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.

80th Anniversary of Victory in Europe and Victory over Japan

Lord Bates Excerpts

Friday 9th May 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bates (Con)]

The greatest generation, whose sacrifice and service we remember this week, not only secured for us a victory over tyranny but gave us the political and diplomatic tools and institutions that would avoid its repetition. The military victories won the war, but it is the often unnoticed diplomatic victories which have secured the peace.

When Britian stood alone and London was being pounded in the Blitz, this city was home to nine Governments in exile. On 12 June 1941, they joined together with representatives of Britain, Canada, Australia and South Africa as the London International Assembly at St James’s Palace to declare that

“the only true basis of enduring peace is the willing co-operation of free peoples in a world … relieved of the menace of aggression”.

This declaration was developed further two months later in a meeting between Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt in Newfoundland when they signed the Atlantic Charter, which would later be signed by 26 other nations. Over the next two years this was developed further, and the foundations of the United Nations began to take shape, culminating in the Washington Conversations on International Peace and Security Organization at Dumbarton Oaks, with much of the preparatory work carried out here in Westminster in Church House.

This was about not just institutions and charters but mechanisms for resolving disputes between nations by law, not war, and holding those who commit war crimes to account. On 7 October 1942, the then Lord Chancellor, Lord Simon, spoke in your Lordships’ House and announced the formation of the United Nations Commission for the Investigation of War Crimes. This led to the London agreement and charter, signed on 8 August 1945 at Church House, which helped to establish the principles of international law and created the first international criminal court at Nuremberg.

Given this pivotal role in the foundation of the United Nations, it was agreed that the ideal venue for the first meetings of both the United Nations General Assembly and the United Nations Security Council would be London, and they took place in January 1946. On the eve of the General Assembly, His Majesty King George VI hosted delegates from 51 countries at a banquet in St James’s Palace and said that, in the long course of history,

“no more important meeting has … taken place”

in this city. He was right. The venues for the General Assembly and the Security Council had been chosen personally by the then Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin. He chose Methodist Central Hall for the General Assembly and Church House for the Security Council because, in his words, he wanted venues that had been “bathed in prayer”.

The remarkable role of this great city and this great country in shaping the post-war political, diplomatic and legal order is something which is worth celebrating, because when politicians, diplomats and institutions do their job, we spare our courageous Armed Forces the enormous cost of doing theirs. But these institutions cannot exist only on paper; they must act in practice. No one nation, no matter how great, can do it alone, and no nation, no matter how small, can stand aside from its responsibility. Yet, those institutions also established a world in which rights and responsibilities were no longer vested solely in sovereign states but in individual human beings and in all human beings.

Will the Minister therefore consider inviting the United Nations General Assembly and Security Council to return to London in January 2026 to mark the 80th anniversary of this great diplomatic victory, so that we can collectively rededicate ourselves to the vision of the United Nations charter, which speaks so profoundly to the world of today when it says:

“WE THE PEOPLES OF THE UNITED NATIONS DETERMINED to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind, and to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small … AND FOR THESE ENDS to practice tolerance and live together in peace with one another as good neighbors, and to unite our strength to maintain international peace and security”?


When we honour those words, we honour their memory.