House of Lords Speech on Overall Policy 3rd Dec 2003
My Lords, it is good that the noble Lord, Lord
Bach, has opened this debate by emphasising defence and security issues. Our
security is of course the ultimate of the nation's interests, although, as we
learn day by day, those are becoming ever harder to define precisely and to
defend in this age of global interdependence and global terror. Like the noble
Lord, I look forward very much to hearing the maiden speeches of the noble and
gallant Lord, Lord Boyce—he is a former Chief of the Defence Staff, but he will
not be the only former Chief of the Defence Staff to speak today—and the right
reverend Prelate the Bishop of Liverpool. We shall listen closely to what they
have to say.
Within all this complexity there is one simple and central aspect: it is that on
however wide and distant a front, we have to defend our nation's security in
this age of global terrorism and, however sophisticated the weaponry needed to
do so, it is the personnel—the quality, courage and skills of the men and women
in our Armed Forces—on which all else ultimately depends. I should add that
today, with great sadness, we also find that our diplomats are being
increasingly exposed to violence, danger and death. I join all those who have
expressed deep sorrow at the death of Roger Short and members of his staff in
Istanbul. We should say a prayer for and add our condolences to those for the
Japanese personnel and diplomats, the Spanish personnel and the Korean personnel
who have been murdered while doing their duty over the past few weeks. We should
also spare a thought for senior British officials—not from the Ministry of
Defence, but those from other departments—who have been grievously wounded in
Iraq, as has been the son of one of the most respected Members of this House.
As the Minister outlined in his remarks, today we are placing almost
unparalleled demands in an unparalleled spread of areas and diversity of
operational commitments on our brave troops. I cite the Gulf, Afghanistan,
Sierra Leone, Bosnia, Kosovo, Northern Ireland and other locations—and who knows
where else tomorrow? That is why Members on these Benches and the British public
are reasonably justified in our anxiety to know just what the Government now
propose to do in order to relieve the enormous strain being put on our stretched
armed services. We are all agreed that they are doing a brilliant job, but how
is the strain to be eased?
I am advised that for many service personnel the interval between operational
tours is now down to as little as eight or even six months, when the guideline
is meant to be 24 months. Fighting troops have a mere six months to rest,
recharge their batteries, join their families and, of course, address the
crucial business of training and retraining on which the legendary efficiency of
our Armed Forces ultimately depends. So my first question this afternoon is
this: when and how is the respite period for our troops to be extended back to
the required 24 months? Can one really count, as has been suggested in the
newspapers, on a so-called "peace dividend" from units being freed from Northern
Ireland, not least when the outlook there appears so shaky? If
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extra troops are to be released, will they be able to affect that miserably
short period of turnover and respite and extend it to something more reasonable?
We all recognise the need for ever greater flexibility in our Armed Forces; that
is the "new strategic environment" referred to in the gracious Speech. But what
are we to make of reports that the Government are planning to respond to that
need in the forthcoming White Paper—my noble friend Lord Vivian will have plenty
to say on that in due course—by axeing or merging some of our proudest
regiments—I hope that that is not true—and by squeezing still further the
already woefully under-equipped Reserves and Territorials?
I shall leave it to other noble and noble and gallant Lords with vastly greater
experience than mine to talk on the aspects of resources for the military, as
well as the new and bizarre accounting method that the Treasury seems to have
dumped on the Ministry of Defence, but I for one should like to see these
reports flatly denied. I say that not just for sentimental reasons, but because
the regimental system is not yesterday's pattern, it is the framework on which
the peculiar excellence of our Army and our frontline forces depends. In
tomorrow's world, I believe that that will be even more the case. As for the
Reserves and the Territorials, not only are they providing, I am told, up to 25
per cent of our troops in Iraq, but we will depend on them more than ever for
homeland defence. Any sensible policy ought to be building them up, not slicing
them down. Can we be told what are the Government's intentions?
If all this uncertainty was not enough, we have a wider question to ask about
the place of our Armed Forces and our military capacities within NATO, about
which the Minister has spoken. All Ministers, not only the noble Lord on the
Front Bench opposite, but the Prime Minister, the
Foreign Secretary and others, have all vociferously asserted that the latest
defence agreements with France and with the European Union in no way undermine
Atlantic co-operation through NATO. Yet that is bound to be difficult for some
of us because the French leadership is totally opposed to the very Atlanticist
beliefs to which the Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary keep loudly
committing themselves. We are being asked to believe that, amazingly, the circle
can be squared.
Of course none of us wants to be America's poodle, as the Prime Minister is
often quite unfairly unaccused of being, but Members on this side of the House
believe—along with, I think, the Prime Minister—that the trans-Atlantic linkage
remains central to our security and to the safety of these islands. So we need
to be clear, much clearer than Ministers have been, about just what is now being
proposed.
There are two kinds of military planning structure: the first is "force
planning" which deals with what forces and equipment are to be provided; while
the second is "operational planning", which covers decisions on how those forces
and equipment are to be deployed and used. I see no great harm in existing EU
military staff doing force planning, but there are huge and divisive dangers in
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having a separate EU operational planning staff outside NATO. Over recent days
we have been given the "housemaid's baby" argument—that it is only a very small
item. But of course it will grow. If the so-called "structured co-operation" now
being proposed in the EU leads to a large, separate entity, or to some
semi-permanent core of EU states quite separate from NATO, then in our view
Britain should oppose it root and branch so as to protect our own national
interest and before we give a dangerous and misinterpreted signal to the
Americans that their time in Europe is up and they should go home.
In Iraq, as the Minister confirmed and we all agree, our troops have continued
to distinguish themselves and to demonstrate the value of meticulous training
and preparation and generations of experience in dealing with low-intensity and
guerrilla warfare. We on this side fully supported the invasion of Iraq and the
toppling of the sadistic tyrant, Saddam. We saluted the Prime Minister's courage
in going ahead, even though we repeatedly warned at the time, and not
afterwards, that he was proving dismally injudicious in his handling of certain
intelligence material on so-called weapons of mass destruction, and on the
nature and imminence of the threat to us.
The Hutton inquiry will deal with aspects of that issue. However, I strongly
agree with the argument of my noble friend Lord Alexander of Weedon, and many
others, that the advice of the Attorney-General on these matters should be
published in some form. There are ample precedents for that; it has been done
before and could be done again. While it is presumably the first war dossier
that interests the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hutton, like many others I
remain astounded by the saga of the second "dodgy" dossier and the unparalleled
sloppiness and incompetence that it demonstrated.
On the ground in Iraq, we are probably still not getting the full picture, since
the violent incidents tend to be reported by the media, and the successes hardly
at all. We forget that large areas of that large country are at peace, schools
and hospitals are open and fully functioning, and business is picking up. As the
Minister says, however, the security situation is the key, especially in the
Sunni triangle above Baghdad.
What was needed from the start, as we could have explained to our American
friends—and I wonder whether we did—is a coherent counter-insurgency strategy
based on deep intelligence, which destroys the terrorists, the jihadists and all
the others, while breaking their remaining links with the civil population. Over
the weekend, our US friends, who may now be learning, had an excellent victory
in their attacks on the guerrillas. Typically, it was portrayed by the BBC as a
defeat, but never mind that. I am told that they came within one hour of
catching Saddam, so the net may be closing in on him.
Above all, the coalition authorities now have to show that they are not an
occupying power but merely a transitional force. They have to promise to stay
until stability is assured, but they have to promise to go as soon as possible.
That is a desperately difficult balancing
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act, and the Americans really need strong friends and allies as well as robust
UN involvement—not whining critics—to help them to complete it.
There is no time for me to consider the broader Middle East picture. However, as
the Minister says, the Iranians are now sounding more positive and co-operative.
The blackspot obviously remains the miserable Palestine/Israel conflict, where
one can only pray that a new road map of some kind, like the Geneva plan, can be
established, and sanity on both sides begins to prevail.
I mentioned the defence ambiguities in our relations with our EU neighbours.
What are we to make of all the other cracks and fissures being created in the
structure of European unity and stability? The smaller member states, both the
existing ones and the newcomers, are increasingly and understandably sour about
the way in which things are going, and especially about the tactless dominance
of the bigger members. Meanwhile, the euro has lost its legal framework, and the
stability and growth pact is in tatters. Indeed, commissioner Monti says that it
has been killed. That is a clear demonstration of one rule for the smaller
brethren and another for the big boys. Is it not ironic that we are being asked
to approve, in the gracious Speech, a draft Bill for a referendum on joining the
euro at the very moment when the whole system is tottering?
Above all, there is the dismal EU constitution project, which the Foreign
Secretary now tells us is desirable but not necessary. If that is so, we have to
ask why it is being pursued at such divisive cost. Of course, we shall have a
chance to debate that in more detail this time next week in your Lordships'
House.
A constitution for a nation or for nations is not just any old piece of paper,
but a document in which every word has legal significance. I know that the
Foreign Secretary is calling it no more than a "label" and that Mr Peter Hain
says that it is just a tidying-up operation. Those statements are being rightly
and almost universally ridiculed. Presumably, they are made only to defend the
Government's crumbling case against a referendum on the issue. That is a
referendum that we want, unlike the one on the euro. We in the Conservative
Party and more than 80 per cent of the country want it. I understand that those
in the Liberal Democrat Party want it as well—or that is what they say at the
moment.
Everyone in Europe recognises that the new constitution is much more than a
treaty; that however many "red lines" there are—and some of those are looking
very crumbly—it shifts power to the European institutions and significantly away
from member states. It creates for the first time in our history a new and
superior legal framework for our national affairs, which will affect every
single one of us. So says the Belgian Prime Minister, Mr Verhofstadt, who
states:
"The Convention's draft is quite rightly accorded the title of a Constitution:
it is more than a treaty—it is the capstone of a federal state’.
Lord Barnett: My Lords, I am sorry to interrupt the noble Lord. If there were to
be a referendum, will he say that there should be 25 member states, but with no
changes to any of the rules and regulations?
Lord Howell of Guildford: My Lords, I will be saying what the Foreign Secretary
was saying the other day. If a referendum took place and produced a negative
result—although it might not—we would be back at the default position of the
Nice treaty, parts of which we thought were very good and parts of which we
thought were over-loaded. The basic mechanics are in the Nice treaty, and could
perfectly well cope with the situation described by the noble Lord.
Finally, I shall just glance at the new international priorities document, which
the Minister mentioned and which came from the Foreign Office yesterday. These
great essays from Foreign Office thinkers are always a little puzzling, because
individually our diplomats are the most marvellous people. They are skilled,
efficient, charming, helpful, courageous and—sadly—must be very brave indeed, as
they risk and lose their lives. However, whenever the Foreign and Commonwealth
Office emits a collectivist view of the world, it always seems to me to have a
touch of the Forrest Gumps about it.
At least we have got away from the jejune idea that one must only drag out the
label "ethical" to achieve a foreign policy. What does that paper do instead,
however? It offers up a number of hugely obvious insights about the modern
world—namely, that foreign affairs are not really foreign. That is quite right,
but it was in a book that I wrote five years ago, so it is not exactly new. It
says that we face a new non-state and unpredictable pattern of enemies via
terrorism. We have
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all known that for years, since long before 9/11. It says, too, that energy
supplies are under threat. They have always been under threat, and were under
threat when I had responsibilities in those matters 25 years ago.
However, the White Paper seems to miss the really big emerging features of the
future—perhaps they are so big it cannot see them—first, that the UK is not
somehow in constant danger of being marginalised in Europe and therefore obliged
to submerge itself, or its destiny—I hate that word—into some supposedly
emerging EU superpower. Even Robert Cooper, the Prime Minister's Foreign Office
guru on foreign affairs, calls that,
"a dream left over from a previous age".
A new kind of Europe is developing of which the White Paper does not seem to be
aware. We should be the champions of that new kind of Europe.
Secondly, US hegemony is not all that it is cracked up to be. Big is vulnerable,
not necessarily beautiful. Thirteen carrier fleets cannot solve global terrorism
or dominate world trade. Thirdly, because these FCO authors keep coming back to
a view of the world comprising the two blocks of the EU and the US, they seem to
spend a lot of time agonising about how to avoid being trapped in a choice
between them. Not only is that choice utterly irrelevant, it does not even exist
in the modern network world. We are all now absorbed in the same network anyway.
Finally, the paper misses the gigantic point that our best and most supportive
friends and links may lie increasingly outside the European arena altogether,
for example, with Japan and the Commonwealth.
I believe that more emphasis on the Commonwealth network would enable us to
handle the Zimbabwe tragedy much more effectively. In response to the challenge
of the noble Baroness, Lady Amos, I reminded her of the detailed proposals that
we have put forward again and again for helping that process forward. She very
kindly wrote to me and responded in detail on some of those points.
Nations, especially old ones like ours, are unimaginably complex things. Neither
their internal constitutions nor their external allegiances can be shoved about
and altered without the most intimate, lengthy and consensual discussion and
debate. I believe that our history and our culture grasp us by a thousand
invisible fingers. Those ties cannot be wrenched apart or just shaken off by
great modernising leaps forward or by the steamroller of majority tyranny, or
even by the charade of a so-called "big conversation" with the people, which I
hope will be shortly laughed out of court.
This is now a fluid and frightening world in which we should be building on, not
tearing down recklessly, our institutions at home and in which our diplomats,
like our Armed Forces, have to keep up a constant and vigilant redefining of our
fundamental interests and how we best contribute globally to their defence and
promotion. Some issues we handle best with our European neighbours, some with
great America, and some with our friends in Asia, the Commonwealth and Latin
America—which does not even get a mention in the Foreign Office paper. Only when
that clearer perception,
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based on our capacities as an agile and confident nation, is firmly at the
epicentre of Government foreign policy thinking can we really be comforted that
the British people's most crucial interests really are being as best protected
as they can possibly be in modern conditions. Only then can we rest, if only
momentarily, on our swords.
