Britain and International Security

Phillip Lee Excerpts

Thursday 2nd July 2015 Commons Chamber

[Dr Phillip Lee (Bracknell) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Halton (Derek Twigg), who made a very thoughtful contribution. I want to talk about globalisation and the opportunities that it has given us, although I get the impression that we have grasped the opportunities and not understood the threats. It is about time we did. Communicating immediately with people across the face of the earth is a fantastic thing, be it by flying or tapping in an email, but with it come the threats of extremism and extreme nationalism via the internet. It is not possible for states as we see them to counter that threat in its entirety because of the amount of data that is flowing, and that is before we start talking about the dark web.

On the transmission of disease that takes place via our remarkable systems of transportation, we do not yet have a bio-security strategy that makes sense in this globalised world; we cherry pick the illnesses that we check. For example, we passed legislation in the previous Parliament on the transmission of TB through migration, but we have absolutely no checks on the transmission of blood-borne viral illness. About 6,500 cases of hepatitis are imported every year into this country, and it is important that those individuals know that they have the condition and are treated, but just as importantly the public need to know what is happening so they can be protected against it. How come we want to treat TB but not hepatitis?

Globalisation also brings with it socio-economic challenges. This country has a large and vibrant economy, but the European economy in proportion to the rest of the world is in decline. We cannot presume to be economically vibrant for the foreseeable future, so we need to start thinking about how on earth we are going to pay our way in this world. This country’s debt is currently about £1.5 trillion. If we add personal debts and liabilities for pension schemes and the like, we get to north of £5 trillion. That is not a sustainable position, and it affects national security, particularly if such debt is held by autocratic regimes.

There is also our level of dependence, and not just at home. We know it is an issue, because welfare is discussed in all parts of the House, and that level of dependence has to change. But there is our dependence on the wider world, too, and how we are increasingly dependent for our energy on countries abroad, most of which are also autocracies and not terribly stable.

The concept of nation states has been challenged by globalisation. What constitutes a country? We have a European view, but I am not so sure that it is shared by our friends or enemies in the middle east. It is, however, important, because we rely on the nation state to provide plenty of things in our lives, not least security, but when it comes to what we would like to see happen in the middle east, we need to define the nation state in a different way, because broadly people in the middle east have stronger loyalties to tribe and to religion than they have to Governments.

Having considered all those issues, and there are plenty of others—this is a very broad topic to cover in one debate—I think that Britain as a country has to decide what it is for. What is our role? What part should we play in global affairs, in bio-security, in making sure that the economies of democracies remain strong and vibrant? That is where we have a problem, because we do not know what it should be and what role we should play. This country should play a big role, because the world is a safer place if Britain plays a bigger part in it. I do not recall any extensive debate on foreign or defence policy in the recent rather parochial general election campaign; I recall only the increasingly parochial arguments, which did no credit to this institution or to the political parties.

Defence matters greatly, and it is unsustainable that we spend more in six weeks on health and welfare than we spend on the defence of the nation in a year. When I turn on my television or my radio, I see an increasingly chaotic, unstable, insecure world. We are being presumptuous if we think we can continue to spend in this way on those areas, however important they might be, if that spending is to the detriment of the defence of the nation.

Only when we have defined our role should we start to have conversations about supranational organisation membership. The upcoming EU referendum is premature, because if we do not know what kind of country we should be or what our role in the wider world should be, it will be extremely difficult to work out whether our membership of the European Union is a good thing or not. We have not yet defined what we want to get out of it. I am well versed in the inadequacies and shortcomings of the EU and the eurozone—we all are, particularly Conservative Members—but I stress that we might just want to retain our membership of certain supranational organisations. We might, for example, want to retain our membership of NATO and to adhere to article 5 if Mr Putin dares to walk into Lithuania.

The document issued by the National Security Council, whose establishment during the last Parliament was a good development, did not mention Russia or Daesh, yet Russia had invaded Georgia and we also had Islamic extremism. That just shows how difficult it is to predict future threats. Given that fact, and the fact that we live in a complex world, I would like us to err on the side of caution and to concentrate extra resources not just on tanks and planes but on intelligence services. We face a challenging future, and I want this great nation to be sustainable and successful.

[Several hon. Members]

rose—