Strategic Defence Review 2025

Lord Bates Excerpts

Friday 18th July 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bates (Con)]

My Lords, it is a privilege to follow my noble friend Lady Mobarik. I join others in thanking the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, for introducing this debate and the review, and in paying tribute to the noble Lord, Lord McCabe, for his excellent maiden speech.

I will address my remarks to paragraphs 7 and 8 of section 7.1 on page 100 of the review. Paragraph 7 reads:

“The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) is the cornerstone of the non-proliferation and disarmament regime”.


Paragraph 8 states:

“To maintain international confidence in the nuclear non-proliferation regime, continued UK leadership within the NPT is imperative”.


That section is highlighted in bold font. The review concludes that the NPT is the cornerstone of our national security and that UK leadership is imperative to it, yet the prospects for agreement at the next NPT review conference in New York in April 2026 are bleak, with some predicting that the NPT regime is on the brink of collapse. The reason is the lack of great power responsibility and leadership being exercised by the five nuclear states of the NPT, of which we are one. The NPT is the cornerstone of the non-proliferation regime, and yet it is in crisis because of a failure of leadership by the P5, which includes us.

There seems to be a rather obvious solution for that, which is oddly missing from the review: the P5 process. The P5 process is a British initiative in nuclear diplomacy that owes its existence to two visionary and courageous speeches—by the noble Baroness, Lady Beckett, then Foreign Secretary, on 25 June 2007 in Washington, DC, and by the noble Lord, Lord Browne of Ladyton, then Defence Secretary, to the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva on 5 February 2008. I commend these to the House, to the Minister and to his officials. In those speeches, they outlined a plan to bring the P5 nuclear powers of the NPT around a table for the twin purposes of reducing nuclear risks and misunderstandings and providing co-ordinated leadership for the non-proliferation regime. They met for the first time in the Locarno Suite at the Foreign Office in September 2009. Initially, it worked. The 2010 NPT review conference was one of the most successful ever. Yet, for geopolitical reasons with which we are all too familiar, that process has been downgraded.

However, in April this year, the UK took over the chair of the P5 process and will carry the leadership baton for the P5 nuclear states in the run-up to the crucial NPT review conference next year. This is a chance to use our immense international standing and influence to make a real difference when it is desperately needed again. Defence and security are not just about upgrading the military machinery to fight wars; they are also about upgrading the diplomatic machinery to avert them.

My request of the Minister is a simple one, and one without cost. Will he agree to meet not me—he will be relieved to hear—but his esteemed colleagues, the noble Baroness, Lady Beckett, and the noble Lord, Lord Browne, to understand their original vision for this great British initiative and to consider how to grasp this moment of opportunity to reinvigorate the process, which we started and which holds so much promise? If he does, he will be realising the mission set out in the review of making not just Britain but the world safer. I wish him well.