Queen’s Speech

Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield Excerpts

Wednesday 15th May 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield]

My Lords, I declare an interest as a member of the Chief of the Defence Staff’s Strategic Advisory Panel, although naturally I speak this evening in a purely individual—perhaps even eccentric—capacity.

Unlike any previous Parliament in the years since 1945, we know when the next defence review will take place. By my calculation, it will be the 12th such review since VE Day and we will receive it in the autumn of 2015, a few months the other side of the May 2015 general election if the coalition does not collapse in the mean time and the House of Commons activates the get-out clause in the Fixed-term Parliaments Act.

Whitehall, quite rightly, is already gearing up for the next defence review with a series of preparatory papers already commissioned by the Cabinet Office on geographical areas of concern and functional topics of various kinds. As in the autumn of 2010, the 2015 strategic defence and security review will be twinned with a new national security strategy document.

I have considerable sympathy for the framers of the 2010 SDSR and NSS. They had to work at great speed and against a financial backdrop that resulted in the combined exercise possessing the characteristics of a fistful of absolutely desperate spending reviews overlain with the thinnest patina of strategy. The 2010 productions reflected, too, the usual British tussle between what Paul Cornish and Andrew Dorman have aptly described as “smart muddling through” and “grand strategy”.

There was, however, only one passage in the 2010 national security strategy which, to be a trifle unkind, clings to the velcro of memory. It was written under instruction to be boring and, my Lords, it succeeded. The sentence that stands out is truly in technicolour and it is in the introduction:

“The National Security Council has reached a clear conclusion that Britain’s national interest requires us to reject any notion of the shrinkage of our influence”.

I am a convinced supporter of the idea of a National Security Council. I think that it is an innovation of the Prime Minister that will endure. However, this product of its collective wisdom was a mixture of Tommy Cooper-style “just like that” assertion of the worst political kind and hubris, not least because the very next day the strategic defence and security review revealed that several of our instruments of influence in the world were going to be reduced—indeed, shrivelled —substantially.

The next pairing of NSS and SDSR in 2015 must do better than that. It must not fall into the trap described by the great cosmologist Carl Sagan of confusing hopes with facts, as the unfortunate 2010 NSS declaration plainly did. I respectfully suggest to whoever finds themselves in government in the summer and early autumn of 2015 that they open the next National Security Strategy document with a different kind of introduction. A 2,000-word essay—no more than that is needed—of Britain’s place in the world, the range of resources we can realistically apply to whatever aspirations the following pages display, and why and how we should deploy those resources effectively and successfully when and where we can.

I share the impulse that we should strive to be a force for good in the world, but in 2015 Parliament and the public will need a long, deep, illusion-free look at our country’s appetite to remain a global player given our size, wealth, population and economic capacities. None of the previous 11 post-war defence reviews did this satisfactorily—not one of them. Such a think piece must pass the Sagan hopes and facts test, too.

Allied to such an essay we would benefit from two extras. First, a statement of what the 2015 Government believe are the core musts of British defence provision. My list would be—and it is only a personal list—air defence of the UK; home defence of the UK, not least against cyber attack, and including the capacity of the Armed Forces to bring aid to the civil authorities if required; the sustenance of the UK nuclear deterrent; the security of the eastern Atlantic and the near north; maintaining our NATO commitments; and our duties to the Falkland Islands and Gibraltar. After this can come the almost limitless list of “wouldn’t-it-be-nice-to” if we had the kit, the money, the allies and the legal cover.

On the resources front, the drafters of and customers for the 2015 SDSR and NSS will need to remember the lessons of defence reviews past. Full funding for the settlement agreed is rarely forthcoming and unforeseen events usually change the picture, sometimes dramatically, in the periods between reviews.

On that score, horizon scanning is enjoying a welcome revival and boost across Whitehall, and not only in the politico-military departments, thanks to a review commissioned by the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Jeremy Heywood, last year and carried out under the supervision of Jon Day, the chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee. It was declassified in January.

Finally, that second extra to a possible opening think piece in the 2015 National Security Strategy. We have up until now had three years’ experience of the National Security Council and its supporting apparatus at work. Might this be the time to review how all the inputting departments and agencies have adapted themselves to this new and welcome broader-gauge approach which, in structural terms, is better than any of its predecessor Cabinet Committees since 1945? An audit and a capability review of all these inputs would be of real value and a summary of its findings could be included in the National Security Strategy of 2015.

We can as a country do a great deal of good in the world, but let us not over-reach, let us not over-preach, and let us do in the world what we sensibly can with the skills and the capacities with which our history has endowed us, but no more than that.