King’s Speech

Lord Adonis Excerpts

Wednesday 15th November 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Adonis (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to welcome the noble Lord, Lord Roberts, to the House, and I congratulate him on his brilliant maiden speech. As a fan of all his biographies, the one I most enjoyed and that is most relevant to this House is his magisterial biography of Lord Salisbury, the last Prime Minister to serve in this House. He gives the most brilliant insight into the Conservative mindset, which is valuable for someone like me. When it was proposed that shop workers should be given relief from having to stand up for more than five consecutive hours, Lord Salisbury said, “Change, change, aren’t things bad enough already?” That is how it seems when we look at the world order today.

Many noble Lords have referred to the optimism that we all felt 30 years ago, with the collapse of the Berlin Wall and a belief, with Fukuyama, that liberal democracy was then on a triumphant path. That was not to be. I believe that the noble Lord, Lord Hannan, was completely correct when he said that we pay too little attention to the strength of our arms. It may also be true that we deployed them in the wrong places in many of the developments that took place thereafter, and we now need to start putting that right in a serious way.

In particular, we need to stand resolutely behind and strengthen NATO. It was only three or four years ago that President Macron said that it was “brain-dead”, but it has now sprung into life again in Ukraine. Never has its role been more vital since Ernest Bevin’s actions led to its creation in the middle of the Berlin airlift. A war is taking place in Europe, and the largest invasion of Europe since the creation of NATO has taken place. Some 18% of Ukraine is still occupied and there have been more than 150,000 casualties in the Ukraine war, with 17,000 killed—and it is still ongoing.

It is on Ukraine that I will focus my questions to the Minister, the noble Lord, Lord Ahmad, whom we are pleased to see continuing in his place—he does a superb job in this House and he will be of great assistance to the future Lord Cameron. On my side, my noble friend Lord Coaker’s speech from the Front Bench was absolutely superb, showing the continuity in our foreign policy on our essential national interests.

I accept the point of the noble Earl, whom we also welcome, in opening the debate—namely, that we have not been distracted—but the big question in respect of Ukraine is that we are in danger of a stalemate. Over the last year, after the initial significant gains that the Ukrainian forces made, with our support, there has been little change in Ukraine in recent months. Indeed, last week, President Zelensky had to contradict his own chief of staff, who said that there was a stalemate in Ukraine. If that is the Ukrainian assessment, there is no reason why we should defy it. We are faced with a very unstable situation in the United States, and it could be that US aid is reduced over the next year.

As I see it, the issue on Ukraine—and I want to put it directly for the Minister to reply to at the end of the debate—is not that we lack consensus, because there is plenty of consensus in the House on Ukraine. It is about whether there is enough action on Ukraine and enough support for the Ukrainians. It is worth a thought experiment at the moment, given the situation we are in and the existential nature of the threat we face from this Russian invasion, whether we should double our support for the Ukrainians at the moment. The Germans have found it very difficult to rise to these challenges historically, but they have just agreed an €8 billion budget for the support of the Ukrainians next year. By my calculations, they are providing three times the military support that we are providing at the moment. Just to take tanks—there are many other measures too—we are supplying 14 Challenger tanks, while Germany is at the moment supplying 18 Leopards and has just committed to another 25.

The question that I put to the Minister is whether our support for Ukraine is sufficient. We need a breakthrough in Ukraine in the next year; if we do not get a breakthrough, we could have another frozen conflict and another type of Berlin Wall across Europe for the next generation. We need to consider urgently and with the space required, despite the other conflicts, whether a really significant upping of our support is necessary, in collaboration with our European partners. I much regretted that in the noble Earl’s speech the words “France”, “Germany” and “the European Union” did not even feature. We need the strongest possible military collaboration with our European partners; we need to consider what it will take to bring about a breakthrough in Ukraine. We have supplied £2.3 billion of aid to Ukraine this year and last. Should that be £5 billion? Should we be doubling our defence effort? What will it take for us to win? The cost of us losing could be incalculable over the next generation.