A leading Conservative peer has claimed the government's foreign policies create division and confusion caused by "multicultural mayhem".
Lord Howell of Guildford, shadow deputy leader of the House of Lords, said during yesterday's debate on the Queen's Speech that the UK was beginning to look like a "failed nation".
"A robust foreign policy should both define and unite us," he told peers.
"Yet instead, with the best most optimistic view, one is left with a dispiriting picture."
He said the UK should be "forging new alliances", promoting new structures within the European Union instead of greater "centralism", building up the Commonwealth, modernising the security forces and redeveloping aid policies.
But the government was doing "none of those things".
"Above all, these ambiguities in our world stance divide and confuse us here at home as both the Afghan and, I'm afraid, the Iraqi involvement have divided us, adding to the multicultural mayhem and planting a deep doubt within our society," he said
"With our staggering public debt, an enormous budget deficit, with the prospect of head-on collision with the international bond markets looming up and with our lost purpose we are beginning to look like, and outside commentators are beginning to describe us as, a failed nation."
Lord Howell said the UK needed a new foreign policy delivered by a new government.
"Our amazing country, built on its amazing and dazzling past and still full of talent and vitality deserves nothing less," he added.
Opening the debate Foreign Office minister Baroness Kinnock of Holyhead said the Lisbon treaty would end "nearly two decades of preoccupation with the institutional architecture of the European Union".
"Calls for renegotiation of the treaties and repatriation of powers lack relevance and lack intelligence," she said.
"Pursued, they would make the UK the only member state willingly to prolong the institutional wrangling that has already absorbed far too much of the UK's energy in recent years.
"That would at the very least waste precious political capital. There is no prospect our EU partners will agree to unravel arduously established current arrangements."
Liberal Democrat Lord Wallace of Saltaire also attacked Conservative policy on Europe.
And he said that David Cameron "isn't much interested in foreign policy".
He told peers: "Behind him stand the passionate Europe deniers, as irrational as the climate change deniers and UN haters in the American Republican party.
"A new generation of Europhobe parliamentary candidates is hoping to join us at Westminster."
He added: "David Cameron would find himself as Prime Minister a latter-day Harold Wilson, trapped by his party into pretending to renegotiate our relationship with the European Union, knowing that this would be a charade, a wasted year of irritating our neighbours to win symbolic concessions to satisfy the benches behind him."
Former chief of the defence staff, Field Marshal Lord Bramall, said the MoD had an "immense funding problem brought about largely by continuing underfunding of the defence programme over the last 10 to 15 years or more".
"What is now required... is a comprehensive strategic defence review although for obvious reasons this isn't possible before the general election," he said.
He added: "The political machinery must be found for a much-needed war Cabinet to curb the Treasury - while the crisis in Afghanistan lasts and before a review takes place - from taking their pound of flesh over defence spending."
And General Lord Guthrie of Craigiebank, another former chief of the defence staff, called for and end to "dithering" over Afghanistan.
"We can succeed but we can't go on dithering," he said. "We cannot lack direction and succeed. The risks of quitting too are huge and should not be taken."
He told peers: "The drive and the commitment of the cross-Whitehall committee chaired by the Prime Minister is going to be crucial and needs to be very much more effective and active than arrangements have been to date.
"Our servicemen and women in the front line need to know the government and the people are for them and the government and the people are resolute.
"They do not want to see - and I use a word others have used - dithering. Dithering over the 500 who are still waiting to have an order whether to go or not to go does not do any good.
"It seems to me so easy to send those 500 and it should not be linked to the 40,000 American soldiers who are waiting to go."
He said there was a "real problem" about setting a date for withdrawal as it gave "greater assistance to the Taliban in their timing".
