Geoffrey Howe, 1926-2015: A Tribute

Sad news that Lord Howe has died.

I had the great honour to serve as FCO speechwriter for him from 1985-87 when he was Foreign Secretary. Of course back then before email and word-processors speechwriting was a ponderous business, with drafts being typed and retyped on hi-tech golfball typewriters by the fleets of nimble-fingered ‘girls’. Hitting deadlines, and even simple research for a speech of any substance was hard work. Some particular memories stand out.

Geoffrey Howe was a quietly brilliant, unassuming man. As a young speechwriter (a position held in not much esteem by the then FO grandees) I had a number of private meetings with him, talking about speeches and his ideas for them. He insisted on the utmost intellectual rigour: every word had to follow logically on from its predecessors, with a speech making sense not only in itself but also as part of a bloc of solid, thought-provoking speeches. This was an exciting time for ideas: Gorbachev was rising in Moscow, and it was possible to start to imagine some far-reaching changes in the way the USSR approached world events.

Sir Geoffrey (as he then was) was the anti-spindoctor. He did not care if a newspaper deadline was missed if the final arguments in a speech had not been nailed down tight. FCO submission folders would wend their way back down to the originators who would dismantle them only to find a terse red ink annotation from his pen deep in an annex. Sir Geoffrey would read papers from his box until 0200 before getting up at 0600. He was generous with praise: tvm (‘ta very much’) was often found inked in the margin. One of my teleletters from Cape Town describing a bad day in the apartheid South African parliament for the ruling National Party came back to me weeks later with his red ink on it: TVM. Vintage CC.

On one occasion he had to give an after-dinner speech and wanted to say something about the Russians’ existential predicament as communism faded. I came up with something roughly like this:

How will people behind the Iron Curtain react when communism falls? It’s a bit like people who have been locked in the dark in a filthy prison for ages. Suddenly the lights are turned on! They are free to go! Will they be pleased as they stagger out into a bright new future? Or furious and despairing when they at last can see properly the disgusting cockroachy conditions they have been living in for so many wasted years?

Good questions. Still being answered.

Sir Geoffrey had to visit the then communist Hungary. I ran up a feisty draft more or less explicitly hammering communism at the philosophical level as stupid and immoral, and shamelessly praising the successes that the Thatcher government were by then achieving in liberalising the economy. Normally the senior FCO mice got to such tracts and nibbled them down into something that was not obviously ‘provocative’. This time everyone was away and there was not much time to fiddle. So the speech was delivered much as drafted. It won storming applause from the Hungarian communist intellectual elite who by then were itching to break free from Moscow.

I also drafted a major speech for him on arms control issues – these were high on what was then called the East-West agenda. I opened by making a rather feeble joke about the subject ‘teeming with acronyms’ (START, OSCE, NPT, IAEA, ICBM, BW and so on). ‘Teeming’ was a very Hovian and oddly undiplomatic word. I always wonder whether my draft prompted him to draw on the word in his fateful resignation speech that helped bring down Margaret Thatcher:

I have to say that I find Winston Churchill’s perception a good deal more convincing, and more encouraging for the interests of our nation, than the nightmare image sometimes conjured up by my right hon. Friend, who seems sometimes to look out upon a continent that is positively teeming with ill-intentioned people, scheming, in her words, to “extinguish democracy”, to “dissolve our national identities” and to lead us “through the back-door into a federal Europe”.

In April 1986 Sir Geoffrey used the plush surroundings of the Lord Mayor of London’s annual diplomatic banquet to make a thematic speech about global food problems. He pressed me to find what he called ‘paradoxes’ – policy or other areas where well-intentioned moves were producing weird or counter-intuitive outcomes. No easy job. To this end I pointed up with the bizarre fact that on the one hand the West was pouring money into more and more weapons systems intended to give the USSR pause for thought, while elsewhere the West was looking for ways to dump some of its wasteful butter mountain on communist countries. In the draft speech I called this farcical situation the Diet of Detente.

Sir Geoffrey did not like this phrase, saying that it made no sense. He struck it out. In the following draft I put it back in, saying that even if it made no sense it sounded good and somehow helped convey the underlying idea in an amusing way. He struck it out again. I reinserted it in the almost final draft. Like EU butter mountains, it was too good to throw away for nothing! Sir Geoffrey gracefully yielded.

And here is the final speech, with that cheeky phrase in it. It caught some newspaper headlines, as I had expected. The speech has many of his own ideas and political insights that I helped knock into shape. But his core wisdom powered it: the arms race was bad enough – the global food subsidies race was even more ruinous. He was right on both counts.

Sir Geoffrey as I remember him: erudite, generous, wry and perceptive. A great man of unimpeachable integrity, whose principled confidence in market forces and political freedom ended the UK’s idiotic post-WW2 exchange control regime and set in motion a surge of investment and national energy that remains with us over 30 years later.

Thank you.

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The Politics of Food

The Right Honourable Sir Geoffrey Howe QC MP

Lord Mayor’s Easter Banquet, London 9 April 1986

In previous years my predecessors and I have used this occasion to present a round-up of international developments. This year I want to try something different, to focus on one theme: the politics of food.

Food is a political issue of worldwide importance: so it is entirely appropriate for me to talk to this distinguished international audience about it.

The political and economic paradoxes of food today are extraordinary. There is no other word for it. And they derive – at least in part – from one simple but misguided idea. It is that sun, soil and rain are not sufficient: for modern agriculture to succeed, one extra vital fertiliser is essential – taxpayers’ money, liberally applied!

The figures speak for themselves. In 1986 taxpayers in Europe, United States and Japan will pay out in direct subsidies for food production no less than $40 billion, over three times the combined gross national products of Ethiopia and Sudan.

This intervention has been on an increasing scale. As a result, huge surpluses have developed.

Europe, for example, is currently storing, at public expense, half a million tonnes of beef, one million tonnes of butter, 18 million hectolitres of wine (enough to fill 64,000 Olympic-size swimming pools), and 16 million tonnes of grain.

But already the United States is storing over five times as much grain – 80 million tonnes. By the end of the season this is expected to double to 160 million tonnes, over 45% of last year’s output

What then do we do with all these surpluses? We cannot eat them. They are expensive to store. So we try to sell them or give them to those in need, but with perverse and paradoxical results.

The first paradox is this. More plus more can equal less. It is hard to accept, but true. Too much food in some parts of the world can simply aggravate food shortages in poorer countries. Why? Because subsidised food surpluses on world markets depress prices. They make local production uneconomic and they undermine self-reliance. And so they compound the dire effects of droughts and other disasters.

The second paradox is the way in which NATO taxpayers, who spend heavily on defence in response to the Soviet and Warsaw Pact arms build-up, simultaneously subsidise the Soviet Union and her allies by selling them surplus food and drink at knockdown prices. The diet of detente indeed!

The third paradox is that expensive producers growing more causes cheaper producers to sell less. Latin America, Asia and Australasia can grow food cheaply, but find their markets threatened by the sale of Western surpluses. So protectionist tendencies develop, despite an international recognition that freer trade is required.

The most distressing paradox of all is the fact that huge surpluses in some countries co-exist with terrible food shortages in others, particularly in parts of Africa. In 1984 one African in four owed his survival to food supplied from outside the continent.

These paradoxes are certainly not new. Let me offer you a quotation:

If grain is very expensive, consumers suffer. If grain is very cheap the producers suffer and the state is impoverished.

It neatly encapsulates a modern dilemma. But it was said 2,500 years ago, by the adviser to Duke Wen of Wei in China!

Politicians down the ages have been forced to grapple with two key problems.

First, the weather. How to produce and store food in good years to offset shortages in bad years. Remember the Bible story: Joseph persuaded Pharaoh to store food in the seven fat years to tide Egypt through the seven lean years. The world’s first buffer stock!

Second, the inherent conflict between the interests of farmers, traders and town-dwellers. It is a conflict that the market can, no doubt, resolve – eventually. But only, it is often thought, at too high a price in terms of economic and political order.

These key problems go to the heart of social stability itself. Food has dominated world history, sometimes because politicians intervened and sometimes because they did not.

There are plenty of examples. Consider, for instance, the impact of the Irish potato famine on Irish and American history.

Consider again the extent to which new European appetites for sugar and tea played a part in determining the scale and pattern of the slave trade – and the impact of that traffic in human misery on the populations and histories of many countries.

Nor are food trade wars are new developments. The opening-up of the prairies in the United States, Argentina and Australia in the last century prompted protectionism in Europe. Disputes have continued ever since.

So the link between food and politics is far from new. But what is new is the scale of the avalanche of surpluses, and their worldwide implications for farmers, consumers, traders and taxpayers alike.

How have these new surpluses come about? The reasons are similar in United States, Europe and elsewhere.

Today in the West we take for granted the amazing variety of food available in shops throughout the year. Look at tonight’s meal: melon, peas, ice-cream flavoured with apricots and strawberry, coffee – none of which is actually in season in Britain in April!

The Lord Mayor and the food processing industry have done us proud.

But this abundance of choice is a recent development. Senior policy-makers in Western countries well remember the painful food shortages and rationing caused by war, depression or poverty.

After the Second World War elaborate subsidy systems were set up in the United States and Europe alike to prevent such shortages – and to help the farming community. National self-sufficiency became the aim.

How times have changed! Improvements in technology, transportation and prosperity have undermined the concept of national food planning.

New technology has brought not only computers and robots but also better fertilisers, fatter cattle, and new types of grain and rice. Storage techniques have been revolutionised and generous subsidies added.

Production in developed countries has inevitably expanded ahead of available markets. Food stocks in some countries now far exceed any conceivable local needs. So other arguments for helping agriculture have assumed a greater importance. The need, for instance, to prevent rural depopulation or to protect the social or environmental fabric of the countryside. They are arguments that should not lightly be dismissed.

Agricultural progress has not, of course, been confined to the West. In recent years the countries of the Indian sub-continent and South-East Asia have almost all enjoyed surging food production. So indeed have countries in other parts of the world. That is good news for all of us. But this very success has itself still further reduced the market for Western surpluses.

These technical advances had been accentuated by major intellectual shift. There is now a widespread realisation that state-run agriculture is inefficient, that freer markets and individual initiative produce results – and quickly.

Since 1978 China, for example, has moved sharply in that direction – and its production of rice, wheat, meat and eggs has been soaring. The largest population in the world is now virtually self-sufficient.

Those responsible for agricultural policy in the remaining centrally planned economies, which are still some way short of self-sufficiency, will no doubt be drawing their own conclusions from that success.

If self-sufficiency became a worldwide achievement, the problems for the surplus producers would be even greater than they are today. But surpluses are still not universal.

Even at the best of times certain areas of Africa are particularly vulnerable to food shortages. The climate is harsh, the soil is poor and, as we all know, long droughts in recent years have reduced millions of people to a desperate, pitiful condition.

The world has responded generously to these dreadful famines. The British Government has given around £200 million of practical, well-directed emergency aid to Africa in the last two years. Some other Western governments have responded on the same scale. Voluntary agencies around the free world also deserve our thanks for the remarkable contribution that they have made to the fight against famine.

Starving people need our help. They can and must have it. This emergency aid will alleviate famine conditions, but massive food aid to get rid of unwanted surpluses is not the long-term answer.

It is not the best answer for the recipients and it’s bad for the donors. The food and its storage have already been paid for by Western taxpayers – with money that would far better be devoted to true development aid.

We are pressing this point with our European Community partners. We want Community food aid to be focused on famine relief or linked to strategies to increase local production.

So, food is an important factor in international politics. Some countries have far too much, some far too little. And the majority of countries, somewhere in between, find their trade prospects threatened.

What should be done?

We rightly devoted much time to thinking about the arms race, but the international community must think too about the reckless “subsidy race” in food.

Excessive protectionism, high support prices, export subsidies, tax rebates and subsidised export credits all damage world trade, hold back development and waste resources. Sooner or later this problem must be tackled head-on. At least it is now, for the first time, on the GATT agenda.

Given the enormous surpluses in some countries it may seem paradoxical to suggest that poorer countries should grow more. But this is of course happening in any event. Many countries have realised the danger of neglecting their farming sectors. So those countries that already produce excessive surpluses must realise that world markets are shrinking and cannot be used as a dumping ground.

We need farming policies, but they must be sensible. In Europe we do need some sort of “common” agricultural policy to prevent damaging competition between national agriculture policies.

Before the Community’s Common Agricultural Policy came into existence that kind of contest with a striking and damaging aspect of the European agricultural scene. Exactly the same kind of conflict is taking place today on a global scale.