Katie Lam is a shadow Home Office minister and MP for Weald of Kent.
By now, it’s almost trite to recognise that we are living in a more dangerous and turbulent world.
Events in Ukraine, Israel and Palestine, the Red Sea and, most recently, the Persian Gulf have challenged long-held assumptions about the global order. International institutions, many of which have stood for as long as living memory, have proven to be out of step with new realities. Alliances which were once assumed to be inviolable are being rapidly reconfigured.
Against this backdrop, there is increasing public interest in the question of how Britain should approach foreign affairs.
This Government’s default position has been to adopt an almost religious belief in the power of international law, and to listen to those in the Foreign Office who still haven’t woken up to the fact that the world has changed. Their plans to hand over the Chagos Islands, now hopefully scuppered, are the single best example of this approach. Clearly, it has been a disaster.
But amongst those who are thinking more lucidly about how Britain should engage with the world, there is a growing acceptance that our efforts abroad are intimately linked to our fortunes at home. A country with a stagnant economy, crippling energy prices, and a broken migration system cannot project power and influence overseas.
To govern is to choose, as the saying goes, and not least because you can only spend each pound once. This Government’s repeated choice to increase the welfare bill (by, for example, removing the two child benefit cap) leaves less money to spend on defending ourselves. Just this week, Lord Robertson, the author of the Government’s Strategic Defence Review, admitted that “we cannot defend Britain with an ever-expanding welfare budget”. By contrast, Kemi Badenoch rightly says the Conservatives will reinstate the cap and use that money to pay for defence.
But before we even begin to discuss how best to defend and advance Britain’s interests abroad, we must be able to articulate what those interests are, and we must have the means to act when we choose to.
Much of that work starts at home.
Clearly, we cannot maintain the kind of military that we need while also spending billions of pounds on those who don’t work. We won’t be able to source equipment for that military if we continue to cripple our domestic industry with endless regulations, and unsustainable energy prices.
And we won’t be able to guard ourselves against national security threats if we aren’t realistic about the role that immigration can play in fuelling those threats. Far too many people, for far too long, have been far too naive about many different aspects of immigration, but naivety about the immediate security threat, and the way that immigration can be weaponised by our enemies, is perhaps the most directly dangerous. From incidental law-breaking to gang crime to terrorism, migration is a thread that binds many of the security threats that we face, and we must be realistic about this when designing policy.
But none of this is to say that we can, or should, withdraw from engaging with the world around us. At an excellent event held by Policy Exchange on Monday evening, analyst Aleksi Aho took attendees through the worldview of the Russian military strategist General Alexander Vladimirov (in summary, thankfully — his “Theory of Science and Warfare” is three times longer than War and Peace). Vladmirov’s work is perhaps the clearest distillation of how many of our adversaries, including Russia, think about the world. This is in terms of “civilisational war”: a constant and existential conflict at the highest level. We may not be interested in conflict with Russia, but conflict with Russia is most certainly interested in us. The easiest way to lose that fight is to pretend that it isn’t happening.
And in any case, a hard and fast distinction between home and abroad may not even be available to us, if that distinction isn’t acknowledged and respected by our adversaries. When hostile states weaponise migration to harm us, or carry out assassinations within our borders, or fund organisations designed to undermine our security, it simply isn’t possible to pretend that the rest of the world doesn’t exist. Weaponised migration in particular is a tool the Russians are trying to exploit in earnest, as we also heard at Policy Exchange, this time from General Jarmo Lindberg, former Chief of Defence for Finland.
Strengthening our hand at home in order to deal with challenges abroad is about being realistic about what we can and can’t do, what needs to come first, and recognising that our interactions with the rest of the world have real, material consequences for the British people. If we want to carry out those interactions on the best possible terms, then we must be genuinely capable of backing up our words with action.
This is a fundamentally Conservative approach to foreign policy. At its best, our party has been able to recognise the world as it really is, and engage with it on those terms. We cannot, as this Government has, hide from uncomfortable truths about the world, or about our own position in it.
Continuing this approach, as a country, will leave us poorer, more vulnerable, and less able to influence the world around us. It would also be a profound dereliction of duty, to those who have fought for our freedom, and those who continue that fight today. The country that we live in was built and maintained by those who took this realistic, Conservative approach to the world.
We must continue in that proud tradition, so that future generations might be able to say the same about us.