Craig Murray offers some thoughts on where significant cuts might be found in the UK diplomatic effort.

It includes this:

… our Embassies in EU countries remain among the biggest and grandest we possess, reflecting the days when our shifting bilateral relationships with European nations were literally matters of life and death, war and peace.

They are magnificent and madly over-staffed by crazily over senior people. They are a great relic of a bygone age, institutions so grand that their overwhelming presence masks their lack of purpose.

Something in this, although of course many of the UK-based members of our Embassies in Europe are not FCO people anyway, so once again Craig makes a populist noise but gets the core of the argument wrong.

Do we really want to cut to nothing the numbers of people working in sensitive Embassy liaison jobs dealing with drug and cigarette smuggling, or preventing illegal immigration, or promoting UK business? When we instead could cut wasteful foreign development assistance and pay for all these services and eg beef up global anti-corruption initiatives?

In any case, the issue is much wider.

Successive governments have given the EU the right to take decisions binding on us (and on everyone else) by voting. This means that in the case of utterly stupid EU Directives such as the one attempting to control our working hours, the UK economy may be dramatically worse off (extra and unnecessary NHS costs running into billions of pounds) if this Directive gets agreed in the face of our strident opposition.

Which is why it makes sense to have serious UK diplomatic lobbying firepower deployed not only in our own capital and in Brussels, but also in EU member states capitals.

It is (FACT) not realistic to lobby effectively on many highly technical EU issues by telephone or by flying visits of London-based officials. Apart from anything else, some of the people who may be most difficult or need persuading may not speak English, or may be in parts of the local bureaucracy unknown to our London/Brussels teams.

Only an Embassy can see the local scene as a whole and work out where precisely in the system (bureaucracy/Parliament/media or all of them simultaneously) it makes sense to apply special arguments or offer policy deals. It is too risky to leave it to the Brussels people to haggle on the spot – by the time they arrive there, our rival delegations’ positions will tend to be set in stone and our chances of blocking a ruinous vote against our interests could be gone…

In short, it is a damn good national investment to maintain significant senior lobbying in a good number of EU capitals – the sums of money at stake far outstrip the puny savings Craig identifies.

For a more detailed explanation of all this, see here.

I have no problem with Craig’s idea of scaling back our consular effort (ie the work diplomats do to help Brits who get into trouble overseas), as much of that either can be done by commercial insurance schemes for travellers or not done at all.

But to make that sort of saving requires Ministers frequently to go on TV and tell the great British public that if they hit robbery or illness or earthquakes or volcano dust on their travels overseas, they’ll mainly have to sort out their problems for themselves.

And when weeping angry relatives then appear on TV raving against government insensitivity and mean-mindedness after some disaster has hit their family somewhere beyond our shores, Ministers will have to say "Life’s tough – don’t say you weren’t warned…".

Not quite what I expect to happen.