Ukraine

Lord Empey Excerpts

Friday 25th October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Empey (UUP)]

My Lords, I join others in congratulating the noble Lord, Lord Spellar, on his maiden speech. I hope he enjoyed listening to himself—certainly, we enjoyed listening to him. He was of course a Northern Ireland Minister at one point and I share the recollection from the noble Lord, Lord Tugendhat, of a trade trip he led to Washington some years ago which I had the pleasure of participating in. I have no doubt that we will hear interesting contributions from him in the days and months ahead.

There is a risk of a self-congratulatory mood around the House today because, by and large, with some tweaks here and there, we all share a general approach of support for Ukraine. The tragedy is that we are in this mess because of failures some years ago. We did nothing when Crimea was invaded; we carried on with business as usual and our German colleagues made themselves almost wholly dependent on Russian gas. We have seen where that has led us.

There is another thing that Putin is banking on. He is looking back to the 1930s: “Well, we only went into the Rhineland—our back yard”. We are repeating the same thing all over again. He has judged, pretty accurately, that, when push comes to shove, many of our colleagues do not have the bottle or appetite for this. The war of attrition of course suits him. Historically, Russia has been a giant sponge—a vast geographical area that absorbs armies. One after the other has tried and failed. Yes, the Ukrainians have punched through the border and occupy a piece of land; that is fine from their point of view, but Russia is a vast nation and Putin controls all the high ground of propaganda and so on, so it is hard to judge what the impact will be.

As for the western response, yes, there have been weapons but, as other speakers, including the noble Lord, Lord Hamilton, have pointed out, they have come late and with limitations. There have been delays. At the end of the day, how long can we ask an invaded population to be in the trenches and see their country destroyed around them when they are doing a job for all of us in the democratic world? We have to recalibrate what we are doing.

We have made this mistake even more recently. We had the Arab spring not that long ago—and what did we do there? There were speeches from this building encouraging the Syrians to resist, but we did not lift a finger when the red line of chemical weapons was crossed. Putin has moved into that country and has a warm-water port; he has taken over the whole place, destroyed the country and got Assad back into office. Now we are trying to pave the way to reintegrate Assad into the western world. The fact is that our eyes are bigger than our belly. We say the right things but, if you are not prepared to put boots on the ground, shut up and stay out of it, because these things will never be settled by meetings in committee rooms in Whitehall or elsewhere.

There has to be a reinvigoration of the political long-term objectives because, the way things are going, we are allowing the Ukrainians to be ground down. Allowing Russia get into a grinding war is the worst thing we could possibly have done. It does not care how many people it loses, by and large. There will be no political repercussions. It is not using the elites around Moscow and St Petersburg, but impoverished people from regions miles away who have absolutely no political influence over Putin whatever.

We now have the potential arrival, in some form or other, of North Koreans. Whether they will replace troops or will be used to try to flush out the Ukrainians from the Kursk region or whatever, they will free up Russian forces for the front line. This is the biggest single escalation since the war commenced its next phase in February 2022. What are we going to do about it? What is NATO going to do about it? The failure came at the very outset when people could see the tanks building up north of Kyiv. The President of the United States could have rung up Putin and said, “If one of your tanks accidentally crosses that border, I will destroy it”. The defensive posture of NATO has been challenged and called out, and we have fallen at the first fence. So we have to rethink things, be much more vigorous and make our minds up. Do we want to take this on or not? We are using the poor people of Ukraine to be crushed and destroyed. That would be a worse sin.

King’s Speech

Lord Empey Excerpts

Thursday 25th July 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Empey (UUP)]

My Lords, like other noble Lords, I congratulate our new Ministers on their appointments, but I also congratulate their immediate predecessors. We have been treated this morning to the menu in Annabel’s kitchen—the noble Baroness, Lady Goldie’s—but she cooked pretty good when she was on the other side of the House, so we have to thank her for her work.

They say that there is not a lot new under the sun. Well, I was just looking up what was happening in June 2010, when the previous Government came into office and launched their review under the guidance of the then Defence Secretary, Dr Fox. The release at the time said that this review was

“to deliver and support the sort of foreign policy this country needed”.

Dr Fox said that

“we would have to confront the harsh facts of the economic climate in which we operate”.

It went on to say that the SDR

“will make a clean break from the military and political mindset of Cold War politics”.

Really? Looking at what is happening in Ukraine, far from the Cold War, we are back to the Somme. Therefore, I think we really need a root-and-branch review of this. It is good news that our colleague here, the noble Lord, Lord Robertson of Port Ellen, is leading that, but we also have to bear in mind that the new Chief of the Defence Staff told us that we needed to be prepared for war in three years, though he said that there is no inevitability.

I will focus on what the noble Baroness, Lady Smith of Newnham, said at the beginning of her remarks about this mythical 2.5% or 2% or whatever. Who says that 2.5% is going to deliver? If you are going to do a strategic review, you do a strategic review. But if the envelope is already sitting there with your boundaries before you even start, it is not a strategic review. The question therefore is: what do we need in the modern world to defend ourselves? If we are starting—to coin a phrase—with the bat of the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, being broken in the pavilion before he gets on to the pitch, that would be the wrong direction of travel. I think we need to do it strategically, and to come back and tell people what it means. That may not be palatable—we all want to see certain elements of welfare improve, to see people looked after in health and education—but everybody agrees, and this Government and the previous Government agreed, that the key priority for every Government is the protection of their people, their way of life and our values. I hope that the review by the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, will not be constrained simply by arithmetic. Let us see what it is. If the Government, Parliament and all of us decide not to take the advice and have a different mechanism for arithmetic, that is fine. But let us at least get it out there and open in public.

I also wanted to raise, and mentioned to the Minister in advance, one local issue—I suppose all politics is local. My hometown, Belfast, has the Harland & Wolff shipyard. It is not the business side of that arrangement that I want to focus on but the infrastructure side. The only other alternative that we depend on for a lot of our repairs is at Rosyth, in Fife. If that is overwhelmed with demand or damaged by an enemy, where do we go?

I ask the Minister to let us know that the Government are focused on the fact that Harland has a strategic asset and piece of infrastructure that is necessary to protect our country in the future, and that we are not going to be sidetracked by short-term business considerations. I wanted to make that point because not only are we concerned, obviously, about the jobs and the business, but the type of infrastructure in place there cannot instantly be replaced in any other location. We wish the noble Lord, Lord Robertson of Port Ellen, well. I have little doubt that if the review can be done in the time available, that itself will be a bit of a breakthrough, but we simply do not have the time left.