Ukraine (International Relations and Defence Committee Report)

Lord Houghton of Richmond Excerpts

Thursday 6th March 2025 Grand Committee

[Lord Houghton of Richmond (CB)]

My Lords, I am delighted to have the opportunity to speak in this debate. I am sorry that I have missed some of it. I declare a relevant interest in the register as an adviser to a defence-related tech company called Thales UK.

I start by agreeing with the view of many that it is a shame it was not felt appropriate to hold this debate in the Chamber. I say this because I think that more recent events give the report a relevance far beyond the relatively narrow focus of its original purpose. In my view, for example, it has a far wider and compelling relevance to the use of information by Governments in the age of artificial intelligence. For my part, I will not focus on any of the specific recommendations of the report, as I have great confidence that others have covered that ground. Rather, I want to spend my allotted time on just one issue: why did we name the report A Wake-up Call?

Many noble Lords will be familiar with the works of the Israeli academic Yuval Noah Harari, the author of the best-selling books, Sapiens and Homo Deus. His most recent book, Nexus, which my son bought me for Christmas at my direction, is a compelling history of information networks from the stone age to present times. In very simple terms, just of one of Harari’s many insights is his belief that there exist two very different views of how information is used. One is a somewhat naive view of information that sees it as the asset by which truth is established and from which wisdom thereafter flows, so the greater the amount of information that can be gathered and assessed, the closer we come to truth and therefore wisdom. Harari does not share this naive or simple view. Rather, he believes that the end use of information, specifically in respect of how nations are governed, is a far more dangerous trade-off between truth and order. More specifically, he argues that Governments, since they are the most powerful institutions in developed societies, have the greatest interest in distorting the truth or at least in hiding the most inconvenient facts. Indeed, he argues that allowing Governments to supervise the truth is like appointing the fox to guard the chicken house.

I would argue that, certainly for at least the past 15 years, successive British Governments have distorted the truth about the state of our Armed Forces. As Chief of the Defence Staff, I bore close witness to this and to some extent always understood why a slightly varnished version of the truth was necessary to avoid public alarm. I could perhaps understand how successive defence reviews rather committed to the delusion that all was well. I could appreciate why inconvenient facts about our performance in NATO, the real costs of the nuclear enterprise, the hollowing out of war-fighting resilience, the state of our Reserve Forces, the lack of a continuum of deterrent capability which permitted the control of escalation and countless other such issues were all being hidden. Indeed, since coming to this place, I have also occasionally marvelled at how at the Dispatch Box dissembling on defence issues has seemed the accepted order of the day.

However, at least two people have seen through these distortions and delusions. One is President Putin, who reached his own conclusions about NATO’s true deterrent capability, a capability that in his eyes lacked credibility and which he was, and seemingly remains, fully prepared to put to the test. The other is President Trump, who recognised that the United States of America was being taken for a wholly unfair ride by the European members of NATO and that it was well past the time when Europe needed to pay for its own security. It is for these reasons that the committee chose the title it did. The UK, Europe and NATO all need to wake up to some remarkably harsh realities.

I am left hoping two things. The first hope is that we have not woken up too late. My fear here is that we already have. In this context, we must be very wary of who benefits from a ceasefire. My view is that it is the side that wins thereafter the race to rearm. My second hope is that, when it comes to our national security, we never, ever, fall so deeply asleep again. The sole issue that I ask the Minister to give assurances on is that, if UK forces are committed to an operational role in Ukraine, it is only in the context of the appropriate command and control, the correct equipment and materiel and the proper security safeguards. Finally, in closing, I wish this Government nothing but good fortune in trying to navigate their way out of this truly awful mess.