Britain: After David Cameron, Brexit And The Chilcot Report

Tom Tugendhat MP is a former Army officer, Foreign Office adviser, fluent Arabic speaker, and now the new Member for the tranquil Kent towns of Tonbridge, Edenbridge and Malling in the United Kingdom. On a visit to Australia in the wake of the Brexit vote, the election of a New Conservative Party leader and UK prime minister, as well as the handing down of the findings of the Chilcott Report into the war in Iraq, Tom Tugendhat addressed The Sydney Institute on Thursday 28 July 2016 to give a brief evaluation of the momentous change afoot in Great Britain.

BRITAIN: AFTER DAVID CAMERON, BREXIT AND THE CHILCOT REPORT

TOM TUGENDHAT

It’s a great pleasure to be here this evening. And it’s a great pleasure to be in Australia. This is my first proper visit to your wonderful continent. I have been here before I must confess, about ten years ago. I flew out of Afghanistan, landed in Adelaide, went to a wedding and the next day I flew back to Afghanistan. I’m not entirely sure that 24 hours at a wedding in Adelaide counts as a full knowledge of Australia. So I really do consider this my first visit to your wonderful country. And it’s an absolute privilege to be here this evening – thank you very much to Gerard and Anne for hosting me this evening at The Sydney Institute.

This is an extraordinary moment. Not just for the United Kingdom but I would argue for Australia too. We have come to a moment of strategic reset and, though the question is Cameron, Brexit and Chilcot, if you don’t mind I’m going to do that classic political thing and answer my own question.

But I hope you’ll like it, because it’s Chilcot, Brexit and Cameron. What I want to talk about is how did we get here? How did we get to a position where Britain is having the greatest strategic reset moment possibly since the Second World War? Possibly since 1939 if you consider that since 1945 the position was evolutionary and we evolved in many ways into the European Union. This time it isn’t an evolution. It’s a revolution.

So the question has to be asked; how did we get here? You would be quite right to link Chilcot to Brexit. Chilcot was the first real review of the Iraq war. And the Iraq war, in many ways, began the level of questioning trust in politicians and leadership that we’ve seen evolve in the United Kingdom and around the world. We’ve now got various different people, making very different decisions from the ones that they had been encouraged to make by their leadership.

In the United Kingdom, the Chilcot Report refers very much to the Blair moment. And, for those of you who have seen the debate in the UK parliament, and for those of you who have seen the analysis that’s been running for some months on what Chilcot says, the result won’t be any great surprise. The Report says what we all expected. It says that the intelligence was wrong, it says that Tony Blair made a mistake. Whether he was culpable or not, Chilcot doesn’t actually say. He doesn’t assign guilt. But he does say that the strategic decision was an error based on false information, based on a failed procedure, based on an unsound government set up. So whichever way you look at it, it comes to a pretty sharp criticism of Her Majesty’s British government and, by implication, there are criticisms of our allies in the United States. It doesn’t extend to criticism of your government.

That report has brought together a sum of various moments that have seen British forces deployed in action in Iraq and Afghanistan in very difficult areas. In areas I served. What it’s done is, effectively, looked at the Blair wars. It’s chosen to look, for obvious reasons, at the Iraq and Afghanistan operations and chosen, again for obvious reasons, not to look at Kosovo. Or Sierra Leone. It also hasn’t looked to, because it wasn’t tasked to, things like Rwanda. So it’s looked very clearly at the failure of strategic intelligence, the failure of decision making in the British government. In doing so it has challenged the United Kingdom to question itself.

Before Britain got the chance to do that, we had a second issue. That issue was Brexit. Many people will know the promise made by David Cameron in 2013 appeared to be for domestic political reasons. It appeared to be to solve a problem in the Conservative Party. I would argue that is a misreading because, the results of the vote demonstrate quite clearly that this wasn’t an internal Conservative problem anymore than it was an internal Labour problem. The country voted “out” in almost every part of the country with the exception of Scotland and Northern Ireland – and it was a pretty solid majority. London was an exception as well, but London’s exceptionalism is perfectly understandable when you look at the level of migrant communities in London and its European elements, and the way the profit is made so much from trade.

So you find yourself looking at a United Kingdom that has chosen, in reality, not just to reject the advice of its political leadership, but to reset the strategy that has been the norm since the 1970s. In many ways, the “norm” has been the accepted wisdom since attempts to join Europe under Harold Macmillan. Of course, it’s quite a stunning moment for us because we now must ask some very fundamental questions. Not just of our own government, but of our friends and our place in the world. And that’s where we come to the post David Cameron phase. This, in many ways, has to be our longest phase because we’re all much more interested in the future than we are in the past.

Our post Cameron phase revolves around, what do we do next? Did Cameron have to go one can ask. I would argue he did. And I was very pleased that he left with dignity, and quickly, rather than being prised out of office like leaders of other parties in the United Kingdom. I’m very glad that he’s also left in such a way that he’s allowed the party to have a pretty tough fight over the next leader and yet to come together very solidly, and quite rightly, around Teresa May. I’m personally delighted as I have supported her since the beginning.

But I’m not just delighted that I happened to get this one right; I’m delighted because she is absolutely the right leader for our country at this moment. I don’t know how many of you know her, or have met her in various other guises. But she’s a phenomenal individual. She’s a very quiet and powerful woman. Her leadership of the Home Office, for six years – in some of the toughest times for security in the United Kingdom – has been majestic. She’s had a very steady hand. And when things have gotten difficult she hasn’t gotten excitable, she hasn’t run to the press, she has run a very organised and well measured department. And I’m very confident that’s what we’re going to see carrying through into Number 10.

The real question for what we do next is: who are we? Where are we? And who are our friends? Some of those answers haven’t changed. Some of those answers are fundamental to us. We are an island off the North coast of continental Europe. That’s not going to change. We are an international community with international links across the world, not just here to Australia but pretty much to every country between the UK and here.

It is a very difficult process to see ourselves in this setting, in this truly global setting, and to ask ourselves how do we deal with it now. For us, NATO is a key alliance. Your partnership is an important element of that. NATO is hugely important to us. And not just because we value enormously the relationship with the United States – which we do – and not just because we see it as helping to guarantee peace in Europe for 70 years. It’s because we see a world that is not stable, that is not peaceful in the natural order of things. We see a world that requires the efforts of friendly powers, the efforts of willing partners to make peace. And to keep it. In Europe you don’t need to be a rocket scientist to see some of the effects that failure to keep the peace has caused.

The first time since 1945 that the borders of Europe were changed by force, you only have to look at Crimea. If you want to look at action definitely war-like, look at the fighting in Donetsk. And look at the action in Georgia. And if you want to see some of the most modern examples of war, look at the cyber-attack on Estonia of only a few years ago that closed down the Estonian government and country for a few days. Though we cannot point the finger directly, it’s quite clear that these attacks have all come out of Russia.

But it’s not just NATO. We value many other relations. We value absolutely our place in the United Nations. We value the Security Council’s work and its influence around the world. We also value Europe. We have chosen to leave a treaty arrangement. But we have not chosen to reject our friends. We have not chosen to insult or abuse France, Germany or Italy and many other countries that are very firm allies. We are changing a trading relationship. It’s quite clear when you look at the security relationship that we share much with our many European partners.

France we rely on for enormous amounts of intelligence and cooperation across border issues. Denmark is an integral part of our battle groups and of our military structures. Estonia, likewise. Germany has partnerships with us on everything from finance to engineering. These are very serious partnerships for us. They’re of extreme value. And we will defend them. And defend that cooperation. But Brexit means we have the liberty to do what we have forgotten for a while. And that is to reinforce other relationships that really matter to us.

And here I come, very specifically, to Australia. While it is true that there are many other relationships around the world that are perhaps more financially beneficial to both of us, in the sense that they’re bigger economies, and others that are closer, there are a few that are more natural fits. This isn’t some harking back to empire. Or 10 pound poms or whatever you called them back then. This is a very modern evaluation of what we see here, today, in Australia. Because today there are two countries where each is the mother of the other. If you work in the UK now, you don’t have to go very far before you meet an Australian. An Australian who is running a bank, sitting in a fund, acting as a lawyer, a partner in a law firm. In fact, one of my best friends from university was an Australian now a partner at Linklaters.

You don’t have to go very far to see that. For them, of course, the “mother country” means to Australia. And they’re bringing their skills to the UK. And there’s about a million UK citizens who refer to the mother country the other way around. When you look at the way that our nations have grown up, for a long time the traffic was one way. But for a long time now, it’s been in two ways.

I sit on the Constitutional Affairs Committee at the House of Commons. Some of the questions we’re asking ourselves, are questions that you would understand very clearly. What is the relationship between Westminster and Edinburgh? Between the British government and the Scottish government. How do you share power between London, the mayoralty, and London, the capital? What powers should we give to Stormont for itself in Northern Ireland?

These questions are questions that are new to us in many ways. And they’re very difficult to answer. But there are other questions. What is the role of the Supreme Court, which has only existed since 2009? How should judges act? What should their powers be?

These are difficult questions; these are really hard questions to answer. They’re fundamentally questions of culture, of ethics and of history and tradition. Quite rightly, we look around the world and we ask ourselves, how do other people do this? How do Americans do this? We get answers; some of them are valid, some of them are very different.

We can look to Germany; we can look to France. But the reality is, the best lesson we get, the clearest examples we get, are when we learn from Australia. The Australian Supreme Court and federal structure teach us very clearly and very powerfully how good government in a parliamentary system, with a federal structure, can work.

So today when I say “the mother country”, it isn’t clear what I mean. In legal terms, I could well mean Australia. In federal terms, I could well mean Australia. So for us, this moment, this strategic reset that we have just found ourselves in, is actually an opportunity. And it’s an opportunity for us to conduct new relationships across the world. It’s an opportunity for us to change the way we look so the we are no longer regional, but international again. And it’s an opportunity, not only for British business but for our friends.

On this visit, I’ve been urging people from Australia to come to the United Kingdom. To help shape our trade policy. To help shape it so that it includes our friends and allies here. To help shape it so that we will prosper from it. Because I’m very confident that the next few decades are going to see an extraordinary opening, and extraordinary opportunity. Some Australian companies will open through London. But many British companies will also open through Sydney and Melbourne and see opportunities here. I’m very confident that this is the beginning of an enhanced relationship. It’s not a new relationship as our relationship is so deep there is no novelty in it – but it’s certainly an enhanced relationship.

And the reality is, the post-Cameron world has given us an opening that Teresa May is very ready to exploit. And Britain is very ready to share with her.