NATO Summit 2018

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Tuesday 26th June 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, I remember many years ago reading in the business pages of some newspaper that when a company or an organisation begins to build a grand, new headquarters, it is time to sell your shares. The noble Lord, Lord Jopling, is suggesting that, although I have to say to him that the record of the British Parliament in taking clear decisions on the renovation of the Palace of Westminster does not suggest that our political system is in terribly good form by comparison.

We still need NATO, in very different circumstances and indeed in rapidly changing circumstances now, as new threats of one sort of another emerge. As we see at this NATO summit, we face threats both from Putin’s Russia and, to our surprise and horror, from Trump’s Administration. We are not quite sure what will happen, and probably neither is he, but it may well be that there is a Trump-Putin meeting and we will have to deal with that. For the United Kingdom, for which NATO has been a core element of its place in the world since 1947-48, and for which it has operated as the cornerstone of our claim to a special position as superior to those continental countries, France and Germany, because we have this relationship across the Atlantic with the United States, NATO matters a great deal. If we come out of the NATO summit with a weaker relationship with the United States we will have to consider how we strengthen our security and political relationship with our European partners. That then feeds back into some pretty fundamental issues about Britain’s place in the world and our relationship with our European partners as we move towards leaving the European Union.

Our relationship with Russia is even more complicated because we are the European country which has the largest Russian footprint—in our boarding schools, in the owning of football clubs and British companies, in donating large sums to our universities and in Russians having second homes—often because their owners do not feel secure in Moscow—in London. We could make more of that and the Government should think about it. We are trying to maintain a dialogue with the Russian elite and the next generation, and perhaps some of them are here.

The downside is that Russian money of all kinds flows into different aspects of British life. I read the Foreign Secretary’s astonishing remarks that the CBI is EU-funded and, therefore, because it receives 1% of its funding from the EU, it is structurally biased in favour of the European Union. If you applied that test to a number of other British bodies it would raise awkward questions. I have read of occasions when Russians resident in Britain turn up at Conservative Party fundraisers and pay large prices to play tennis with David Cameron, or whatever it may be. That may not account for 1% of Conservative funding but it raises interesting questions. I will not mention what might have been contributed towards Vote Leave.

I shall follow the noble Lord, Lord Dannatt, and talk about one of the other threats we have to face, which is called in the preparations for the NATO summit the insecurity in the south. We neglect that at our peril. The debate about migration in this country has been overwhelmingly about migration from Europe, where the population is going down, and not sufficiently about migration from the south, where the population continues to rise rapidly. In every year over the past 20 years, immigration into Britain from the south has been greater than immigration from the rest of the European continent.

I looked up the figures for the Nigerian population yesterday. Nigeria had a population of 100 million 20 years ago; it is approaching 200 million today; and it is estimated it will be approaching 300 million in 20 years’ time. We have to ask: where are those people going to go? There is not the water in northern Nigeria for them, nor the infrastructure. We all know that when a population rises rapidly you have frustrated young men, particularly half-educated young men, who are easily radicalised. They move into the cities and often foment revolution, fanatical radical movements and whatever.

These are huge problems which threaten our security. We will have to face them together with our European partners because these people will all want to come across the Mediterranean to Europe. As the noble Lord, Lord Dannatt, suggested, three helicopters are peanuts for what is needed. We already have some useful co-operation with the French across the Sahel in west Africa but we will need a great deal more. This issue is being debated across the whole of Europe and will pose large and ethical problems with which we will have to deal.

The British response is complicated by the deep confusion about what we think our role in the world is. We talk about a global Britain—the Foreign Secretary disappears off to parts of Asia almost every week—and we are left with deep confusion as to how we manage our defence and security and how closely we collaborate with others. Practically, we have co-operated more and more closely with other European forces: for 30 or 40 years with the Dutch and increasingly closely with the French since 1998. I am very happy to see the announcement that the British have now joined the French-led joint force separately from the European Union, which is intended to bring together the limited forces we have to make them more effective. That is clearly a necessary part of our way forward. I rather wish that the Ministry of Defence for many years had had France as a comparator against which we measured ourselves, rather than the United States, which meant that we wished to have quality equipment of the sort the Americans were buying: the F-35, larger aircraft carriers and so on—indeed, recreating aircraft carriers that were built so that French aircraft could not land on them. I remember Liam Fox trying to reverse that decision when the Conservatives came into power in the coalition in 2010 and discovering that the Ministry of Defence had not thought about the desirability of sharing with the French the ability to land on each other’s aircraft carriers.

[Lord Davies of Stamford]

I am most grateful to the noble Lord. I have to correct him: the Ministry of Defence, in which I then served, did think very long about this. I was very much in favour of adopting the catapult approach to carriers so that we could be interoperable with the Americans and the French. I am sorry to say that I lost that battle, but the argument was certainly had and went on for a very long time.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

I thank the noble Lord. I think that that might strengthen my point.

The Prime Minister has declared the objective of a deep and special partnership in foreign policy and security, as well as in trade, with the European Union after we leave, which is to be formalised in the treaty. I ask the noble Baroness, Lady Goldie, whether she can tell us a little more about that, since the Prime Minister has given us only the heading and not yet any of the detail of what this rather important—indeed, fundamental —aspect of British foreign and defence policy might be. The Prime Minister was undermined yet again by the Foreign Secretary when he referred to European Governments last week as the enemy, when she is, after all, talking about them as our closest partners.

The debate about whether we are in the top tier or not is, in a sense, yet again about whether we think we are superior to the French and the Germans, out there in the Pacific Ocean going back east of Suez, or whether we accept that we are, as the Duncan Sandys report suggested very nearly 60 years ago, a leading power of the second rank. When the report came out in the 1960s, the Daily Mail attacked all the members of the committee for suggesting that Britain was not a global power. We have not changed since then. I spent last summer looking back at some of the things that Jo Grimond—the leader of the Liberal Party when I joined—had written in the late 1950s about Britain’s place in the world. He said that the whole idea that we had to stay east of Suez, that the Commonwealth was a long-term continuing asset, and that we were separate from Europe and should stay out of European integration was a mistake. That could almost be written again today, because we are still stuck in this endless argument about how special we are. Indeed, the Henry Jackson Society’s briefing for today’s debate suggested that being able to project power to the Indo-Pacific region was key to Britain’s future. One of the reasons why the Wilson Government reluctantly decided to retreat from east of Suez was that the cost of maintaining naval forces east of Singapore, or even east of Aden, was such that it was more than we could bear. The Foreign Secretary has again boasted that we are returning east of Suez. The cost of that and the extent to which it will overstrain our limited capabilities seem enormous.

Lastly, I wish to warn everyone that if we are talking about spending more on defence we have to realise what this means for the British economy. It is now growing more slowly than it has for several years. It is likely, as we leave the European Union, to grow even more slowly, which means that tax revenue will not increase. There are those, such as Liz Truss, who said two days ago that we should not contemplate tax increases. Jacob Rees-Mogg in the Mail today is quoted as saying that he does not think there should be any tax increases to provide more money for health.

If we are going to give a lot more money to defence, we have to raise taxes or cut expenditure elsewhere. We have cut local authority spending by nearly 40% over the past few years. I see when I walk around Bradford how much that has damaged local communities. We have cut spending on prisons and probation by 40%. We have cut spending on the police by a third. If you are saying we should cut into some of those issues more deeply in order to be able to fund defence, then I suspect you are not going to get any more money for defence unless you are prepared to argue for a higher level of taxation. Let us therefore be realistic and recognise that we are now in a hard place as we leave the European Union, and we have to cut our coat and our global aspirations according to the limited cloth we have.