Defence Implementation Road Map

Bernard Jenkin Excerpts

Tuesday 10th November 2015 General Committees

[The Chair]

We now have until 3.35 pm for questions. At my discretion, I will allow supplementary questions.

[Mr Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)]

It is a pleasure, Mr Hanson, to serve under your chairmanship. May I ask the Minister why we support EU defence industrial policy when we do not have a defence industrial policy of our own?

[Mr Brazier]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for his question. We are not supporting EU industrial policy; we are supporting initiatives by the EDA to do what is sometimes called “speed dating” to encourage companies in different European countries to talk about how they can work together to reduce the massive overcapacity in the European defence industry and to get better value for money. To expand that answer slightly, one of our specific contributions has been to persuade countries to look at cross-purchase, or reciprocal purchase, as well as at several nations collaborating, because that is often a cheaper and more effective way of getting good value for defence.

[Mr Jenkin]

I thank my hon. Friend for that answer. May I remind him that in the 2010 Conservative manifesto we were going to pull out of the European Defence Agency? Then, under the coalition, we were told that we could not pull out of the EDA because we were in coalition. Now we are not in coalition, but we are still participating in the EDA. Why have we changed our policy?

[Mr Brazier]

We regularly review our membership of the EDA. The most recent study took place after I became a Minister. It is a relatively small budget and a simple tactical choice. In fact, one EU country chooses not to participate: Denmark. The choice is entirely pragmatic. At the moment, the small budget spent offers value for money, we feel, because in a number of areas we can see that savings are provided. The EU is not a competitor with NATO, at least not as we are formulating it, but having the EU as a forum where we can discuss participation in various collaborative projects—my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset mentioned collaboration—intellectual property rights, dual use and so on, provides good value in some areas. We do not have an ideological commitment to remain a member, but an independent study has looked at it in the past 12 months and we believe it offers good value for money.

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[Mr Brazier]

The EDA is an intergovernmental agreement. Denmark is not a member, although Denmark is a member of the EU. I tried to make it clear from the beginning of my speech that the Government’s policy is to stop the Commission from expanding its competencies. From time to time we review our membership of the EDA; it has a small budget, which is doing useful work in a number of areas. It has saved us money—I mentioned two or three of the areas where it has done so—but we are not allowing the Commission to develop an industrial or a defence industrial policy for Europe. We have no intention of doing so.

[Mr Jenkin]

It is interesting how much assertion and denial has to be done to explain why it is in our interest to be involved with this at all, but I commend my hon. Friend for starving the EDA of the cash that it craves. Other member states would willingly vote for that, but we use our veto to prevent it, which certainly keeps things in check to a degree. However, will he clarify why, when every strategic defence review from 1998 onwards described, as he just did, NATO as the cornerstone of our defence, the 2010 SDSR did not?

[Mr Brazier]

I am most grateful to my hon. Friend for his kind comments on my exercise of the veto last year. My noble Friend Earl Howe is going over to do that next week. The short answer to my hon. Friend’s question is that I do not know. I congratulate him on his observation, and I would be surprised if NATO was not pretty central to the next SDSR.

[Mr Jenkin]

I am most grateful for that assurance. Rather than repeating what the 2010 review said—it referred to

“our status as a permanent member of the UN Security Council and a leading member of NATO, the EU and other international organisations”,

as though NATO and the EU were pari passu with each other—may I suggest to the Minister that we include the words, “NATO is the cornerstone of our defence” in the 2015 SDSR?

[The Chair]

Order. Before the Minister answers, I remind the Committee that we are dealing with European document No. 11358/14, “A New Deal for European Defence”. Although matters relating to 2010 may have relevance to the wider debate, the focus of questions should be on that document.

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[Mr Brazier]

I am grateful to my hon. and gallant Friend, but I can only repeat what I said earlier. The EU provides collective defence capability in a small number of niche areas where NATO has chosen not to. I have mentioned several times, because it is of particular national interest to us as a country that still has a significant merchant fleet, the joint EU action off the horn of Africa, which has been a triumph—piracy there has virtually stopped. It is run from Northwood by the British, although, I am sorry to say, we have not had much in the way of naval vessels in it in the past year or two. The French-led operation in Mali is another such example. I thought that the willingness of EU countries to get together occasionally and tackle issues that NATO, for one reason or another, chooses not to was relatively uncontroversial.

The first half of my hon. and gallant Friend’s quote on Europe’s defence capability is true. The industries are in the individual countries and the policy remains a member state matter. We have made it absolutely clear—I do not think I could have made it clearer—that we have resisted successfully every attempt by the Commission to try to dictate to us in this area.

[Mr Jenkin]

Will my hon. Friend clarify whether section 2 provisions of the treaty on European Union are justiciable by the European Court of Justice inasmuch as they affect defence and the European Defence Agency?

[Mr Brazier]

I will have to wait for official advice on that. I will return to it during the debate.

[The Chair]

We will have an opportunity during the debate to include that should we so wish. Does any other Member want to ask a question?

[Mr Jenkin]

The answer to my question is that I believe they are and that there is no exclusion from the European Court of Justice. The European Defence Agency statute, established by article whatever it is, includes provision for qualified majority voting in a very substantial number of areas, which includes, as I will explain later, permanent structured co-operation and majority voting, from which we could be excluded or subject to qualified majority voting. These are serious potential developments. Does my hon Friend not understand the risk of participating in this at all?

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[Mr Jenkin]

When considering this instrument, it is worth noting first that the document is dated 26 June 2014. That we are dealing with it at such a late stage is an indication of how poor our scrutiny arrangements are and how incapable we are as a Parliament at keeping up with developments in the European Union.

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Mr Jenkin]

I am making absolutely no personal criticism of my hon. Friend, and I give way to him on that basis.

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for giving way. The document was recommended for debate by the European Scrutiny Committee about a year ago. The coalition Government refused to send documents for debate, and a huge backlog built up. Much of that is now being cleared by this Government, and I hope that more work will be done. It was not a failure of our processes; I am afraid it was a failure of Her Majesty’s Government.

[Mr Jenkin]

I am very grateful for that information and I am sure the Committee is, too. I was about to say that this is the first occasion, apart from a Government statement after the 2013 Council of Ministers meeting, that we have debated the 2013 conclusions in any depth. That underlines a serious state of affairs.

[Mr Brazier]

I remind my hon. Friend that I started with an apology for the tardiness of the debate. To answer his earlier question, it is true that the EDA does operate, as he suggested, on a qualified majority vote basis. In matters that are deemed to be important for national sovereignty, however, any member can escalate the matter up to the Council of Ministers, where it must be agreed by unanimity. The practical effect is therefore not as he imagines.

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[Mr Jenkin]

I appreciate that my hon. Friend has received that reassurance, but, as I will explain, it is not worth very much. The fundamental problem is that our Government like to pretend that the EU’s common security and defence policy is harmless intergovernmental co-operation that has no access to money or legal sanctions and is therefore a federalist paper tiger. The 2013 Council conclusions actually give the lie to that, and any Conservative Prime Minister should have been wholly opposed to them. To sign the UK up to the programme in the document is not just another step towards a Europe army, which has always been a dream of federalist nations such as Germany, but another blow to our already beleaguered defence industries and another nail in the NATO coffin, in order that continental defence industries should not be exposed to US competition.

Much of the 2013 conclusions appears to be the usual verbiage and high-flown rhetoric about the EU being a “global player” in defence and about the

“strong commitment to the further development of a credible and effective CSDP”.

The understatement:

“Defence budgets in Europe are constrained”

is a feeble attempt to mask the reality that member states, including the UK, are all cutting their defence budgets. The oft-repeated plea to “make use of synergies”—a common theme of such documents—to improve capabilities has so far proved a forlorn hope. The invocation of increasing the effectiveness, visibility and impact of CSDP is bound to fail.

It is almost entirely down to France and the United Kingdom that EU defence means anything at all. We work increasingly bilaterally with the French, and other operations are NATO operations under an EU flag. NATO remains far more significant because it has US backing, and its people at Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe are practised at planning and generating force for multinational operations. However, NATO gets its first mention only as a “partner” in paragraph 6 of the 2013 conclusions alongside the UN, the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe and the African Union—as though NATO were equivalent to the African Union. There is mention of

“strategic partners and partner countries”,

but it is telling that the EU cannot bring itself to name the United States of America, the one military entity that dominates the world and the sole guarantor of European security. That underlines the squeamishness, futility, parochialism and vanity of CSDP.

The potential to damage UK defence interests is in the detail. The call for an EU cyber-defence policy framework and for an EU maritime security strategy both involve the federalist EU Commission. Remember, the Commission is the EU’s most powerful legislative body, so, if the Commission is involved, that is anything but intergovernmental co-operation.

To agree to that is to agree to a threat to the independence of UK policy in those fields. The fact that the Council will also call for

“increased synergies between CSDP and Freedom/Security/Justice actors”

opens the door to legally binding defence commitments to

“tackle horizontal issues such as organized crime, including trafficking and smuggling of human beings, and terrorism”.

A lot of that is already firmly in in the Commission’s legislative purview. That is another compelling reason for the UK to exercise its Lisbon treaty opt-out from EU home and justice affairs, which unfortunately we spurned last year.

Finally, on military capability development, the EU intends utterly to eclipse NATO, backed by the two legally binding 2009 defence procurement directives that enhance the power of the European Defence Agency, which is becoming an embryo EU defence ministry. The EDA’s statute enables decisions to be taken by majority voting, and, where any single state can threaten a veto, a subset of member states can act unilaterally as a bloc in the name of the whole of the EU—that is what they call structure co-operation.

EU defence is not so much about defence—because, as we see, defence expenditure across the continent is declining—as it is about protectionism of continental defence industrial interests whose technology rather lags behind their US counterparts. The Council proposes support for remotely piloted aircraft systems—a squeamish name for what we call drones or unmanned aerial vehicles—air-to-air refuelling, satellite communication and cyber. In at least two of these areas, air-to-air refuelling and cyber, the UK is already supreme in the EU—we have, for example, GCHQ in Cheltenham—so why should we agree to the EU directing our policy? That is what this amounts to. For all those capabilities, US interoperability is essential for the UK, but there is nothing in these documents about co-operation with our closest ally, because EU defence is about excluding the US wherever possible. That is why NATO is not an acceptable vehicle for those who want European integration.

In the 2013 conclusions, we read that the Council

“invites the Commission (again), the European Investment Bank and the European Defence Agency to develop proposals for a pooled acquisition mechanism”,

which can only mean some kind of EU defence purchasing agency. It may not require much money to develop legal control over member states’ defence procurement programmes. How so? The proposals for

“strengthening Europe's defence industry”

are to be

“in full compliance with EU law”.

This is not intergovernmental. The Commission again is invited

“to set up a Preparatory Action on CSDP-related research”.

Finally,

“The European Defence Agency, in cooperation with the Commission (yet again), will prepare a roadmap for the development of defence industrial standards”

which is what we are looking at today, and

“develop a harmonized European military certification approach”.

Those are the key means by which the EU can obtain control over defence. One of the key purposes of NATO was to ensure transatlantic standards and certification to ensure interoperability. The EU is duplicating that role in order to create its own separate and distinct standards that are not compatible with our US counterparts.

Again, on this question of certification and standards there is no reference whatever to EU-US co-operation, which would make sense. That is because the EU wants standards and certification that will exclude US defence equipment from EU markets wherever possible. That is what EU defence policy is really about.

I am sorry to tell my hon. Friend the Minister that I shall not be voting to take note of this document and will vote against if the opportunity arises.