Armed Services: Sexual Violence

Lord Hamilton of Epsom Excerpts

Tuesday 9th December 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Coaker (Lab)]

I congratulate my noble friend again on the work that he did with respect to encouraging women into the service and in particular into the Navy and indeed the submarine service. A number of noble and gallant Lords are in the Chamber listening to this debate, and I know that they too have been right at the forefront of encouraging that. Let us be clear, of course there are unacceptable behaviours; of course there are examples where standards are not met, but across the whole of the services, the contribution that women make is phenomenal. They add to our services; they are an important part of our Armed Forces, and it is a brilliant career for women. I hope many more women join the services in the future.

[Lord Hamilton of Epsom (Con)]

My Lords, the noble Lord missed out that it was a ministerial decision to send women to sea, and it was taken because we were turning away very good women and accepting substandard men. That decision was taken by a Conservative Government.

[Lord Coaker (Lab)]

I will just say to the noble Lord that I try very hard not to be partisan on defence matters. I do not really care whether it was a Conservative Government or a Labour Government. The important principle is that women have made a huge contribution to our Armed Forces. That decision was the right one and, frankly, that is what we should be celebrating.

Ukraine

Lord Hamilton of Epsom Excerpts

Friday 31st October 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hamilton of Epsom (Con)]

My Lords, like other noble Lords, I welcome the noble Lord, Lord Barrow, to this House. He clearly brings with him a great degree of expertise, and I am looking forward to his maiden speech later. The noble Lord, Lord Coaker, in his excellent opening remarks, said that Ukraine’s security was basically our security. This is a message that was repeated constantly when I was on the NATO Parliamentary Assembly—I got thrown off shortly after the election because of the appalling results for the Conservatives. All the time, it was recognised at that stage that we could not allow Putin to win in Ukraine. Basically, as the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Stirrup, has referred to, Putin will claim victory from whatever settlement comes out of this.

The extraordinary thing is that we have always had the capacity in the West to defeat Putin in Ukraine, but the trouble is that we have never used the capability that we have. We all know well that wars are won by the grim determination of the troops on the ground—the Ukrainians certainly do not lack that—combined with technology. Technology is absolutely critical. Where we in the West have a lead over all other countries in the world is in the air, particularly with the F35. Bear in mind that the F35 is the only fifth-generation jet in the world and has a capacity to jam all attacks on it. It flies in at 65,000 feet and can protect 11 other aircraft with inferior defences, so it is an absolutely lethal weapon, but we failed to use it. Why did we fail to use it? There was a man under the Biden Administration called Jake Sullivan, and I think he was responsible for the narrative that went, “Well, we don’t really want to remove Putin as a dictator in Russia because we don’t know what will replace him. We suspect that the whole of Russia will break up into fiefdoms with nuclear weapons and they’ll be much more difficult to negotiate with”.

That, of course, was also laced with the whole concept that Putin was keen to deploy, which was that this could all develop into the third world war with an exchange of nuclear weapons. President Putin, an ex-KGB man, knows about nuclear deterrence, even if other people seem to have forgotten about it, and he probably also knows that his nuclear deterrent is infinitely inferior to anything in the West. I do not think he wants to be remembered for saying goodbye to Moscow. I think that much of this is exaggerated, and the Ukrainians have every right to feel that they have been shedding a lot of blood on our behalf. We could have done much to change that.

I turn to the whole question of sanctions. If President Trump has decided that he is not prepared to deliver Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine, this reduces the capability of Ukraine to degrade the Russian economy by taking out its oil refineries and so forth and making it more difficult for it to export oil. In those circumstances, we lean very much on the sanctions that are being imposed on Rosneft and Lukoil. What I do not quite understand is why we do not sanction all Russian oil. Presumably you could have a situation where some rusting oil tanker is stopped at sea; the captain is asked “What are you doing?” and he produces a sheaf of papers and says, “I’m not carrying oil for Lukoil or Rosneft— I’m carrying it for some other company that was created yesterday”. How do we then say, on that basis, that we will stop that oil being delivered? Perhaps when the Minister comes to sum up, she can spell out to us how this will all work.

Other than that, the coalition of the willing, as the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Stirrup, has pointed out, will have a very difficult task. We have to ensure that air power plays a major role in that. I would like to see aircraft based in Ukraine, doing their training in Ukraine in a NATO base, not a Ukrainian one. We should then be determined to make sure that peace is maintained, which I am sure will come eventually.

Ukraine

Lord Hamilton of Epsom Excerpts

Friday 25th October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hamilton of Epsom (Con)]

My Lords, I add my welcome to this House to the noble Lord, Lord Spellar. He and I have been on the NATO Parliamentary Assembly for some time, during which time he has demonstrated a certain steel in his support for NATO, a steel no doubt tempered during his time fighting the communists in the electricians’ union. I look forward to his contributions in the future, which I know will be very robust.

The NATO Parliamentary Assembly reiterates all the time that we cannot afford to let Ukraine lose the war against Russia. All I would say is that, if that is the attitude of the West, it has a very funny way of going about it. Let us face it: we win wars by the grim determination of our troops on the ground—the Ukrainians have demonstrated that in full—and with technology. Every time there has been a suggestion of new, advanced technology being deployed in Ukraine, there has been delay and prevarication, whether it is tanks, F16 aircraft or missiles. We are still arguing, as the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, mentioned, about whether Storm Shadow can be used in Russia. We should be firing cruise missiles into Russia. They have a 1,000-pound warhead and could do incredible damage when they arrive, but they are not being allowed to do so. All the time, we are saying that we support Ukraine and want Ukraine to win, but then we do not give it the kit to do so.

Let us be honest: even if we did deploy this technology, we would adjust the stalemate that exists in Ukraine a little in its favour, but we would not win the war. The only way to win the war is by deploying air power, which is where we have effortless superiority over Russia. That would make a serious difference. I am not going to push that case yet again, because I know there is no support for it and everybody thinks it would end in the third world war, which I do not think is true. The problem is this whole attitude towards escalation, which has come from the United States, and particularly from an adviser called Jake Sullivan. There is an election coming up and one of the great advantages is that he will presumably move on and somebody else will take over. His advice to Biden has always been that we risk escalation the whole time in anything we do in Ukraine, and therefore we do not want to up the ante at all. On that basis, you never win anything.

I want to return to a recent Question Time, when the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, said that the future of Ukraine lay in Ukrainian hands. I am afraid that this is not wholly accurate. The future of Ukraine and of this war lies with the United States of America. It is the major donor to Ukraine and, if it threatens to withdraw the support that it gives, Ukraine will have to comply. If Trump wins the election in a fortnight’s time, he has said—I do not know whether he will keep to this—that he will force a peace deal on Ukraine before he is inaugurated. If Harris wins, I suspect the same process will take place but it will just take a little longer. The West is not going to live with a stalemate in Ukraine. Indeed, one slightly argues, what is the point of living with a stalemate? If you stand to win the war ultimately, there is some point in hanging in there. If you are never going to win, which is the position we are in now and I cannot see it changing, we might as well settle sooner rather than later.

Then we have to consider what will actually happen. The Americans will go to Kyiv and tell Zelensky that he has to settle; Zelensky will say he does not want to settle; and the Americans will say, “If you don’t, we will cut off all arms supplies, you will lose the war even more heavily and you will have a worse settlement at the end than you would if you did it now”.

We must look to the security guarantees that Ukraine puts in place to make sure that it does not get invaded again. Ukraine keeps saying that it needs to join NATO. I have to say that it is never going to join NATO as long as it has a frozen conflict with Russia and Russia occupies a lump of its country, which is likely to be the outcome of any peace agreement. Therefore, we should look to other people within NATO. I look to the Joint Expeditionary Force, set up by NATO in south Wales in 2015, and made up of the Baltic states, Norway, Denmark and Holland, led by the British. In 2017, two additional members joined the Joint Expeditionary Force, the two neutral countries of Sweden and Finland, neither of which were, at that stage, members of NATO, so there is no reason why Ukraine should not join the Joint Expeditionary Force. The British Ministry of Defence, because it does not want to be seen to split NATO, constantly says that the Joint Expeditionary Force is mainly a training organisation. I am fine with that. Let us set up training in Ukraine, both for aircraft and for troops on the ground, so that we have a NATO presence in the post-war settlement. We must have F35s, because they are critical, but let us have them training in the Ukraine, which will act as a deterrent to Russia ever invading again.

Tempest Global Combat Air Programme

Lord Hamilton of Epsom Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd July 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Coaker (Lab)]

I very much hope that the noble Baroness and I can carry on working together. Without being pompous about it, all of us across this Chamber share an interest in the defence of our country and in freedom and democracy across Europe and the world. Working together is extremely important. On her question about the defence industry, she may have seen that yesterday the Prime Minister announced Skills England, which will work with the defence industry and defence companies to overcome one of the biggest hurdles this country faces: the skills shortage, which we have been trying to overcome for a number of years. Redoubling our efforts on that will make a huge difference—but that is just one example of how we intend to work with the industry.

[Lord Hamilton of Epsom (Con)]

My Lords, is there not a great risk that the sixth-generation jet fighter will be yet another white elephant, with escalating costs that will completely distort the defence budget—very similar to the aircraft carriers ordered by the noble Lord, Lord West?

[Lord Coaker (Lab)]

Of course, the defence review will look at defence in the round, but it is really important that this country looks at what the next generation fighter should be. That is an important step. Looking back in history, the Typhoon was at one time a project on a research board and, before that, it was the Tornado. If memory serves me correctly, the Phantom was the fighter programme before that. Our industry and research programmes are the envy of the world. Of course these programmes need to come in on budget, make sense and meet the threats of the future, but looking at what the global combat aircraft of the future should be is an important part of any defence review.