Armed Forces Act (Continuation) Order 2017
Lord Stirrup Excerpts(9 years, 6 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Stirrup (CB)
My Lords, this important debate comes at a crucial time for our country and I am grateful to the Government for making space for it in the timetable. We will shortly be immersed in the considerable legislative agenda attendant upon Brexit and then there will probably be little time for anything else. Yet while we are devoting our attention to the Brexit trees, it would be very dangerous for us to lose sight of the whole wood. Much of our attention over the next two years will understandably be taken up with economic and trade concerns. Yet we stand at a time when our underpinning assumptions about the world in which we live, and in which we will need to trade and carry on business more widely, are threatened in a way that we have not seen for decades.
Over the past three years we have been commemorating various centenaries connected with the First World War, and the Government are now thinking about the appropriate way to mark the end of major European hostilities in 1918. In doing so it will be important to reflect on the fact that the war was a strategic failure for the supposed victors. This was not because of events on the numerous, blood-soaked battlefields, but because the politicians of the day were unable to create a lasting political settlement. The treatment of Germany, the retreat of the United States into its more traditional isolationism, and other such misjudgements, set us on the path to the Second World War and another 60 million deaths.
This is in contrast to the situation after 1945. The sustained engagement of the United States in setting up and supporting international institutions, the reduction in barriers to trade, the economic and political resurrection of Germany, and even the sense of collective endeavour in containing the Soviet Union all contributed to the development of stability and prosperity. Yet that post-war order, which most of us in your Lordships’ House have taken for granted for most of our lives, is being shaken. The foundations have not yet been destroyed, but the building is at serious risk. The threatened—and, to some extent, actual—retreat of the United States from a position of leadership in the wider world, the rise of nasty nationalism and xenophobia in many countries, the growing popularity of beggar-my-neighbour trade policies and the pursuit of amoral opportunism, particularly by Russia, have all left Europe in a state of insecurity that some had rather naively hoped we would never see again.
Further afield, the increasing muscularity of China’s policy in the Asia-Pacific region risks miscalculation and conflict with its neighbours. Above all, North Korea’s almost ineluctable progress towards a nuclear-armed ballistic missile capable of reaching Hawaii and Alaska poses a challenge that no US President could ignore. Some people believe that these problems are remote from the UK and should not concern us directly. They are wrong. War in the Asia-Pacific region would have serious and possibly disastrous consequences for us all, and we must take the danger seriously. Within that wider context, we have a continuing threat to our security from extremist Islamic terrorist groups, and a whole new dimension of conflict within cyberspace. Economic, resource and population pressures are all contributing to increasing levels of instability in many parts of the world, and mass movements of people seem likely to be a feature of the international scene for some time to come; indeed, they could well become worse. I could go on, but I have already depressed myself enough.
Of course, the world is not all bad. There are developments that give one cause for hope and some problems that we once thought intractable have succumbed to patient persistence. But what worries me most about the current situation is not simply the scale and nature of the individual challenges—it is the evident weakening of our will to combat them vigorously and collectively. For us, in Europe, the bedrock of such an approach has long been our commitment to NATO. Those who talk about the alliance becoming irrelevant must ask themselves what sort of collective security arrangement might replace it. Certainly, it will not be the EU. In fact, there is no substitute for NATO—at least, not in the near future. Our first response to the challenges of the turbulent present must, therefore, be to ensure the solidarity and capability of the alliance.
NATO’s responses to the challenges posed by Russia’s actions over the past few years have been rather slow, although they go in the right direction, and the strengthening determination to stand behind Article 5 is reassuring. To be successful, NATO needs the wholehearted involvement of the United States, and we cannot take that for granted. President Trump’s demands for European nations to spend more on defence are neither new nor wrong. Germany does not, as he claims, “owe” money to NATO, nor should the United States be “paid” for the large contribution it makes to the security of Germany—not least because it does so to safeguard its own security. However, Germany owes it to itself, and to Europe as a whole, to spend at least the NATO minimum of 2% of GDP on defence. Others also need to do more, but Germany’s example in this regard is crucial. I therefore welcome Chancellor Merkel’s commitment to increase spending to that level.
However, we need to be clear about the significance of the 2% figure. It is a bare minimum, designed to provide a clear baseline against which one can measure delinquency. It is not like some fundraising target, which we should celebrate reaching. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Touhig, that while he is right to question what lies beneath our own figures, the present Government are far from the only ones to have used creative accounting when it comes to defence expenditure.
In any event, the UK’s commitment to the 2% floor merely raises us above the level of those who should be named and shamed; it does not imply an adequate level of investment in our future security. Indeed, I argue that our public expenditure on security remains woefully inadequate in light of the present challenges to international order. We undoubtedly have first-class military capabilities, as the Minister has said, but we do not have enough of them. Our ships, ground combat formations, aircraft and people are spread too thin, and it is obvious that financial pressures within the MoD are mounting. We ought to be spending more like 3% of GDP on defence, not just the minimum of 2%. We also need greater investment in diplomacy and in other elements of soft power. There will always be arguments about how the money should be spent: about the balance between platforms, weapons, people and new capabilities—such as unmanned vehicles and cyberwarfare. But when such arguments are about the division of an already inadequate cake, they rather miss the point.
The mantra of the moment seems to be about taking back control. With control comes responsibility, and with responsibility comes the duty to will the means as well as willing the ends. Successive Governments have paid lip service to the fact that preserving the safety and security of their citizens is their first priority, but their actions—particularly their spending decisions—have said otherwise. The Minister has pointed to all that the present Government are currently doing in this regard, and I acknowledge that they have at least reversed the miserable downward trend of investment in recent years. They have made a start, but they must do more. We cannot provide all the resources necessary to tackle such a dangerous world ourselves, but we can—and should—set the example for others. It is clearly in our interest to do so.
If we are to be a great global trading nation we shall require a reasonable degree of stability and predictability in the world. Without that, not only our security but also our prosperity will be at risk. Perhaps, as we approach Brexit, it is time to remember, with Thucydides,
“that prosperity can be only for the free, that freedom is the sure possession of those alone who have the courage to defend it”.
I hope that the Government will find the courage to make that defence a financial practicality.
Brexit: Armed Forces and Diplomatic Service
Lord Stirrup Excerpts(9 years, 10 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Stirrup (CB)
My lords, among the uncertainties that surround the United Kingdom’s departure from the EU, there is a constant—one thing that will not change—and that is the relationship between our security in these islands and the security of the rest of Europe. We cannot change our geography by referendum. The safety of Europe is our safety. We long ago gave up the idea of national defence in favour of collective security, and nothing that has happened over the past months has changed that. We may be looking to renationalise aspects of our economic and legal structures, but renationalising our defence is simply not practicable.
For many years now the main elements of our defence policy have been a strong transatlantic relationship and, associated with this, our membership of NATO. Some say that these are no longer valid and no longer have the relevance they once did, and that we should forge new relationships. But when it comes to the exercise of hard power, one needs capabilities and structures upon which one can rely in the most difficult of circumstances: the chaos of war. They are not easily achieved.
The safest route for us as a nation is to ensure that NATO remains a useful and credible alliance, but we face challenges in achieving this. In terms of the sum of its members’ capabilities, NATO remains a very strong military power. But not all of those capabilities are as large, as well trained or as supported as they should be. There is a degree of institutional hollowness that must be corrected. Inevitably, that means investing the necessary resources.
The United Kingdom has traditionally been an exemplar and a powerful voice on security issues within Europe, but I fear that Brexit may threaten this. Yes, we will remain one of the most important members of NATO and maintain one of the highest levels of capability within the alliance. But the strength of our voice, the weight of our opinions within the European fold, will inevitably be diminished. For some years, we have firmly resisted the desire of a number of our partners to create new military structures within the EU that duplicate those within NATO. We have argued that duplication wastes scarce resources and complicates decision-making, all of which would be to the detriment of NATO and of European security in the round. We have consistently won those arguments; we are now likely to lose them, with the unfortunate consequences that I have described.
We have, of course, long agreed that the EU has a useful military role to play at the lower end of the spectrum of conflict and we have participated in, and in some cases led, such operations. A number of them have indeed proved valuable. There appears to be an appetite within the Government for us to continue to contribute to CSDP missions after we leave the EU. I have no doubt that this would be possible but at the moment, we participate fully in the strategic formulation and direction of such missions. Ministers and officials meet at the EU level and hold considerable sway over the direction of policy. The Chief of the Defence Staff sits on the EU military committee, and has a strong voice in the strategic planning and direction of operations. That will not be the case after Brexit. If we continue to participate in CSDP missions it will be as followers, not as leaders.
How should we respond to these challenges? First, we must redouble our efforts with regard to NATO. We must be at the forefront of policy formulation, doctrinal development, capability enhancement and training initiatives. The UK is already doing much along these lines but we must do more. Secondly, we must strengthen and sustain our bilateral defence relationships within Europe. The Anglo-French initiative is making good progress; we must make it indispensable to both sides. We also need to do more with Germany and with other partners in this regard. Finally, of course, we need to invest appropriately in defence. The Government have made a start on this but it is only a start. It is worth recalling that the NATO figure of 2% of GDP, which we have heard cited so much today, was intended as a minimum investment in defence—a rock-bottom, not a ceiling to which members should aspire. We have to invest according to need, and the need is great.
Influencing Europe’s policies for the security and defence of the continent, so crucial to our own security and safety in these islands, will become more difficult for us after Brexit. We will lose avenues of approach and elements of leverage that we currently possess. We must do whatever is necessary to make up for those losses in order to safeguard our own national interest. I hope that the Minister can give us some indication of the Government’s intention in this regard.
Armed Services: Claims
Lord Stirrup Excerpts(9 years, 10 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Stirrup (CB)
My Lords, this is an important debate, and I, too, thank my noble and learned friend Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood for securing it and for the interesting ideas that he advanced, which I support. In considering these and other aspects of the problem, it is important to be clear precisely what we seek to achieve. We are not suggesting that the Armed Forces should somehow be freed from the constraints of the rule of law. The notion that military personnel, if not kept on increasingly tight rein through legal process, would have a tendency to unlawful behaviour is totally unjustified and does great disservice to the men and women who sacrifice so much on behalf of our nation. The need to act lawfully is not a side consideration for the Armed Forces; it is an integral part of the ethos and training.
When I was an operational commander responsible for making decisions about whether or not targets should be attacked, I had a lawyer at my shoulder the entire time. We worked hand in glove to ensure that all decisions conformed with the law of armed conflict and the various other legal constraints placed on us, but I did not need a lawyer to spell out for me the various considerations of the law or the necessity of abiding by them. These had been part of my training for years and were as much a part of my thinking as the military necessity and effectiveness of the decisions I was making. The lawyer was there as a sounding board, as a provider of expert advice and as a check of last resort, should I have some sort of mental aberration, but we were not coming at the process from different angles, one military and one legal; the legal was a fundamental part of the military.
The same is true in all other parts and at all other levels of the Armed Forces. The people we are discussing today are professionals. Wider moral considerations aside, they take pride in doing their job professionally, and that means doing it under and within the law. Can I guarantee that none of them would ever act unlawfully? Of course not. Humans are not perfect and occasionally somebody, knowingly or not, will carry out an illegal act. They must be subject to the full rigour of the law.
The noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy of The Shaws, rightly highlighted the terrible Baha Mousa case, but later suggested that the MoD would generally resist investigation of such cases. I say to the noble Baroness that I was present during discussion of the Baha Mousa case in the MoD. To an individual, we were sickened. We were determined that responsible parties should be brought to justice. It was as far from resistance as can be imagined.
That said, the context of military operations is very different from that which most people experience throughout their lives. It is inherently chaotic. Operations take place in a violent arena where uncertainty abounds and an opponent is trying his utmost to wrong-foot you. In such an environment, the cleverest, most perspicacious and well-trained people will make judgments that turned out to be wrong. It is inevitable. It is inherent in the nature of the beast.
This uncertainty and imprecision extends beyond the boundaries of immediate combat. Some people have claimed that their aim is to ensure that our people go to war only with the best possible equipment. Of course we should all like that, but the effectiveness of equipment will vary according to many different factors; it cannot be perfect in all regards. Ordering an attack today with imperfect equipment may well be less costly in the long run than delaying that attack until the equipment can be improved. These are complex issues with no neat solutions.
It seems to me that that complexity has been extended beyond all reasonable grounds by the involvement of human rights legislation. The protections offered by such legislation are important in the round and are part of the very society and culture that our Armed Forces are there to defend but, ironically, we now run the risk that the way those protections are being interpreted will actually weaken that defence.
I, for one, have always been somewhat bemused by the concept of a right to life. What about the young girl who tragically dies of leukaemia? What happened to her right to life? There is, in my view, no such right—not least because it is inherently unenforceable. What there is, and must be in any civilised society, is an obligation on its members not unnecessarily to hazard the safety of others. Some may argue—rightly, I think—that this is simply another way of making the same point, but how we put things is important. It influences how we think about those things.
No military commander would ever wish unnecessarily to hazard the people under his or her command, but in the Armed Forces it is sometimes necessary to do so. The degree of necessity and level of acceptable risk are often difficult judgments, and sometimes they will turn out in hindsight to have been wrong. If the decisions were made negligently, those responsible for them should be called to account, and legal routes for doing so have long existed, but if every judgment is to be second-guessed in the courts, the result will be caution and even risk aversion. History has amply demonstrated that both tendencies are themselves damaging and dangerous over the long run. The 2013 policy paper The Fog of Law and the subsequent 2015 paper Clearing the Fog of Law provided an excellent overview of the issues involved.
Some argue that the courts can be relied upon to understand the difficult context of operations and to ensure that only egregious cases go forward, but such post-fact filtering, while better than none, will do nothing to diminish the impact on decision-making in the field. Commanders will still face the prospect of their judgments leading to legal challenge, and the assurance that they should eventually be cleared will be of no comfort to them.
In sum, we expect people in our Armed Forces to make difficult judgments in complex and ambiguous situations. With the benefit of hindsight those judgments will inevitably be called into question and, on occasion, even those making them will conclude that they turned out to be wrong. But the alternative is much worse. Hardened veterans of many nations over many centuries have averred that only one thing frightened them more than a commander who made the wrong decision and that was one who made no decision. Unless we restore some balance and provide the military with a degree of protection against the increasing tide of legal challenge it faces, that is the very situation we will be engendering.
Refugees and Migrants: Royal Navy and NATO Interception in Mediterranean
Lord Stirrup Excerpts(10 years, 7 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Earl Howe
My noble friend is absolutely right. This is why NATO is in a support role, as I emphasised, to alert the authorities in the Turkish coastguard and FRONTEX, which is the EU border control agency, to intercept the ships. It is not our role to intercept those ships; it is for the Turkish and, if need be, the Greek coastguard authorities. They have assets in the area which are well placed to do that.
Lord Stirrup (CB)
My Lords, what degree of co-ordination will be maintained between the NATO mission and the EU’s anti-people-smuggling mission in the Mediterranean, Operation Sophia? While the two have separate areas of operation they will both require access to strategic capabilities such as surveillance, reconnaissance and helicopters, which the noble Earl has mentioned, and which are in short supply. It would seem essential that a high degree of co-operation is maintained between these two operations if those scarce resources are to be used as effectively and efficiently as possible.
Earl Howe
The noble and gallant Lord is absolutely right. As he knows, the UK has provided a significant contribution to the EU naval force operation countering migrant smugglers in the Mediterranean off the coast of Libya. We have been doing that since July last year. HMS “Enterprise” remains committed to that operation over the winter, identifying potential migrant-smuggling vessels off the coast of Libya. He is also right to draw our attention to the whole of the Mediterranean as an area of concern. We must not forget that Operation Sophia is just one part of the overall, comprehensive approach to tackling the migrant crisis. The migrants who come up from sub-Saharan Africa are, by and large, those who leave the Libyan coast. In the main, those arriving at the Turkish coast stem from Afghanistan and Syria.
Syria: Brimstone Missiles
Lord Stirrup Excerpts(10 years, 8 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Earl Howe
The noble Lord is absolutely right. There is no question that Russia is actively targeting civilians and is almost certainly in breach of international humanitarian law in the process. That has to stop. Russia cannot continue to sit at the table as a sponsor of the political process and, at the same time, bomb the civilian areas of the very groups of people whom we believe will form the backbone of the new Syria, once Assad has left.
Lord Stirrup (CB)
My Lords, is the Minister able to give the House figures for the number of civilian casualties in Syria caused by the action of ISIL on the ground?
Strategic Defence and Security Review
Lord Stirrup Excerpts(10 years, 10 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Stirrup (CB)
My Lords, it is perhaps worth reflecting that, during the previous strategic defence and security review in 2010, it was made clear to the Government of the day that achieving the kind of reductions that they sought in defence expenditure, at the pace at which they sought to make them, would inevitably result in a degree of strategic incoherence. If the Government nevertheless wished to proceed on that basis, the best that could be achieved was to leave defence in a position from which it could rebuild coherence between 2015 and 2020, hence Future Force 2020.
That, however, would require real-terms increases in the defence budget in each of the years after 2015. The Prime Minister acknowledged as much when presenting the outcome of the 2010 exercise in the other place. Following the most recent defence and security review and the preceding spending review, that funding increase has now, happily, been put in place. I welcome this, but we must be clear that it does no more than was assumed in 2010. It will allow defence to deliver a coherent programme, but it does not bring defence spending back to pre-2010 levels. We will still have smaller Armed Forces, and they will still be stretched to respond to the demands that the Government place on them.
We should also remember that the SDSR sets out an intent; that intent still has to be delivered. Some of the most significant defence shortcomings in recent years resulted not from the 2010 review but from the further cuts that were imposed in subsequent years, so we must seek to ensure that the plan set out in the current review is adhered to. Even that outcome was in doubt until recently. Two years ago, the prospect of the Government reversing the decline in defence spending looked fairly bleak to most of us. Among the important factors in turning that position around were undoubtedly the strong signals coming from Washington that the UK’s position as a reliable partner was in serious doubt.
We have long put our membership of NATO and, within that, the transatlantic relationship at the heart of our security strategy. We flirted dangerously with weakening, if not destroying, that crucial pillar of our defence. Thankfully, we appear to have recognised our folly in time and to have amended our way, but we must ensure that we do not repeat the error.
Any strategy must consist of ends, ways and means brought together in a coherent and achievable way. Our object is the security of our nation, its people and their interests. Two of the principal ways in which we pursue those goals are through our relationship with the United States and our leading position within NATO. This means that we have to employ our forces in a way that is consistent and appropriate, that we have to make levels of investment that are consistent and appropriate to the international situation, and that we have defence capabilities that we are clearly willing to use when the circumstances so require.
There is of course plenty of scope for debate over the exact meaning of terms such as “appropriate”, “relevant” and “circumstances”, and these complex questions and the difficult choices to which they give rise are at the heart of any defence and security review. But what should never be in doubt in the minds of friends and opponents alike is our willingness to put our security at the top of our political calculus. We have started to do that in this review and through more recent events. We must continue to do so in future.
Commonwealth War Graves Commission
Lord Stirrup Excerpts(11 years, 3 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Stirrup (CB)
My Lords, I, too, have an interest as a member of the Government’s First World War centenary advisory committee. I join, too, in congratulating the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth of Drumlean, on securing this short but important debate. It is important because there are very powerful reasons for recognising and supporting the outstanding work of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission.
Those reasons were most powerfully brought home to me 11 years ago this month. I was in Normandy for the 60th anniversary of D-day. We were waiting in the Commonwealth Cemetery at Bayeux for the Queen and President Chirac to arrive for the start of the ceremony and I was talking to a group of cadets from the Air Training Corps. They were bright, enthusiastic young people, mostly around 17 years of age, who were helping with the administrative arrangements and looking after the veterans.
We were standing by a row of headstones and I asked the cadets whether they had really looked at the inscriptions. They had not, but they then started to read them in detail. They found words such as “Private Joe Smith, Died 9 June 1944, Aged 18 years”, “Private Arthur Brown, Died 10 June 1944, Aged 18 years”, “Aged 18 years”, “Aged 19 years” and so on. I could see from their eyes that for the first time they really understood: these were not just names from history. These were young people, much of an age with the cadets themselves, who had met their deaths in those days of June 1944. For the first time, the cadets truly understood this and thus made a personal connection with the past.
The same, of course, is true of the First World War. The three-quarters of a million who died were not just names on a wall or on a gravestone; they were not just appalling statistics. Each was an individual, and a lot of those individuals were not much older than those whose names we read in Normandy. Some would perhaps have gone on to be statesmen or diplomats, some to be businessmen, doctors or lawyers, artisans or farmers, factory workers or labourers. But it did not matter: the gravestones made no distinction of rank or status, and rightly so. For in that awful democracy of death, who dares say that any one potential life lost was worth more than another? They all loved and were loved. They all had hopes, aspirations, frustrations and disappointments. They all had value, and the full value of their lives was unrealised.
Herein lies one of the greatest achievements of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. The graves that it maintains and the headstones above those graves allow us to connect not just with the conflicts of the past, but with the people caught up in those conflicts, with the costs of those conflicts and with the individuals who paid the price. In the study of history, war can too often be represented mainly by the sweep of great events, but even in this technological age war is a very human business and the cost, even when the carnage is greatest, is measured in individual lives. The Commonwealth War Graves Commission helps us to realise and appreciate that basic truth. It enables us, young and old, to make the human connection. Its work enables us to say not just “We will remember them” but “We will remember them as the individuals they were”. Those who paid the ultimate price in the service of this nation deserve no less.
Armed Forces (Service Complaints and Financial Assistance) Bill [HL]
Lord Stirrup Excerpts(11 years, 6 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Stirrup (CB)
My Lords, Amendment 1 makes a very significant change to this Bill. In essence, it provides for a complainant who at the end of the full military process of investigation and hearing is dissatisfied with the judgment that has been reached to apply to the ombudsman for, essentially, a totally new hearing, not a review of whether the complaint was handled properly and appropriately, and not of whether the judgment reached was reasonable within the range of reasonable decisions that could have been reached, but an entirely new judgment on the merits of the case.
It is, of course, perfectly possible for two or more people to reach, in varying degrees, different views on the merits of a case on the same set of facts as presented. Perhaps the most obvious example of this is a dissenting judgment in the Supreme Court. This Bill, as amended, is now essentially saying that the judgment and view of the ombudsman is of more value and is more reliable than those of anyone in the military chain of command or of the Defence Council. Noble Lords will be able to judge for themselves whether they think that is a sensible thing to do. All I will say is that having been in the position of having to review many such hearings and judgments at Air Force Board level, I certainly, to some extent or other, found in favour of the complainant on quite a number of occasions. I could not give your Lordships an exact percentage at this remove, but my sense is that it was quite a significant percentage. The sense that someone in the chain of command is automatically going to be prejudiced and unable to give the complainant a fair hearing is entirely unfounded.
Nevertheless, this Bill provides for a process that is not simply judicial review but is essentially a rehearing on the facts. Given the number of complaints that go through in any given year, and that one of the defects that this Bill was intended to address was the delay in the hearing of such complaints because of their volume, it seems inevitable that the number of complaints on merit that are to be made in future to the ombudsman following the service process will be fairly large. This means that the ombudsman will not in every instance be able to hear that case personally. Some of her deputies, some of the people in her new office, will have to do that on her behalf. Although she will, of course, be called upon to sign off the outcome in every case, it will be people from the ombudsman’s office rather than the ombudsman herself who will hear some of these retrials, if I can put it that way. Therefore, it seems to me that if we are to agree to such an amendment, the very least we must insist on is that within the regulations that will give effect to this Bill in due course, the qualifications and training that will be necessary for anybody from the ombudsman’s office to sit in judgment on such de novo hearings are set out in no uncertain terms. The Minister alluded to this in his speech, and I welcome his words, but when he sums up I ask him to reassure your Lordships that he will come back to us with a form of words which, at the very least, will satisfy us that this unfortunate amendment will do as little harm as possible.
Lord Palmer of Childs Hill (LD)
My Lords, first, I take the opportunity to thank the Minister, my noble friend Lady Jolly and other noble Lords for their input into this Bill. I think it is very important. I take issue with the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Stirrup, because, when my colleagues in the other place asked me if I had any problems during earlier stages of the passage of this Bill in this House, with the Bill having started in your Lordships’ House before moving to the other place, I said that one thing that I spoke about, on which they spoke in the other place, was that the ombudsman would be able to look only at the process rather than the detail. I believed at that time, during the earlier stages of the Bill in this House, that the ombudsman should, in certain circumstances, have the ability to do so—but, as my noble friend said, this is after it has been through all the chains of command, and it is not meant to usurp any of those points.
Russia: Armed Forces
Lord Stirrup Excerpts(11 years, 8 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Astor of Hever
My Lords, I will do my very best to ensure that that happens. Just for the benefit of the House, on 28 January two Russian bombers flew close to the south coast in congested civilian-controlled airspace, unauthorised and without communicating with UK air traffic control. The UK response was conducted in accordance with well-practised NATO procedures and the bombers were escorted from the UK’s airspace by Royal Air Force aircraft.
Lord Stirrup (CB)
My Lords, the Minister has agreed with the NATO minimum target for defence expenditure of 2% of GDP, but his own party has yet to commit itself to that minimum level for the United Kingdom. Will he take this opportunity to correct the position now, and if he cannot do so, will he explain the inconsistency between that and what he has just said? Will he also explain how on earth we stand any chance of persuading our partners in NATO and Europe to do better, because they are doing even worse than us in this regard?
Lord Astor of Hever
My Lords, we have met the 2% target for this entire Parliament. We are committed to spending 2% of GDP on defence until the end of the financial year 2015-16, following which decisions will be determined in the next comprehensive spending review.
Armed Forces
Lord Stirrup Excerpts(12 years, 3 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Stirrup (CB)
My Lords, we are within a year of a general election, following which the next Government will have to make some key choices about government expenditure over the coming years. Over the past four years, the burden of financial retrenchment has been largely borne by those departments whose expenditure has been unprotected. If that is to continue beyond 2015, we have seriously to question whether we as a country are taking a sensible approach to public policy.
There is no doubt that restoring the nation’s economic health and public finances are essential prerequisites for the provision of good public services, including our Armed Forces. This overriding priority has meant that in the short term we have faced difficult choices and painful reductions in many areas. However, our aim must be to restore long-term coherence, not to allow short-term distortions to become structurally embedded.
With that in mind, we have to take account of our national interests and aspirations. The nature of our economy and the sources of our wealth mean that we cannot responsibly withdraw from the global scene. We rely on a degree of global order and stability to pursue our goals; that means we should invest in the promotion of such order and stability. It has long been a key tenet of our foreign and security policy and I see no prospect of change in that regard. Even in the teeth of the economic challenge at the time of the last security and defence review, the Government rejected the notion of strategic shrinkage. I would have preferred a slightly different formulation. It would have been better to say that Britain was committed to sustaining its international strategic role in the long term, but that to do this we would have to suffer some strategic retrenchment in the short term. That would have been a better reflection of the reality.
Either way, we must take account of the current and likely future international situation. I will not repeat all that I said in the debate on the humble Address responding to the gracious Speech from the Throne in this regard; suffice it to say that the global threats to security, as other noble Lords have said, are many and serious. However, I will restate a key point I made in the earlier debate. I believe we are witnessing two major strategic shifts, both of which could pose serious challenges to our future security and prosperity. The first and most obvious is the rising economic might of China and its use of increasingly sharp elbows on the international scene. The major points of friction may be far removed from us geographically, but in this globalised world the consequences will certainly be felt here.
The second development is the continued unravelling of the Sykes-Picot agreement and the subsequent post-1918 arrangements that were intended to tidy up the detritus of the Ottoman Empire. The most malign consequence of this is the growth of an ungoverned space straddling the Syria-Iraq border and the emergence there of extremist Islamic groups, such as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.
There is perhaps little that we can contribute directly regarding the first development, but we have friends in the Asia-Pacific region that we should stay in close touch with and support where possible. Regarding the second issue, we cannot say how things will develop in the Middle East; nor, I suspect, can we exert much direct control over the outcomes. At the least, we should do all we can to prevent the outcome of a slide into a full-blown Sunni-Shia war, which seems to me very much in prospect at the moment.
If that were not enough, we face serious challenges on our own continent, which until recently some people thought would be at peace for ever more. It has been suggested that the EU has in some way provoked Russia’s actions in Ukraine. I am certainly not going to defend all of the EU’s policies in this regard. However, I believe that Russia’s actions are illegal and wholly unacceptable, and that the chances of subsequent miscalculation on the wider European scene have grown considerably. We now face a situation where many members of NATO feel distinctly less secure than they did 12 months ago, and they understandably seek reassurance. We have allowed ourselves and NATO to grow weaker over the past few years; risks and uncertainties are greater when we are weaker than when we are stronger. We need to be stronger if we want to be more secure, even in Europe.
We will need to employ all of the nation’s means of power if we are to rise successfully to the challenges we face on the global scene, but one thing is perfectly clear to me: we will not be able to meet them through soft power alone, important though that is. We will need the capabilities of our Armed Forces—capabilities that we have progressively weakened in the name of financial retrenchment.
Life would be easier if we were able to identify the specific capabilities we will need to employ. We can certainly say that, for example, intelligence, Special Forces and cyberwarfare will feature heavily. However, the history of security and warfare tells us that we need to retain flexibility across the full spectrum of operations. Those who have predicted the demise of particular kinds of warfare have usually been proved wrong, sometimes in spectacular fashion. Even the famous horse/tank moment is often misunderstood. It was not a fundamental change in tactic, about the mobile application of power and shock action. It was, rather, about the ability of emerging technology to provide new and better ways of doing the same basic things. That is often a challenge for military thinkers. We therefore need to retain as wide a spectrum of military capability as we can manage, and sustain within it sufficient flexibility to be able to react successfully to the unexpected, because the unexpected is certainly what we will be called on to face.
Money was the overriding issue at the time of the last strategic defence and security review. The Government’s strategy was quickly to eliminate the structural deficit; everything was subservient to that aim. Defence was set a savings target of between 10% and 20% of its annual budget. The work of the defence review showed that the consequences of this would be unacceptable to the Government, even given their strategic objective. The final level of saving was between 7.5% and 8%. Even that level of reduction was impossible to achieve without introducing a degree of military strategic incoherence. The plan adopted by the Government was to restrict, as far as possible, the short-term damage, and to leave defence in a position in 2015 from which it could restore coherence. Crucially, the Government agreed—the Prime Minister confirmed this when he announced the outcome of the review—that this could be done only through real-terms increases in the defence budget in each of the years from 2015 onwards.
I want to be clear on this point. Although the required level of growth was not specified, it was quite clearly growth in the total budget. The subsequent announcement—that the MoD would assume, for planning purposes, a 1% annual increase in the equipment budget—was necessary to allow sensible long-term planning, but it was a subsidiary issue to the increase identified as necessary in the defence review. What has actually happened is that the defence budget has been reduced even further. Although in-year underspends allowed the MoD to make those savings, one has to wonder how much capability we have forgone as a result of them. Crucially, we have reduced the baseline against which future budget entitlements will be measured.
The result is that the level of defence spending in this country is already dangerously low. NATO has set 2% of GDP as the minimum that members should achieve. Most are well below this and I fear that we fail to meet the target ourselves if one strips out the additional cost of operations, which is supposed to be funded from the contingency reserve and not from the defence budget. Even in an era of continued austerity, we cannot allow this to continue. We should bear in mind the small percentage of national wealth that we are considering here, set against what is agreed to be the first responsibility of any Government. We should be setting Europe a good example in this regard, not a bad one.
We are shortly to host the next NATO summit. I believe that, in advance of that meeting, the leaders of all the major political parties should commit themselves to spending at least 2% of our GDP on defence. That would set a much-needed tone at the summit, and put the most important issue at the top of the agenda. Beyond that, the Government should face up to their responsibilities by delivering the necessary real-terms increases in the defence budget over the second half of this decade. If they do not, then they must acknowledge that the planned Future Force 2020 will be undeliverable; that there will have to be further serious reductions in our Armed Forces; that we have accepted a future of strategic shrinkage in which our international influence will be seriously diminished; and that the nature of this country will be fundamentally changed as a result. Anybody proposing such a dramatic shift in policy ought surely to make their intentions plain in advance, and to seek the specific sanction of the electorate for them.