Scotland: Independence Referendum

Baroness Neville-Jones Excerpts

Thursday 30th January 2014 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Neville-Jones (Con)]

My Lords, I add my thanks to those of other noble Lords to my noble friend Lord Lang for securing and leading this debate and for the wisdom of what he said. The noble Baroness, Lady Goldie, is no longer in her place, but it is a great pleasure to have her in this House. I agree that we have a great new weapon here—her call to arms was certainly very forceful and also quite right.

Much of the comment on the implications of the referendum in Scotland has focused on the economic aspects, but in the course of the debate so far we have also begun to see a wider picture. In a moment I will focus on the security side, which has already been mentioned by some other noble Lords. First, however, following what the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, said, I should just like to say that it is a very unattractive prospect to be caught like a pig in the middle between the Scottish Government and the Council when trying to do something. I see the point that he made—that it would be extraordinarily difficult. It is not clear to me whether the other members of the Council would play ball. That is only one of the many great difficulties that this potential scenario throws up.

Before I go on to talk a bit about the issues that conventionally come under the heading of security—and the list starts with terrorism—I should like to comment on the question of an independent Scotland’s potential membership of NATO. This throws up equally great difficulties when we come to the propositions that might confront us as regards the economic European Union. Why? Frankly, it is pretty extraordinary that a Government who dispute the central tenets of the defence policies of the alliance and seek to remove from their soil the facilities which are so important to nuclear deterrence should simultaneously imagine that they would be wanted or valued inside the alliance which their actions were weakening. It is very difficult to see how the alliance would countenance that. It does not work that way. That is another area where the Scottish people are being sold a false bill, and it is very important that they hear other voices.

I turn to issues that the noble Lord, Lord Browne of Ladyton, mentioned—and I agree entirely with what he said. I want to focus on the threats that this country has been tackling in a major way, from before 2010 but, most particularly, since the national security strategy of 2010. We identified terrorism, cyberattack and organised crime as major threats to the stability of the security and stability of this country. Terrorism and cyberattack were classed as tier 1 risks and organised crime as a tier 2 risk. Despite our great efforts and the investment that has been made since then in combating organised crime, it has enormously grown, and I would not be at all surprised to see in a further security strategy that it came out as a tier 1 risk. My point is, in relation certainly to the other two risks, that those risks are not going away; they are remaining. Daily extensive, intensive and expensive efforts manage to keep them under control.

So what are these efforts? The annual bill in this country for maintaining capabilities and for the operations of the agencies, and for the cyber intelligence alone, runs at over £2 billion per annum. That does not take into account the contributions also made by the police or other government agencies and the military to our overall strategy. As a result of that overall strategy, we have a well honed machine, which goes under the label of Contest, on which our counterterrorist effort is based and which is being used as a model to combat organised crime. It is because of Contest that we have seen so few outrages since the London bombing, but we should not imagine that it is because they are not being attempted—they are, and there are plenty of them, and the operations of the police and agencies frustrate them.

The whole of the UK benefits from this security umbrella that runs from the centre, but this would change, and it would change radically, in the event of Scottish independence. The authority of the agencies, the legal framework under which they operate and their ability to provide security would stop at the border. The noble Baroness, Lady Liddell, was quite right to say this. The Scottish Government have recognised this, and they know that they would have to set up what has been described as a security and intelligence agency, which would engage in what they have described as intelligence sharing. That is all very well, but the putative budget for defence as well as for security in an independent Scotland is only £2 billion per annum; that includes defence as well as other agencies. For a share of this sum it seems highly improbable that, with set-up costs and operations, an intelligence service could be created that was adequate to act as an effective and trusted partner to UK and other allied intelligence services. To share intelligence, agencies have to be capable of generating their own. I have no doubt that the UK, in its own security interests, would want to do what it could to increase the security of its geographical neighbour and long-time partner, but we have to recognise that the control principle governing intelligence derived from third parties would undoubtedly quite severely limit what it could share. Scotland would lose the benefit of what the UK has at the moment in its membership of the “Five Eyes” community.

That would have important implications for UK security. The UK could not allow a less secure Scotland, if that turned out to be the case, to be used as a back door to penetrate the UK, and we may be sure that that would be tried. Unavoidably, we would have to fall back on securing the English-Scottish border to become a control point, with all the cost and inconvenience that would be involved. That would be true irrespective of whether Scotland were a member of Schengen or managed to persuade all parties involved to be allowed to continue to be in the common travel area of the British Isles.

I have one last point. The border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland is often pointed to as an example of the way in which it is possible to keep an open border in the face of a terrorist threat, but this is not an apt analogy. The control border is across the Irish Sea, and it most certainly is monitored and can be closed in emergencies. I would hate to think, but it cannot be excluded, that this could happen within Great Britain. The more we diverge in policy and practice, the greater the danger. We would surely be better off by maintaining the open and peaceful border that we have had for 300 years.