Ukraine

Lord West of Spithead Excerpts

Friday 25th February 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord West of Spithead (Lab)]

My Lords, I intend to focus on just one issue, but I first join the praise for the noble Lord, Lord Sedwill, whom I have known for a number of years. I thank him for his very good speech, which of course shows his great experience in a whole raft of areas.

Here we are. There is a war in Europe now. Russia has invaded Ukraine. It is the most ghastly act—a number of speakers have said how unacceptable it is—but it is a war. Generally, when there is a war and an expectation that possibly there might be more war, there is quite a focus on spending in the military. There has been almost no talk from the Government about enhancement of spending on the military. None of us wants to have a greater war, but it is clearly a possibility. I find it extraordinary.

I hope that, even as we are speaking, contracts are going out within the Ministry of Defence to fill up the shortfalls that we have across our defence forces. There is no doubt that we have shortages of weapon stocks. We have weapons that have not been brought up to the right sort of state and there has not been the maintenance that is needed and required. This is because we have steadily cut our defence forces over a number of years, which has not been unnoticed by Putin and other dictators—people pay regard to this. He has built up an idea that, in the West—in our own country but particularly in Europe—people were not willing to stand up for and, if necessary, actually fight for what they believed in. Putin drew that conclusion, and you cannot blame him when you look at the dearth of spending on defence across the EU—the noble Lord, Lord Sedwill, touched on this and mentioned that we must strengthen our military.

As I say, I really hope that, as well as sanctions, which are great—they should be as vicious as possible, as we need to show Russia that this is unacceptable—we are spending, and sorting out problems and strengthening the military as we speak. The problem in defence is always that it takes time to make a major change—that was what we all said over the last years, when things were being cut—but, my goodness, we absolutely have to do this because, as has been said by a number of speakers, we must reinforce NATO within the eastern European NATO countries, which are relying on us. They joined NATO because they liked Article 5. They knew that Russia was still a threat—they have always seen that—and we absolutely have to reinforce the NATO forces that are there.

A number of speakers have mentioned this already: at one time, we would have been able to put an armoured division into somewhere like that. Now, however, we would find it very difficult to provide an armoured brigade: that is the state we have got to. So we really must spend some money on defence.

Why do we need to reinforce those eastern European NATO countries? The reason is that we must show Putin that if he does anything in those regions, there will be a fight—and it needs to be a fight that can be at a conventional level: otherwise, the nuclear tripwire is too low, and that is a horrifying thought. As my noble friend Lord Robertson also mentioned, I saw the speeches that Putin made to his nation. I must say that he has always been an unpleasant and nasty man, but I used to think there was a certain rationality to him. That gave me the impression that he was unbalanced, and the last thing you want is someone unbalanced in control of a country that has major nuclear weapons and who has spoken loosely about them. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Howell, that Putin’s statement was in effect saying, “You watch out, I’ve got a nuclear weapon”. We know that his policy of de-escalation is to fire a nuclear weapon. What an extraordinary and terrifying prospect. So we must reinforce our military and make sure that it is strong enough, and we must get into eastern Europe to show that we have that will. I hope that, by those means, this will not extend any further. However, I must say that I am very worried about this. We must start thinking about enhancing our military and, in the future, looking at 3% on defence—that would give a strong message. We are in a different and very dangerous world.