King’s Speech

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere Excerpts

Thursday 21st May 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, it is always a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Hintze. His patriotism and clear-headedness are an inspiration.

“An increasingly dangerous and volatile world threatens the United Kingdom”.


Those were His Majesty’s first words—well, not quite his first words; I think his first words were:

“My Lords, pray be seated”.


He is a very polite monarch who always puts the immediate before the important, but his first important words were:

“An increasingly dangerous and volatile world threatens the United Kingdom”.


You would think, listening to this debate, that no one disagrees with that. On every side, we have heard listed, sometimes in abstract terms and sometimes in specific terms, the various forms of danger that threaten us: cyber attacks, energy shortages and direct kinetic threats.

I put it to your Lordships that we do not really believe that: if we did, we would be behaving very differently. To develop the theme of the noble Lord, Lord Hintze, we would be putting minesweepers before Motability. To adapt the old First World War catchphrase, we would be putting guns before butter. We would, in short, be prioritising actual security over social security, rather than spending more than five times as much on the latter as on the former. That is not the behaviour of a country that truly believes it is threatened by an increasingly dangerous and volatile world.

What is the single biggest threat to our security? We have heard all the abstract nouns listed on all sides in this debate. They have sometimes been more specifically identified as Russia, China, Islamic terrorism or whatever. But above and linking all those threats is the really serious threat, which is that we are not growing economically. As long as our GDP is flatlining, it does not matter whether we spend 2%, 4%, 5% or 10% of GDP on defence, because the number is not increasing.

We are bloated as an economy, morbidly obese and adipose. Like anyone in that situation, getting fit again will require some short-term pain. There was an opportunity for some of that short-term pain in the King’s Speech. We had been promised a Bill on welfare reform, and it was very ostentatiously dropped. What did we get instead? A whole series of Bills increasing the power of state regulators and growing the state at the expense of what is left of the private sector. There are Bills on regulating water, Bills on regulating ticket sales, Bills on regulating oil, Bills on regulating energy prices and Bills on regulating housebuilding. This, again, is not the behaviour of a country that thinks that it faces an immediate threat.

Behavioural psychologists tell us to infer motive from behaviour, rather than the other way around. If we infer motive from behaviour, the Government have decided to prioritise short-term popularity, particularly with certain groups of the electorate, over the long-term security of the nation.

The noble Lord, Lord Grade, said that he had rejoined the Conservative Party and therefore could regain his opinions. I recently moved in the opposite direction. My partisan glands were cauterised in a painful operation.

This problem has grown up under successive Governments, including that of my former party. There has been a repeated unwillingness to face short-term, bad headlines in pursuit of long-term security considerations. But the strength of this country was always its relative economic success. From the Nine Years’ War until the end of the Cold War, we were successful in war and victorious and powerful in the councils of the world, not because of some magical property in our soil, seas or skies and not even because of the fighting spirit of our people—excepting the present company of noble and gallant Lords—but because we had a technological edge over our adversaries based on greater economic advancement. We are making a choice, instead of pursuing that advantage, to spend it on short-term popularity and on making ourselves more comfortable.

The noble and gallant Lord, Lord Stirrup, quoted the Athenian ambassadors as quoted by Thucydides in his history: the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must. We are making a decision to be relatively weak because we do not want to face any of the short-term pain, and that is how powerful countries become weak countries. They become bloated and overweight, and in the end they lose the capacity to defend themselves and collapse, as all powers collapse.

“Altogether elsewhere, vast

Herds of reindeer move across

Miles and miles of golden moss,

Silently and very fast”.