NATO Summit 2018

Lord Soley Excerpts

Tuesday 26th June 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Soley (Lab)]

This is a timely debate, backed up by a helpful and thoughtful report from the International Relations Committee. It comes at a time when there is constant discussion about the need to increase defence expenditure. My view, which I have expressed a number of times in the House, is that we need to go up to a figure of around 3%. I take on board the suggestion of the noble Lord, Lord King, that a percentage of GDP may not be the best model; I also take on board the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, that we could not do that along with the health increases without increased taxation. I can say only, yes, I think that will be necessary. If that is done by the Conservative Party, it will be done partly by smoke and mirrors and, if it is done by a Labour Government, it will be done by them trying to encourage people to be enthusiastic about paying more taxes—an enthusiasm which, in my political experience, diminishes with every step towards the ballot box.

The key to this is to win an argument not just with the British people but with people in continental Europe, most notably the Germans, that a credible defence policy can stop wars and prevent wars. In my history in politics, arguments about increasing defence expenditure nearly always focused on a fairly simple argument about protecting our boys—that was the phrase, but it is now our women as well—and making sure our people are well equipped. If you are to win the argument, particularly with the younger generation, and particularly in Germany, for historic reasons, we have to convince people that a credible defence policy prevents war and that if you do not have a credible defence policy—and at the moment I am not sure that it is credible—there is an increased danger of war and that danger is greatly increased if there is instability in the world. We have been lucky; the last 70 years have been pretty stable, and many of us know the reasons why—stable superpower positions and so on. That is going, and Trump is an example of the breakdown of the United States as a key leader, dominant above all the others. It takes place at a time when nationalism is rising everywhere, whether the milder form—if it is that mild—of the SNP in Scotland or the Donald Trumps of this world or the more extreme versions of Mr Putin.

Going back to the 1990s, I remember hosting for about three days a group of very senior Chinese government leaders who came to see us in the UK when I was chairman of the Parliamentary Labour Party. At the end of that visit, when we had established quite good relations, their leader asked me, “How do you think we’re getting on in China?” I said I thought that economically they were doing astoundingly well and I was getting encouraged by the rule of law—at that time we were sending judges there, as though we had more spare judges here than anywhere else in the world—but I was concerned about their ability to change leaders without a crisis. To my surprise and, I have to say, pleasure, he leaned forwards and said, “You might be worried, Mr Soley, but not as worried as we are”. The same applies to Mr Putin. These semi-autocratic, not-quite dictatorships, not-quite democracies—I suspect we can see the same happening with Mr Erdoğan in Turkey at the moment—do fine when they are being nationalistic, but when things go wrong or when the leader just dies, there is suddenly acute instability, and in an unstable world that is a threat to peace.

The other week I found myself arguing with people I did not expect to have this argument with that Mr Putin was responsible for the poisoning in Salisbury of the Skripals. The arguments being put to me varied from, “You don’t know it couldn’t have been done by MI6”, to, “We’ve got no proof that it was Putin”, and so on. I found myself saying, “Join the dots together. There was Litvinenko poisoned with polonium 210 and a trail of polonium 210 from the restaurant in London on to the BA seat and back to Moscow. Then there was the shooting down of the Malaysian airliner with a Buk missile, and Australia and the Netherlands, which had most of the passengers on board, pointed the finger at Putin, and then there was Crimea. People underestimate the impact of that because the deal on Crimea between Russia, the US, Britain and France was that Ukraine would give up all the nuclear weapons it had following the end of the Cold War in exchange for a commitment not to change the borders of Ukraine by force. That went out of the window. Finally, there were the Skripals, and there will be other examples”. It takes quite a while to convince people and I think the reason for that is that they want to believe that it is going to continue to be a peaceful world and that Russia will be okay. I am increasingly alarmed by Mr Putin and Russia, not because he wants a war—I am sure he does not—but because he thinks he can hold the situation with a combination of nationalism and the new attempt at cyberwarfare and so on. It that goes wrong, we end up in a much hotter situation than we are in at the moment. That is what troubles me.

There was a reference to one encouraging thing in paragraph 57 of the report by the committee chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Howell, which is about the importance of engaging with Russia. It is difficult, and yes, we do have to take tough action because of what happened to the Skripals, but at the same time we want to engage with the Russian people. There is no doubt that they feel better now than they did before Putin arrived. Why? Because Putin is an effective nationalist, and he makes a great appeal to nationalism.

Of course, Russia has a great history—in the arts, in science, in literature and militarily. The Russians are not going to allow themselves to be put down easily, yet at the same time—this is a point that the International Relations Committee report makes well —we have to balance the combination of deterrence and trying to engage with the Russian people. Although all the internet options for engaging with people are much greater than they were, we do not have to look very far to find countries like Russia and China making it much more difficult to use them. This is a complex argument.

I have another point about something to which I think we are still paying too little attention. I voted remain in the referendum on coming out of the European Union. I had thought that there would be a slight majority to stay in, but I was not surprised by the outcome. My belief, which I have expressed before in this House, is that we have to make a success of it—and we can, although it will be difficult. One of the things that we all underestimate is that, despite all the economic difficulties, the real impact will be a loss of political influence because the United Kingdom will no longer be a member of the European Union. That is profoundly important in both the short and the longer term. For example, will we still have a seat on the United Nations Security Council in 30, 40 or 50 years’ time? These things are incredibly important, and my worry is that we also underestimate the effect, as we leave the European Union, on the countries in continental Europe that believe, and always have believed—to their credit—that the EU is a political entity, moving slowly and steadily towards ever-closer union. At the end of that road, whether people like it or not, a nation state in some form emerges. Personally, I think that is good. But Britain will not be part of it.

It has been apparent for some years now that a number of European leaders are saying that without Britain they can now move towards having common foreign and defence policies. That is growing. When people say to me that the European Union will never have a defence policy, I say, “I think it will”—and actually, I think that is a good thing. We carry on about the United States being necessary in Europe, but it would not be necessary if the EU had a credible defence policy. Russia would not dare touch a European Union with a common defence policy, because the EU is much richer and more powerful, and it has more skilled people, a larger population and, above all, a population that is not declining in terms of age and ability as the Russian population is. There are a lot of these rather worrying developments around, and we face them in the context of a NATO summit that may be in danger of looking backwards, not forwards.

My final point is about the cyber area, which is referred to in several reports that I have read recently. I simply say that soft power and cyber power will have a growing effect. I have talked on occasion to the noble Baroness, Lady Lane-Fox, about how we are struggling to co-ordinate our thinking and our politics with the emerging technologies. It is incredibly difficult, because to some extent we are constantly overtaken by the science. I do not have any simple answers to that; I wish I did. All I can say is that we are in a very complex area, with growing instability in the world and the rise of nationalism, and we need to have, as we do not have now, a credible defence policy.