Do we care about ethics?’ The diplomat I was talking to sounded weary. “Of course we do. We always have. In my first job we agonised whether to sell bullwhips to a bull-breeder in Korea. We were worried that the police might use them on protesters. But do you want Britain to prosper? Because that prosperity does depend on trading and investing and liaising with countries whose values we don’t like.”
If Britain restricted its commercial relationships and its political alliances to the liberal democracies who think and behave as we do, we would be infinitely poorer and more vulnerable. There would be no oil, no billion-pound contracts and no intelligence-sharing from the Gulf states; none of the cheap goods from China that have underpinned the economic growth of the past twenty years; no Russian gas to keep our houses warm. The unpredictable, competitive, dangerous, interconnected world we live in makes lofty moral isolationism an impossible choice.
The cancellation of the Saudi prison contract this week looked like a triumph for morality over realpolitik. But that tactical withdrawal is just a minor example of the Foreign Office’s daily struggle to balance our interests with our values.
It’s in our interest to be rich and safe, but we’re uneasy about doing trade, defence and intelligence deals with countries that have a poor human rights record. Britain believes it has an evangelical mission to do more. We’re simultaneously trying to spread the values of liberal democracy and human rights worldwide, so we’re caught up in an ethical tangle when our political and commercial alliances strengthen and support repressive regimes.
Governments and the Foreign Office justify this by arguing that when we engage with illiberal states we influence them. This is the case that Sir Alan Duncan, MP, a member of parliament’s intelligence and security committee, was making when he attacked Michael Gove for forcing the cancellation of the contract. Disengagement from countries we disapprove of was a comfortable moral position, but “it leads to no progress whatsoever”.
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I sympathise with Duncan’s thesis. It has history behind it. Since the Second World War the values of Britain and the West have mostly triumphed as autocracies fell. The trouble is, it’s no longer true. The Arab Spring largely produced anarchy or authoritarianism. From China to radical Islam to imperialist Russia we are facing self-confident cultures that are not remotely interested in adopting our values. They are no more likely to suddenly conclude that sharia is mistaken or that a one-party police state should be dismantled than we are to start chopping off arms for theft. We think we can nudge them, but we are largely deluded.
I have been reading the Foreign Office’s annual human rights and democracy report, detailing its relationship with 27 “countries of concern”. It is a startling catalogue of ineffectiveness. In Eritrea, Burma, Saudi Arabia and Sudan we lecture and condemn to almost no effect. We make clear to the Burmese that “one political prisoner is one too many”. In China we work hard: “we have lobbied at all levels”; “we have raised concerns”. It reports only a single improvement, not attributed to Britain: from January this year China has stopped harvesting the organs of executed prisoners.
The lesson we should draw from this is a deep humility. We have much less persuasive power than we imagine. We matter less than we think we do. Faced with this futility the government has quietly but determinedly shifted its foreign policy away from lecturing to focus on what it knows it can deliver: investment and jobs. In a radical change, almost every foreign visit, whether to the Far East or Iran, is now about exports; every government department is expected to contribute; commerce is encouraged with every country except those on a proscribed list. In ten days the Chinese premier will be here for an “enormous” state visit; bringing with him almost 200 Chinese companies and contracts worth tens of billions. In November the Kazahkstani dictator will follow, bringing gas and oil contracts.
This realism about the limits of our influence doesn’t mean that we should abandon any sense of our own morality. On the contrary, it should make us much more honest and analytical about what we are doing and why. If we want to earn money from contracts with Saudi prisons and police, let’s admit it, and stop pretending that we’ll simultaneously be doing good. If we can’t stomach the contracts, as I wouldn’t, let’s be frank about lost jobs. But let’s stop fooling ourselves that for us, virtue and self-interest magically coincide.