Defence Capabilities: EUC Report

Lord Gilbert Excerpts

Wednesday 24th October 2012 Grand Committee

[Lord Gilbert]

My Lords, I am afraid that I am going to be in a very small minority today, probably not for the first time, which gives me no tremors whatever, as I am unable to add to the fulsome welcome that this report has received.

Before I turn to the substance of the report, I wish to draw the Committee’s attention to some of the stylistic matters that caught my eye. I do not normally care to read reports, but I intended to read this one from cover to cover. However, I gave up on page 10, actually only the fifth printed page of the report, where there is a misplaced apostrophe. Noble Lords will ask, “Why am I wasting the Committee’s time on a misplaced apostrophe?”. On the previous page, page 9, there is one of many subordinate clauses without any commas at either end, so you have to read the sentence over and over again to find out what it actually means. On page 8, going backwards, there is an egregious spelling mistake that any child of 15 would be punished for making. On page 7 we have a sentence starting with a conjunction.

The real blow, though, comes on the very first page. I am now going to read out to the Committee a direct quote from the middle paragraph of the summary:

“By better coordination of forces and most of all by ensuring that forces are capable of, and willing to, deploy Europe can achieve this now”.

I will happily buy lunch for any member of this Committee if he can show me how to parse that into an English sentence; it is not capable of being made into a sentence. It really is disgraceful.

This accumulation of grammatical solecisms, misspellings and punctuation errors says to me one of three things: that the members of the committee read the report and did not notice these things, which I find unbelievable, seeing how talented they are; that they read the report and did not give a damn about them, which I do not think would be the case; or, much more likely, they never read the report. That is the most charitable explanation. The noble Lord, Lord Roper, may frown, but his name is on this report. He is chairman of the committee and is responsible for putting the report in front of us with the House of Lords imprimatur on it.

[Lord Radice]

I am loath to intervene on my noble friend’s speech because I am sure that it is going to be extremely good, but I suggest that the noble Lord reads the sentence before the one that he has criticised. He might then find that it was more intelligible. It is a good thing to read a couple of sentences rather than just taking one on its own.

[Lord Gilbert]

Of course, I read the whole page. The noble Lord is right, but that sentence is rubbish. It is not even a sentence and it should not be in a House of Lords report. I ask the noble Lord, Lord Roper, to ensure that in future any reports from any sub-committee of his committee are written in decent English. I have got that off my chest, but I stand by what I said. It seems to be perfect evidence that the people who wrote the report did not read it before it was printed.

Now we come to the substance of the report. Of course, the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, has been overwhelmed with congratulations at how wise and timely it is, but I am afraid that I am rather bored with this report. Why am I bored with it? Because it does not say anything new. Why does it not say anything new? Because I have heard the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, say it 16 times before. He told us himself that he had, over and over again. What is in this report? It is in the speeches of the noble Lord, Lord Robertson.

I hesitate to point this out to my noble friend, who was my boss at one time, but I think Albert Einstein pointed out that to say the same thing over and over again and expect a different result is a higher form of lunacy. Why has the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, had to make the same speech over and over again? For the very simple reason that everybody ignores him. They all say, “What a wonderful speech”, but the continentals do not do anything and are never going to. That is the point. All the Eurofanatics sitting on this side of the Room are in denial. They think by saying that Europe has to do this or that, Europe might do it. However, Europe has never done it. It is not going to do it and has no interest in doing it—and we all know it.

It is high time that the House comes to recognise what I have said many times: this country’s friends are not the other side of the North Sea or the English Channel but in the English-speaking world. We have talked about taking the lead in cyberdefence, but we are doing that with the Americans and the Australians. As you would expect, that is where our friends are—in the English-speaking world. I am afraid I have no great enthusiasm for this report.

Coming to a subject close to my heart, I draw your Lordships’ attention to paragraph 93, on page 42—

[Lord Radice]

The noble Lord said he did not get beyond page 10.

[Lord Gilbert]

I dipped into it. Of course I did not read through it. The noble Lord, Lord Radice, is very active on this. I am very interested. They found some idiot called Pierre Vimont—what a lunatic. This is what he is summarised as saying:

“Despite the limited success of the A400M”.

I would like to hear anybody else in your Lordships’ committee talk to me about the “limited success” of the A400M—it is a disaster, but there is not a word in this report saying why it is a “limited success”. The paragraph goes on:

“We also heard evidence that money could be saved by collaboration”.

That is a deep insight. Before that, the report notes that Pierre Vimont also suggested that,

“it was important to continue with such projects”

as the A400M.

For the benefit of noble Lords who do not keep up to speed on logistic arrangements, the Americans have found the combination of the C130 and the C17 quite capable of satisfying all their airborne logistical requirements, as have the Canadians, the Australians and the Indians—and so, up to now, have we. When we finally procure this A400M, we will be abandoning the C130 and so will lose interoperability with the Indians, the Canadians, the Americans, the Australians and, by that time, quite a lot more people.

I have been told by a former Conservative Defence Secretary that the Americans were going to close down the C130 production line. That is rubbish, and simply not true. If you read the most recent edition of Defense News, you will see that they are going to go on with more and more sophisticated C130s. The C17 has also proved itself capable of undertaking tactical missions. The A400M is a complete, absolute wanking disaster, and we should be ashamed of ourselves. I have never seen such a waste of public funds in the defence field since I have been involved in it these past 40 years.

I am sure that the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, takes this all in the spirit in which it is offered. It is not a personal criticism of him, but this report is nothing new. My noble friend Lord Robertson has said this many times before, and nothing is going to happen from it.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Rosser]

My Lords, I listened to my noble friend Lord Gilbert with interest since his contributions are always enjoyable. I have been called a fanatic before, but not, I think, a Eurofanatic. That is the first time.

[Lord Gilbert]

I assure my noble friend that I was not referring to him.