Integrated Review of Security, Defence, Development and Foreign Policy

Lord Alderdice Excerpts

Thursday 22nd April 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Alderdice (LD)]

My Lords, first, I welcome the noble Lord, Lord Godson. It is very good to have him here, not only for his expertise, but because one thing that I think unites Members across this House is the need to improve our reputation with the fourth estate. I have no doubt that he will bring to the inside some of his experience from the outside and enable us to do that. I remind the House of my registered interest as the director of the Centre for the Resolution of Intractable Conflict at Oxford University.

I welcome the idea of an integrated review of this kind and much good work has been put into it. As the review makes clear, we face extraordinary and difficult challenges, requiring complex of approaches to address them properly. However, I found that there was a disjunction between two different approaches within the report. I would like to speak to them in two ways.

The first is general. On the one hand, the report—in some very thoughtful and properly troubling passages—describes how the international rules-based order has been breaking down. It makes it clear that, rather like Humpty Dumpty, it will not be possible to put it back together again. However, at the very beginning of the report, one gets the sense that everything is wonderful, we are doing marvellously and we are going to capitalise on our place in the rules-based international order. These two things do not seem to fit terribly well together. It appears that there is a real need to struggle intellectually with putting them together because we have major challenges.

The second area is more troubling and more immediately so. As I said, the draft by the Prime Minister at the beginning is very positive and upbeat. One can see his very particular phraseology in it and feels like saying “Rah, rah, rah!” at the end of it—until one reads the rest of the report and compares it with one’s knowledge of what is going on. This is profoundly troubling.

I have warned repeatedly in this House that we are already into the third global conflict in cyberspace and it is emerging in other spaces too. Let me give two examples of the urgency. First, Margarita Simonyan, editor-in-chief of the state-funded Russian media outlets RT and Sputnik, said that war with the US is inevitable. She believes that the conflict will break out when, not if, Vladimir Putin seizes more territory from Ukraine. Within the last two weeks she has said that there will be a kind of war driven by hacking and the forced disruption of internet access. She said:

“I do not believe that this will be a large-scale hot war, like World War II, and I do not believe that there will be a long Cold War. It will be a war of the third type: the cyber war.”


Turning now to the second example, as is known, I am a psychiatrist, and I have watched with bemusement what I can describe only as the mass hysteria in the response by many leaders, including European leaders, to the question of the vaccine. But the reasons became clear to me in the last few weeks when I had my friends do some research. AstraZeneca is being targeted by large-scale malign influence campaigns conducted by the Russian Federation, using bots to advance its economic and foreign policy goals. The Russian operation has been successful in having France and others disqualify the AZ vaccine from use in their populations. Russia has been adversely influencing things, as it has been in elections and the gilets jaunes campaign. If we do not inform our populations that this is going on, we can scarcely be surprised if they do not appreciate it.