Ukraine (International Relations and Defence Committee Report)

Baroness Smith of Newnham Excerpts

Thursday 6th March 2025 Grand Committee

[Baroness Smith of Newnham (LD)]

My Lords, this has been a fascinating debate. Like others, I thank the noble Lord, Lord De Mauley, and the committee for producing an excellent report that has contributed to this being such a stimulating debate. Clearly, there are other, slightly more recent factors that have contributed to it being even more timely and interesting than it might have been, and I agree with the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Houghton of Richmond, that it would have been preferable if the debate could have been held in the main Chamber.

We are just over three years after the start of the current operations in eastern Ukraine. I put it like that because today we have really talked only about the situation since February 2022, yet the situation in Crimea since 2014, which was mentioned by my noble friend Lord Alderdice, and the situation in Georgia in 2008 remind us that Russian expansionism is not new.

Although the title of the report, Ukraine: A Wake-up Call, is very telling, it is also important for us to remember that for too long, this country, like our NATO allies, tended to turn something of a blind eye. We do not talk about the fact that 20% of Georgian territory is still occupied by Russia. We do not talk very much about Crimea because we seem vaguely to have assumed that it is now just Russian, so we talk about Ukraine of the borders of February 2022, but until two weeks ago, we had at least assumed that we were on the same page as our transatlantic allies.

We are on the same page as Canada. Indeed, Donald Trump and JD Vance have done the most extraordinary thing: they have united Canada and have persuaded the Québécois that they are Canadian after all. Donald Trump appears to be doing something that his friends in the Reform Party probably would not like, which is reuniting Europe, not in terms of European institutions—I am not going to get into any technicalities about the UK-EU security relationship in terms of a bilateral relationship that is signed and sealed as a treaty—so much as the very clear fact that European states need to work together.

There has been a wake-up call, which we began to see at the time that this report was written, but it has become ever greater. At the same time, President Putin has managed to catalyse NATO by ensuring that Finland and Sweden have finally decided that they should be NATO members rather than outside it, so there are a lot of unintended consequences. As noble Lords have pointed out, this report was completed six months ago. By House of Lords standards, debating it within six months is quite quick. The fact that the Government have already responded is excellent but, obviously, nobody could quite have predicted what has happened in the six weeks since President Trump was inaugurated for the second time.

We are in a very different situation where our American allies perhaps cannot be relied on as in the past. As my noble friend Lady Harris pointed out in her trenchant and powerful speech, the US vice-president’s comments were, quite frankly, unacceptable. To suggest that the United Kingdom is “some random country” that maybe fought some war 30 or 40 years ago is absolutely unacceptable and reprehensible. The transatlantic relationship might not be a special relationship in US eyes in the way that it has sometimes been in British rhetoric. As the former UK ambassador to the US, Dame Karen Pierce, pointed out yesterday to the International Relations and Defence Committee, the Americans do not see it in a sentimental way, and they never have. As several noble Lords have pointed out, it is quite reasonable that the United States, particularly, but not only, under Donald Trump, in many ways sees the transatlantic relationship through a transactional lens.

One wake-up call we need to understand is that whoever is the American President, we cannot simply assume that NATO will go back to the alliance it was during the Cold War. We need to be aware of that but, equally, we need to be able to trust our allies. We cannot have the vice-president of one of our allies rubbishing the United Kingdom or denigrating the President of Ukraine. It is utterly unacceptable.

I absolutely agree with the many noble Lords, starting with the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, who pointed out that the Prime Minister has been very effective over the past few week in working with both the US and our European partners. However, we also need to make sure that we are not only standing up with Ukraine against Putin but standing firm against the United States when it is not acting as a reliable partner.

Various issues arise from that. It will surprise noble Lords that I agreed with a couple of points made by the noble Lords, Lord Balfe and Lord Skidelsky. On the question of our relationship with the United States, at a meeting yesterday, it was pointed out to me that we should not just assume that we go back to old-fashioned business as usual. However, the UK’s relations with the United States are qualitatively different from those of our European partners: we are part of the Five Eyes, we have various defence capabilities that our European partners do not, and we clearly have the nuclear deterrent. As the noble Lord, Lord Balfe, pointed out, the French nuclear deterrent is independent, but ours is closely tied to the United States. Is the Minister able to confirm that we can use our deterrent independently? It is clearly important because our deterrent is the NATO nuclear deterrent and France’s is not. That is my first question.

Various noble Lords have mentioned the incoming German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, who has talked about the UK and France sharing their nuclear deterrent. To what extent are we able to do that beyond saying that NATO offers a nuclear umbrella? There are questions about the non-proliferation treaty, which is not frequently talked about anymore, but there may be issues there, so it would be interesting if the Minister could comment.

Defence expenditure is one of the issues that has been partially overtaken by events in the past two weeks. We now have a timetable to get to 2.5% and several noble Lords talked about moving to 3%. That is my party’s policy, and we believe we should do it quickly, but not on the back of development. The noble Lord, Lord Skidelsky, made a valid point that we might say that we need to increase defence and there might be various niche capabilities that the noble Lord, Lord West, would want if he were in the Room, but we need to be clear about what we would be spending that 3% on.

Defence procurement is clearly one of the issues. The questions raised about our defence industrial base are hugely important. My noble friend Lady Tyler of Enfield was one of the Peers who mentioned that we need to strengthen our defence industrial base and to work with small and medium-sized enterprises, particularly those that have found that the uncertainty pending the SDR has created issues with their balance sheets and cash flow. Will the Minister tell the Committee what work is being done with small and medium-sized enterprises, particularly those that have dual-use capabilities? Equally, we need to be working with our European partners. As several noble Lords mentioned, interoperability is vital. Defence spending of 3% may or may not be enough. We need to make sure that we have the right capabilities, in the right place, at the right time, not just as the United Kingdom but with our NATO partners and allies.

My final question is on the size of the Armed Forces. For years, these Benches have been saying that we need to restore the 10,000 cut to the Army. We also strongly believe that we need to strengthen the reserves, but the other important point that was raised is about total defence or civilian defence.

Taking the lessons of our Finnish and Swedish partners is important. What are His Majesty’s Government doing not only to think about civilian capabilities but to talk to the United Kingdom? At the moment, we are, to an extent, talking to ourselves. We will have people watching online. There will be people from the Armed Forces or veterans listening in. There might be people from the Russian embassy or the American embassy listening in; maybe even the Chinese embassy has an interest. What we really need, however, is to be saying things that reach out to the ordinary citizens—in particular, not people of our generation, because most of us will be over the average age of the UK population. The noble Baroness, Lady Fall, pointed out that she lives with some Gen Z people. We need to be reaching out to them, to schools, to universities and to our young people to explain why defence and security matter.

This is not just about the past; it is about the present. It is about the defence of democracy and standing up not just for Ukraine but for what it stands for. We are doing it for Europe and for a future that is for Gen Z, their children and grandchildren.