Strategic Defence Review 2025

Lord Skidelsky Excerpts

Friday 18th July 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Skidelsky (CB)]

My Lords, I have a long-standing respect for the noble Lord, Lord Robertson. In the early 2000s, we were both engaged in trying to build better relations with Putin’s Russia—he as chair of the NATO-Russia Council and myself as founder of the UK-Russia round table, whose efforts were then openly encouraged by the Prime Minister, Tony Blair. Since then, our paths have diverged. I have huge reservations about the report that the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, so ably presented earlier—mainly because I believe that it greatly exaggerates the threats that we actually face.

I am perhaps the only person in the House who takes this view, but I am happy that complete unanimity is not a requirement of membership of our august assembly. On one thing we can all agree—that we should spend more on our own defence, if only because the United States is no longer a reliable guarantee of our security. However, this salutary prudential note is overwhelmed by the report’s concentration on the need to guard against a supposedly imminent and potentially lethal Russian danger. The SDR states:

“Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 … irrefutably demonstrated … the threat, with state-on-state war returning to Europe”.


It goes on to say that the UK and its allies are “under daily attack” from Russia—note that word “daily”—

“with aggressive acts—from espionage to cyber-attack and information manipulation”.

We are told that Russia has demonstrated

“its willingness to use military force, inflict harm on civilians, and threaten the use of nuclear weapons to achieve its goals”.

The conclusion from all that type of argument is that Britain must rearm to deter and, if necessary, “fight and win” a war against Russia. As Mark Rutte, NATO’s Secretary-General, put it, the British had better rearm or “learn to speak Russian”. This view of the matter is wildly overwrought.

The report then argues that, since Russia has intentionally blurred

“the lines between nuclear, conventional”

and sub-state warfare, an integrated British response should combine both conventional and hybrid forms of war preparation. So great stress is placed on the need for a resilient home defence to guard against

“espionage, political interference, sabotage, assassination and poisoning, electoral interference, disinformation, propaganda, and Intellectual Property theft”—

and all these weapons are daily used by our adversaries.

To my mind, the tone is dangerously over the top. Let me point to two specific defects. First, the SDR wants to prepare the UK for “high-intensity, protracted war”, but it says nothing about its possible duration. The Cold War ended with détente, but there is no peaceful endgame in these pages, only a continuous state of armed alertness. As the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Bristol asked: where is the peace strategy? Secondly, to keep the UK in a constant state of war alertness requires, as Prime Minister Keir Starmer has frankly admitted, a radical “shift in mindset”, a transformation of culture and the eradication of unacceptable behaviour—in short, acceptance of defence and security as the “organising principle of government”. Have the authors of the SDR stopped to consider the Orwellian implications of gearing up the nation for permanent war preparation?

The SDR rightly draws attention to the increased, and often subterranean, threats of harm opened up by rapidly accelerating technological innovation. But I draw the opposite conclusion: the multiplication of technological threats provides a compelling argument, not for a nuclear or an AI arms race, but for global co-operation to limit the malign use of technology. It is the joint responsibility of leaders of all the great powers to act as adults and not as children playing around with their lethal toys. It is the duty of those with the greatest power—for good or ill—to behave in such a way as to maximise the chance of a peaceful future for us all.