UK's Cleverly calls for expanded UN Security Council to tackle global challenges

Foreign Secretary says the world is 'living through a turning point in the history of humanity'

Britain's Foreign Secretary James Cleverly speaks at Chatham House. Photo: Chatham House

James Cleverly, the UK's Foreign Secretary, has laid out a five-point push to reform international institutions in the wake of disruption facing the global order that would include extensive change to the UN Security Council.

In a speech at Chatham House's London Conference on Thursday, he said the expansion of the UNSC should include helping it respond better to international crises.

“I have five transnational priorities,” he said, starting with reform of the UN's most pivotal bodies. “We want to see representation and membership extending to India, Brazil, Germany and Japan. I know this is a bold reform but it will usher the security council into the 21st century.”

The other reforms are an overhaul of international financial institutions, sustainable public finances for low and middle income countries and a rewriting of the World Trade Organisation rulebook.

The fifth initiative surrounds the development of artificial intelligence and quantum computing, and challenging the world to come together with a multinational approach to managing AI.

“I will chair the UNSC's first ever meeting on this issue in New York next month,” Mr Cleverly said. “We are at the edge of a gigantic leap forward in the relationship between man and machine – one that will amplify the positives but also the negatives of the tech revolution.”

Mr Cleverly argued that overall the world was “living through a turning point in the history of humanity”.

The UK wants to “work with as broad a coalition as possible” on worldwide challenges and said it should be “obvious” that the “voice of the poorest and most vulnerable countries must be heard strongly in the multilateral system”.

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“Global multilateralism brings the sheer heft that is needed to tackle humanity’s most fundamental challenges,” the Foreign Secretary said. “That’s why the United Kingdom cares deeply about multilateralism. We’re deeply invested in it. And we want it to succeed and thrive.

“Because a world without multilateral institutions would be immeasurably worse.”

In the first speech on multilateralism by a Conservative foreign secretary since the 1990s, Mr Cleverly pointed out the shift in the world's centre of gravity, driven by demographic, economic, technological and social change.

At the end of the current century, more than a third of the world's population will be African, while only 5 per cent will be European.

There will be inevitable migration pressures from these shifts and Mr Cleverly said the UK will “not be found wanting” when it comes to rising to the “moral challenge” the world faces as a result.

The development challenge is to create the aid and debt conditions to alleviate pressures on the poorest countries.

“Stopping illegal migration to the United Kingdom begins with ensuring that the poorest people in the world have access to clean water, sanitation, basic health care and education,” he said.

"Preventing conflict will also reduce the push factors for those people seeking to cross borders.

"This is a moral challenge to humanity as much as a political challenge."

He pointed to “Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine” as “a calculated assault on the UN Charter and on the central principles of an international order that was designed, above all, to bring an end to all attempts at conquest and annexation”.

Yet Moscow had turned the perception of the Ukraine war in many countries into a struggle against an overbearing West.

Mr Cleverly said he wanted developing nations to have a strong voice and be their own champions, not to turn to Russia as an ally for their ambitions.

“It is ironically Russia that has acted against the interests of those of the poorer people in the southern parts of the world, those who are disproportionately impacted by the price inflation which is the direct result of Russia's invasion of Ukraine.”