80th Anniversary of Victory in Europe and Victory over Japan

Lord Farmer Excerpts

Friday 9th May 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Farmer (Con)]

My Lords, I join many others in complimenting, first, the Minister on his inspiring opening speech to this debate. I also compliment the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Peterborough on her speech. I was particularly encouraged by her focus on families, a subject dear to my heart.

These victories in Europe and the Far East were primarily over wicked, dangerous and anti-human ideas. John Maynard Keynes said:

“Ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else”.


Ideologies that took over in Germany and Japan justified the complete domination of their regions: German territorial expansion into central and eastern Europe and Japanese subjugation of east Asia. Such coercive ideologies undermine human flourishing and lead to the killing, at worst, or silencing, at best, of vast swathes of populations. Most recently, trans ideology came close to doing the latter.

Ideologies’ victims just do not fit with the programme, frequently because of immutable characteristics, such as those born Jews in Nazi Germany, or they simply do not or cannot see the world through the ideological lens imposed on them. Hence, freedom of thought and expression are such precious values.

Yet there is a deeply human need for absolutes and certainties, which post-modern relativism has barely dented. Mathematician and philosopher Professor John Lennox exposes the self-contradiction at the heart of post-modernism. It expects us to accept as absolute truth that there are no absolute truths. New atheists proclaiming atheism’s truth and denying God defy post-modernism. Jürgen Habermas, an earlier atheist, voiced dangers of the shift from our moral basis to the post-modern. He said:

“Universalistic egalitarianism, from which sprang the ideals of freedom and a collective life in solidarity, the autonomous conduct of life and emancipation, the individual morality of conscience, human rights and democracy, is the direct legacy of the Judaic ethic of justice and the Christian ethic of love. To this day, there is no alternative to it … we continue to draw on the substance of this heritage. Everything else is just idle postmodern talk”.


New atheists such as Richard Dawkins recognise that jettisoning what he refers to as “cultural Christianity”, something the post-war West has come perilously close to doing, means that the flowerings reeled off by Habermas will lose their roots and wither. That said, we have lived through 80 years of the greatest advances in the history of the world. From a technological, scientific and health perspective, no previous 80 years have ever been better to live in, so the sacrifice of those who secured the victories in Europe and Japan has been worth it—but we cannot rest on their laurels. The survival of any world order cannot be guaranteed, and threats abound.

I see four “D”s of decline and decay surrounding us, such as the towering levels of debt. Shopper politics provokes Governments to borrow lavishly, and private debt is egged on by consumerism. Demographically, we and many other nations are in a bind. Ageing populations are not replaced by new births or supported by younger generations, as the extent of older-age loneliness reveals. It is socially acceptable to say that one is too selfish to have children, and other forms of decadence are reinforced. Popular culture tells us to live for the moment, avoid sacrifice, self-denial or service. Finally, concerns over, for example, historical slavery, sharply divide us over whether western civilisation is even worth defending or upholding.

Yet the motivation to care about, speak up for and protest over the weak, the vulnerable and those who have not, often at great personal cost, flows, per Habermas, from our Judeo-Christian foundations. The Roman Empire into which Jesus Christ was born was not at all so inclined. Our freedom to pursue those ends was bought for us by those willing to stand against vicious, authoritarian regimes.

Defeat, then, was not inevitable—neither is decline now. YouGov polling in the Bible Society’s Quiet Revival report found an increase of 50% in church attendance across all ages, with the most dramatic church attendance growth among young men. Now, more than one in five are attending church at least monthly—ditto, almost one in two young Black people aged 18 to 34.

Perhaps those Judeo-Christian foundations of justice and love, which proved so effective in beating back the dark ideologies of the Second World War, are surfacing again. A new generation is discovering that in a relationship with our maker and with each other, in Habermas’s “collective life in solidarity”, lies the wellspring of meaning and the essence of what it means to be human.

Ukraine: UK Policy

Lord Farmer Excerpts

Monday 17th March 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Farmer (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Skidelsky, for securing this debate and agree with much of what he said.

Stepping back and looking at the last three years of war—in Ukraine and Israel-Gaza—our Government and military policy have learned an enormous amount about up-to-the-minute warfare and states’ capabilities. We are living in the age of the drone and the hypersonic missile. Russia is clearly much weakened after expending its stores of men, munitions and money. So I query the assertion that it is eyeing greater swathes of eastern Europe, given its much-depleted status. This is not Munich. We appeased Hitler when his army was intact and bellicose and before a shot was fired, whereas we are now three years into a bloodbath.

If Russia is expansionist, we should calmly consider why. In the Cuban missile crisis, when the USSR parked its missiles on its doorstep in Cuba, the US understandably felt very threatened, and we were all a blink away from nuclear war. Ukraine’s aspirations to join NATO presented a similar threat to Russia, as would a peacekeeping coalition of willing NATO countries’ soldiers—NATO’s missiles on its doorstep.

Turning to Trump, it is fashionable for commentators in this country and Europe to be scathing and disdainful, but there was no major war during his last presidency. Anthropologists say that war is failed trade and as deals are what drive him, he wants peace. He wants to be known for peace, requiring others to strive for peace too. That was what the Trump-Zelensky-Vance drama in the White House was all about. Listening to the whole press conference and the quiet Zelenskian aggression reveals that he, Trump and Vance were worlds apart. As Trump said at the end, it is going to be a tough deal to make because attitudes have to change. He did not play nice and now attitudes are changing.

There is also the important aim of keeping Putin out of the arms of Xi Jinping. Are the Government adjusting their expectations and encouraging others who might be in the coalition of the willing to do the same so that the West, broadly, is in line with Trump’s position?

UK Defence: Hypersonic Missiles

Lord Farmer Excerpts

Monday 3rd March 2025 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Farmer]

To ask His Majesty’s Government how they plan to defend the United Kingdom against hypersonic missiles.

[The Minister of State, Ministry of Defence (Lord Coaker) (Lab)]

My Lords, the Ministry of Defence, in collaboration with NATO allies, through AUKUS pillar 2 and with other international partners, is working on hypersonic and counter-hypersonic weapons programmes. Central to this is the work of the UK’s Missile Defence Centre, which funds research to develop new capabilities, to sustain existing ones and to better integrate into the UK-wide science and technology sector. Further IAMD capabilities are being considered through the strategic defence review.

[Lord Farmer (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for his reply. Since 2020, when Sky Sabre replaced Rapier missiles, missile warfare has evolved in front of our eyes in the two major war zones of Ukraine and the Middle East. Last month the IISS reported that integrated air and missile defence is an “ambition” but “not the reality” in Europe and that

“the UK does not have the capability”

to defend against a concentrated intercontinental ballistic missile attack. The report of this House’s International Relations and Defence Committee, Ukraine: a Wake-up Call, published last autumn, heard that overreliance on NATO partners means our defences are “negligible” and we urgently need to increase investment in integrated air and missile defence. In light of this, will the Government be prioritising the need for defence beyond Sky Sabre, given this concerning appraisal and the developments in long-range drones and hypersonic missile systems that I mentioned earlier?

[Lord Coaker (Lab)]

The noble Lord raises very important points, but some of them will have to wait for the outcome of the defence review. He mentioned Sky Sabre. We are increasing the number of Sky Sabre units to nine, which is a significant increase, so we are not waiting for the outcome of the defence review. We are upgrading all the Type 45 destroyer Sea Viper missiles to make them more capable of dealing with ballistic missile attack. Again, we are not waiting for the outcome of the defence review.

We have a European project, the Diamond Project, where information is shared between missile defence systems across Europe. Again, we not waiting for the outcome of the defence review. The Sky Shield defence initiative looks at information sharing and capability. Again, we are not waiting for the defence review. But the noble Lord is absolutely right to say that air defence is being looked at by the Government and being looked at by all of our eyes, because it is becoming increasingly important not just with respect to defence on the battlefield but with respect to homeland defence as well. Clearly, all of us are going to have to look more carefully at that.