Defence, Diplomacy and Development Policy

Lord Browne of Ladyton Excerpts

Thursday 30th January 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Browne of Ladyton (Lab)]

My Lords, my noble friend Lord McConnell reminded us in his opening remarks that few, if any, of the forces that will influence our common future on this planet respect or can even be bound in any form by national boundaries. We all know this but, unfortunately, many times we behave as if we do not, thinking that we can influence these things without partnerships across the world. I pay tribute to my noble friend, congratulate him and thank him for the way in which he has introduced it. I am honoured to follow the noble Lord, Lord Howell, another noble Lord who has a global vision—a perspective that he shares with us regularly and always to our benefit—and I thank him for his contribution.

We are at the start of a new decade, and tomorrow we leave the EU. Things are going to change—there is no doubt about that. The time is right to engage with the challenges posed by the announcement in the Queen’s Speech of an

“Integrated Security, Defence and Foreign Policy Review … covering all aspects of international policy from defence to diplomacy and development.”—[Official Report, 19/12/19; col. 9.]

But we need to live up to those words. In his contribution to the Queen’s Speech debate on 7 January, at col. 65, my noble friend Lord Robertson of Port Ellen described, in a few short sentences, by reference to the 1997-98 strategic defence review, the level of consultation that a proper review of this nature requires. As I recall, his wise advice attracted universal approval from your Lordships’ House, including from the Front Bench. Beyond approval, the Government have a responsibility to act on that advice.

Thanks to my noble friend Lord McConnell, we have two and a half hours of debate today, but that is insufficient by a long way for your Lordships’ House. On that point, surely it is not an unreasonable expectation that, in winding up, the noble Baroness the Minister can give your Lordships a clear undertaking that, at an early date before decisions are made, the Government will find time to debate the proposed review more fully so that Parliament has a proper opportunity to help to shape the review process. If she cannot do so and the Government do not find the time to do it, it will be difficult to avoid the conclusion that their talk about wide-ranging consultation is meaningless.

My noble friend asked an Oral Question about the proposed review, on 8 January, at col. 178. He was being a bit unfair to the Government; it was a bit early to ask the questions he asked, but they are on the record. I am sure that, in the intervening three weeks, the Government have thought about the review and are now in a position to give better answers to the questions he posed, because their answers then were all engaging but lacked substance.

Today, I intend to use my time to focus on the imperative of peacebuilding as the essential route to building a safer, fairer and cleaner world. From my experience of the views of those whom we charge with the responsibility of delivering our country’s hard power, I say without fear of contradiction that that view is shared by those very brave people. Since it was first coined—it was in the context of the Vietnam War, I believe—the phrase “We cannot do this by military means alone” is a common approach favoured by almost every senior military officer who has experienced the reality of modern conflict.

That was certainly the case when I served as Secretary of State for Defence; if anything, that phrase is even more pertinent in respect of the security challenges we face today. A modern nation must navigate all kinds of problems to be truly secure. This is truer when the risks and threats it faces emanate from abroad—as is the case with the UK, as confirmed by the constant assessment of threats that have informed successive national security strategies in this country. Almost all of the threats that we identify at any given time in these strategies emanate from abroad. Investing money in good governance, education, infrastructure and the alleviation of poverty directly will challenge the root causes of insecurity in the countries from which these threats emanate. The deployment of military force will often, at best, tackle only the symptoms. Our recent experience suggests that the deployment of military force, when it is not properly thought through, can and does make matters worse.

So, while ensuring that the resource commitment to defence reflects our ambition for our defence capabilities, the review should aim to create a paradigm shift in the way we think about peace. In large measure, that work has already been done for us. In the extensive work of the Institute for Economics and Peace, based in Sydney, Australia—the organisation which publishes the Global Peace Index—we will find a template for how to do that, which will assist significantly in helping to meet that challenge. Before I go any further, although this is not formally a registrable interest, I should make it clear that I not only admire the work of the IEP but have agreed to serve on its board of advisers. So I have an interest but not a formal one.

Using data driven-research—the data seldom lies—the IEP has developed metrics to analyse peace and quantify its economic value. For 13 years, it has been developing and publishing national indices, calculating the economic cost of conflict and violence, analysing country-level risk and both understanding and promoting positive peace. Its research is now used extensively by Governments, academic institutions, think tanks, NGOs and inter- governmental institutions, such as the OECD, the Commonwealth Secretariat and the United Nations.

The data, which is ideologically neutral, points to the value of policy interventions that create and sustain peaceful and resilient societies. Positive peace is associated with many social characteristics that are considered desirable, including—the evidence proves this—stronger economic outcomes, higher resilience, better measures of well-being, higher levels of inclusiveness and more sustainable environmental performance; in other words, an optimal environment in which human potential can flourish.

If reports are to be believed, this is just the kind of thinking that will be attractive to the Prime Minister’s principal adviser and which will push back against the growing narrative that we need to use our significant development arm for the purposes of our own interests exclusively. So we need to leverage it for trade purposes and other purposes.

Also, have we learned nothing? This is exactly where we were in the 1990s. As a result of a sustained approach to the use of aid in our national interest, we ended up with the national scandal of the Pergau dam. Thankfully, with a Labour Government, and through a series of steps culminating in 2002 with the passing of the International Development Act and the earlier creation of DfID as a separate government department with its own Secretary of State, the UK established a framework and a transparency to ensure no repeat of Pergau. If we take a step back from where we are now, we will end up back where we were in the 1990s, and that is back to aiding corruption.

Knife Crime

Lord Browne of Ladyton Excerpts

Thursday 27th June 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Browne of Ladyton (Lab)]

My Lords, I am pleased to follow the noble Lord, Lord Wasserman, and would be happy just to adopt his speech. He clearly has significant knowledge of policing. The part of his speech that I really want to own is his commendation of the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, for securing this debate and for the way in which he introduced it. Clearly, I follow two speakers who have significant knowledge of policing, and I do not intend to compete with that. We find ourselves in a debate where there will be violence—but it will be violent agreement with each other.

However, I feel qualified to contribute to this debate because, before I was elected to Parliament, I spent about 25 years practising law in the west of Scotland. In that 25 years, I was in courts at every level and every single day I was confronted by the tip of the iceberg of the violence in the society of which I was a member. All across Scotland, the level of violence was horrific. In the court I most practised in, I saw the same names coming up generation after generation, behaving in exactly the same way and producing the same damage to their own families and to others. There was a general sense of resignation that that was just the norm—a combination of things that nobody would ever be able to shift.

When I became the Member of Parliament for Kilmarnock and Loudoun, for a period that did not change. But then a police officer called Carnochan came on the scene, who was appointed to a position that most people who do not know about policing would recognise as essentially the Taggart of Scotland. He was in charge of Strathclyde Police’s murder squad. He transformed the way in which, even after a quarter of a century of knowledge of it, I looked at the issue of violence. It was a remarkable event for me when I met him and Karyn McCluskey, who worked with him and who started what is now referred to as the Violence Reduction Unit but then had another, more sophisticated name—but that does not really matter. He told me an interesting anecdote. He said that Strathclyde Police’s clear-up rate for homicides was extraordinarily high—well above 90%. They were in great demand across the world as people wanted to know how they could clear up these crimes so well when many other places had terrible challenges. He told me that, as he was about to mount a podium—I cannot remember exactly where it was—he had a road-to-Damascus moment. He thought, “Why should I be so proud of clearing up murders? I should really be preventing them from happening”. From his knowledge, he had an instinctive sense of why such violence was happening and set about, with the permission and instruction of the chief constable in Strathclyde at the time, who was a man called Rae, to concentrate on it. Within five years of setting up the unit and implementing what has become known as a public health approach, he and others had halved the level of violence in the community that they served as police officers. It was a stunning statistic.

In preparation for this debate, I came across an interview that John Carnochan gave recently—he has been very busy with visitors from London and the south as he explains to people, including the Mayor of London and others, how he did this. I commend the interview to everybody. It was published on 10 May 2018 in the Inside Politics section of the online version of Holyrood magazine. It was an extensive interview in which he explained his achievements in the current context. There was a sentence in it which was compelling. He said that when people came first of all, he thought they were looking for a magic bullet and there was none—if they were to reduce the level of violence, a complicated approach would have to be taken. They were shocked by the fact that the level of violence in Scotland is still appalling, but the point he was making was that it had been halved in a relatively short period and there was still much more work to be done. In no sense was this man complacent.

I shall quote one sentence that is crucial and is the lesson that we should all take away—it is not nearly a sophisticated approach, but it is a very strong truth. He said:

“I said to them, you need to get past the crime figures. Stop talking about knife crime and talk about violence, and try to understand the patterns”.


He then goes on to explain what he means by that—noble Lords can read it for themselves. He pushes back against those who suggest that such phraseology diverts attention from victims and the consequences of crime, because it does not. He said that he would never give up on these issues—aspects that the noble Lords, Lord Paddick and Lord Wasserman, identified—which are important to individual communities and their safety. But the most important thing is to learn from that. Having grown up in this environment, I cannot imagine a more difficult one in which to try and shift the pattern of violence. Despite the complexities that we will hear about in this debate, if it can work there it can work elsewhere.

My second point is in a sense more important for the House than for this debate. I have been immensely impressed by the quality of the seven briefings I have received, including one from Barnardo’s which has been referred to. At a few minutes past 11 pm last night, my mobile phone alerted me to an email and I got, for the first time, a copy of the College of Policing’s Knife Crime Evidence Briefing. I am giving the college a subliminal message that 11.10 pm the night before the debate is a bit late. I have not read it yet, but I have looked through it. As I was thinking about this, it occurred to me that I cannot do justice to any of the briefings I have received, but they are full of great stuff. We are constantly searching for a way for Parliament to be relevant and to bring people in. Why do we not open a portal for every debate—it would have to be moderated—where those who wish to engage could post their briefings in real time? People could consider and relate back to them. It would stop all noble Lords having to read them and give them name checks; they would be part of our deliberations. In this environment it would be a good thing to do.

I have run out of time and I apologise, but I have a question about government accountability. I have been trying to follow what the Government are actually doing on strategy and planning in relation to violence. There has been a lot of activity and renaming of committees and after the Prime Minister’s summit on this there was a Written Statement. The last paragraph of the Statement says that the deliverables of the summit represent,

“an increased programme of work across Government”.

It promises some things which I hope the Minister will refer to in her summing up. It promises to keep Parliament updated, it promises a plan of action and it promises some detail on how the Government will go forward. We know the strategy; we now need to hear what the plan of action is.

Brexit: Proposed UK–EU Security Treaty (European Union Committee Report)

Lord Browne of Ladyton Excerpts

Wednesday 16th January 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Browne of Ladyton (Lab)]

My Lords, as the noble Lord, Lord Kirkhope, specifically said—and as the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, adopted and applied—the security of our citizens is the paramount responsibility of the Government. The security implications of Brexit have not been debated nearly enough, and I believe the Government should have found time for a comprehensive debate about it so that our citizens could be fully informed of the implications of this decision that they in the majority have asked us to make.

I commend and thank the noble Lord, Lord Jay, for the thoughtful way in which he introduced this report. I also congratulate the noble Lord and his committee on this excellent report. I will not be able to do justice to it in the time that has been allotted, but I will do my best. In so doing, I remind your Lordships that on 9 January in the debate on the EU withdrawal Bill I made a speech which was confined to internal security matters. That speech can be found at col. 2258 of the Official Report. Noble Lords will be relieved to hear that I do not intend to repeat it, as I went on longer than I should have, but I will repeat the theme of the speech—whether we leave the EU with no deal or with the Prime Minister’s deal, our internal security would be significantly diminished.

I was not the only speaker to make that point. In the closing stages of the debate, on 14 January, the noble Baroness, Lady Manningham-Buller, who has significant experience in security, also made reference to this inevitable consequence of Brexit. In winding up the debate, the Advocate-General for Scotland—the noble and learned Lord, Lord Keen of Elie—managed, in a speech which as I recollect made only passing reference to the actual debate, to find one paragraph in which to make reference to our future internal security. Referring to the contribution of the noble Baroness at col. 101, he was willing to concede that there is an issue of “police co-operation”, asserting that it could be maintained,

“beyond the EU by reciprocal arrangements—for example, in the case of Norway and Iceland”—[Official Report, 14/01/19; col.117.]

by specific agreements which will apparently,

“maintain the sort of relationship that we would intend to have going forward”.—[Official Report, 14/01/19; col.117.]

I remind your Lordships that, in the words of the Prime Minister—specifically, her Statement when she came back from the December European Council—this will be,

“the deepest security partnership that has ever been agreed with the EU”.—[Official Report, Commons, 17/12/18; col. 527.]

That clearly implies an agreement that is better than the Norway and Iceland agreements.

As a simple aide-memoire, I have with me Norway’s official brochure, which can be found on its Government’s website, on what Norway’s partnership with Europe means. If anybody takes the trouble to look at it, they will see that pages 18 and 19 cover justice and home affairs and the Schengen agreement. I do not intend to go through this shortened version, but it has a number of agreements with the European Union. To get access to EU police co-operation, Norway had to join the “Schengen co-operation”, as it refers to it, in 2001. In order to beat that, do our Government intend to join the Schengen co-operation or to make some similar arrangement with the European Union to meet the challenges of the political declaration? The brochure goes through all the agreements on another page.

The important thing is that this is the result of what appears to be 13 years of negotiations, and even the co-operation with regard to the European arrest warrant, which was agreed in 2014, has not, four years later, entered into force. That seems to echo many of the recommendations in the report that we are debating, which are probably expressed more temperately than I have put them. The Government may think that they can do it another way, but the evidence does not suggest that they can.

The report that we are debating was published, as we have heard, in July. Since then, the negotiations with the EU on withdrawal have concluded, and on 25 November the Government published their agreement and the accompanying political declaration. On 28 November, the Government marked their own homework, publishing their assessment of the part of the political declaration which dealt with policing, judicial co-operation, foreign policy, security and defence. Not surprisingly, they passed. Their assessment was that the Prime Minister’s deal is better than no deal. Importantly, what was missing and what has been missing consistently from the Government’s engagement on this issue is an assessment of what that will be compared to what we already have. No Minister will ever utter those words or explain it to anybody. I am therefore offering the Minister the opportunity to answer the question I put in the debate. In the compromise negotiations that will be necessary in the event of any form of deal, what parts of our security are the Government willing to compromise on, and to what extent? The people of this country need to know that and deserve to know it, and even if they voted for Brexit, they certainly did not vote for that.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

We are going for overarching. I think the point I made was that we disagreed over an ad hoc approach, and that moreover we wanted an overarching approach. I will just look at my notes to make sure that I am not contradicting myself; I hope I am not.

[Lord Browne of Ladyton]

My Lords, I am reluctant to intervene on the Minister—I think we are all conscious of the time—but I have been listening carefully to what she has said, and she seems to have represented the provisions of the political declaration as being agreed. I am not going to go through all its paragraphs but I have copied down three active verbs from three of them, and they are very important. One of them is “consider further”, one is,

“work together to identify the terms for the United Kingdom’s cooperation”,

and the third is “consider how”, and whether,

“the United Kingdom could contribute”.

To me, that does not imply or state agreement on anything; it just says, “We can talk about these things”. They are all aspirational. Nothing is agreed and, set against Michel Barnier’s clear and specific speech in Vienna in June last year, it cannot be agreed. Some of the issues that the Minister has suggested can be agreed cannot legally be agreed by the EU because we are not part of the ecosystem.

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

My Lords, I hope noble Lords will forgive me; I talked about the political agreement as it stands. I am talking about this at a certain point in time—with cognisance of what is happening in another place—so I am talking about the Government’s hopes and aspirations. We have conducted the debate so far in an utterly civilised manner, which is refreshing, so I hope that the noble Lord will accept this in that context.

Taxation (Cross-border Trade) Bill

Lord Browne of Ladyton Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords & 3rd reading (Hansard): House of Lords & Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 4th September 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Browne of Ladyton (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Fox. I hope that his speech has engaged the Minister’s business experience and encourages him to take back to his colleagues in government the significantly persuasive detail of the argument he presented. I also hope that the Minister will refer particularly to that in his response to the debate.

I do not suppose that this will be much of a surprise to anybody but I support the UK’s continued membership of a customs union with the European Union. However, like my noble friend Lord Tunnicliffe, I recognise the necessity of this legislation for an alternative customs regime should we find ourselves out of the European Union without a deal—which, frankly, looks increasingly likely—or with a deal that requires us to leave the customs union.

This is a complex piece of legislation. It consists of 58 clauses and nine schedules and includes provisions covering some of the most complex areas of legislation: import duty, export duty, VAT and excise duty. It is astonishing that it comes before your Lordships’ House in the state it is presently in. I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Kramer, and the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, about the designation and the motivation for the designation of the Bill as a supply Bill. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the sort of scrutiny that this Bill demands is being avoided. Candidly, in the time that I have been in your Lordships’ House I have never before contributed to a debate on a Bill that was designated as a supply Bill. When I was preparing for this debate I wondered what the point of it was, but having listened to the speeches thus far, I can now see that this is a significant opportunity for people to make good arguments, even if they do not affect the legislation before the House.

These restrictions were not before the House of Commons. The other place had the opportunity to scrutinise the Bill fully but it can hardly be said—and I read the report of all the debate there—that it has done so. I draw attention in particular to the proceedings in the other place on Monday 16 July, when both Report and Third Reading were conducted over four seriously timetabled hours, with reducing times offered to speakers as the debate progressed. A minuscule number of Members of the other place managed to contribute to the debate. The consequence was that, as the Official Report shows—these statistics do not particularly prove anything but are indicative of the position—Report and Third Reading are contained within 127 columns of the report, covering the less than four timetabled hours of debate. Sixty-five of the columns are necessary just to record the amendments that were considered and the votes thereon, and only 59 columns record the debate. It is not possible for the Government to come to this House and say that the Bill has been scrutinised or—as the noble Viscount, Lord Trenchard, told us—that it has been considered in the other place and voted on. It has not been considered at all. I spent more time reading the amendments and looking over the votes in the Official Report than I spent reading the debate. It is a disgrace. What is the position of the Government and the Brexiteers on how this squares with taking back control to our Parliament?

While I am on the subject, perhaps the Minister, in his summation, will explain to your Lordships how telling the people who run businesses in Northern Ireland that, in the event of a no-deal exit from the European Union, if they want to know how to conduct cross-border business, they should ask a foreign government how to do it, is consistent with taking back control of our own destiny. That appears to be the compelling argument for us leaving the European Union in the first place. Who thought that that was the right response to give to the people of Northern Ireland?

Among the amendments considered on Report, which my noble friend Lord Hain went through in some detail, were four put forward by the ERG—the European Research Group—which were designed to kill off the possibility of the Prime Minister agreeing a Brexit deal on the basis of the Chequers agreement. It appears that they have worked. I understand that they have been aided by the position that the remainers in the Conservative Party have also taken on the Chequers agreement, and that it is now dead in the water, but they certainly would have worked on their own. Recent evidence suggests that the Prime Minister is now hemmed in by both sides of her party. In the current environment, the space for a deal that all sides of the Conservative Party and the EU 27 can agree is virtually non-existent.

It is incomprehensible why the Government accepted these amendments. All of them were designed to undermine their preferred Brexit policy. It is also instructive that the Minister, in his opening remarks, completely ignored all these amendments. He referred to amendments in a generic sense but made no particular reference. We talk about ignoring the elephant in the room, but there is a massive elephant in this Bill. It significantly changes both the Bill and the Government’s policy, yet in the Minister’s introduction of the Bill to your Lordships’ House, it was as though it did not exist. As the Minister knows, I admire him greatly. I suspect that the reason why he did that was that he could not bring himself to put forward the argument that was asserted by Mel Stride, the Financial Secretary to the Treasury, in some very short sentences in summing up the debate on Report, when he said that these amendments not only are not as damaging as they may seem but are consistent with the Government’s position. There is no persuasive argument for that.

An analysis of the amendments, which my noble friend Lord Hain has done, shows that they damage the Government’s position significantly and undermine it completely. I challenge the Minister, if he is able, to give us not bland assertions over a couple of sentences, as his colleague in the other place did, but a serious analysis of these amendments and their effect on the Government’s position. If he wants to explain to us that they do not change the Government’s position, can he please share them with us in summarising the debate? I had intended to go through each amendment to explain why they have that effect, but my noble friend did that for me. I could not do it any better so I will rest with the arguments he put forward.

Over the next couple of minutes—recognising the constraints that are upon me in this speech and upon this House, and recognising that I see little point in referring to any specific provisions of the Bill, but out of respect for those beyond this House who have taken the time and trouble to consider the provisions of the Bill and to provide us with briefings for today’s proceedings—I would like to make reference to one or two points, and to two particular briefings. I invite the Minister, at least in the fullness of time, and perhaps in written form, to respond to the points made by both the Law Society of Scotland and the Fairtrade Foundation, whose briefings I received and both of which impressed me.

The Law Society of Scotland makes a compelling case about the scope of the delegated powers contained in the Bill—echoing concerns over the use of Henry VIII powers, as discussed significantly in the context of the then European Union (Withdrawal) Bill—and about the importance of ensuring that the Government are obliged to consult stakeholders in the process of setting regulations to establish a customs regime. As is its wont, the society proposes in its briefing paper a number of very specific and well-argued amendments to the Bill. I ask the Minister to consider these amendments and, perhaps, to respond to the House in some fashion about the Government’s position in relation to them.

The Fairtrade Foundation provided an interesting briefing which covers both the trade and customs Bills. It points out that this Bill, as drafted, makes no reference to sustainable development and would allow tariff changes to take place without regard to their impact on developing countries. It hopes that the Bill will be amended to include sustainable development criteria to which the Secretary of State must have regard in Clauses 8(5) and 39(4). I am completely confident that it would not be the Minister’s intention for tariff changes to take place without regard to their impact on developing countries. I trust that in due course the Minister will take this into consideration and respond to the point being made in this briefing. Perhaps a suitable amendment to the Trade Bill could address this deficiency if it is not possible to do so in this Bill. I assume that the Government have copies of these briefings; if not, they can be provided.

Finally, I want to make a specific point about customs and excise. I am in possession of a briefing from the Scotch Whisky Association. This is a significant industry not just for Scotland but for the United Kingdom, with £4.3 billion or more of exports. It is a very active co-operator and partner with the Government in the customs and excise environment. Tomorrow, I will attend a meeting of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Scotch Whisky and I know that representatives of the industry will ask me—because they do so every time I meet them—what the timetable is for the implementation of these new customs arrangements.

This is an organisation which has contributed to the development and introduction of the present European customs arrangements that allow spirits to be traded across the European Union, the excise duty being paid only when the goods arrive at their destination. It is called the EMCS. The industry helped the Government to build this system, so it knows the problems, for the industry and for the Government, associated with building new customs systems. Frankly—I summarise bluntly what they say—its members tell me that it is now too late for us to get new customs or excise duty arrangements not only for the EU but for their industry in time for any of the expected dates on which we will leave the European Union. It will take years.

Therefore, perhaps the Minister can give some indication of how long—once this Bill is passed and becomes law, as inevitably it will—this industry should expect to wait before customs arrangements are worked through and bedded down so that it can continue to make the sort of contribution that it does to the economy of this country.

Royal Bank of Scotland

Lord Browne of Ladyton Excerpts

Tuesday 5th June 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bates]

My noble friend is absolutely right. There is a sense here of forgetting the history of what the situation was in 2008 and the incredible damage that was done to our economy—which we are still having to clear up so many years later. That is the reality of the situation. When the National Audit Office looked into how we would do this, the first sale was done on an accelerated book-build process, and it recognised that it offered value for money in the circumstances. However, the fact is that we are in these circumstances as a result of the realities of what happened in 2008, and we should not forget that.

[Lord Browne of Ladyton (Lab)]

My Lords, on the “Today” programme this morning the Economic Secretary, John Glen, when seeking to justify not waiting for a better price, on that specific point said that the Government’s judgment was that, looking at the market conditions, there would be no better price in the foreseeable future. What precisely are those market conditions that he referred to, which are not referred to in the Minister’s answer, that the Government estimate will keep this bank’s price depressed?

[Lord Bates]

These are matters which we take independent advice on; that is why UK Government Investments is there. It tracks what is happening in the market on a daily basis. I have already mentioned some of the things which are happening. Earlier this month there was a large settlement with the Department of Justice, of £3.6 billion; UKGI also recognised that in April, the bank turned in its first profit in 10 years. Those factors were weighed together, along with the fact that there are very few windows during the course of the year when we can dispose of assets, because of potential conflicts of interest.

Queen’s Speech

Lord Browne of Ladyton Excerpts

Wednesday 15th May 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Browne of Ladyton]

My Lords, I am pleased once again to follow the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Stirrup, in a debate in your Lordships’ House because it gives me an opportunity to commend his well-argued and characteristically clearly delivered speech. I sense from the response of noble Lords that the Minister would be well advised to heed the words of the noble and gallant Lord, as indeed I did every day that I was the Secretary of State for Defence when we served together in the MoD. I am also pleased because it gives me an opportunity, which I have not had so far, to congratulate the noble and gallant Lord on his elevation to Knight Companion of the Most Noble Order of the Garter. I remind noble Lords of my entry in the Register of Lords’ Interests, particularly my involvement in organisations associated with non-proliferation, arms control and disarmament issues.

On 6 and 7 May, the two days before the gracious Speech, I attended the ninth annual NATO Conference on Weapons of Mass Destruction, Arms Control, Disarmament and Non-proliferation in Split at the invitation of NATO and representing the European Leadership Network. There were over 100 participants in this conference, which has a very extensive agenda. Some 20 NATO countries were represented, as were four countries from the Middle East along with Japan, China, India and other nations across the world.

Chatham House rules apply to those discussions so I will not—even if I could in the short time available to me—share with noble Lords all of what was said. However, it was an extensive agenda, covering nuclear, biological, chemical and cyber threats. There was a significant discussion about the defeated ambition to have a conference on a weapons of mass destruction-free zone in the Middle East, and all aspects of proliferation were discussed. Many of the national delegations present had been at the preparatory committee of the NPT review in Geneva and had come from there. It was good to see that the Egyptians were at the conference in Split despite their leaving the NPT review disappointed that no date was fixed for a rearranged conference on weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East. The House will also be aware that the fourth P5 meeting to discuss the P5 obligations under Point 5 of the 64-point plan that came from the NPT review in 2010 and the P5 obligations under Article 5 of the NPT took place on the margins of the Geneva discussion, hosted by Russia.

I think there will be agreement on all sides of the House that these are important issues. In almost any hierarchy of threats, these issues would be high in anybody’s priorities and on the list of issues being discussed. As I have said before in your Lordships’ House, when representing a European organisation in that environment, when both the United States and Russia are represented, and if China is also in the room, you have to have pretty sharp elbows as a European to get into the discussion. The scale of their weapons capabilities is such that Europeans, even when aggregated, appear rather small. It was slightly disappointing and worrying that there was no Russian voice in these discussions and at the conference, for the first time to my knowledge.

What was even more disappointing from my perspective was that there was no official United Kingdom voice either. At the NATO discussion on weapons of mass destruction, we appeared to have no point to make. This is not the only recent example of our country not being represented at important discussions relating to the threats and challenges that the world faces. Recently, the Norwegians convened a meeting to discuss the humanitarian effects of weapons of mass destruction, particularly nuclear weapons, and we did not turn up. On that occasion, I think, it was out of solidarity with our P5 partners, none of which turned up to take part in that discussion, to my disappointment and that of many other countries of the world, and which I am sure your Lordships will share. Although it was no surprise to me, I share the disappointment of the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, that these issues did not deserve one line in the gracious Speech.

As will be clear to every noble Lord in this debate in your Lordships’ House today, the range of this debate shows the extensive competition there is for that priority. Almost every noble Lord who has spoken has bemoaned the fact that something was not in the Queen’s Speech. Of course, not everything can be in it, and the range of challenges for priority are very obvious from the nature of this debate. However, it is also obvious that if Europe is to seize the opportunities of the future, it has to deal with the legacies of its past. That has been a significant part of the debate this afternoon and it will be into the evening.

Nowhere is that more evident than in defence and security issues. The blunt truth is that the security policies of the Euro-Atlantic region remain largely on Cold War autopilot, 20 years or more after the end of the Cold War. The Euro-Atlantic region is home to nine of the 14 states in the world that have nuclear weapons on their soil and 95% of the nuclear weapons that exist in the world. However, we seem always to want to talk about the “other”, instead of what is in our own neighbourhood. We are home to large strategic nuclear forces, many—indeed, thousands—of which are ready to be launched in minutes. Thankfully, that does not include the United Kingdom’s forces, but it does include Russian and American forces. Thousands of tactical weapons remain in Europe and a decades-old missile defence debate remains stuck in neutral. New security challenges associated with prompt-strike forces, cybersecurity and space remain contentious and inadequately addressed.

This legacy contributes to tensions and mistrust across the Euro-Atlantic region and needlessly drives up the risks and costs of national defence at a time of unprecedented austerity and tight national budgets. We must ask ourselves why, two decades after the Cold War ended, the United States, Russia, France, Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom and other European nations spend hundreds of billions of dollars, roubles, euros and pounds in response to these tensions while both local and national leaders face a growing list of fiscal demands and unmet needs. This is not just about guns versus butter, although that is a very attractive argument in the current environment. The likelihood of a major war in Europe may have radically reduced since the end of the Cold War but this legacy undermines any effort to build a true Euro-Atlantic partnership to meet the common threats and challenges of the 21st century, which we can all list and which we all know will have to be addressed in a collective and multilateral fashion across the world. The status quo divides our continent and will set Europe and Russia up for a future of failure and irrelevance in the emerging international system if it is not addressed.

Many across the world believe that we need a new approach to defence and security issues in the Euro-Atlantic region. In response to that growing demand, the European Leadership Network, under my chairmanship, the Nuclear Threat Initiative under the chairmanship of Senator Sam Nunn, the Russian International Affairs Council under the chairmanship of Igor Ivanov, the former Russian Defence Minister, and the Munich Security Conference, under the chairmanship of Wolfgang Ischinger, brought together a Track II dialogue to discuss some of these challenges with experts. I was pleased to be able to invite my noble friend Lord West of Spithead, who accepted, and General Sir John McColl, the former DSACEUR, who recently retired and is now the Lieutenant Governor of Jersey, to join that significant group of people, including very senior former soldiers from Russia and the United States, to address some of these issues.

I do not have time now to go into the detail, but I have a copy of the report from that dialogue and I commend it to both the House and the Government. It is a comprehensive document that sets out the principles that ought to instruct such a dialogue and a step-by-step approach to take us, over 15 years, away from this difficult set of circumstances that we have got ourselves into by not addressing these challenges. We need political leadership but we will not have it if we do not even recognise this challenge when we set the course for a year’s debates.