Ukraine (International Relations and Defence Committee Report)

Baroness Harris of Richmond Excerpts

Thursday 6th March 2025 Grand Committee

[Baroness Harris of Richmond (LD) [V]]

My Lords, I, too, congratulate the noble Lord, Lord De Mauley, on introducing this excellent report. It makes grim reading. By its reckoning, we are not defending ourselves as a country well enough. It pre-dated, but was prescient in, its conclusions, which played out in the terrible scenes at the White House last week when, finally, American foreign policy was laid bare.

There will be no security backstop guaranteed by our long-term allies. We have in effect been cut off from what we have long believed to be our security lifeline. America, under this President and his wealthy backers, has reneged on that long-held view that the western alliance worked together against the dictator and aggressor, Putin. That view was shattered to pieces when, at the recent United Nations General Assembly, the resolution blaming Russia for starting the war was voted against by peace-loving, democratic nations such as Belarus and Hungary—and the United States of America. Now, President Trump is threatening to revoke the legal right of 240,000 Ukrainian refugees to stay in the US. Who could possibly have thought it?

That was only the beginning. Things have deteriorated inexorably since then. This report articulates the urgent need for us to examine and address the areas that we need to support in our military strategy in order to assure this nation that we can protect and defend ourselves—the very first priority of any Government. In doing so, we need to ensure that we play our important part in a pan-Europe security role, helping Ukraine to survive this terrible war, particularly since the United States has just decided to suspend its military aid to Ukraine—a shocking, brutal and traitorous act toward a country trying to save itself from Russian aggression.

There is so much in the committee’s report, ranging from the underlying importance of deterrence, through the defence recruitment system and how we build mass, to how we need to recruit and retain more reserves and the urgent need to better understand and work with our defence industry. I applaud all the speeches that have talked about this; it is a blueprint that I hope will be studied and accepted by those about to produce our strategic defence review.

The report identifies what must now be done to rectify this, at speed—all the while acknowledging how difficult this will be when our resources are so low and money is scarce. However, raiding our international aid budget to help pay for this urgent uplift to our national security is, I believe, the wrong way to go about it. There are around $300 billion of frozen Russian assets across the G7 and the EU. We hold around £25 billion of those. Will the Government urgently bring forward legislation to unblock those assets? The money that we have taken from the international aid budget could then be put back and made to work in those countries whose very existence relies on our support. In the long run, that soft power that we have exercised so well in the past will be remembered.

The report also makes much of engaging the whole of society in understanding the importance of defending ourselves against future aggression. A déjà vu moment for me came as I recalled my visit to the civil defence college in Easingwold some 35 years ago. We had three days of intensive training in all aspects of what we should do in the event of nuclear war being declared. As local councillors at the time, we were given insight into how we should help our communities prepare and ultimately survive any attack. We had tabletop exercises, discussions and military personnel guiding us through debates and lectures.

Shamefully, some of us treated this important seminar as a bit of fun—light-hearted relief from our day job as councillors. One evening, I organised an escape committee to the local pub, when we were not supposed to leave the estate. It was only when we were subjected to the awful sound of air raid sirens on some exercises that the reality of what we were doing there had the desired impact on us. Ukrainians have had that every day for the past three years and the reality of Russian terror in so many unspeakable ways.

There was a bunker at County Hall in those days and only one person was in charge of running our county’s emergency defence service—how very British. At least we had an appreciation of just what was involved in civil defence. My fear now is that this knowledge is completely lost and that it will require a considerable effort to bring it back into existence. The report is a wake-up call indeed for this and I ask the Minister what plans the Government have to bring back civil defence awareness in our society.

Now we know that we cannot count on America any more to help in the defence of our way of life and our values as democracies, we have to stand as one against those malign forces that seek to destroy those values. Ukraine has shown us how to do this and we must continue to help that brave country fight for its right to exist. This report charts the work needed to bring this forward at speed. Now is the time for us to make ourselves ready.