Armed Forces

Lord Balfe Excerpts

Thursday 7th September 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, I too begin by thanking the noble Lord, Lord Soames, for initiating this debate. It is a pleasure to have him among us, and we are very lucky that he has come from the other place to join us. I am sure that his contribution will be widely appreciated over the years to come.

Two themes have come through very clearly: that we are not spending enough and that the Army and the military forces, including the Navy, are just not big enough for what we are trying to do. Those points have been made by several people. I want to concentrate on what I call the need for realism, because our attitude in defence is often pretty unreal. On its own, the UK cannot really do very much at all; we have to work in an alliance and in alliances with other like-minded countries. That is point one.

The second point is that we are a most important part of NATO, but we are not important enough to get the General Secretaryship, it seems. We have to realise that, even within NATO, we are beginning to be overshadowed by Germany. Within NATO, we need to concentrate more on interoperability. I was the first leader of the European Parliament delegation to the NATO Parliamentary Assembly in around 1989. At that time, we were talking about the need for interoperability. The fact of the matter was that you could not send a tank through Denmark without the permission of the Danish parliament—and the fact of the matter is that interoperability is still a challenge for NATO and one that we need to look at.

The other challenge is that we need to be more realistic about Article 5. We are fond of saying, “Oh, it’s an Article 5 commitment”, but all that Article 5 says is that an attack on one is an attack on all. It does not say what we should do if Russia decided to intervene in Estonia. It does not give Lisbon any guidance as to what it should do, apart from saying, “Oh dear, Russia has intervened in Estonia. What shall we do?” As far as I can tell, we are not obliged under Article 5 to do anything at all, other than to note that an attack is an attack on us all. That needs looking at.

The point has been made on more than one occasion that the United States is yet again blowing hot and cold on its commitment in Europe. This has been the pattern for many years now. We must bear in mind that, in the end, Europe will have to defend itself. We cannot outsource defence for ever. In fact, we cannot outsource it for very much longer.

We hear lots of strong words about Ukraine, but we also need some realism. One day the fighting will stop—we do not know when, but it will. When it stops, Russia will still be in the same place geographically, it will be the same size and it will present the same challenges, and we have to come to terms with those challenges. We go on about Russian money rebuilding Ukraine, but the truth of the matter is that it is not going to happen. It has never happened—one country has never rebuilt another. It might be said that we rebuilt parts of Germany after the Second World War, but Germany did not rebuild anyone outside its borders for many years until it was rich again. We have got to be realistic: when the fighting stops, Ukraine will need a lot of help from the countries of the West that are now behind it.

As Ben Wallace said, the world is now more unstable and insecure, but I am not sure that that is not a predictable thing. What I would say is that we need to be tolerant and we need to look at building a new Helsinki and coming to terms with the reality of being a small but important nation contributing to the defence of our common home.