Ukraine

Lord Desai Excerpts

Friday 25th October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Desai (CB)]

My Lords, I rise as the 33rd speaker in your Lordships’ debate. I am pleased to follow my friend, the noble Lord, Lord Whitty—I cannot call him my noble friend any more.

I was very cheered to hear the echo of 1938. I was born too late for that but now, at last, I will be in the third world war. I might say that it is about time that I had some fun in my life. What we are discussing right now, let us be clear, is that we are willing to start the third world war—or, rather, that Putin has already started the third world war and we are going to co-operate with him in having a nice third world war.

Of course, there is the £23 billion hole that the Conservatives left for us, we have to redefine our debt calculations and we do not have money for pensioners for this winter, but we will find the money—maybe £100 billion, maybe more; I do not know what it is. But that is fine. I think there is all-party agreement that we are going to go to war—and who am I as a Cross-Bencher to object to that?

As the noble Baroness from the Liberal Democrat Benches pointed out, India was absent at the Commonwealth meeting. At that Commonwealth meeting, there is a huge demand for reparations, which we may not be able to escape. Forget about that. But if India was at Kazan and not in Samoa, there is a reason. Prime Minister Modi—whatever you may think of him—is the only person who was able to tell Putin that it was not the time for war when he invaded Ukraine, and he is the only person who has been to both Russia and Ukraine. He is, I think, the only statesman right now who may be helpful to us, if we can take advantage of his membership of the Commonwealth. But, of course, we do not want to do anything like that—we want to fight. So, let us fight. Let us have a proper five to six-year war, which would be very good for us. After all, Russia has been encouraged in this war effort. There was an article in the New Statesman by Wolfgang Munchau only last week saying how much better the Russian economy was now because of the war. Let us remember that, while we have sanctions on Russia, India has helped Russia to sell all its oil, because we are not the only power in the land. NATO is not the only power in the land. There is BRICS, there is China and there are others.

But so what? We are going to fight because we are determined to fight. It is good, therefore, that we should all be combined and should be able to fight. I am not an expert on defence, but I have been hearing and reading in newspapers that we do not have enough soldiers in our Army; we have problems with our Navy and need more money there; and we need more money in the Royal Air Force. But we will find the money somewhere, it does not matter where, because peace is always a misery and deficits matter. In war, deficits do not matter. So thank God that, at least five days before the Budget, we have decided to go to war so we can have a new Budget calculation by the Chancellor of the Exchequer.

So I think we are in a good position, and I congratulate the new Government—and we have decided, with this Labour Government, that times were going to be tough, and now they are going to be tougher. We are going to fight a war, and I am sure that in about five or six years we will be the victor, as we were in the last war. We remember the last war very fondly, so let us have another war, and let us once again be proud that we defended ourselves.