UK-US Co-operation on Using Atomic Energy for Mutual Defence

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd October 2024 Grand Committee

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

My Lords, I am extremely grateful to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Goldsmith, for both the meticulousness of these reports and for the unfussy, intelligible and lucid way in which he set out the recommendations. I have nothing to add on that level of detail, so I shall take a step back and ponder why these alliances among the English-speaking democracies are the basis of our security.

I take your Lordships back to 9 August 1941, a date which one or two Members of our Chamber will no doubt remember as if it were yesterday. This was the day on which President Roosevelt made the longest walk of his presidency. In a way that is now almost unimaginable, the US media contrived to hide the fact of the President’s polio from the electorate, so he was always pictured standing unaided or seated. However, on that day, walking from the decks of USS “Augusta” to those of HMS “Prince of Wales”, he decided to walk so, supported by his son on one hand and by a naval officer on the other, he made the slow progress to meet the British Prime Minister, while the band of HMS “Prince of Wales” struck up “The Stars and Stripes Forever”.

What followed was the most extraordinary demonstration of what binds the anglophone democracies together. It happened to be a Sunday, so the crews of the two vessels were mustered for a joint religious service. Churchill had chosen every detail personally and meticulously, down to the hymns and the reading that the chaplain gave from the pulpit. It came from Joshua:

“As I was with Moses, so I will be with thee: I will not fail thee, nor forsake thee. Be strong and of a good courage”.


Afterwards, exultantly, Churchill burst out, “The same language, the same hymns, the same ideals”, and when he said “the same ideals”, he was not making a general point about being the good guys. Think of the world as it stood in August 1941. The entire Eurasian landmass, from Lisbon to Vladivostok, was under one form or another of autocratic rule. Liberty was thrown back to the alliance of English-speaking peoples. We talk of universal values, but actually almost everything we mean when we say that was a precept overwhelmingly developed in the language which I am now speaking. The things that make the modern world rational, comfortable and pleasant—regular elections, uncensored newspapers, equality between men and women, the ability of different parties to contest without people being exiled or shot, habeas corpus and jury trials—were overwhelmingly the heritage of the English-speaking peoples. Imagine that the Second World War or the Cold War had ended differently. There would have been nothing universal about them then. We tend to be polite, so we gloss over the extent to which these values became universal as a series of military actions by this country and its kindred allies.

I spent 21 years in the European Parliament and was often teased by continental colleagues about this country’s supposed subordination to the United States. They would mock us: “Do you have any foreign policy of your own? Do you always just have to wait for a phone call from DC? Have you become a sort of aircraft carrier for the US?” As patiently and politely as I could, I would explain that, formed by the same history and institutions, when presented by the same problem, we tended to respond in similar ways. We had a shared indignation with injustice and a shared belief in freedom and the elevation of the individual over the collective.

All of us have lived through a period of anglosphere hegemony, where these values have been treated as universal because they have rested on victory in the Second World War and then the Cold War. But permanence is the illusion of every age. There are rival models out there. Thinking back to the debate we just had in the Chamber, I say that a lot of these rival systems have come together from no motive other than a shared hostility to us. It is very difficult to see what the religious fundamentalists of Tehran, the hermit kingdom of North Korea, the imperial and nationalist autocracy of Russia and the still notionally communist state of China have in common, beyond a hostility to western individual and property rights, free contract and all the things that go with them. History rather disproves the idea that we have an automatic advantage—that other countries will feel their way towards our values as they become richer and more educated.

The Chinese model, in particular, strikes me as a civilisational or categorical alternative to ours. Unlike the others, it is capable of export. Plenty of countries out there do not much like us but, through a combination of high technology—facial recognition and surveillance —and the use of notionally private companies such as Weibo, Tencent and Alibaba to act both as proselytisers and spies for the regime, in a peculiar way Beijing seems to have built a model that it can sell. It could say to, for example, Maduro in Venezuela, “If you don’t want to worry about any more elections, here is a way that we can build you your panopticon state, and then we won’t need to worry about having to deal with any of your successors”.

That, fundamentally, has caused our renewed interest in the Pacific and triggered the AUKUS agreement. It was about maintaining a free world based on the rule of law, rule among nations and open sea lanes, against revanchist states that challenge the established order.

I hope we will be able to build on and strengthen the AUKUS alliance. I look forward, in particular, to its expansion. I am encouraged by conversations that I have had with the Opposition in Canada, who are keen to become involved if there is a change of government. Apart from anything else, that would make it much more euphonic; “CAUKUS” works a lot better than AUKUS, which is quite difficult to say.

I feel that our interest in the Pacific region, quite apart from being in tune with our past, is reflective of the critical economic importance of that region. Just as, at some point in the 18th century, the centre of the world shifted from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, in this century it has shifted to the Pacific. Tied as we are by habit and history, kinship and custom, language and law, many of the nations in that region do not have the option of remaining neutral.

Let us remember what we are defending. Beijing has a tendency to divide and rule. We have not really been on the receiving end of very much direct aggression, but Australia has—a complete trade embargo and immense diplomatic pressure after it called for an inquiry into the origins of Covid. I do not think that we could possibly be indifferent between an allied English-speaking democracy and an autocratic state. As long as we still have a song to sing and more to give, I hope that we remain involved in that region. Nothing lasts for ever. The day will surely come when

“all our pomp of yesterday


Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!”

But I tell your Lordships what: when that day comes, we are going to miss this era through which we pass more than we currently imagine possible.