.

But in the period after the Cold War ended, I think people perhaps felt that we no longer needed to invest in the level of defence we had, that there was no real threat from Russia, that we should spend money on our domestic priorities. And America reduced its engagement in Europe, began to focus more on China, confrontation that will be the key one, the structuring ones for the next generation.

And then, Putin reminded us all that war in Europe is not something that's been consigned to the history books. First of all, he went into Georgia in 2008. Then he helped himself to 20% of Ukraine and Crimea in 2014, and then he went for the whole thing with his extraordinary gamble of an all-out invasion two years ago now.

And that has brought America back into full engagement in Europe. For how long that will last, I don't know. But it has reminded people that when we are facing down Russia, the US is absolutely indispensable. The European countries can't alone deter Russia.

But as you say, the effect of Ukraine I think has been to pull European countries, including the UK, closer together. I think it put all the rows between the UK and the EU over Brexit into proportion, when you've suddenly got full scale war two hours flying time away. And the subject of our report that will be coming out shortly from my committee is that relations have improved between the UK and the EU as a result of the Ukraine war. We've been working much more closely on issues like sanctions against Russia, which only makes sense if you do them in the widest possible group. And in other areas, we are coordinating more effectively on defence of Ukraine, supplying arms, a whole series of areas where we're talking more to the EU.

So I think the effect has been both to strengthen Nato and also to focus the EU on its geopolitical role, which it's underplayed up to now. And I would never have imagined that the EU would've funded out of its collective EU budget arms deliveries to Ukraine. That would've been a taboo at any time up to the outbreak of this war.

So a little bit of a sense of the EU discovering that they can play more of a geopolitical role, and I think the need for them to be working closely with the UK reciprocated from London, we'll see how durable that proves to be. The EU has not actually been very effective over the Israel-Gaza war. Countries have been divided on how to deal with that. But on Ukraine, they have been effective, and I hope that we can use that to build some rather deeper rooted cooperation in foreign policy that will last in the years to come.

Lord Speaker:

The historical reality is that for every war, there has to be a peace process eventually. How do you see it working out with both Ukraine and Gaza?

Lord Ricketts:

In Ukraine, I felt from the beginning it's most unlikely that there's going to be an outright victory by either side. I don't see the Ukrainians driving Russia out of every millimetre of Ukrainian territory, unfortunately, including Crimea. Nor do I see the Ukrainians collapsing and Russia overrunning the whole of the country.

So at some point, there is going to be an armistice, a truce, with a dividing line between a US... A Russian occupied zone and independent Ukraine. That is not a good outcome, and it will be for President Zelenskyy to choose when that time comes.

But it's not necessarily a terrible outcome. If you think of the armistice in Korea, which has now lasted over 70 years, what's happened in North Korea, completely dismal. South Korea, spectacular economic success. If you think of the division of Germany in 1945, West Germany hugely successful, East Germany a failure, and eventually unification between the two countries.

So I think if we can get 80% of Ukraine, independent Ukraine on the path to EU membership and Nato membership, imagine the result of that in the 20% still occupied by Russia. They will benighted and rather sad places. And I think the problem for the Russians will then be to stop talent moving from the occupied part of Ukraine towards the west.

So I don't think we should look on a truce or an armistice in Ukraine as necessarily a terrible thing. In Gaza, the war has to come to an end sometime. And in my view, the Israelis have to think that the policy of purely a security response to the Palestinian problem, occupying Palestinian territory, repressing Palestinian opposition, that hasn't worked. The awful terrorist attack of 7 October showed that that has not worked, and however difficult, they need to start thinking about a two-state solution. We'll need the moderate Arab countries to come in and fund the enormous reconstruction program that is going to be needed, with European and American help, probably also provide security. New Palestinian leadership that can be much more focused on working with Israel, not the terrorism we've seen in the past. And frankly, a new Israeli government who can put behind them Prime Minister Netanyahu's policy security only, and look at a political settlement. Because at the end of the day, the security settlement hasn't worked.

But that's asking a lot. But sometimes, crisis can produce opportunity, and I just devoutly hope that in this case that will prove to be the case.

Lord Speaker:

So in many ways, it's a rerun of the Oslo Accords for a two-state solution. But do you see the possibility for a wider conflagration in the Middle East spreading even further?

Lord Ricketts:

Just before coming to that, you're right. And the Oslo Accords were about as close as we got. And the reason people like me support a two-state solution is not because it's easy or ideal, but because I just don't see any alternative. The alternative is a forever war between the Israelis and the Palestinians, which is in nobody's interest. And I think probably an Israel-Palestine settlement can only be reached by widening the scope.

I think it was Eisenhower who said, "If you can't solve a problem, enlarge it." And so peace between Israel, and Saudi Arabia, and the remaining moderate Arab states, that could be part of a solution, which would give Israel more of a sense of belonging in the region and integration into what after all is a very dynamic economy. For as long as this goes on, the risk of a wider war is there. The Houthis wouldn't be firing missiles at Western shipping if it wasn't for this war. Hezbollah are on a knife edge frankly, for wider military action in the north of Israel. The risk of an Israel-Hezbollah conflict is absolutely there. And Iran is enjoying poking the West, provoking the West, encouraging their proxies to make trouble wherever they can without directly involving themselves.

So it is urgent that this is Israel-Gaza conflict is brought to some sort of at least a ceasefire, so we can start to build an outcome that gives Israel security, but also recognises that the Palestinians have rights as well. All that is easy to say and extremely hard to do, but we're at a dangerous moment, John, at the moment.

Lord Speaker:

If I can reflect on Northern Ireland, is that when there was the conflict between ourselves and the IRA, that the conflict led to a recruiting drive for young people to sign up for the IRA. Is it a parallel with Gaza and Israel here?

Lord Ricketts:

Yes, there is. Absolutely. I mean, there must be a generation of young Arabs in Gaza, but perhaps more widely in the Middle East, radicalised by what they've seen going on in Gaza. And the huge challenge for a new Palestinian leadership, rather like in Northern Ireland, is to turn that round and to say, "However we've been provoked, this is not a solution to our problem." And that the right way is to accept the reality of Israel, and to work with Israel, and find a peaceful settlement, find a way of coming together. And it's probably even more difficult than it was in Northern Ireland, but Northern Ireland shows the power of two communities saying, "We've had enough of terrorism and violence, we're going to come together in our mutual interest." That has to be the objective in Gaza and the occupied West Bank as well. Although my goodness, it feels like quite a distant prospect at the moment. It's a case of leadership that's really what's needed in the region.

Lord Speaker:

Yeah, there was that opportunity that the leadership, as you mentioned years ago, but it dissolved.

Lord Ricketts:

Yes, it's been tantalising. It's come close sometimes, and Prime Minister Rabin and other Israeli leaders. For the moment, it feels a long way away. But it feels to me that the Netanyahu policy has failed. And I suspect that Prime Minister Netanyahu won't be Prime Minister very long after this conflict has been at least put into a ceasefire. Equally, Hamas won't be around. We need new leadership on both sides. That's a matter of course in Israel for the Israeli people. But there has to be a better way than just waiting for another terrorist attack on the lines of 7 October and then responding to that. We've got to try and move on from that.

And the Americans are crucial. Britain has been playing, I think a very effective role. Moderate Arab countries are more involved than they were. If you think back to the Yom Kippur War of 1973, Kissinger did most of that shuttle diplomacy himself. Now we've got Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, Egypt, UK, other Europeans involved as well, which is good.

Lord Speaker:

Let me take you back to Brexit. What's your view on Brexit? What have been the consequences on Brexit?

Lord Ricketts:

My own professional view as a former diplomat is that it has left the UK less influential in the world and poorer than we would've been if we'd stayed in the EU.

If you look back, it turned out to be an extraordinarily bad moment for the UK to decide to leave the EU and to try and seek a future as a free trading nation. The world has been in retreat from global free trade for some years now. The Americans have been pulling back, other countries. Barriers are going up rather than coming down. That's a very tough world to go and make your living in a world outside your closest economic block.

So I think there's no question that Britain's role in the world was diminished both by leaving the EU and both by the manner of it as well. The chaotic way in which it was done, the years of British politics being completely preoccupied with that issue, not really engaging with the wider world. And we've got to build back from that. Every time the government has threatened to break international law, it just does rather further damage to our international reputation.

And so I think we need a period now of re-engagement with the world, recognising that Brexit is a fact. We're not going to be re-joining the EU certainly in my lifetime I would say. But there's lots we can do to improve links to reduce obstacles, and frictions, and barriers in the years to come. As long as we convince the European countries that we are serious about it, and that we will carry out the agreements we've signed, that we will be clear about what we need, and then good partners in delivering it. Incremental improvements are possible and they are needed. I do not think we are going to see a night and day change in our relationship with the EU anytime soon. Remember, the EU has massive issues of its own to cope with now, like the proposal to bring Ukraine and six or eight other countries in. I mean, that's an agenda for 10 or 20 years.

And so Britain needs to be working bit by bit to rebuild good links with our European neighbours. Having found that the idea of pure independence, pure sovereignty in a world as troubled as this one with as many barriers, hasn't been a good solution.

Lord Speaker:

Is there such a thing as sovereignty in the modern world?

Lord Ricketts:

Nobody has complete sovereignty in the modern world. Not even America. And even the world's biggest superpower cannot simply ignore other countries, has to work with other countries.

I think Britain has always been great when it's worked with allies and partners, when we've provided the ideas. And I'm very interested in the period as the Second World War finished, where Britain was absolutely fundamental in the design of the United Nations, the international financial institutions. British ideas, American clout, hard diplomacy, helped to lay the foundations of the international order.

And we can play that role again, provided we accept we do it with our friends and allies as partners, and not in some kind of British exceptionalist mode, which I don't think has worked.

Lord Speaker:

So what we need is the equivalent of a Marshall Plan after the Second World War. Would you agree?

Lord Ricketts:

I would agree. I would agree, absolutely. And we need the leadership that led to that, the vision that saw that investing in the rest of the world, from America, from Europe, rebuilding Ukraine, putting the resources into the Middle East to try and move beyond that, dealing with the problems of these non-aligned countries who have seen the international order not as serving their interests. All that is going to require major investment. Not just from governments, I think from private investment as well. And there, the City of London is an unsung asset for the UK I think. For example, in dealing with climate change, I think you could say we need a new Marshall Plan to save the planet from the devastation of climate change. But that needs real political leadership.

Lord Speaker:

And I think you've said on climate change, there's not just an environmental program that's required, but there are also security implications with climate change. Can you elaborate on that?

Lord Ricketts:

There certainly are. There's no doubt about it. I mean let's take for an example, the Sahel region bordering the Sahara Desert. It's an area where the French have played a major role for many years. But successively, their position has been knocked back by a series of coups by extremist Islamist regimes taking over in countries like Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger.

And it's happening partly because of desertification, which is depriving rural communities of their living. Young men are migrating to the towns, they're becoming radicalised, and longstanding dynastic rulers have been overthrown. And the French are being kicked out. French bases around the region have closed. This is an area where a great deal of migration come through, from the very populous parts of more southern parts of Africa.

So we have migration, we have trafficking, we have instability, we have Al-Qaeda and its offshoots setting up shop there. And this is partly because of the stresses put on traditional regimes by climate change.

And there are many other examples as well. I think if you look over to Sudan, for example, Eritrea, Somalia, exactly the same sort of phenomena happening. So climate change can produce radicalisation, which can stimulate migration, which is then an immediate issue for our countries as well.

Lord Speaker:

And on immigration, I think what you infer is that we need a long-term strategy for immigration. Not just focusing on this year, the number of immigrants that come, but it's a global issue.

Lord Ricketts:

It's absolutely a global issue, and it can't be stopped, I think by building more walls or preventing desperate people from coming. Really the problem starts at home in the countries where these people are not finding jobs, or are finding that wars, and chaos, and instability are making life impossible, at which point they then all move towards the wealthy countries.

It is just worth a slightly more optimistic note remarking that nobody wants to be a migrant to China or to Russia. They want to come to the West because of the quality of life here, because of what we offer. Of course, many of them bring skills, and we in many cases need the contribution that they can give.

But this is only going to get greater. And the greatest proportion of under 25s is in Africa. And unless we can help African countries improve their economies, create job opportunities, deal with climate change at home, a lot of those people are going to want to migrate towards the wealthy, well off, West European countries. I think that's just inevitable. It's a huge issue for the next generation of diplomats, parliamentarians, and citizens.

Lord Speaker:

And demographics have to come into that. The European countries as a whole, the populations are going down. So it would be suggested that we need more people to come in to service the economy.

Lord Ricketts:

Absolutely. And we've seen, for example, in Germany, Germany accepted over a million migrants from Syria and Iraq in that very fraught period in 2015, and pretty successfully integrated them. There have been tensions. But when far right parties have recently called for mass expulsions of migrants, we've seen millions of people demonstrating against that policy. In other words, in favour of maintaining a generous, welcoming approach towards the migrant communities that have come to Germany, because partly Germany needs their support and they've many of them integrated effectively.

It's the same in all our countries. We are a declining population in terms of age, and the demographic of the workforce is getting smaller. We're all getting older, I'm afraid, John. And we are all going to need in our declining years, more support.

So yes, we need young people coming into our countries, and the politicians have really got a responsibility to get people to see that that can be an advantage, shouldn't be seen as a threat or a risk. Of course, it comes with implications for public services, and housing, and all the rest of it. But I think if the political class could see that as the opportunity it is rather than a threat, and encourage, perhaps the inevitable public worry and anxiety about that, then we are in real trouble.

Lord Speaker:

There is a view of politics and politicians that the population don't have much trust in. Is politics a noble profession, is it a vocation?

Lord Ricketts:

I call myself a parliamentarian rather than a politician, because I don't belong to any political party. But I have worked with politicians throughout my career. And I've seen almost all of them have been decent, hardworking, well-intentioned people who want to make a difference, who want to serve the national interest. I think that's why they went into politics.

And I've seen bosses down the years like Geoffrey Howe, like Jack Straw, like David Miliband, working late into the night every night trying to add value to the problems that were crowding onto their desks.

And so I don't think the politicians have got worse from that point of view. I think the climate in which they work has got more toxic. I think it's become more difficult to be a politician and not to be affected by the abuse that seems to become the currency now in talking to politicians.

But yes, I think politics is a noble profession. I think being a public servant is a noble profession. You commit your life to trying to do better for your country in these different ways, and that deserves some respect. And the cultural abuse, it's extremely unhelpful, because I think it drives away many talented people from wanting to do that.

Lord Speaker:

Lord Ricketts, you're a supreme example of the type of expert voice that's in the House of Lords. And I'm delighted and privileged that you have come along to share that experience today. So thank you very much, and this will go out, and there'll be many people looking at that, and I think will be grateful for your contribution. Thank you.

Lord Ricketts:

Thank you, Lord Speaker, for the privilege of coming and talking to you.

 

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