D-day: 75th Anniversary

Lord Balfe Excerpts

Tuesday 4th June 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, I begin by congratulating the noble Lord, Lord Reay, and saying how pleased I am that he has joined us on these Benches. I am sure that he will make many valuable contributions on connectivity, as well as on many other things, and I look forward to hearing them.

Most of us in this Chamber have two things in common: we were nowhere near the Second World War, but we have benefited enormously from the international settlement that followed it. I was born just before D-day in what was very much another country. One factor in the Britain—or England—of that time was that some 20% of males between the ages of 20 and 40 were from outside the UK. They were soldiers from Canada, the United States and many countries of Europe who were in Britain as part of the build-up to help with that invasion and what followed it. I have a few figures: there were apparently almost 3 million US servicemen in this country by 1945. They had come, some had moved on—they were not necessarily here at the same time—but they had been here.

I echo the sentiments made by other noble Lords that we must not confuse the personality of the President of the United States with the people and institutions of that country, to whom we owe a debt of gratitude. By coming out of isolationism under Roosevelt, the United States did more to build the western European—now European—values that we believe in than probably anyone else. By the time D-day happened, albeit a very important happening, the Germans were already on the road to defeat. It was a question of time, as in the case of Japan in the summer of 1945: it was going to be defeated, but how long would it take? The Germans were going to be defeated, but how long would it take? We needed all those troops. We should not forget the enormous contribution of General—rather than President—Eisenhower, who pulled together the disparate politics and attitudes of many different people, and many leaders in the different contingents that made up the allied forces of the Second World War. Eisenhower was a truly inspiring politician who wore uniform; he certainly pulled everybody together.

Denis Healey—a noble Lord in this House many years ago and a leading member of the Labour Party—once said of the European Union at a small meeting that I attended: “Europe will be in trouble when there is no longer a generation that remembers the war; that remembers Anzio and why the post-war institutions were built”. He was absolutely right. The Second World War was in many ways just a continuation of the First World War, at the end of which the mistake made was the retreat of internationalism. When I lectured in history, I used to say: “You can rewrite your history, but you cannot rewrite your geography”.

I would like people to take a closer look at the history of inter-war Europe. It was not a history of flourishing democracies and a wicked Soviet Union; in the eastern part of our continent, it was a history of pretty repressive regimes. There was not much democracy to be found in the countries of central and eastern Europe, or in the countries of the rest of Europe. Southern Europe had a variety of authoritarian regimes. If we start with Ataturk in Turkey, Venizelos, Mussolini, Franco, Salazar and swing round to the country my family came from, the Republic of Ireland, they were all quite authoritarian regimes. To my mind, what we got out of the Second World War was the liberal democracy that has persevered since then.

The person we have to thank for that is largely Roosevelt, who had a vision of what could happen. Both Roosevelt and his successor, Harry Truman, had had the advantage—an unusual one among those from the United States—of spending time in Europe. Harry Truman spent this time in uniform; Roosevelt—who was from a much more privileged background—crucially spent time in Germany as a young person. We tend to forget what we owe to these people. We forget what we owe to a heroine of mine, Eleanor Roosevelt, who saved the International Labour Organization, getting it moved to Canada during the Second World War, who wrote the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and who had an enormous impact on social issues in America as well as on the development of, for example, the principles of the Atlantic Charter.

After the war—it could not have happened without D-day—we had the Council of Europe, the European Union and the European Coal and Steel Community. All were built on the hope and belief of a generation of which I am pleased to be a member that we could build a better Europe together. The biggest lesson of D-day is the multinationalism in its endeavour to achieve an ideological objective, which was the Atlantic Charter and its principles of democracy. To me, that is what D-day was about and why we are, rightly, celebrating it now. But we would not have the institutions that we have in western Europe had it not been for the assistance of the United States. Without Marshall Aid, there would have been no rebuilding; without NATO there would have been no guarantee of defence. The European Community would probably not have existed had it not been for the way in which the Americans quite openly intervened in European elections to get the results they wanted, with Governments who would build the type of societies that they wished to see. We should remember that: the societies we live in are owed in part to the determination, thoroughness and vision of, in particular, General Marshall, President Truman and Dean Acheson, the American Secretary of State. By all means, let us be critical of the current inhabitant of the White House, but let us remember the debt we owe to the people of the United States who, in so many ways, gave so much to make Europe a civilised continent.

Folic Acid

Lord Balfe Excerpts

Wednesday 9th January 2019 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Manzoor]

I agree with the noble Baroness that the issue has been on the agenda for some time. I am an optimist. There is a consultation, which will be sharp and rapid. She is raising her eyes but the reality is that we have to take into consideration all the issues. It is about responsibility, and choice too. People can go on the NHS website Change4Life, which talks about healthy lifestyles. There is a positive and proactive campaign to ensure that women of childbearing age take folic acid. Young women—and all those of childbearing age—need to ensure that they have a well-balanced diet that includes things such as broccoli, spinach, pulses and so on. That is their responsibility as well as a matter of government accountability.

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords—

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

My Lords—

[The Minister of State, Ministry of Defence (Earl Howe) (Con)]

My Lords, we have had two supplementary questions from the Labour Benches and only one from the Conservative Benches, so would my noble friend like to continue?

[Lord Balfe]

My Lords, I draw attention to my interests as set out in the register. Every week that goes by there are more medical tragedies which could be avoided, so there has to be a sense of urgency. I hope this consultation is about how to implement the procedure, not about whether or not, as I think that question has been answered. I ask my noble friend the Minister to assure us that the consultation will be about operationalising the addition of folic acid, not about another way of looking at evidence which has already been thoroughly examined.

[Baroness Manzoor]

I do not know what is going to be in the consultation because I have not had sight of it, but it will take into consideration a wide range of issues to ensure that we are able to move forward in the positive way which I know noble Lords across the House want.

Reconciliation: Role of British Foreign, Defence and International Development Policy

Lord Balfe Excerpts

Friday 14th December 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, I join the many noble Lords who have thanked the most reverend Primate for introducing this debate on this subject, and I thank the noble Lord, Lord Campbell, for his comments on hard power.

Reconciliation of course revolves around working with other people. One of the things we are about to do in leaving the EU is to remove some of our areas of political co-operation. We will no longer be part of the political co-operation that exists within the EU. They will come to joint statements and we will be invited to associate ourselves with them but we will not be in the room drafting them. We can give them our input in advance and it may or may not be taken into account but the fact is that, like Norway and Canada, we will only be invited to associate ourselves with them.

We could possibly learn a bit by adjusting our foreign policy to be a bit more like that of Norway and Canada, because one of the points that I would make to the noble Lords who have spoken, particularly the noble Lord, Lord Campbell, is that the illusion that we have much in the way of independent hard power is exactly that: an illusion. Since we joined the EU, our defence forces have moved from a size that could recapture the Falklands to one where we would be jolly lucky if we could recapture the Isle of Wight. We do not have any effective defence forces on a world basis. We have a fairly adequate force for defending ourselves, but that is about as far as it goes.

We will also notice the difference in our ability to conciliate at the United Nations. There is one country in the EU that is secretly quite happy to see Britain go, and that is France because it will become the only P5 member of the EU and will effectively become the undisputed champion co-ordinator of EU responses to UN initiatives. Again, we will be invited to comment, but we will not be in the room and we will not be shaping those comments. The French Quai d’Orsay is the only other really excellent diplomatic service in Europe, and it will move into the gap because it is capable of doing so.

There is another area where we will find it difficult to conciliate. We have lived for many years under the illusion that NATO defends Europe, almost as though the other members of the EU had nothing to do with it. To an extent, of course, they did not because they thought NATO was an Anglo-American club. They are not too keen on introducing a 2% contribution to a club where they do not see themselves having much influence. Britain has consistently blocked the development of a military capacity in Europe. That block is going to be removed. No one in Europe believes that President Trump is committed to the defence of Europe; they believe that, like most American Presidents, he is committed to the defence of the United States. So Europe sees itself as needing to develop its military capacity, not in the way that it has been developed until now but very much more in a defensive capacity, with the capacity to keep the peace within its own shores.

What should we aim for? The first thing that the forces for reconciliation—the FCO, the British Council and the World Service of the BBC—need is money. The idea that you can constantly cut back on your agents of soft power is totally counterproductive to carving Britain out a new place in the world. There is a need for us to nurture those three institutions, all of them widely respected. I think particularly of the British Council, which in many areas is little more than a business for running language schools. It needs far more input in promoting British values and Britain’s unique contribution.

We also need to reconcile our attitude to human rights on a broader plane than we have. I wonder what the reaction would have been if Mr Jamal Khashoggi had been murdered in the Iranian embassy or consulate in Istanbul. I think it would have been very different: not an embarrassed cover-up, pretending that it did not happen, which is going on at most levels—except, interestingly, in the United States Senate. There would have been outcry. There should be outcry. We must get away from what I think of as selective outcry and step a little away from the policies of Washington when we look at what is in our self-interest.

I met Bashar al-Assad on three occasions before the Syrian war started. It was not the nicest place in the world—no one is pretending it was—but the Christian and Jewish communities had a certain amount of stability there. I always believed that there was some prospect of nudging him forward—more so than in some other Arab states, incidentally. The heavy-handed way we dealt with it has destabilised the region and the border with Israel. It has brought an enormous influx of refugees into Turkey—another country we are prone to misunderstand when it suits us—and it will be with us for many years to come.

It is no good complaining about a refugee crisis when we have caused most of the refugees to exist. These people did not wish to blow up their homes in Aleppo so that they could come to Stuttgart; they wanted to live in Aleppo, but we in Britain and the United States promoted a war which has ended in the dreadful situation there is now.

Yes, we need reconciliation. One element on the way to getting it is to stop believing that we must always have an enemy. However much hard power we have, we are not going to march on Moscow. At some point, we must settle down and try to sort out the outstanding and large problems of Europe, many of which are connected not to Gorbachev or Putin but to the disastrous Yeltsin years, when the Soviet Union was in a state of virtual meltdown. When we talk about Russian billionaires in London, we seldom extend the sentence to say, “Russian people who are billionaires because they have appropriated the assets of their country”. Very few of them worked for their billionaire status. We need to help Russia to re-establish itself but make it clear that there are limits beyond which it cannot go. When I hear that Macron has been in Russia, or that others have been there five times this year, or that Chancellor Merkel—who speaks fluent Russian, as Putin speaks German—is on the phone once a fortnight, but we cannot manage to send even a junior Minister to the World Cup final in Moscow, I wonder if our concept of how to reconcile our relations with Russia is sound, sensible or even halfway thought out.

I conclude on this point about the UN peacekeeping forces. I was recently privileged to go on a delegation to Vietnam on behalf of the Inter-Parliamentary Union. While we were there, we met representatives of the defence ministry. They were about to send a peacekeeping mission to South Sudan as part of the UN force. It was obvious to me that they had not the faintest idea what they were doing. I am pleased to say that the British military attaché in Hanoi is advising the Vietnamese. I raised a simple problem. They said, “What problems do you think we might encounter?” I said, “You could well find that one of your soldiers has a serious family bereavement or illness. You need plans to bring him back”. They said, “Do we?” I said, “Of course you do. The morale of the whole force will collapse if it is seen that you have no plans to offer humanitarian assistance to your soldiers”. I very much take on board the point made about UN peacekeeping forces.

Like the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, but with nowhere near his experience, I have had much experience of Cyprus over the years, nearly all of it in the north. The UN peacekeeping force there is regarded as a fixed body. They think it will always be there. They do not need to solve the conflict because it will be there. President Trump occasionally does something sensible. He asked, “Why are we still funding it after all these years? Why is it not being sorted out?” To an extent, UN peacekeeping forces have been seen as an agent for reconciliation when, in reality, they have just been an element for control.

We have a lot of things to think about. I am grateful to the most reverend Primate for initiating this debate, which has enabled us to have a wide-ranging discussion over a whole area that we need to think about very carefully in these perilous foreign policy times, in what now appears to be a post-Brexit world.

Queen’s Speech

Lord Balfe Excerpts

Thursday 22nd June 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, I see that the House is filling up but I doubt it is because I am speaking. I will speak about defence and then foreign and Commonwealth affairs, but I will preface the whole thing by welcoming the noble Lord, Lord Ahmad, to his new role. I dealt with him extensively in his previous one, when he looked after the regulating of aircraft. He will now be spending his time getting on them so he will be doubly pleased that he put so much work into making sure that they are safe and efficient.

I do not think I have ever quoted the DUP before but I will start with a quote from its manifesto:

“When the public finances improve we believe it will be appropriate to have a new National Security and Strategic Defence Review. The 2015 Review demonstrated a lack of strategic ambition and was too much a product of expenditure limitations”.


I echo that sentiment. In the post-EU world that we are moving into, the security and defence capacity of this country will be our unique selling point on the world stage, and it is absolutely vital that we get it right.

I believe we have become far too obsessed with the 2% target. We are a P5 power. We should not be setting our defence targets alongside those of nations that are, frankly, less prepared to engage in military operations than we are. We need a first-class defence force. We look at the United States and we see defence expenditure at 3.61%, even after substantial reductions, and I would like to feel that our defence review, if we have one, will not be aimed at how little we can spend but at how much we need to spend to play an effective role in the defence of the western world.

I welcome the points made by the Government on legal claims against the Armed Forces. I do not have the length of experience of the noble Lord, Lord West, although I had a few years in the Territorial Army many years ago. If you are in a battle situation, you cannot be wondering whether some firm of lawyers is going to be chasing round after you. I welcome the decision by the Defence Secretary to seek to opt out of the European Convention on Human Rights prior to future military operations. I hope that will be maintained and we will continue to do what we have said we will do, which is to stop vexatious claims against the Armed Forces. This is not helping us to be a decent defence country with a decent defence capacity.

I welcome what is being done for veterans but if you look at the situation of veterans in the United Kingdom compared with the United States, where they are honoured members of society, we still see instances where soldiers are asked not to wear their uniforms in public. In the United States soldiers are encouraged to wear their uniforms and given priority in certain public services, and I would like to see this. We see many examples and last weekend we saw a particularly petty one:

“‘Blinkered’ MoD prunes hoes for heroes”.


This was a gardening project—horticultural therapy for people severely disabled in war. What is the saving? Just £350,000. This is peanuts to the department, and I quote the Ministry of Defence’s words—I am not making this up—in the article:

“There will always be some instances when we’re not able to use public money to support their services”.


Are we living in the real world? “Their services”? These are people who have had their limbs blown off and for whom we are asking for a minor contribution to help them settle into a better life. When I was in Washington not that long ago, Congress ran a golfing tournament where members of Congress and the Senate went out and played golf to raise charitable money for the veterans’ association of the United States, for limbless ex-servicemen. If we could do something more in that way, we would be doing a lot better.

I turn briefly to a couple of matters where we need to sort out what to do on foreign policy and defence. First, what is to be our attitude to continuing to participate in joint EU affairs in a military capacity? For instance, will there continue to be a naval input into Operation Sophia and the Navfor operation against piracy off the Somali coast? There is a precedent: Norway is a participant in the Somali operation. I hope that we will not only continue but make a fairly strong statement as to our policy on future operations of this nature, because when the EU plans its joint efforts we will not be at the table. But those countries will wonder whether we will be there and we need a fairly strong statement of principle about our attitude to future operations of this kind. I would also be interested—this is where we stray on to an FCO point —to know what our planned disengagement is from the European External Action Service. A lot of able Foreign Office personnel are serving with the External Action Service. Will they all be withdrawn by March 2019? Will there be a phased withdrawal? Will we continue to give any support to the External Action Service or not?

Finally, I echo the words of the noble Lord, Lord Collins of Highbury, about the importance of keeping trade unions involved. We often forget the contribution of our trade union movement through the TUC international committee, through its commitment to human rights and through its solid support for this Government—as well as previous ones—when intervening on the world stage through the ILO and many other bodies, whether it is working to help improve the conditions of workers in Bangladeshi factories, people in prison or the like. I hope the Government will be able to commit to continuing our help for the trade union movement’s operations and fully utilise them in driving forward our foreign policy.

[Baroness Dean of Thornton-le-Fylde (Lab)]

My Lords, the gracious Speech had just one paragraph on defence—