Joseph Cotterill, Features Editor

20 November 2007

Britain will conduct its future foreign policy through “smart international coalitions” on a revamped “multilateral platform”, Foreign Office minister Lord Malloch Brown told an LSE lecture audience on Thursday November 15.

Speaking on ‘UK foreign policy, business and civil society’ in the Old Theatre, Malloch Brown aimed to give a “practitioner’s feel” for a diplomatic world “midway in transition” to an “exciting new frontier of public policy”.

His remarks were, however, chiefly directed at describing the United Kingdom’s dealings with civil society in “coalitions of interest” rather than business. In this new world, the “next generation of political leadership” would emerge from non-governmental organisations to take the lead on solving international problems.

Governments, he said, had “lost ambition” on many issues, while the reform of international institutions remained incomplete. Malloch Brown reiterated the government’s support for an enlarged United States Security Council, in which Japan, India, Brazil and “possibly” Germany had seats.

Accusations of bombast, boastfulness and hostility to the United States have dogged Lord Malloch Brown since his appointment as a ‘goat’ or outsider to Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s “government of all the talents” in June. He had previously held positions as administrator of the United Nations Development Programme from 1999, and as United Nations Deputy Secretary-General under Kofi Annan from 2006.

Malloch Brown remained within his Foreign Office brief of Asia, Africa and the United Nations during the lecture. He outlined how the United Kingdom was working with “coalitions of interest” in areas of concern in Zimbabwe, Darfur, Afghanistan and Pakistan, and on the issue of climate change.

Responsibility for containing the crisis in Zimbabwe would have to fall on “African civil society” rather than the UK alone, he argued, while peace groups in Darfur should not expect a “Versailles Treaty for Africa” to emerge out of negotiations with Khartoum.

Acknowledging that NATO support was “fraying” in Afghanistan, Malloch Brown nevertheless insisted that the United States and the United Kingdom should not be left as the “sum of the parties” involved either there or in its neighbour Pakistan. NGOs such as Amnesty International had powerful leverage in both countries, he said.