NATO

Lord Bates Excerpts

Thursday 10th February 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bates]

My Lords, it is a great honour to follow the maiden speech of the noble Lord, Lord Flight. Unlike the noble Lord, Lord Browne, I did not have the privilege of serving alongside him in the House of Commons. I departed the other place as he arrived and I arrived back at this place just as he departed. It is great to be in the Chamber with him. I have heard a great deal about his ability, winsome humour, sharp mind and intellect. He will bring those powers of debate to bear, I am sure, on many occasions. Although the noble Lord, Lord Flight, talked about India, he began his life as an Essex boy, of which he is very proud. He had a distinguished career in business, after studying at Magdalene College, Cambridge. He was then elected as a Member of Parliament for the outstandingly beautiful constituency of Arundel and South Downs in 1997. I have it on the surest authority—from a distinguished former constituent of the noble Lord, Lord Flight—that he was a most assiduous Member of Parliament. He was a very hard working and diligent constituency MP. I am sure that that tradition and experience is something that he will bring to this House and his duties here. I am sure I speak on behalf of all noble Members in saying that he is a great addition and we welcome him.

I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Addington, on securing this debate in the ballot. I also had a subject in the ballot but was not successful. However, I am delighted that this subject was. Like many Members, I tend to look at the subject that I had in the ballot, then at the guy who was fortunate enough to win, and think about whether I can squeeze my words by contortion into what I first wanted to say. I will perhaps test the House’s patience on that in the last couple of minutes of my offering.

The noble Lord, Lord Addington, introduced the subject of NATO so well, highlighting the key issues for consideration at present. The world has changed since 1949, when the NATO treaty was signed in Washington DC. The threat at that point was the Soviet Union, so NATO was formed.

I declare an interest: I have recently been appointed as a member of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly. In fact, I am so new that I have not yet attended my first meeting; I do so in two weeks’ time. I was pretty amazed to hear about the number of committees there—it is 300 or 400. A distinguished former Secretary-General, the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, who is in his place, says that that is perhaps not the case, and obviously I defer to his great expertise. But the assembly seems to be getting a very nice new building, smarter than what existed before, at the cost of €1 billion, I think, which seems to be quite a handsome addition for NATO in rather straitened times, particularly when we are finding things pretty tight in our defence budget here.

More important than that is to discover what NATO’s role is in the modern era. When I was looking back, I thought, “It would be good to go back to see what the different articles said in the original treaty about its purpose”. Two things were evident from the original text of the treaty, dated 4 April 1949. The first was this:

“The Parties to this Treaty reaffirm their faith in the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations and their desire to live in peace with all peoples and all governments”.

That is quite an interesting point. Sometimes we perhaps see NATO as a rival to some institutions, particularly the United Nations and its Security Council, which had been formed just three years before. The UN had its first meeting in Church House just across the way here; the first meeting of the General Assembly was in 1946 in Methodist Central Hall. We sometimes think that NATO is trying to dilute the authority of the UN, but the treaty itself is very clear that it saw the peace and prosperity of peoples and Governments as being vested in the United Nations charter. It specifically said that it did not want in any way to diminish the lead role of the Security Council and the General Assembly in pursuing their tasks.

NATO had a very strong political remit. Today we tend to think of NATO as a purely military body. It is a formidable military power because, in the classic term, it was created to keep the Americans in and the Russians out. There was another part to that phrase, but it is no longer needed. To an extent, it has done that; NATO has succeeded in keeping the United States engaged in Europe, and that has helped immensely to guarantee our security. Of course it has not quite kept the Russians down, because now they are partners. In fact, I shall see President Medvedev turning up in Lisbon for the discussions there on the future of NATO as a partner. To see Russian observers at all meetings of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly—they have a right to attend—shows that the world has changed for the better, and NATO has been a very successful part of that.

Where does NATO go from here? On that, some of the thinking that has gone into the coalition’s strategic defence and security review can be helpful to us. The central argument in the helpful document that it produced, which is now our national security strategy, is that we need to move on from thinking that we can go around the world intervening—to move from intervention to prevention. There is a much greater emphasis on the prevention of conflict than on intervening in conflict. When you are a huge military power, there is the temptation that if you are a hammer you see every problem as a nail. Politics brings a subtlety to such matters. I am in politics because I abhor violence; I want peaceful solutions to all conflicts, peaceful transitions of power and the peaceful operation of societies.

The political dimension needs to step to the fore and take on the role of prevention. Prevention is very clear in the new security and defence policy. It says that we will move resources—this is a radical concept—of nearly £300 million away from the Ministry of Defence and put it into a pot which is about conflict prevention and resolution. That is a phenomenal leap. It recognises, as the national security policy says, that we must get better. Its top aim is to tackle the root cause of instability. Rather than intervening afterwards, we should intervene before. That is the whole thrust of where the national security policy is going.

That is a perfect role for NATO. It can use the fact that it keeps the United States in. It is crucial, in my view, that Turkey is also a member. NATO somehow transcends the European Union and adds something different. It could have a unique role in pursuing initiatives for peace and reconciliation within the world, intervening politically and in humanitarian ways rather than in a military way, which is always more costly. That fact was stated by the Prime Minister on his visit to Afghanistan recently.

As I come to the last minute of my time, I will chance my arm by raising an issue that I chose for a balloted debate recently. It is linked to the United Nations. Next year, there will be a United Nations resolution that proposes an Olympic Truce for the period of the Olympic Games in London 2012—from seven days before until seven days after. It will be passed by the United Nations General Assembly and all 193 member states of the United Nations will sign up to it. It will declare that they will pursue initiatives for peace and reconciliation during the period of the Olympic Games in the spirit of the ancient Games.

The problem is that if it is like any other of the previous resolutions, it will be completely ignored. If we are to go back to the almost defining point of NATO, where we recognise that if we are to have peace, prosperity and security in this world it will be through a broad-based international order and the United Nations will be at its heart, surely it behoves us to take United Nations resolutions seriously. There is no better resolution in my view to start with than to declare a truce during the London 2012 Olympic Games.