Defence

Part of the debate – in the House of Lords at 2:42 pm on 12 May 2000.

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Photo of Lord Wallace of Saltaire Lord Wallace of Saltaire Liberal Democrat 2:42, 12 May 2000

My Lords, as with all defence debates, this debate has raised a wide range of subjects. I note that we have heard more speeches from Members on the Cross Benches than from those on the Conservative Benches. That should not pass unnoticed in a defence debate. For some time I have felt a little naked on these Benches in defence debates. I shall welcome to these Benches the arrival next week of Lord Roper, a very good friend with whom I have worked and written on defence issues for many years, and the return of Lord Redesdale, who has experience of serving in the Territorial Army.

I should like to touch briefly on a large number of subjects. As regards manned aircraft, I am more persuaded by the noble Lord, Lord Gilbert, than I am by the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Craig. I worry whether within the next 10 years the manned fighter bomber will become the equivalent of the battleship. I should like to comment on recruitment and retention, about which we are all rightly concerned and which deserves separate treatment. As my noble friend, Lord Dholakia, has reminded me, there is underway in this country a sustained effort to recruit among ethnic minorities. It is going well and we are grateful for the help of Colin Powell in that respect. It is one way in which we can reduce the current shortages.

But I want to talk mainly about defence as such and the threat against which we believe we are now preparing. After all, defence is needed to meet anticipated threats. It is now 10 years since the end of the Cold War. There is no foreseeable threat to the territory of the United Kingdom or to what we used to regard as core western Europe as a whole. Therefore, it has been rational to reduce defence spending over the past 10 years.

I disagree with the Conservative point of view as put by the noble Lord, Lord Burnham, which seemed to me to echo that of the American Republicans who wish always to cut spending on education and health and increase it on defence. They then resist using or deploying forces outside the country. Incidentally, I must also say that, having spent some time going in and out of a remarkably unsafe building--the Ministry of Defence Main Building--I would have thought that recent refurbishment might have made the survivability of those who work in the building rather better. The Conservative approach to defence seems to me to lack a degree of common sense.

It is now a question more of security than of defence. As the Minister said in her opening remarks, we are talking about stability and about Britain's global and regional responsibilities. Britain has responsibilities as a member of the EU, NATO, the Commonwealth and as a Permanent Member of the Security Council of the United Nations. Again, I would say to our Conservative colleagues that the vigour with which they insist that Britain maintains its permanent membership of the UN Security Council does not sit easily with their resistance to the use of British forces in support of UN operations outside Europe.

I want to concentrate on Chapter 2 of the Defence White Paper and on the question of NATO and the very relevant issues which the noble Lord, Lord Chalfont, raised about nuclear missile defence and the implications of that for the transatlantic partnership. I share his view that the transatlantic partnership remains the key to British and European security and that the maintenance of NATO is therefore of fundamental importance to Britain. However, as the noble Lord also said, I believe that we face some immense problems which arise from the divergence of assumptions on the different sides of the Atlantic.

I spent two weeks either side of Easter in the United States, at the spring conference of the Transatlantic Policy Network. I met a number of Congressmen. I met several members of the foreign policy advisory team of George W Bush, and I have to say that I came back very worried. We were told firmly that nuclear missile defence in the United States,

"is a done deal and it is not worth discussing the issue further".

We were told that in terms which effectively meant, "Let's not discuss the rational question of how far there is a real threat". The weight of opinion behind it in the United States is now such that there is no way of resisting.

Those of us who then listened to people who spoke about the severity of the North Korean threat to the United States found that a little difficult to grasp. However, we were equally worried when some of those to whom we spoke said, "Well, of course, it is not really North Korea; it is really China and Russia". The assumption that China and Russia are fundamentally antagonistic to the United States and must remain enemies against whom one deters is part of the worry that I have about the discourse of American defence policy.

I was also worried when one of the experts there to whom I spoke said that within the defence circles of the United States a discussion was just beginning about the ethical quality of the current trends within American defence; that the pursuit of the revolution in military affairs and in nuclear missile defence is intended to ensure that no American is ever killed in any conflict and that the only ones who are killed are always foreigners. That view is beginning to worry some of the more responsible people who are involved in these discussions.

I found myself thinking about the debate held 20 years ago in the Committee of the Present Danger, which suggested that the Soviet Union was building up an overwhelming preponderance of weapons and was inherently expansionist in the early 1980s. This partly led to the SDI debate.

I remember, 20 years before that, when I was first in the United States as a student, the missile gap debate. I even remember visiting in Vermont an observation post on the corner of a property there which still had in it the identification charts for German bomber aircraft. It had been manned from 1942 to 1945. In spite of the fact that no German aircraft had the capacity to reach Massachusetts, let alone Vermont, that had fed the American vision that there is a threat out there and that, above all, one must maintain the United States secure from it.

Over the next two years, there will be a very severe set of difficulties across the Atlantic in relation to nuclear missile defence. It involves the United Kingdom directly because, as an authoritative article in Survival said recently, upgrading the radars on British territory is clearly a breach of the ABM treaty as currently signed. Therefore, it requires amendment. Thus, the British Government will have to accept amendment of the ABM treaty.

I worry also about the divergence of the discourse about defence and security in western Europe from that of the United States. In the United States, one hears conversations about rogue states--Iran, Iraq, Libya, Cuba, North Korea--and about weapons of mass destruction--chemical and biological weapons. The last time I was at Harvard, I was shown some wonderful charts about how far biological weapons spread if dropped from the World Trade Tower in New York. There is a whole set of discussions going on about that sort of thing. They speak of the revolution in military affairs, the greater Middle East, the strategic importance of central Asia as a buffer between Russia and China, Islamic fundamentalism and the role of the Turkey/Israel partnership in resisting Islamic fundamentalism, the geopolitics of oil, and so on.

As the Minister's excellent introductory speech clearly demonstrated, the European discourse uses a very different language. It is about peacekeeping, peace-making, conflict prevention, weak states, defence diplomacy, partnership and dialogue. One needs a different balance of forces for that. One needs different equipment. The deployment in Sierra Leone demonstrates that.

There is a particular problem for Britain in that regard because, as one or two noble Lords have mentioned in the debate, the United Kingdom wishes to maintain interoperability with the United States, as well as recognising that in active conflict situations, we are most likely to be working alongside our European allies. So we are torn in both directions in terms of what sort of equipment we want to have and how much high technology we wish to procure.

I welcome, as my party has throughout, moves towards closer European defence co-operation. Again, I wish to remind the noble Lord, Lord Burnham, how that started. It started in 1994-95 with the Franco-British defence dialogue in great secrecy. Michael Portillo was one of the major players in that dialogue. It grew partly out of the experience of British and French commanders in the field in Bosnia and the recognition by both British and French commanders that they were the two who were serious and that there was a great deal to be gained from working more closely together.

The United Kingdom has become the model for successive European defence reviews elsewhere. The United Kingdom Government have rightly taken the lead in pushing very good progress so far. We have some way to go. We are waiting to see the next key decisions which will be in Germany when the Weisza cker Commission reports next month as to how far the Germans are prepared to follow the model which the French, following the British, have now taken.

Rational further progress down that road includes pursuing further shared logistical chains, further joint training establishments and, please, one may ask the Government, a little more visibility for those areas in which the British and the Dutch, the British and the French, already collaborate closely. I always wish to remind people that there is the British-Dutch marine amphibious force, now 26 years in operation, about which very few people in the British Parliament are even aware.

The underlying question is, where will forces be needed and what will they be required to do? We dearly hope that current progress in Ulster will reduce one cause of overstretch for the British Armed Forces. We also recognise that in south eastern Europe, Britain and her European allies have now taken on a long-term commitment. It should not be one that will require too many front-line British forces. There is likely to be a gendarmerie requirement for state reconstruction for which the British are less well equipped than some of our continental partners, and a requirement for soft security operations in which the EU, as well as NATO, is an active participant.

Africa and the south, as we see with Sierra Leone, will clearly be a major preoccupation. As Chairman of Sub-Committee F of the Lords European Communities Committee, I have read various papers from the Justice and Home Affairs Council of Ministers. They spoke of how to cope with the flood of immigrants and refugees entering Europe. The common conclusion of the various country studies was that we have to do something about preventing state collapse in the countries from which refugees come. There are now some 50,000 to 60,000 Somalis living in London, some of whom have come to London legally--but many of them are here illegally--over the past 10 years because the Somali state collapsed. Clearly, there is a British and a European interest in playing a role in relation to those countries. That ought not to be the major role. We do not want to take on the white man's burden again, but everything that Clare Short and others talk about in terms of defence diplomacy, supporting regional forces and retraining them is highly desirable.

In the Middle East, unlike Africa and south-eastern Europe, we are likely to work with the Americans; indeed, we will be working in support of them. In that area British, European and American views diverge. We face a difficult dialogue with our American partners, particularly under a Republican administration, as to what we do in the Middle East. Clearly, continuing to sell arms to the Middle East is not a sensible policy. Anything that we can do as the EU, and at a transatlantic level, to tighten controls on arms sales to that unstable region will be highly desirable.

Lastly, there are the Caucasus and the other areas around Russia. It is possible that if the Chechen war had overflowed into Georgia or if there had been problems with Russian minorities in the Baltic states, we may have seen problems that would have required some sort of limited confrontation with the extremely inefficient, badly organised Russian armed forces. I hope that the British Government will stress--here again we differ from our American partners--that Russia should be engaged in dialogue and should not be assumed to be a long-term enemy. Pursuit of NATO enlargement should be taken carefully and slowly rather than as a process that is seen explicitly as excluding Russia.

Closer co-operation with our European partners is the basis for an intelligent British defence policy. The maintenance of the transatlantic partnership, in spite of the many and real difficulties ahead, is as important. On these Benches we believe that we should maintain the size of the budget, particularly if Ulster allows us to reduce overstretch; that we should put much more effort into maintaining the quality of our Armed Forces; that improvement in recruitment should take place; and that we must ensure that we obtain the best quality equipment possible.